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Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

theamericanconservative.com

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Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#101

Post by mgleason_3 »

CalRobert wrote: post #57
mattlondon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of developments in the UK - certainly in London - are proposing zero parking. We had a (now shelved) plan near where I live to build 700 2 & 3 bed apartments in a new development with zero parking spaces in the design. This strikes me as blindly optimistic that of those 700 apartments (that will likely have between 2 or 3 people or more per apartment on average, so somewhere like 1500-2500 people) absolut…

" think their usual rationale of being "environmentally friendly" is really wake-washing/cover for wanting to fit in more apartments that sell for £650,000-1,000,000+ each, vs parking spaces which only sell for £25,000 each." ...and? The fact that apartments cost more than homes means that the market values that area more highly for human habitation than for car habitation. Perhaps you simply can't afford to store yo…

Sheesh, these “conversations”. Just “eliminating” parking at new developments does not eliminate the _need_ for parking. People still have to get to work, school, the grocery store.

We had that happen near us 30 years ago by a developer who used a similar argument. A golf course was developed into 13,000 apartments with virtually no parking.

Overnight, the surrounding neighborhood’s streets were changed. Once they had been calm quiet places with plenty of parking. Now they are loud, crowded with double-parked cars blocking the street, blocked driveways, yelling and fist-fights. They’ve tried many thing to “fix” the problem. But 30 years later, the problems only gotten worse. It still sucks. Of course the neighbors will oppose it - label it NIMBYism or whatever you like.

But, we do have a problem and it would be great to actually change the status-qo. So, here’s a proposal:

*New buildings may be constructed without parking but _only_ if both of the following conditions are met:

1. The occupants are not allowed to own or operate motorized transportation of any type. This is enforced by the local police and the fines are huge.

2. 20% of the sales price of the new development is used to build mass transit.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#102

Post by ff317 »

CalRobert wrote: post #68
crispyambulance wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep seeing the word "homestead" lately. Is that a thing now?

It generally refers to the practice of living on enough land to support yourself, producing your own food, heating fuel, etc. Depending on how many people are involved you might be able to do this on 5 acres with a good water source, though of course that depends quite a bit on whether you want to eat meat, have cold winters, have bad soil, etc. It's been popular with plenty of folks for some time, like libertarians,…

I think usually the unsustainability argument is about scaling it to the population of the world. Our modern and in many ways awful systems of mass food, energy, and water production are just vastly more efficient per capita of resource requirements than individuals could ever hope to be "living off the land". Even if their footprint's a bit lower, it's only a solution for the relatively-elite of the planet, and they're actually being more wasteful than others of net resources in some senses.

Just doing the quick ugly napkin math for rough validation, Wikipedia says the world has roughly 14,000,000 km² of "arable land". If you convert that to acres and divide by the current global population, that's a little under half an acre per human. If the average family grouping were of size 4, that's only 2 acres of supposedly-arable land somewhere in the world per family. That's skipping over a whole lot of details and side-points, but still, it doesn't seem like this is a sustainable path for the whole planet to go down.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#103

Post by neonate »

carapace wrote: post #48

"Building Living Neighborhoods" https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm Christopher Alexander (of Pattern Language fame) > Our goal is to help everyone make our neighborhoods places of belonging, places of health and well-being, and places where people will want to live and work. This has become possible through the use of Generative Codes, Christopher Alexander's latest work in the effort to make possib…

Do you know where that Gurdjieff quote comes from? I've not heard it before.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#104

Post by techsupporter »

mgleason_3 wrote: post #101
CalRobert wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" think their usual rationale of being "environmentally friendly" is really wake-washing/cover for wanting to fit in more apartments that sell for £650,000-1,000,000+ each, vs parking spaces which only sell for £25,000 each." ...and? The fact that apartments cost more than homes means that the market values that area more highly for human habitation than for car habitation. Perhaps you simply can't afford to store yo…

Sheesh, these “conversations”. Just “eliminating” parking at new developments does not eliminate the _need_ for parking. People still have to get to work, school, the grocery store. We had that happen near us 30 years ago by a developer who used a similar argument. A golf course was developed into 13,000 apartments with virtually no parking. Overnight, the surrounding neighborhood’s streets were changed. Once they ha…

I agree with the idea of impact fees being used to fund public transit but your first suggestion sounds very confrontational for a few reasons:

First, why are only the people who "got there first" allowed to use the public streets for storing privately owned items?

Second, why not require that people who do have parking are only allowed to own as many motorized vehicles as can fit in their parking and cannot use the public right of way to store their private possessions, with huge fines?

It seems like we need more carrot and less stick.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#105

Post by jschwartzi »

JJMcJ wrote: post #83
bcrosby95 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crazy thing is a minor change could make many suburbs much more walkable: put the stores on the street and parking in the back. Not sure why they started doing the reverse. I've lived in a lot of California suburbs that are still within walking distance to shops (~1 mile), but the experience is so bad because of the way they've arranged parking.

Unfortunately many shopping centers that build out to the sidewalk will display a blank wall with ventilators and so forth facing the sidewalk, and the real entrances are in the interior, facing the parking. In one way this makes sense since almost all customers arrive by car but it certainly makes the street visually unappealing. EDIT: I wrote "arrive by foot", obviously it is arrive by car in suburban locations.

This also means that if you arrive on foot you have to walk around to some back alley or something in order to access the building, which defeats the whole purpose of fronting the shop directly on the sidewalk. Or they'll drop or raise the sidewalk in relation to the walk-up entrance and put a railing up making it impossible to access any shops from the sidewalk. As much as developers think they're favoring sidewalks they're really just paying lip service to the idea.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#106

Post by yellowapple »

techsupporter wrote: post #104
mgleason_3 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sheesh, these “conversations”. Just “eliminating” parking at new developments does not eliminate the _need_ for parking. People still have to get to work, school, the grocery store. We had that happen near us 30 years ago by a developer who used a similar argument. A golf course was developed into 13,000 apartments with virtually no parking. Overnight, the surrounding neighborhood’s streets were changed. Once they ha…

I agree with the idea of impact fees being used to fund public transit but your first suggestion sounds very confrontational for a few reasons: First, why are only the people who "got there first" allowed to use the public streets for storing privately owned items? Second, why not require that people who do have parking are only allowed to own as many motorized vehicles as can fit in their parking and cannot use the…

> why not require that people who do have parking are only allowed to own as many motorized vehicles as can fit in their parking and cannot use the public right of way to store their private possessions, with huge fines?

> It seems like we need more carrot and less stick.

I feel like that suggestion is precisely more stick and less carrot. More carrot and less stick would indeed be to put some of the money toward public transit, or to build parking spaces for smaller vehicles (e.g. bikes/scooters, motorized or otherwise).

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#107

Post by jschwartzi »

wahern wrote: post #87
wastedhours wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also safety, or the pretence of safety. Who's going to be the architect signing off on an obscure narrow alleyway with poor visibility and hidden recesses in a major metro area today? We're obviously living in some of the safest times there's ever been, but that probably plays on some minds (alongside the "it's more efficient to build straight lines" part).

In very expensive real estate markets high-end shops and chain stores will tend to dominate the store fronts on the streets. One way to create a sustainable space for small shops--flower shop, toy store, sandwich shop, etc--is to provide small, out-of-way commercial spaces such as along alleyways. Their size and location make them permanently unattractive to big stores, so you create a relatively safe inventory for m…

This is how Ginza in Tokyo is laid out, and it was wonderful to be able to just walk around and shop without listening to traffic noise all day.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#108

Post by wasdfff »

mattlondon wrote: post #56
graeme wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? It seems to both be more profitable for the developer and better for the environment.

Because there isn't enough space. 4 or 5 parking spaces is the same footprint that a 1 bedroom apartment would consume, then multiply that by the number of floors which is often between 4 or 8 in the outer parts of "central" London. So 4 to 5x25000 for parking spaces, or 4 to 8x650000. Underground parking is possible but rare - you see it more these days, but then it costs significantly more than just a tarmac lot ou…

You see both underground and multistory above ground in residential builds in LA. However I’m willing to bet that those 2-4 stories of parking make up most of the cost of building.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#109

Post by yellowapple »

mattlondon wrote: post #56
graeme wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? It seems to both be more profitable for the developer and better for the environment.

Because there isn't enough space. 4 or 5 parking spaces is the same footprint that a 1 bedroom apartment would consume, then multiply that by the number of floors which is often between 4 or 8 in the outer parts of "central" London. So 4 to 5x25000 for parking spaces, or 4 to 8x650000. Underground parking is possible but rare - you see it more these days, but then it costs significantly more than just a tarmac lot ou…

> Underground parking is possible but rare - you see it more these days, but then it costs significantly more than just a tarmac lot outside both to construct and to purchase a space in.

An apartment costs significantly more than just a tent outside, too. We still choose to build apartments instead because they're easier to build vertically and they're more attractive.

> Multistorey aboveground would take up space that would be used by apartments and would never get past planning approval in a residential area.

You can always build apartments on top of the multistory aboveground parking. That's pretty common in San Francisco.

An ideal would be for every building to have parking underneath it at street level, and then for there to be an upper "street" dedicated entirely to pedestrian and bicycle traffic (and perhaps rail). It'd be a huge upfront cost (which is why very few - if any - cities actually do this), but it'd be a much better experience for pedestrians and drivers alike. It could also potentially pay for itself (by charging for parking), and having all cars underground could make it easy to recapture any automotive emissions (hopefully electric cars will mostly or fully displace ICE cars, but if not, then it's at least a lot easier to trap greenhouse gases in a tunnel than out in the open).

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#110

Post by lotsofpulp »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #42
lotsofpulp wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t imagine avoiding bad PR (for something that clearly wasn’t the hotel’s fault) is worth $800M. They must have thought there was some possibility of legal liability, at least the the cost to defend with lawyers. But there shouldn’t be, in a sane world the suit would have been tossed immediately.

What they thought is mostly irrelevant, acting as if this is some kind of precedent and that hotels are now responsible and prepare to have your bags and rooms searched every day is stupid overblown alarmism. The payment was large because they had liability insurance that covered 7/8ths of it, and the plaintiffs realized it would be very easy to get them to pay at least that amount out.

In my experience, just because your insurance pays, it doesn’t mean you don’t have an incentive to stop the payout. Premiums are based on how much insurance pays in claims, so their future premiums will be higher than if there were not to be a payment in the first place.

I still don’t see why a hotel would be at all culpable, so I would love to see the analysis of the lawyers involved. It is not legal precedent, but it is precedent in the sense that if MGM’s lawyers thought it best not to fight it, then what can a smaller company do?

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