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Comment by tsukaisute | Hacker News Reader

I'm a firm believer that Americans don't understand how to zone cities. In Asia (e.g. Japan) you can have beautiful high-rises mixed with things useful for daily life, be that small shops, restaurants, or convenience stores. Even Ginza has useful things if you walk a couple of blocks.

On the other hand, if you take Seattle's Belltown, there will be art stores, realtor offices, and other things you rarely ever ever need, and yet you have to drive five minutes to buy a bottle of water.

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I'm a firm believer that Americans don't understand how to zone cities. In Asia (e.g. Japan)

Your observation is astute: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-...

You don't have to drive 5 minutes to buy a bottle of water in Belltown. You can do that in a 5 minute walk, and there are multiple grocery stores within a 5 minute drive.

Could we not fixate on the choice of example? I'm not familiar with Belltown and I don't really care, I'm much more interested in the parent's point and whether it's true.

I can walk across the street from my apartment in Bellevue and get food, furniture, and groceries but this is the exception even in Bellevue: outside of downtown areas many apartment complexes require getting in a car or bus to get anything.

The point is development in Belltown has been highly restricted for decades, preventing dense, multi-purpose buildings from being built in that neighborhood.

Even the newer buildings being built right on Denny and Queen Anne Ave N in Belltown are entirely the creation of zoning, as they are height capped and forced to subsidize parking (which rents for $0.XX per sqft a month) over usable space that rents for dollars a square foot. Most of the people living and working in that area are using transit, with 70% not driving: https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/docs/2014TrafficRepor...

I'll bite; Belltown has barely any bodegas and no grocery stores. The closest grocery store is Whole Foods in SLU or QFC in Lower Queen Anne.

However I think the real takeaway from the parent comment is that US cities are not designed for pedestrians[0].

[0] http://www.newurbanism.org/pedestrian.html

There is an IGA on 3rd below Pike. But yes Belltown has (mostly) always been a wasteland. There used to be a pretty good grocery store kitty-corner from the Cinerama.

You're saying Americans don't understand zoning because of one part of Seattle?

The big difference between most of America and Japan is that people on this side don't give a shit about each other. So if you want to be able to sleep at night without dealing with constant frat parties and the police telling you to just deal with it, your only option is to live in a low density area, with no shop around, on a small dead end street.

So people get very opinionated when it comes to zoning, and it ends up done sub optimally.

Put some teeth on laws that make it so a single person can make 200 others miserable with no repercussion, and all of a sudden most resistance to proper zoning will go away.

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