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Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

strongtowns.org

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Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#501

Post by mrctte »

KptMarchewa wrote: post #271
mrctte wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is true, why are there so many international tourists in U.S. cities every Summer? Furthermore I've both vacationed to - and lived in - SF at different stages of my life.

Any stats about tourists in Houston or Phoenix? I'm pretty sure that international tourism is more of a thing in more "walkable" cities like New York.

I think there are quite a few other factors that could explain the difference in international tourism between Phoenix and NY.

LA seems to be doing alright though with ~7.5M foreign visitors a year: https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/2019-...

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#502

Post by sammorrowdrums »

jseban wrote: post #67
sammorrowdrums wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in the Netherlands. We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing. Much Urban planning was involved in making it better for cycling though, and it wasn’t always great for it. Off-road cycle paths being a mainstay for…

> We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing. Yeah which means that you spend a lot more time and energy on grocery shopping. That is for me directly inverse to quality of life. The more time I spend in traffic (cycling…

The quality of like is a personal reflection, but cycling is not inefficient, for door to door short trips bike is literally faster than public transport (which is also specifically pretty good in Amsterdam) and driving.

The layout out cities to accommodate lots of cars and easy parking is a huge cause of inefficiency often.

I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but I would go as far as to say most people don’t accurately imagine how it would be, when they haven’t lived somewhere like Amsterdam.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#503

Post by vidarh »

enra wrote: post #488
vidarh wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's not been that it's inconvenient to do it without a car, but that it's inconvenient to do it at all . I used to do my shopping on the way home from work, and the stores were on my way so they added nothing to my travel time, yet they added time spent in shops , and I had no desire to keep doing that when delivery options appeared. I'm in London, and use Ocado, which means if I can't even be bothered to ope…

I started using Instacart in 2013, after few years completely stopped using and any other grocery delivery. The problem is that often the shopper thinks things are “out of stock” if they don’t find them, or they just buy the wrong item. So each delivery you are always stressing about if you get all the items and if the quality of produce is good enough. I’d rather order stuff from Amazon or another web store that onl…

This is rarely a problem with Ocado, which I use. Their stock management is good - they're not picking up from stores but from their own increasingly automated warehouses. Very occasionally they do run out, in which case they ship you substitutes. If you don't want the substitutes they take it back to questions asked, but it means it's rare I get a delivery where stuff is missing and there isn't a viable replacement.

Ocado is increasingly licensing their warehousing platform internationally, so it's likely to show up near you.

I'd agree with you if we were talking about staff picking from a shop floor - that does not work reliably enough at all, but that model is several years outdated and the only reason some of those still survive is that the more automated systems like Ocado's and a few others are a lot more capital intensive to roll out as it means building dedicated specialized warehouses.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#504

Post by xyzelement »

gkop wrote: post #475
xyzelement wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Quad plexes by right [0 for example] makes a lot of sense to me. If you’re OK with a quad plex next door, IMO you’re not part of the problem I would actually not be OK with quads next door to my house right now, because that is not the type of life I bought into. That may sound crazy so let me explain. For 39 years, I valued density/walkability/convenience of city life, and lived in NYC for most of that time. Now…

Thanks for the reply! I can empathize. Have you experienced a neighborhood with a mix of half SFH, and the other half a smattering of 2, 3, 4 and occasional 10+? I currently rent in such a neighborhood and it’s fairly awesome. It supports a fabulous small business district, and the families playing and riding their bikes to school seem very happy too. If you are familiar with a neighborhood such as mine, can you desc…

I guess my town sounds just like what you describe, especially since my town does have some low-rise apartment buildings, though not exactly in my area.

I guess the difference would be - the greater density becomes, the fewer of your neighbors you know, etc. Also, because of how our town is, everyone who lives here is either a young family who moved here for the space and community, or people who have lived here a long time (ie raised their families then stayed). Once you mix in 10+ apartment buildings, I assume you get a higher mix of single people etc, which is a totally different vibe.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#505

Post by harpersealtako »

stackedinserter wrote: post #489
pronlover723 wrote: post #15

I'm pretty addicted to "Not Just Bikes" youtube channel which seems to be either directly or indirectly related to stongtowns https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes It's frustrating. Even though I'm currently in SF, SF still doesn't feel remotely as nice as many other places outside the US. Public transportation is slow and although the muni is okay the busses are kinda gross compared to good non-US cities. There are…

The biggest problem with NJB is that he completely ignores important fact: there are many people that don't want to live in apartments or even close to other people. Surprise surprise, we really want to live on 10 acres of land in our 3500 sqft house, with our motorcycles, garage workshops, dogs et cetera. We don't need "sense of community", we just want to have quiet space for ourselves.

I think you're touching on really common mistake a lot of new urbanists make, and the linked article generally is about. The problem is there's a lot of demand for dense neighborhoods but not enough supply -- not that suburbs and rural developments are objectively bad or that nobody actually prefers them. In many cases certain interests, hobbies, preferences and lifestyles are completely incompatible with the dense developments preferred by certain opinionated urban planners.

New Urbanists should focus on "why dense neighborhoods are good" over "why suburbs/car-oriented neighborhoods are bad", because they probably need the support of all of us suburb-loving car-driving folks in the first place, and a lot of us interpret criticism of car-driving and suburban living as a heavy-handed attack on our way of life rather than as a reasonable argument for having affordable options for both lifestyles.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#506

Post by erik_seaberg »

rhacker wrote: post #422
neutronicus wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main service landlords provide is maintenance. There's no direct food analogy but I don't think it's too stretched

A home needs so damn little maintenance. They're not providing that as a service. If the person owned a home maintained it - what fix a broken hot water heater for 600? And that's a reason to make more people required to rent?

Isn’t it something like $8K to replace the roof every 20-ish years?

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#507

Post by stackedinserter »

ryeights wrote: post #500
stackedinserter wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, 1bdrm apartment is more than enough when you live alone and don't have any hobbies aside of hosting parties.

Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of hobbies necessitate having a giant house to engage in them?

Sure! In our family:

- bicycles: in my case it's five bicycles plus trailer for the youngest

- motorcycle

- woodworking: tools, worktables, storage etc

- tinkering/DIY: separate table + shelf

- mountain ski gear for three people (soon four)

- hockey gear

- piano

Plus car (and her stuff), storage for seasonal clothes and such, separate rooms for kids, ideally a room for guests, IT den, deck and backyard (and garden stuff) just because I love it, so it adds up to ~1500sqft pretty quickly.

I wish I had bigger house, so I wouldn't have to share my garage between {1..3}

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#508

Post by ryeights »

stackedinserter wrote: post #507
ryeights wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of hobbies necessitate having a giant house to engage in them?

Sure! In our family: - bicycles: in my case it's five bicycles plus trailer for the youngest - motorcycle - woodworking: tools, worktables, storage etc - tinkering/DIY: separate table + shelf - mountain ski gear for three people (soon four) - hockey gear - piano Plus car (and her stuff), storage for seasonal clothes and such, separate rooms for kids, ideally a room for guests, IT den, deck and backyard (and garden st…

Fair! However, keep in mind that you're nearly 2 standard deviations above the average household size in the US [1], and probably above 2σ in physical activity as well... ;)

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242189/disitribution-of-...

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#509

Post by bkberry352 »

ryeights wrote: post #500
stackedinserter wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, 1bdrm apartment is more than enough when you live alone and don't have any hobbies aside of hosting parties.

Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of hobbies necessitate having a giant house to engage in them?

Not necessarily a giant house, but many hobbies require having a detached house for noise isolation (music, woodworking, cars, etc.) or a garage to work with materials you don't want in your living area (glues, paints, 3D printer resin, etc.).

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#510

Post by CalRobert »

zachrip wrote: post #495
CalRobert wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's wonderful! If you care to write about your experience with DAFT I'd love to read it. shawnindutch.com kept a blog about it for years but that appears to be a dead link now :-(

I'm not sure there'd be much to write about to be honest. There are a lot of resources and Facebook groups but we all basically use the same exact process. What are you curious about?

I suppose I am more curious about getting on in Dutch society, making friends, etc. I worry we'd have a hard time finding friends, especially since we're in our 30's and have two young kids, but then again I messaged NotJustBikes and he mentioned they moved with kids older than our own and they've gotten on fine.
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