Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

governing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 370 posts

Re: Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

#291

Post by xorfish »

grumblenum wrote: post #202
graeme wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've never dealt with a city in my region that didn't have variance procedures for building and land development permits. In my own experience, these committees are nearly a rubber stamp unless an adjacent property owner expects to be inconvenienced. You're observing what's called realized preferences. Coffee-table planners seem content to frame everything as a political problem, as if developers are an extended civi…

There were plenty of walkable places in the US. They were just bulldozed for the car.

https://strongtowns.org has a few good examples.

Re: Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

#292

Post by chronofar »

haolez wrote: post #130

I've been to a few cities in the US (I'm a foreigner), like Denver and Atlanta, and they are very pedestrian hostile. Almost no sidewalks, every street looks like a roadway (large) and every shop seems to belong to these islands where you can park your car and do your stuff. Not saying this is good or bad, but it's very different from every other country that I've came across. An exception in the US would be Las Vega…

In both cities you will find new developments in the city that are imminently walkable and highly desirable (more expensive than other parts). I think these cities are actually great examples of the shifting preferences indicated here. They were built to sprawl, but are finding large success when they improve pedestrian infrastructure.

Re: Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

#293

Post by xorfish »

notJim wrote: post #35
harryh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some truth in this post, but it's also important to understand that in most of the places with very large lots, it is illegal to subdivide the lots and build denser housing. If greater density was legalized, it would almost certainly be built and inhabited in a great many places.

People have this all-or-nothing thinking about this, but realistically most cities ought to have a mix. A single person in their 20s doesn't necessarily need or want a house with a yard, but they might want one later on. Right now, in most places that means allowing more options for apartments to be built, and more medium-density for people who are somewhere in between.

There needs to be a land tax that is high enough to cover the cost of infrastructure.

This is currently not the case with single family homes.

Re: Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

#294

Post by Retric »

presentation wrote: post #289
Retric wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve lived in walkable US cities. The main ingredients are mixed use, high density, effective public transportation, useable sidewalks, and zero surface level parking lots. Roads and underground parking is fine because they don’t lower density that much and density defines how much you can reach in a reasonable walk. What I think people miss is public transportation is the least important part of the equation. Once p…

Roads often do make a big difference - if there are too many lanes it you end up with a block-sized, loud and dangerous chasm in the middle of what could be a bustling neighborhood. I live in Tokyo and it’s dominated by streets that are literally barely wide enough to have two cars pass each other at <5mph, and I’ve come to love that.

IMO this still just comes down to density. Getting to a park just across a 3 lane divided highway isn’t a problem especially via skyway or underground tunnel. Walking 5 miles to that same park isn’t.

Narrow streets can significantly boost city density which then gets people out of their cars. One way streets make crossing traffic easier. But, if there’s nowhere to walk to then it’s all kind of pointless.

Re: Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

#295

Post by brandonmenc »

hanniabu wrote: post #50
cletus wrote: post #17

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…

Many choose suburbs because there aren't walkable cities as an option

I have never met anyone who lives in the suburbs because "the city wasn't walkable."

It is always because they want a larger house, more land, and no shared walls.

Re: Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

#296

Post by UncleMeat »

nomel wrote: post #103
notJim wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> However, it does mean that parking will become harder In the city I'm near, using public parking lots means a 20 minute walk to your destination, with a $10 fee from all the time walking (or uber), with private parking costing around $15, and no meters in sight. This creates an isolated area that people never go to for a bite to eat, coffee, window shopping, or anything really, since it's a > $10 fee just to step o…

This wouldn't be a bad thing if the public transportation was also effective. It should be hellishly expensive to use a car in a big city. It just shouldn't destroy your ability to get to work if you don't have a car.

In my experience, NYC is the only city in the US that has made this work. The MTA is plagued with cost overruns and other problems, but you really can get places quickly using the subway.

Re: Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

#297

Post by afarrell »

habosa wrote: post #261

Sometimes I think Americans don’t know how badly they want this. Americans will tell you how wonderful European cities are with their small streets and their public squares filled with great restaurants. They think we don’t have cities like that because we’re lacking some fundamental European-ness. No. We just put cars everywhere. Cars ruin everything. Now you have wider streets. Louder streets. More dangerous street…

The problem is there are real costs:

- Politicians need to be willing to withstand accusations that they are allied with property developers who earn more than they spend.

- Politicians have to be willing to piss off people who support minimum parking requirements and other restrictions.

- Those same politicians have to be able to get re-elected.

- Large numbers of people have to credibly promise to volunteer and vote for a local politician who supports the walkable urban development policies alongside positions they disagree with.

An individual can want it, but it requires costly collective action to change. If just one person goes to a town council meeting and argues in favor of letting a housing developer build apartments near them, that will have little impact unless they also talk 2 other people into both taking similar action and recursively getting similar alignment.

The rate at which YIMBY activism spreads is too low.

Re: Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

#298

Post by UncleMeat »

voisin wrote: post #256
analog31 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your city may be similar to mine, insofar as the "residents" of the downtown area are mainly the people who work there and have already paid for parking. Not surprisingly, a lot of the restaurants do most of their business at lunch time. A city where you have to drive a car to a curated pedestrian zone is not walkable by my highfalutin sensibilities. ;-) I get around town by bike. This is not for the faint of heart i…

> Your city may be similar to mine, insofar as the "residents" of the downtown area are mainly the people who work there and have already paid for parking. If massive parking requirements is the #1 urban planning disaster of the last century, the #2 surely has to be zoning regulations that prevented mixed use areas where people can live/work/play in close proximity. And this was only to… force people to buy cars to g…

You can see this in the south bay in an incredibly acute way.

Where are Google, Microsoft, and a bunch of other enormous campuses located? East of the 101. Where are all of the residential areas? West of the 101. Gazillions of commuters need to cross the 101 to get from their home to their office twice a day. This means that everything is limited by a few small overpasses that are crazy expensive to expand.

What if people could build apartments over there? Too bad. Not zoned for housing.

Re: Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

#299

Post by jjoonathan »

HPsquared wrote: post #254
jjoonathan wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of real estate, does anyone have data on the impact of personal range on the ability of land owners to extract rent? The feeling I get from sampling shopping experiences at various levels of density is that higher density means higher rent and higher prices. Cars are enormously wasteful in a physics sense, but in an economic sense they do wonders to commoditize our complements, and I fear that getting rid of…

Density and rent are definitely correlated, but I think the causation mostly works the other way: in areas with high value (high rent), people will build more densely to take advantage of the high-value location.

That's how density increases naturally due to market forces, but we are talking about enacting policy to directly spur increased density and what its effects will be.

I would expect the policy to create lots of value, but because of the way land ownership works, I would expect most, all, or more than all of that created value to accrue to the people who own the correct land. More importantly, I would expect it to bleed away from those who don't. Shops away from Main St would be screwed, while the new lovely walkable storefronts would have $5 coffee and $15 sandwiches and the apartments within walking distance would have $5000/mo rent. Those massive flows of money wouldn't go to shop owners or workers or maintaining the infrastructure (see: NY, SF), the money would go into the pocket of whoever owned the land, because our policy choices would have just gone towards ensuring that owning the correct land was all that mattered.

It just seems crazy to me how eager people are to build an economic steamroller and then throw themselves in front of it. Fight to commoditize your complement, don't fight to help your complement commoditize you!

Re: Surveys show Americans want more walkable cities

#300

Post by UncleMeat »

542458 wrote: post #98
graeme wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They’re illegal because people vote for representatives who makes them illegal and show up to city council meetings to petition for them to be illegal. Existing areas in that style tend to be expensive, but are often (at least where I’ve lived) some of the most NYMBY areas in a city. They like the benefits their density has brought, but won’t tolerate the lot next to them getting one iota more dense.

Is that because they don't prefer that design, or because protecting the price of their house is so essential to their long term financial stability that they'll block literally any policy, no matter how good, if it threatens their house price?
Post reply on HN