211–220 of 370 posts
I wouldn't mind more walkable if it didn't come at the cost of being around many more people. Every walkable city I've been to is either filthy, cramped, loud, over run, and/or very very expensive. I don't want to live so close to people to hear them, smell them, or be bothered by them or their pets.
I want to live in a walkable streetcar suburb: * Reasonably sized (2-3k soft) lots * Homes built with a variety of beautiful architecture * Area is not overbuilt to the point where all greenery and sunlight are gone and replaced by large buildings * alleys behind the lot, with garages hidden, to keep a single car (which is still really necessary in modern life) * small, thin, tree-lined streets * within walking dista…
As a rule of thumb, you need 10k people / square km (25k people / square mile) to sustain local services and to enable most people live without using a car daily. If 50% of land area is used for streets, parks, and commercial purposes, that 2-3k lot should house at least five people. I believe the average single-family home in an area with no housing shortage houses ~2 people. Once population density is substantially…
No, they don’t. This is a classic example of listening to what people say vs observing what they do. And it’s a good lesson in product development. Ask your users “do you want X?” And the answer is inevitably “yes”. Ask them “do you want A or B?” And you’ll start to get a better approximation of user behavior. Better yet is observing actual behavior. In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves. Americans…
It's not a hard choice when suburbs have been subsidized like hell for about 70 years while money has been drained out of cities to pay for said suburbs. Here in Ohio there is this garbage designation for "rural farming areas" called townships that get huge infrastructures subsidies/grants, even though they are all just suburbs/exurbs. Look at any of the areas around Cincinnati, Columbus, or Cleveland and check out h…
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Everyone is subsidizing your housing appreciation when you don’t allow more housing to be built. The activists who are driving up the price of your property are the activists trying to stop upward growth. It’s pure supply and demand.
> Everyone is subsidizing your housing appreciation when you don’t allow more housing to be built. The activists who are driving up the price of your property are the activists trying to stop upward growth. It’s pure supply and demand. I advocate for building and development. I'm just pointing out that the activists that are supposedly rallying for 'high-density' just end up increasing my home price because (1) the h…
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This can be misleading. The supply in walkable areas will, by near definition, be lower than places you have to drive to. Such that the evidence isn't that houses are more expensive in walkable areas. The evidence is that it is not economically viable to build more walkable neighborhoods. Edit: I meant to say it could be an alternative, not that it is.
It is far far far more economical to build walkable neighborhoods. They require far less infrastructure costs, from water piping to sewer to roads. Quite often the only places that can sustainably fund themselves on property taxes are walkable multiuse neighborhoods. A ton of suburbia is sitting on huge infrastructure bills that will come due in the near future. Car-dependent neighborhoods only exist because law prev…
From what I’ve seen it has little to do with accommodations for vehicles at the residence level and more to do with the proximity of interesting places to walk to. It does help if these ‘interesting places’ don’t have much parking accommodation.
Walkability flows from density, And NIMBYism has killed that.
I wouldn't mind more walkable if it didn't come at the cost of being around many more people. Every walkable city I've been to is either filthy, cramped, loud, over run, and/or very very expensive. I don't want to live so close to people to hear them, smell them, or be bothered by them or their pets.
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Your thesis is flawed. It is illegal to build new dense walkable neighborhoods in almost all of north america. But existing neighbourhoods of that style tend to be both highly priced to live in and also popular tourist destinations, implying high desirability. The older east coat cities built walkable neighbourhoods before they became illegal.
> It is illegal to build new dense walkable neighborhoods in almost all of north america Yes.. because of the people's representatives. Why is that do you think? > The older east coat cities built walkable neighbourhoods before they became illegal. Technically, they were built before the modern automobile era when there was really no alternative. Additionally, geography played a part. Manhattan is land-constrained. S…
Zoning is too local, so if I can't afford to live near my job I can't vote to allow me to live near my job.
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Something I only recently learned is that zoning rules generally require housing developments to include a certain amount of parking. This drives up the cost of housing, because of the space required (either up or out.) Many cities are reducing or eliminating these requirements in an effort to make housing more affordable. However, it does mean that parking will become harder, as there will be more competition for st…
Only solution i see is a brand new city built from ground up with entirely new rules and welcoming people to that kind of life. Car free, autonomous pods, grids, public transit and small footprint. If it succeeds then others will have a model to emulate. I do not know what legal changes will be needed to make something like this happen. There is no reason other than safety where existing archaic town planning rules n…