edit: the article mentions "illegal neighborhoods and illegal houses" but doesn't say anything about the laws when they were built.
1. People highly praise city/town/neighborhood X for its density, walkability, livibility, sustainability, and other quality of life elements.
2. That city/town/neighbourhood could not be built today because of laws which explicitly ban the things which make it so highly praised. If it was destroyed in an earthquake, it couldn't be rebuilt in any form which shared the attributes which made it loved.
This isn't about earthquake strengthening; it's about density, parking, transport, multi-family dwellings, mixed-use neighborhoods, etc. An ocean of ink has been spilled on the problems of suburbs full of single-family homes (and zero commercial presence), but our laws frequently require that, regardless of the preferences of consumers.
(More generally: The argument for zoning laws is that local government knows better than residents what the people really want, and what makes for a good city. That does not seem to reflect reality.)
It seems like it's theoretically possible for residents and visitors in a given city to enjoy its current building stock while simultaneously desiring different standards for new construction. Whether or not that is the case in Somerville, I don't really know, but a statement that the city couldn't legally be built from scratch the same way today doesn't necessarily imply (in my mind) that the zoning laws are illegitimate.
I get that there are other issues here too, of course.
Is it? Can you explain why this would be so? Or even better, provide any evidence that this is true in any of the locations people have been discussing (Montreal, Somerville, Manhattan, Portland, etc.?)
Let's drill down and focus in particular on laws about multi-family dwellings. What logic would make them good when they already exist, but bad if you wanted to build more, and even bad if you wanted rebuild them after a natural disaster?
A duplex is split between two families. They both think multi-family housing is for college students, the universal bane of Massachusetts housing debates.
It also makes sense to me that someone would appreciate a historical landmark but place a lesser value on a modern replica of that landmark. Similarly, I could imagine a person admiring a historical neighborhood more than a modern recreation of it.
> Let's drill down and focus in particular on laws about multi-family dwellings. What logic would make them good when they already exist, but bad if you wanted to build more, and even bad if you wanted rebuild them after a natural disaster?
I'm not sure the answer needs to be logical (see above), but even if it must be, I don't know why placing limits on something implies that it was never actually good in the first place. Natural disasters are another story for sure, but I would imagine that sort of massive rebuilding was not the primary motivation for the present zoning laws in Somerville.
Proponents of zoning talk about things like reducing congestion and preserving the character of the neighborhood. If you can't exchange like for like these arguments fall flat. Changing the rules of the game after you've won, so to speak, smacks of crony capitalism. Cynically I believe that zoning laws primarily exist to extend property rights over land that a person is unwilling or unable to buy.
The situation is: it's impossible to build a neighbourhood resembling somerville under current zoning laws.
I live in a prewar neighbourhood in Montreal. It's dense, beautiful, and loved by locals and tourists alike. If you could clone it and build it elsewhere, it would be worth trillions to cities across North America.
But it's illegal to build, because the streets are too narrow, there isn't enough parking, there is a mix of residential buildings and businesses, the buildings aren't set back far enough, and so on.
We don't actually want narrow streets, lack of parking, and pedestrians looking in our windows. The novelty makes it cute though.
If neighborhoods like yours were common, they would have no value.
Regardless, I just wish that the US government (and the vast majority of state and local governments) would stop making the choice for all of us with massive explicit and implicit subsidies for motor-vehicle-optimized travel.
Although a more effective solution would be to scrap zoning laws and actually make the suburban blight towns convenient for workers and pedestrian residents.
If you excluded cars, the place would turn into a downtown version of a strip mall. (expensive tourist trap) There would be no jobs other than things like waiter, retail clerk, manicurist, etc. -- is that how you wish to be employed?
You are focusing on the bad of cars, and ignoring all the benefit they bring. They even bring benefit to people without cars. Heck, you can rent one. I bet you've done it.
Cars indeed have benefits, but they are noxious to cities. In my experience, the fewer cars there are in the city, the more pleasant that city is. And as the above examples demonstrate, that doesn't mean you are suddenly killing the economy or your job prospects.
Pedestrians looking in the first-floor windows can be solved by putting shops on the first floor.
I'm also strongly in favor of the forever-proposed Green Line Extension into Somerville and Medford. I know it will increase rents while I'm still a renter, and I know it's gentrifying some neighborhoods at the moment, but by God it has to happen! It's downright shameful the way a Somerville resident has to walk or drive to Davis, Porter, or Charlestown to get to a T stop, and those will only travel through selected arteries that don't necessarily include most of our workplaces.
Heck, we could redraw the bus-lines too, so maybe I could get a bus from Somerville through to the main artery roads of Cambridge. When the weather sucks too much to bike, at the moment, my commute doubles, because instead of a 15-minute bike ride, I have to walk 10 minutes to the Red Line at Porter, take the train for five minutes to Central, and then walk another 10 minutes to work from there -- a circuitous route that just happens to go through the Mass Ave-focused Red Line we actually have transit for.
Pardon the suggestion, but it seems you'd rather be in a car.
That's in addition to the fact that slower cars are much less likely to hit you at all, because they have more time to brake and maneuver before impact.
[0] https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...
I don't know. We had that kind of stuff in Europe for a long time. We don't value it for novelties sake there.
I know it's a matter of personal taste, but I yet to see a modern residential area where I would want to live. Some of these neighbourhoods seems designed to suck the personality out of anyone who dear to move in.
Contrast with Vancouver, where land is overwhelmingly allocated to large, residential-only neighbourhoods of tightly-packed single-family dwellings with a starting price of $1.5 million. These neighbourhoods are often beautiful, tree-lined utopias with lovely heritage homes, but they are walking distance from nowhere and can't effectively house the city's growing population. And you can bet that the people who live in them furiously oppose any change to that status quo.
Price of groceries really hit me though haha, but Montreal's living arrangements felt incredibly balanced, and that's a really hard thing to pull off.
So we have a large amount of housing/commericial stock when neighbourhoods were mixed used and designed for walking.
I'm actually not sure you could build Montreal again in Montreal. (I mean, I really don't know what regulations are like for new neighbourhoods)
I wonder though, to what extent this is success and love by scarcity.
i.e. if you outlawed oatmeal in 99% of cities, sure there'd be an absolutely booming tourist destination around that 1% of cities which will specialise in artisanal oatmeal. It'd create lots of jobs and become an attractive place to visit for its rich, unique and vibrant food culture, and attract all kinds of wealthy people who have financial and mental bandwidth to care about something like a $25 unique oatmeal recipe. It'll be a clean and wealthy city attracting students, artists and tourists. (I'm exaggerating the effect of oatmeal here haha but you get my point).
And so you may conclude that if you'd clone that, it'd be worth trillions for cities across the country. When in reality, if you'd deregulate oatmeal, there's none of that boom, oatmeal is just oatmeal like it is today, a boring staple of a lot of people's breakfasts that has none of the flair of the city described earlier. Quite a lot of people will eat oatmeal and there'll be a substantial industry behind it sure, but there'd be no particular love or specialness about it.
At scale, it's quite likely that a lot of the old zoning laws just wouldn't work, and were changed (dare say fixed) for a reason. Inevitably some old neighbourhoods of cities which thrived for various reasons (perhaps including, being connected to a larger city with modern zoning laws) may do very well, like pre-war Montreal. But that may also just be survivor-bias. All over Europe there are thousands of old villages with similar old infrastructure, beautiful too, that are just not appealing and where the population is shrinking, and where modern zoning laws could make interesting improvements to public infrastructure.
Lastly I feel people are appealed by some more older building materials and the notion that age correlates with authenticity. It's not that in newer neighbourhoods people are uninterested in living there because the zoning laws create too large or too narrow sidewalks, or too low or too high buildings, it's probably more about a new office made of glass rather than brick isn't appealing to the well to do stereotype hipster, despite there perhaps not being any specification that new buildings can't be made of brick in the zoning laws. But even if you clone an old neighbourhood's style, and build it new, but the tourists you mentioned wouldn't come to such a new place because it's new. In fact they'd be more more interested to visit parts of Montreal that were built under newer zoning laws, than an entirely new city with none of the culture, built similar to Montreal's old zoning laws.
So I'm not entirely convinced you can just clone it and get great results. Just thinking out loud.
Strawberries are a commodity. They're also great, and liked by nearly everyone. We are all better off for being able to go down to the grocery store and pick up a box of strawberries for a few bucks. That's worth a huge amount, even if it may not express itself within our lives in direct monetary terms.
If Montreal-like neighborhoods were ubiquitous then we might not find it special, but we'd still enjoy it and benefit from it enormously.
To recast it in tech terms, ubiquitous internet connectivity is surely worth trillions, even though it's a total commodity that people basically don't care about unless it breaks. It was a lot more special back when it was rare (I still remember my first taste in a university computer lab) but it's a lot more valuable now.
But it comes full circle, because at the end of the day these properties must have a foundational estimate of value based on what everyone thinks of them. As long as most people agree an acre yard 3 car garage and wall around your land to hide the neighbors is optimal, at least a block away from any highly trafficked street, that is what you get.
Now, it's entirely possible the dataset the author is using to justify his position actually covers things that are safety issues.
Somerville is awesome. It leaves you wondering why we can;t have more towns like it.
And this is the answer: because building Somerville today would be illegal.
This article lacks some context. The housing market here (I live in Somerville) is red fucking hot. Somerville desperately needs more housing, especially high density housing.