101–110 of 683 posts
Seems like parking is a side effect for people's preference for larger houses and yards. Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically.
How would you propose convincing people to live four inches from their neighbor? This seems like somewhat of a challenging sale. I cannot speak for everyone, but I have lived this way and it is not good.
I live car-free in NYC. A large appeal of NYC to me was not having to park. I don't ~mind~ driving, but I absolutely hated having to deal with finding parking when I lived in other cities. Parking generally makes me feel stressed (competition for free spots), or makes me pay (using something like SpotHero makes it easy to find a spot, but costs me). It's not even just major cities either- I'm frequently in a college…
Ahh yes, only the most important, noteworthy neighborhoods that most likely aren’t transit deserts, right?
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> share walls with their neighbors I honestly don't know why anyone would ever want to do that. To me, it's only done out of necessity, and is a driving force in motivating people to get the hell out of that situation asap. But the cool thing is, some people can choose that, if that's what they desire, even though I can't understand why.
I chose to buy my first house in a townhome complex with 100 units. Why? Maintenance was outsourced, and at a lower price than I could pay for myself (100 households at once get a good group buy price!) Everything on the exterior of my house was taken care of. The complex has 2 shared green spaces, one for dogs, one for people. The large green space for people is bigger than the yard in my current single family home.…
The next thing you know you've been trying to get the broken communal door/gate/sewer/extractor fan/lights/electric/gas/whatever fixed for months if not years and no one at the management company is even returning calls, and you sure as hell can't fix it yourself since you are not legally allowed to do it (and you can guarantee that if you were to do something yourself the dormant management company would suddenly spring to life and sue you to hell and back). Then next summer they hike the management and maintenance prices 500% and there is fuck all you can do apart from suck it up because now you can't sell because no one wants to pay the high fee, and you can't not pay it as you'll be taken to court for non-payment of contract within days (and P.S. their contract says they can hike the prices as they please because wow look at that cool yard for dogs! I totally forgot to read the entire contract.whatevs.)
TL;Dr it is great while it is all working fine. IME after a few years once the initial glean and glow has worn off and things start to naturally wear out and break, it will go to shit. It will start small with broken lawn furniture that doesn't get replaced, then before you know it the roof is leaking and there is nothing you can do apart from hope the people you pay to look after the place but are not responding to emails or calls actually do something.
But hey good luck with your place anyway.
I live car-free in NYC. A large appeal of NYC to me was not having to park. I don't ~mind~ driving, but I absolutely hated having to deal with finding parking when I lived in other cities. Parking generally makes me feel stressed (competition for free spots), or makes me pay (using something like SpotHero makes it easy to find a spot, but costs me). It's not even just major cities either- I'm frequently in a college…
I am fully in favor of walkable neighborhoods and reducing the need to drive. But lack of parking is just not a stressor that most Americans worry about.
I live car-free in NYC. A large appeal of NYC to me was not having to park. I don't ~mind~ driving, but I absolutely hated having to deal with finding parking when I lived in other cities. Parking generally makes me feel stressed (competition for free spots), or makes me pay (using something like SpotHero makes it easy to find a spot, but costs me). It's not even just major cities either- I'm frequently in a college…
Google tells me that the average TCO of car ownership in the US was $10,728 in 2022. Between my partner and I, we're saving $20,000 per year not owning a car (and that's assuming a generous expenditure on bicycle TCO). High rents mean nothing when considering how much you save on not needing to own a car.
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I chose to buy my first house in a townhome complex with 100 units. Why? Maintenance was outsourced, and at a lower price than I could pay for myself (100 households at once get a good group buy price!) Everything on the exterior of my house was taken care of. The complex has 2 shared green spaces, one for dogs, one for people. The large green space for people is bigger than the yard in my current single family home.…
This is all fine while the management is fine. As soon as the company or people change, it goes to shit. The next thing you know you've been trying to get the broken communal door/gate/sewer/extractor fan/lights/electric/gas/whatever fixed for months if not years and no one at the management company is even returning calls, and you sure as hell can't fix it yourself since you are not legally allowed to do it (and you…
HOAs are member voted, it is a thankless job and improving things is as simple as running for the board, every time someone has wanted to take over they have been welcomed on. The HOA there has been going strong for almost 25 years, doing a great job managing the place.
The HOA did indeed fire their previous management company for incompetence, since the complex is in a large metro area, there is no shortage of competition in that field.
Edit: Oh and it isn't like people I hire myself are super reliable! I've had vendors working on my house ghost me, sometimes in the middle of a job. And there is also the cost of my time in learning about different fields (e.g. yard irrigation), collecting multiple quotes, and trying to do background checks to ensure the people giving the quotes do good work.
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Density and diversity are opposing forces. Since diversity is now the absolute highest value in western culture, density can never be anything other than dysfunctional or a lament.
Do you have a source for this claim? I don't understand how diversity and density would be opposed to one another.
>You could imagine a world in which streets were pedestrianized and where we planted trees and gardens and in what is currently space reserved for parking, and closed streets, outside schools, so kids can have places to play. I would love to see a LOT more of this in urban centers. I live in a college town that is about the same size as Iowa City. Iowa City has taken the step of closing off their downtown and making…
What else can be done? Universal lot sharing agreements, shared parking, and annulling reserved parking stipulations. Especially the later is a structural factor in the oversupply of parking. It's the parking equivalent of circuit-switching networks - which naturally results in the oversupply of circuits. Mutatis mutandis for all things parking. If one is to admit that these played a role in the oversupply of parking…
> What else can be done? Reduce the regulatory regimes that force cars on business owners and individuals: eliminate street level parking requirements for property owners, create car-free zones in city centers, declare war on Saudi Arabia, prioritize foot traffic in new commercial development, set minimums for bike/pedestrian friendly mileage, decrease the number of single family residences and increase multi-family…