871–880 of 1001 posts
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High rises are not dystopian. What is dystopian is people living in fucking tents
I'd rather live in a tent in a rural area with access to nature than an inner city high rise.
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Which alternative is less dystopian? * Clearcut wilderness to build more suburban homes * Don't build more homes, just stuff more people into existing homes * Let the excess population live in cars or on the sidewalk * Cull the excess population
Maybe excess population live somewhere else that costs less? That is, quite literally, the choice I made.
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Interest rates are super high right now, so you might get some reprieve in the short term. They'll probably slow play Vallco until rates come down, doing just enough to keep their zoning exemption?
Interest rates are not super high. They seem that way if you only look at the past few year, but they are close to normal if you look on a larger time scale.
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> The answers are very uncomfortable. Are they? Isn't it possible that people who live in beautiful neighborhoods with mature trees, nice big yards, and low traffic streets that are safe for kids to play around, want to keep them that way for primarily those reasons? Of course their desires alone shouldn't be the final word on proposed changes to codes, but implying that all of these homeowners are primarily driven b…
Nothing about this would let a developer cut down your tree, build on your yard, etc. You just wouldn't be able to stop your neighbor from selling their property to a developer who might cut down trees and build things there. It's not unreasonable for you to have preferences about what your neighbors do with their property, just like it's not unreasonable for you to have preferences about which kinds of restaurants a…
When each neighbor bought into the neighborhood, they all signed up for this same basic deal. Many of them would likely have chosen to not spend their money on the property had their neighbors not been bound by the same rules.
What is being proposed is a significant change to those rules that every owner at some point agreed to. This absolutely does affect everyone in the neighborhood because an older neighborhood is more than a collection of unrelated properties, it is a collection of actual homes of similar size and character with a particular feel and aesthetic.
A change to the rules may absolutely be necessary for the health of the city / population as a whole. Totally agree with this. Don't pretend though that it's not coming at the cost of infringing on the existing homeowners' reasonable expectations of what they bought into when they purchased their properties. Again, maybe it does need to happen, but homeowners are not unreasonable for wanting to keep their neighborhoods as they've always known and loved them.
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First thing to fix is the broken financial model. Exclusive suburbs pay disproportional less taxes for low density, low efficient, infrastructure. They are being subsidised by high density areas. That's not fair.
How does that work? Property tax is by city and suburbs are their own cities. For example, my city has implemented has implemented a Mello-Roos for new developments to fund new schools.
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I'm not an expert, but I lean towards relaxing zoning laws but not getting rid of them completely. Look to Houston to see what happens when there are no zoning laws at all.
What's wrong with Houston? You have pretty much whatever you want there. You can go get a single family house, live in a gated community, rent a shack on the bayou, go be a hipster in montrose, live in a high-rise downtown... Pretty good as far as I'm concerned.
The outer loop of 99/Grand Parkway nearly encompasses D.C. and Baltimore [2]. Commuting from 99-adjacent (e.g. Sugar Land, Cypress, and the Woodlands) to downtown is common enough. I've seen Katy to Baytown for months while working on (oil & gas) projects. Same goes for Midtown/downtown to Baytown to work in the refineries. Trying to serve an area of that size with any sort of transit is not easy, regardless of density.
As Houston continues to grow, it's going to continually max out arterial road capacity. Even Katy Freeway backs up every day despite being 20+ lanes at its widest [3]. All of those cars have to go somewhere. And you're devoting so much valuable real estate to dozens of lanes for a few hundred thousand commuters. Not even the reverse commute will save you [4].
I have another post that mentions my optimism about Houston suburbs eventually providing more transit and density [5]. It's silly that your choices of hosing are single family or stranded apartment buildings adjacent to the highway [6]. The inability to convert some number of homes into 2 or 3 apartment buildings on the same lot like this [7] seems less disruptive than 5+ unit apartments.
Fundamentally, both are much easier than providing increasingly-distant suburbs with power, water, and highways. Hopefully Houston can start embracing this before prices become as ridiculous as other regions.
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[1] https://tcwp.tamu.edu/wetlands/wetland-loss/ [2] http://mapfrappe.com/?show=64047 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_10_in_Texas#/media/... [4] https://mobility.tamu.edu/mip/corridors-pdfs/houston/HOU-22-... [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33567501 [6] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brea+Luxury+Apartments/@29... [7] https://www.apartments.com/43-hooper-st-worcester-ma/9rsxk34...
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This has little to do with the existence of zoning laws themselves, but the specific zones that they define. Japan has zones, so does Spain. But there's just nothing anywhere near as Restrictive as most US cities' R1 zone. Many places have R2s and R3s that are still more restrictive than the least dense thing than a Spanish city has. Remove zones alone, and HOAs will get areas into legally binding covenants that are…
First thing to fix is the broken financial model. Exclusive suburbs pay disproportional less taxes for low density, low efficient, infrastructure. They are being subsidised by high density areas. That's not fair.
Looking at other countries like Japan with like barely any zoning laws, this looks great, I hope it leads to more mixed cities again and more walkable/liveable areas like before WW2. It is funny that America land of the free had so many restrictions, building up hundreds of zoning laws across the country did a lot of bad and led to a lot of urban sprawl leading to very poor cities and towns that literally cannot pay…
Wow that's great news! The level of bureaucratic creep that has been imposed on property owners is actually unbelievable to me. I obviously understand some regulations (you can't built a chemical processing plant in a residential neighborhood, obviously), but cities have creeped themselves into all-powerful overseers. Most cities now have the power to tell you what kind of house you can build, how you can paint it, h…
> If you don't want to deal with living near other people, move to the country. The reverse could also be said - if you don't want to deal with people deciding together that they want their community to have certain guidelines, move to the country. You can do pretty much whatever you want in rural areas without significantly impacting your neighbors. People living together in a small area do get to decide together wh…
