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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

> Is "just" changing zoning actually enough? Is there a case study?

Changing zoning and eliminating minimum parking requirements, height limitations and setbacks is a good start.

Case studies? Towns in the US before zoning, and much of modern Europe?

Politically... it's a much tougher problem. People are used to their 'burbs and feel they have a right to tell other people what to do with their own land.

Signing up for organizations like the various YIMBY groups, Strong Towns, and so on is probably a good first step.

If you don't have a local YIMBY group - make one!

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I want my car. I need my car for when I drive to places NOT in the city. Like visiting family.

Make it so I can still store my car (near) my unit. Also that there's a GOOD loading dock so I can get items to/from my unit and transport.

This might be a mega-garage at the edge of a city with moving belt people movers and giant commercial promenades that are covered indoor malls /between/ buildings.

It might just be more parking under the building out of sight.

I also NEED sufficient privacy. I don't want to hear my neighbors slamming the microwave around, food processioning, or cleaning. Nor do I want to hear that idiot above me who thuds around too much. Build it in to the fire and privacy codes that there WILL be walls of sufficient thickness.

Make that inner wall a complete full one, no plumbing or electrical/etc. That's where all of the insulation goes. That's the disconnect between units. Then /outside/ of that build the utility / facing wall that isn't for support, it's for finishing and routing of wall items.

The roof? I'm not sure how to handle that other than, maybe something similar.

Then, what I want, give me a good choice of true high-speed (Ethernet/Fiber) ISPs.

Also, what other people want. Do all of the above, but also build in PLENTY of FAMILY sized units. Units with 4+ real rooms and a common area. Also make it easier to sublet within those rooms for friends (this means the inner doors might need locks as well, and should also sound-isolate).

You can have that. A freestanding home in a quiet neighborhood with a garden and space to park one car per family with affordable housing and high quality transit in reasonably dense urban development (150+ density, 2x that of the city of San Francisco) is possible. And it scales to millions of people, even tens of millions. But you need Japanese street geometry. That means small blocks and really narrow streets. Really narrow like 4-5m wide streets making up 80% of all street kilometers in your city. That's 4-5m building line to building line with no sidewalks because the entire street has to be shared.

It works, but it's no good for daily driving. You can get out of town in a car with some patience, but you're going to take the train in town.

If you can accept that, you can have it all. But no American city has made that choice.

I just moved to a new, big building in SF that has literally all of these things. This is the new market rate housing that Yimby groups are fighting for in cities, it's being built.

At least part of the issue is a chicken and egg type problem. Older city housing stock mostly does not meet your criteria (or it does but costs several millions of dollars and has no density), so people oppose dense urban housing, so it doesn't get built, so we never get to see how it actually can meet the criteria people care about.

While I'm not especially sympathetic to a lot of the cities must change to accommodate what I want, it honestly sounds as if you like certain aspects of city living but not others. The problem is that they more or less come as a bundle.

The problem is that they more or less come as a bundle.

Not everywhere. Salt Lake City for example has wide streets and multi-story underground garages to allow locals and commuters alike to drive to the city, with a walkable city center above the garages. The newest residential buildings in the city also advertise their double-walled soundproofing between units.

If you're OK with smaller cities, then there are quite a few options. I know quite a few people who live in downtown Raleigh for example. But I suspect that most of the people advocating for city living are thinking more in terms of SF and NYC.

I'm in the process of moving from SLC to SF myself, and if you are okay with staying in like a five block radius, there are quite decent walkable food and living options in SLC. The air gets pretty bad, though.

I was never especially wowed by SLC when I used to visit there semi-regularly though the nearby skiing is hard to beat.

One issue I have with a lot of smaller cities with walkable cores is that you run out of choices pretty quickly. I'm familiar with a number of places in that vein and they're fine to visit once in a while but I think I'd tire of them as an example of "city living" pretty quickly if I were looking for that sort of thing.

I never got bored with lunch for the two and a half years I worked downtown in SLC. Now that I'm in SF I am having a hard time finding replacements for some of my SLC favorites -- one advantage of a smaller city center is there's more variety in less walking distance. SLC has good Asian crossover, Chinese, Vietnamese, Mexican (good stuff like mole), American, Thai, Italian, hipster, burger, pizza, sushi, etc. options all close to each other. Some of that is fairly recent.

For lunch, I'm fine with a handful of options. Heck, I was good with the handful of decent lunchtime restaurants in downtown Nashua NH for a number of years. But for the tradeoffs involved with actually living in a city, I want a lot more than a reliable rotation of restaurants.

Since I'm currently moving from small city to big city, could you list some of the tradeoffs as you see them, and how best to address them?

Specifically with respect to SF vs. SLC though it's somewhat general to coastal big city vs. relatively prosperous smaller city:

- SF is going to be a lot more crowded, noisy, less clean, obvious signs of poverty. Nothing you can really do to address it other than be aware that some areas are best generally avoided.

- On the other hand, SF has a lot more culture, restaurant variety, and is just a more interesting urban environment than SLC. So, basically, take advantage of that. SF, more than even most larger cities, has a huge number of interesting nooks and crannies to explore.

- Generally speaking, smaller cities often do have some degree of walkability in a central core but you're still crowded in to some degree while you lack the variety and opportunities that preferred large cities have to offer. (I'm not personally much of a fan of smaller cities. I think they tend to have city disadvantages without giving me offsetting benefits.)

These are all things you can absolutely pay to have under a market-based system. More mixed-use housing does not mean there won't be other kinds of housing.

Markets would probably also provide units without all the above and while you may not want to live there, perhaps someone would accept it rather than not be able to live in an area at all.

> Case studies? Towns in the US before zoning, and much of modern Europe?

And Houston. There are many case studies, and they point in many directions.

Houston doesn't exactly not have zoning.

https://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2015/09/08/forget-what-youv...

>“We do have a lot of land-use regulations,” Festa said. “We still have a lot of stuff that looks and smells like zoning.” To be be more precise, Houston doesn’t exactly have official zoning. But it has what Festa calls “de facto zoning,” which closely resembles the real thing. “We’ve got a lot of regulations that in other cities would be in the zoning code,” Festa said. “When we use it here, we just don’t use the ‘z’ word.”

> Case studies? Towns in the US before zoning, and much of modern Europe?

Both places started from quite a different place than a modern US municipality. A little too glib an answer, I think.

Current Japan. Same level of tech, the entire nation was bombed to bits in WW2, so it's not for historical reasons (absent Kyoto, which was spared but has some of the worst urban traffic, so old designs might not work too great).

Main difference between Japan and US is that the zoning is "zoning class or lower", not "zoning class"

So an area that is "factories" can also have commercial stores or residential areas. Areas that are zoned for high rise offices can also have high rise residencies or low-rise offices.

This means that decisions on what gets built in an area are much more guided by what people want. Convenience stores get placed in the middle of neighborhoods (same zoning class as small housing), because.... that's the logical thing to do. Small 3 people companies just set up shop in an appartment, not needing to get more expensive office space.

The end result: if a neighborhood is far from a super market, someone will quickly buy up a plot of land and set one up. Services go where they need to. The lack of reclassification also avoids regulatory hurdles and potential NIMBY vetos.

Case in point: next to where I live, there used to be a large factory. It's gotten demolished and is being replaced by a couple apartment complexes + a grocery store + book store. The process went very quickly, with little issue.

It helps that the transit companies are also real estate, so there's a bit of planning on that end for larger development. But most of the growth is organic, and there are a lot of players.

> the entire nation was bombed to bits in WW2

Which makes it an exceptionally poor case study for our purposes.

Also, Japan is about the size of California while America is one of the largest countries on Earth.

Yes, no place is exactly like the U.S. And no two humans are alike either but that doesn't mean we can't test medicines, for example.

What specifically about urban environments in Japan and Europe won't work in the US?

Are you planning to raze the existing homes, infrastructure, roads, etc.? If so I don't know how it's comparable.

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