11–20 of 93 posts
They already don't have those parking requirements in Copenhagen, and it sure as heck ain't because they've got cars parking themselves with one inch of clearance.
I wonder why 4b apartments are so rarely seen in the US. In Asia they are quite common.
Here's a recent story of what happens when Asian family sensibilities move into a typical American neighborhood
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/realestate/massive-home-a...
neighbors were upset about this addition, built to house aging parents
https://wjla.com/resources/media2/16x9/1280/986/center/90/fd...
“Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month. Also, all of this is about NIMBYism, which is about house prices being inflated to make up most of households’ wealth, which is not fixable without triggering a massive wealth redistribution. Most western societies are stuck in a very non-ideal Nash equilibrium and it is not going to be solved any…
“Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month. Also, all of this is about NIMBYism, which is about house prices being inflated to make up most of households’ wealth, which is not fixable without triggering a massive wealth redistribution. Most western societies are stuck in a very non-ideal Nash equilibrium and it is not going to be solved any…
I'm just doing a Ctrl+F through the document, but I can't find "5 years" or "Human driven". But if it does appear somewhere, taken out of context, it could mean "no more than 5 years" or "at least 5 years". A bit of ambiguity.
This is why we can't have nice things. Huge additional costs and design constraints because of * 2-exit-stairwell requirement * elevator laws * parking laws Article contrasts with an apartment building in Denmark to show what could be possible.
Elevator laws make sense so long as they apply to general areas and not every single building. It would really suck for the majority of builders to decide to cost-skimp and skip elevators, effectively locking disabled people out of dense living.
Parking laws need to be removed and replaced with minimum transit requirements. Provided transit options are accommodating for disabled people (which is totally possible, all the buses around me do it) then the only thing hurt (read: no longer subsidized) by making parking optional are car manufacturers, dealers, and gas companies.
As soon as you look at comparisons like this that are also in the US but somehow managed to be much cheaper, you realize the problem isn't whatever this analysis is about. It's got to be something else.
"Most of the apartments have a window on just one side. The interior facing rooms on the lower floors are going to have a lot of trouble getting light in. With a window on only one side, you can't ventilate your apartment by opening windows on multiple sides. This increases the demand for HVAC, which increases the cost of living."
I doubt A/C costs are anything but negligible compared to the other design decisions.
I thought it was about the CD-ROMs lol. I had no idea it was a town also.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm just doing a Ctrl+F through the document, but I can't find "5 years" or "Human driven". But if it does appear somewhere, taken out of context, it could mean "no more than 5 years" or "at least 5 years". A bit of ambiguity.
“A self driven car cannot block anyone in. "Humans park their own cars" will be true for maybe five more years“ Ok “human parked”, apologies. Maybe not as out of touch but still pretty out of touch.
I wonder why 4b apartments are so rarely seen in the US. In Asia they are quite common.
The article mentions a lot of the reasons. Our building codes, especially the double stairway requirement, eliminate a lot of reasonable layouts and have downstream effects on the economics of apartment buildings. Another reason that isn't mentioned in the article is that there are different ideals for family housing, especially in suburban areas like Walnut Creek. Family apartments just aren't as desirable.
The real problem is families in the US don't desire apartments and so no one builds apartments that families would desire to live in, thus perpetuating the problem.
