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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

You're focussing on a nit. The situation is not "the neighbourhood is generally fine, but would need some tweaks for the fire code"

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.

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Most first world nations have become very bad at city building through what they think are good intentions, it's really sad.

Most modern cities are either tall uniformly looking high-rise building or extremely boring suburbs.

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.

Montreal's urban planning is seriously underrated. The city has a winning formula of medium-density walk-ups with lots of parks and commercial mixed in, and the formula is replicated over and over to create a huge, highly-liveable area with tons of interesting and beautiful neighbourhoods. Montreal affordably houses 1.6 million people in a fairly modest footprint without ever feeling crowded.

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.

I think a key to our success is that almost all the areas you describe were built before cars. Montreal was once the biggest city in Canada, then declined.

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)

Agreed, I studied in Montreal for half a year. Was amazed to find a cheap room, cheaper than back home in Europe, in a prime location in a similarly awesome city.

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.

> 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.

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.

IMO it's more like strawberries or something similarly delicious than it is like oatmeal.

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.

Novelty brings value to things that would otherwise be junk.

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.

You may be right for most people! I'm sure you're right for yourself. As someone who lives in such a neighborhood (and lived for two years attempting to survive biking and walking among the plentiful parking, wide streets, and zero pedestrians of suburban Los Angeles) you are very wrong for me.

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.

As a resident of near-downtown Boston, I want cars out of my neighborhood, ideally the entire downtown. I love the wide sidewalks and want bigger ones. Mostly I'm jealous that we can achieve neither the efficiency nor the beauty of transportation in Central European cities like Zürich because the suburbanites, their remote matchboxes, and their eyesore parking garages are obstacles to every proposal to improve (or even maintain) public transportation. To choke those folks out of the area with narrow streets and zero-car zones would be a blessing.

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 got narrow streets, they'd be bumper-to-bumper spewing exhaust. You would be unhappy.

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.

Consider Delft and Leuven. Two small vibrant cities, near Rotterdam and Brussels respectively. Both don't have a lot of cars in their center, are completely walkable, both are wealthy cities, both are not tourist traps, both offer employment for all ages from retail clerk to PhD computer chip researcher, they are most certainly not outdoor strip malls. Those are just two examples that I know personally, but there are hundreds more the world over.

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.

As a resident of Somerville, I definitely want narrow streets and a lack of parking. I'm really tired of drivers almost running me over on the way to work on my bike because they think they have exclusive rights and high speed limits on any road with at least two lanes.

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.

You hate being almost run over. (oddly, you think narrow streets will... give you more space???) You hate the weather enough to spend 20 minutes in it (10 plus 10 is 20) rather than just 15 minutes in it.

Pardon the suggestion, but it seems you'd rather be in a car.

Narrow streets are safer for cyclists. Cars tend to drive as fast as feels safe regardless of posted speed limits, which makes wide streets into dangerous speedways.

Also, wider streets tempt drivers to pass unsafely, while narrow streets make it clear that you simply can't pass and are stuck behind the cyclist.

Slower cars kill you slowly. Dropping the speed from 40 MPH to 20 MPH means it takes twice as many milliseconds to grind you against a planter, mailbox, bus, parked car, etc.

This is wildly untrue--to a greater extent than one might expect. If you're a pedestrian and are hit by a car at an impact speed of 40mph, you have a roughly 50% chance of dying. The odds of death if you're hit at 25mph are roughly 12%.[0]

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...

> We don't actually want narrow streets, lack of parking, and pedestrians looking in our windows. The novelty makes it cute though.

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.

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