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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

#61

Post by non-entity »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #46
chasing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. It's the main reason many European cities and Manhattan feel so engaging and alive in comparison to other US cities (just using my experiences). In walking cities you interact with the city itself -- you can stop and look at things closely, walk into a small store you've never noticed before, run into a friend and chat, or pause and just people watch. In car cities everything's far off and viewed through glass,…

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.

I don't understand why in many suburban areas there will be sidewalk for miles, and then it will just cut off for maybe a mile or so, just to have the sidewalk pick back up again on that same road

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#62

Post by jl6 »

They have been optimized away.

Grids, blocks, straight lines, clear boundaries, maintenance space, standardized signage, standardized safety and accessibility, standardized everything... these are all things which reduce TCO.

Non-standard, interesting, niche, characterful, bespoke, artisan, historic... these all carry hidden costs that manifest in property prices or taxes or inefficiency.

Everyone admires the aesthetics of the latter type of cities but not so many are willing to pay the price for them.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#63

Post by zip1234 »

asokoloski wrote: post #33
assblaster wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meanwhile, other purists decry cul-de-sacs as a suburban abomination that inhibit walkability.

There is a third way. Suburban single-family zones full of cul-de-sacs are designed to be metaphorically put under glass and never changed. Building massive towers, on the other hand, is very drastic and has the potential to destroy the character of a community. I like the approach advocated by the Strong Towns movement: allow the next increment of development by right, everywhere. So a neighborhood of mostly single-…

I like their idea for height restriction as well--allowing a story higher than those buildings around it.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#64

Post by School-Cotton »

mattlondon wrote: post #52
Analemma_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliminating parking requirements is also starting to gain traction in the US: Seattle did it [0], and it's underway in Los Angeles [1]. Unfortunately it tends to make NIMBY opposition to development even more intense than it already is ("They'll use up all the street spaces!"), but fingers crossed we can keep this trend going. [0]: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/sea... [1]: https://la.curbed…

Well that NIMBY response was the same here. In London generally on-street parking is already at- or over-capacity, so adding an extra couple of hundred to a thousand people wanting to park their car in the surrounding 3 or 4 streets is not just NIMBY-style petty complaints of "I don't want someone parking outside my house" and so on, but more "there physically isn't enough space for even more people to try and park i…

Does London not have buses and trains? Why do people need to park or drive anywhere?

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#65

Post by mattlondon »

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…

Oh I've got no doubt that the value for humans is higher. It's just the unrealistic expectations from developers that zero people will bring a car and park on street that is absurd.

Often these "luxury apartments" that they build like this actually don't have cars so they are kinda right but for the wrong reasons: these sort of apartments in London are often bought by people for speculation/money parking/laundering and are actually never occupied (1) so it is more that the market values the apartments as assets/money laundering opportunities more than human habitation. Locals cannot afford to buy these sort of places.

1 - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/20/uk-foreign-...

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#66

Post by ilamont »

There used to be a neighborhood in Boston called the "West End" which was actually pretty far east in the city, bumping against the North End, Beacon Hill, and the Longfellow Bridge which crosses the Charles River.

Most of the buildings were brick tenements built in the 1800s. One of its most famous native sons was Leonard Nemoy, who left the West End in his late teens to start his acting career.

The West End had narrow, winding streets, and the city government said this was a fire hazard because fire apparatus couldn't be driven down certain streets and alleys. That was true (I saw an old black and white picture of a fire truck that got stuck making a turn) but there was another motive in moving to have the tenements cleared and the area flattened: "Urban renewal." The city wanted other buildings built there, not to mention the elevated central artery. Over the strenuous objection of residents, almost everyone was cleared out and the buildings flattened from 1958 to 1960. The elevated highway, new hospital buildings, government buildings, and commercial structures went up in its place.

The history of the West End is covered by the West End Museum (https://thewestendmuseum.org/)

Leonard Nimoy was never able to go back home; his parents relocated to West Roxbury. The central expressway was demolished in the 1990s and the highway put underground (part of the "The Big Dig", see https://www.mass.gov/info-details/the-big-dig-project-backgr...).

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#67

Post by domador »

kn0where wrote: post #54
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.

Bait parking is the sad reason. People are more likely to park and go into the store if they can see from the road that there are available parking spaces.

Maybe they need automatically-updated signs in the front that announce the number of parking spaces available in the back.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#68

Post by CalRobert »

crispyambulance wrote: post #58
journalctl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because sprawl has enormous externalities that the proponents thereof refuse to pay for, and likely couldn’t actually afford without massive subsidies. I know lots of people have a homestead fetish (which I don’t deign to understand), but it’s not sustainable.

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, fundamentalist Christians, environmentalists, etc. - I notice it's becoming more common among people concerned about climate breakdown, who are probably concerned that the support structures which make cities possible will fail.

Calling it unsustainable probably refers to half-assed homesteading, where you basically do some gardening on a big patch of land but still drive everywhere and use lots of energy. Homesteading (grow your own food, coppice trees for heating fuel, solar panels for electricity, ride a mountain bike to get around, etc) can have a very low carbon footprint.

Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered

#69

Post by unholythree »

carapace wrote: post #45

I was walking with my mom and her dog up Brotherhood Way in San Francisco and we tried to take a shortcut through the new development on Summit Way to get into Park Merced. (There is no shortcut, BTW. There are some abandoned could-have-been-stairs but, as I say, they are abandoned.) Anyhow. The houses are each quite nice but the neighborhood itself is terribly soulless. It's like a locker room for people. The vibe w…

That's always super annoying. In my mother's old neighborhood there is a former train yard that was an empty field for decades. It was two or three blocks wide, about dozen blocks long, and split into thirds by a couple cross streets. When uppermost third was finally developed, instead of joining the existing street grid, they surrounded it in a fence and ran a silly meandering loop inside.
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