We Regulate the Wrong Things
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
That is true, height is often a bad proxy for some other quality you're looking for and which could be solved in original ways besides height e.g. in the north east you'd want enough light to reach the street and avoid gloomy alleys, besides height you could manage it by removing wedges of the building (from a basic cuboid shape), or having a front courtyard or a large atrium, or yes height. Height also becomes a factor of the street width, narrower streets would tend to get shorter buildings.
Furthermore regulating height can be counter-productive: while you want to avoid excessive shade in the north-east, in the south-west you want to do the exact opposite, much like cities of northern africa or the middle east, for an arizonan or texan city to be walkable it needs shade and air flow rather than light: you need buildings tall enough that they protect pedestrians from the sun (without falling into gloom), but you also want them to guide and amplify the slightest breeze.
> 3. Land Use
> Segregation of uses is the most important of those features. The biggest factor that predicts walkability is the presence of actual destinations in walking distance of where people live. The postwar paradigm has been to rigidly control where commercial land uses can go and where they can’t, based on the premise that they are a nuisance in a residential neighborhood—bringing traffic, noise, and possibly crime. Yet all commercial uses are not created equal.
Many places segregate by maximum nuisance rather than specific land use: plots are give an maximum nuisance level, and businesses are charted according to the expected nuisance they produce. Anything below the plot's MNL is allowed and thus your small corner shop or barbershop (low-nuisance businesses) can live in a "residential" area, but a nightclub or a machine shop probably can't.
My neighbourhood of Montreal has some of this, but I think a lot is grandfathered in. You can't just open anything you want in any building, even if there's a similar store around the block.
http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
This is actually why Manhattan's older buildings look the way they do, with a distinctive 'cake tower' look, but the actual fight for sunlight has been a lot more complicated: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/12/how-the-battle-for-su...
> Segregation of uses is the most important of those features. The biggest factor that predicts walkability is the presence of actual destinations in walking distance of where people live. The postwar paradigm has been to rigidly control where commercial land uses can go and where they can’t, based on the premise that they are a nuisance in a residential neighborhood—bringing traffic, noise, and possibly crime. Yet all commercial uses are not created equal.
Most Americans these days live in suburbs, and I can't really think of many that don't adopt rigid single-use zoning.
Refrigeration. In days past people needed to make regular trips to buy food. We needed lots of stores, butchers, bakers and such within walking distance. (Think a metal shop is a nuisance? Imagine living downwind of an open-air butcher's yard.) Today, largely thanks to refrigeration, we can purchase larger volumes and keep them safely in our homes. So we don't need to go to the store every day, and when we do we purchase more than we can easily carry. This isn't a bad thing. It has freed up countless man-hours increased our dietary options. Not every urbanization problem is about cars.
Problem with that is that if you happen to run out of milk,or salt, etc., you have to plan the whole trip, instead just quickly coming downstairs and buying it in the grocery store that is in the same building as your apartment.
Another problem is that instead of buying fresh bread everyday in your local bakery you have to buy this packaged, loaded with chemical conservants shit that supermarkets sell.
Grocery store within walking distance should be considered a human right :)
Even in most suburban areas (much less urban; rural areasmay have his problem but it's kind of the nature of the beast) this is far from true, even before considering the availability of grocery delivery services.
> Another problem is that instead of buying fresh bread everyday in your local bakery you have to buy this packaged, loaded with chemical conservants shit that supermarkets sell.
In most (again, non-rural) places where you have a long drive to the grocery store, you'll also have a long daily commute to work and a fresh bakery (dedicated or attached to a grocery store) with very little deviation from the commute route, so it's quite possible to buy bakery-fresh bread every day if you want.
My grocery store sells normal bread. Just plain stuff with normal ingredients. Baked on site. But here too refrigeration has a part. The supermarket "bakery" starts from frozen blobs of dough that are created offsite and stored until the day they are needed. Because they are transported frozen and/or very cold, they don't need any preservatives. The tiny grocery in your building won't have the capacity to run a bakery and so will have to stock preservative-filled loaves.
The shift to larger "destination" grocery stores often means fresher foods. Look at costsco. Hate it as a big-box store, but their turnover means they can run a full bakery without caring about shelf life. The tomatoes sold at my Costco are also fresher than those at any local grocery because they come strait from the greenhouses without middlemen distribution networks.
Getting that for everybody would pretty much require paving America with supermarkets. Consider the sizes of some supermarkets near me, roughly estimated in feet: 250x200, 250x250, 250x300. All of these have lots that are nearly 1000x1000, though shared with other stores.
So for walking to be equally fast, ignoring the need to carry groceries, we'd need 50% of the land to be supermarkets.
The benefit of the normal supermarket gets even bigger if there are people in the household who can't reasonably walk to a store on their own. Kids need to be watched. Elderly and obese people have trouble carrying groceries for 1900 feet. Shopping would mean taking trips all day long, one for each bag of groceries, so 1900 feet is really way too far. Cut that down to compensate though, and then there physically isn't enough room for all the required supermarkets!
For me walking a 2.5km round trip to my nearest local store vs driving the 8km return to my supermarket both take about half an hour if I'm grabbing a couple of things.
In terms of space - no one is suggesting these grocery stores should be the same size as a supermarket - if they are less centralised they need to hold less stock and can be smaller. If you can walk there, you don't need enormous car parks.
It may not be as ~efficient~ but it sure makes for a nicer existence.
- grocery store (x3)
- dentist's office (x2)
- hairdressing salon
- pharmacy
- kingergarten (x2)
- pizzeria
- Starbucks
- music school
- post office
None of this thins ruins the overall experience, because they all are small scale and none of them has their own parking lot - they are located at the ground floor of residential buildings (except music school which has it's own small building). Kindergardens are most interesting case because they both are actually just apartments adapted to their new role, so each of them hosts maybe 20-30 kids.
I've never seen a good answer for how walking is supposed to work for the less-able-bodied. My knee isn't getting better with age.
It's odd to even think of a grocery store that isn't a supermarket. I guess that would be like a Wawa, 7-11, Circle-K, or Walgreens. Those exist in suburbia, but they are nothing like what I expect for normal food shopping.
I can count on being able to buy artichokes, fresh and frozen whole turkey, fresh and dried apricots, asparagus, Bartlett pears, frozen rabbit, fresh cilantro, fresh and dried figs, bean sprouts, and alfalfa sprouts. I can almost count on quinces, dragonfruit (pitaya), and fresh beef heart. Other people can count on what they like, somehow choosing Muenster and rice cakes and tofu.
I like having both options - I stop at the supermarket on my way home from work for a bigger shop. But when I just need one thing it's great to be able to walk and get it.
Plentiful parking is available at my supermarket door too - but it's a different experience. The need to navigate other cars, the busy intersections which inevitably exist around shopping centres, the larger store with more people - it all creates a larger and more frustrating/stressful experience than a quick walk in the sunshine when I only need a couple of things.
None of those products seem extraordinary for a small grocery store to stock they all sound like staples of any shop - especially the fresh food. If they don't exist in your local stores then that is of course an issue - but it is an issue by design where you live.
I imagine part of the cost if that to achieve the kind of stock levels I have you need a certain population density (I live on the urban/suburban fringe of my city) - and if you live in the suburbs with everyone on a 600m2 block then of course it will be difficult to maintain fresh stock and a large enough customer base. But this article is talking about making cities walkable areas so it doesn't really apply to suburbs anyway.
Have you considered that other countries exist, do not look like American suburbs, but also do not consist of 100% end-to-end supermarkets with the odd park or hospital thrown in?
I think some of them burn lots of time walking and on buses, maybe a couple hours for their groceries. I think some of them live on food from other sources. They could order food to be delivered. They could eat junk food from a vending machine.
I walk half a mile with two grocery bags, and that's pretty much enough for a week's worth of groceries. Granted, certain bulk items are more annoying and I have to make special trips for them (like a bag of rice) but those are more the exception than the norm.
> Kids need to be watched. Elderly and obese people have trouble carrying groceries for 1900 feet.
For the elderly and obese, they make personal folding shopping carts, which are not an uncommon sight in urban areas.
Suburban Americans also helicopter parent their kids much more aggressively than the norm; when I was a child in New York City, my parents trusted me to not burn down the house if they were gone for half an hour, and once I was attending school it wasn't uncommon for me to fetch something for them from the store. And if you bring kids with you to the store it's basically free labor for walking back with groceries.
Is this true? According to the US census 62% live in cities:
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....
Now it’s not 100% clear what they’re referring to by “city”, as they also mention “incorporated areas”, which could refer to suburbs, so I won’t say your wrong exactly, but it doesn’t seem accurate.
It probably will depend on how we define “city”.
I would ask colloquially: how many Americans live in low density single family home zoned areas that require the usage of a car for commuting and access to various services? That’s my colloquial definition.
Eventually they won, and had a fantastic bar.
https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2018/09/29/minneapolis-restau...
The problem is you always have to have a border between low rise and high rise development. The difference between having a 1 story next to you with an 8ft fence and having a 5 story next to you is huge. Also there is no dealing with the new parking issues that will be created unless suddenly people decide they want to ride city busses.
But in any event, if you live someplace with a shortage of housing supply relative to demand, including many people who would be happy to live in studio or 1-bedroom apartments, then it becomes absurd to have most available land zoned to only allow buildings with <2 story single family detached houses on largish lots with strict parking requirements and sad little unused yards in the back, as happens e.g. in San Francisco and many nearby cities. Housing prices get driven up to absurd levels making the whole region unaffordable except to the best-paid professionals.
You end up with a large number of 2-bedroom single-family houses occupied by groups of 20-somethings sleeping in bunk beds; workers essential to the basic functioning of society commuting hours each way every day; schoolteachers working extra part-time jobs so they can afford to sleep in someone’s closet; families raising multiple kids while renting a small in-law unit in someone else’s back yard; people forced to move away when they get married because they can’t afford to live anywhere but their current rented multi-roommate spaces, the prices of everything in the economy going up but all of the difference siphoned off by large land-owners, ....
Having a few people’s gardens shadowed for part of the day by 3–5 story apartment buildings just isn’t that big a problem in comparison.
No, I'm talking about the burbs where they've decided to put 5 story commercial next to city blocks of single family homes on quarter acre lots. 2 stories would be fine... 25% of the houses are anyway.
There's always going to be an edge to zoning, but going from 1 story to 5 is stupid. There's no parking, no transit, no shopping, just offices and houses. The commercial was single story and fit into the neighborhood, but now going 5 it's just going to cause problems.
All the pale yellow part, https://sf-planning.org/zoning-map
What city do you live in?
https://www.salon.com/2018/11/04/despite-thorough-debunking-...
YIMBY won't reduce the homeless population, make housing more affordable, or the city more livable... it's not a simple market and pretending it is won't solve the problems.
Be careful of what you wish for. Because getting at the actual quality you want is part of what makes building in SF so difficult, e.g. the infamous "shade on public spaces" test.
"Height", "neighborhood character" and a few other things are typically things that are legally required for the regulators to consider in their decisions, so they keep being brought up.
What people really want is typically just two things (1) keep the value of their homes up through scarcity, and (2) keep outsiders out.
A good example is Denver, where they actually changed street angle closer to the river Platte because of light issues, specifically to melt snow I believe.
These are just people who don't walk enough outside to know how long it takes to walk places. They're trying to maximize efficiency in a rather horrible way.
Those things 'don't compute' into our secular views of productivity and equations ... but they are essential.
All the little mouldings, trimmings, foliage, gardens, window sills, the brick, the cobblestone, the dishes, the wine.
And I would add 'local people'. Expats and immigrants are good folk, but when everyone is a transplant, there's no rooted culture, and there's something missing. Nobody can agree on what should be what, and you end up with bland everything. Take for example many European cities have strong limits on building height etc. because to the locals, it's imperative, but in the new world, it's generally the opposite. The land in Stockholm is worth a lot, economically, it would make sense to just bulldoze everything and put up skyscrapers. Thank goodness that won't happen.
Then again, in 50 more years, who knows?
I walk around some places and they are a total mishmash. Guess what - there are no architects for most of these things, just CAD guys grabbing stuff from here and there without thinking, mishmashing it together.
Our homes are like poorly cropped photoshop mishmashes of random photos from the internet.
I was once visiting Tunisia, a local man was showing me around, he pointed out the fountain that his brother designed. He said he didn't like it, I didn't see why. He point out that the perimeter was Arabic, and the main fountain was colonial i.e. Italian renaissance. As soon as he pointed that out, even my untrained eye could see the issue immediately, I was like 'oh yeah' obviously.
This guy was not educated, I'm not sure how literate he was, and yet even he could point out basic architectural issues.
The world is such a mix we forget what the components are, and are unfortunately not able to forge our own. I feel it's not quite a 'nice mix' but 'lowest / cheapest common denominator' in most things.
Then again, each generation has its own problems. Housing for all but the rich is built around cheapness and available technology. Ours is a bungalow neighborhood because in the early 1900s, that was the cheap way to build houses. Balloon-frame construction with 2x4s and factory nails would have been anathema to previous generations - how could that possibly last? (Answer? About a hundred years.) My kitchen door is crooked because the door frame was crooked, built by relatively low-skilled laborers with poor measurements and tools, and the guy putting in the door just trimmed it to fit. No replacing that.
This is an interesting subject to me. There's value in preserving traditional styles. When I look at one of those bad-architecture blogs, certainly there are things that are obviously tasteless or mismatched to me. But there's also a lot of things where I can't see the problem until it's explained, and even then it just sounds like an arbitrary list of rules that you're supposed to follow because the cool people do it. The architectural equivalent of not wearing white after Labor Day.
If it performs the functions of a home and makes the people who live in it happy, how much does architectural integrity really matter?
Complex roof lines (another symptom of McMansion Hell) leads to leaky roofs [2] and expensive repairs.
[2] Frank Lloyd Wright's houses notoriously leaked along the roofs. When called upon it, he is recorded as having remarked, "That's how you tell it's a roof!"
I doubt it really.
The 'enforced aesthetic' in North American regions generally are very poorly conceived in the first place and are usually utilitarian, not actually aesthetic.
Typically 'forced aesthetic' only happens in places wherein there is a strong and obvious history in the area.
Vienna, Stockholm, Zurich as easy and obvious examples.
This 'forced aesthetic' is also culturally impinged, meaning that it's kind of what people would do anyhow.
Would you seriously consider knocking down and old building in Zurich and putting up a McMansion? I doubt it.
It might be an impossible thing to do from scratch, wherein there are no obvious references either. A 'new development' in Switzerland could easily have it. A suburb of Chicago ... probably not.
It would take an enormous degree of thoughtfulness and careful consideration to do in most places in North America, but it might be possible, particularly in places like New England. I could see a village in Maine saying 'no new development within the township unless it meets colonial era criteria' or something like that.
Without it, you get a deluge a true kind of blandness of hyper mediocrity. A lack of critical mass around cultural ideals, meaning corporate developments rule: a shopping mall on every corner.
Every city council and local government official wants to 'increase the GDP', and a few new Wallmarts and a 'Starbucks on Every Corner of our Community' would do just that - so it takes quite a lot of cultural momentum to keep those things in check.
And I'm just scratching the surface: how we design our living spaces goes a long way to defining who we are as a people as well.
So many of the photos here have skinny sidewalks for people and fat roads for cars, and a space like that is never going to be full of people -- the sidewalk is a place "to get from here to there", not a place to be.
Probably the best rule of thumb I've found is "Would I jaywalk here"? If an area is people-first, you have a lot of pedestrian traffic, little car traffic (because folks drive alternate routes), and what traffic there is travels at low speed. For car-first areas, it's a losing game of Frogger.
Many European cities do a much better job of giving space to people instead of cars. We should do a better job of it here too.
this is mainly because many european cities are simply far older then cars, and public infrastructure was usually build around the victorian/late industrial era aswell. This results in a far more limiting option regarding "massive suburs".
Also, many people seem to forget the population density of (western) europe. When the next town with its own 1000+ years history is 20km away, you cannot create urban sprawl without getting resistance from the people living in said village.
Just watch the people in Amsterdam in the 70s revolting against the dominance of cars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY6PQAI4TZE
I am fully in favor of mixed development and would love to live above a coffee shop, restaurant, bodega, retail store etc. I am not in favor of living next to a place where assembly or manufacturing is taking place (or any other industrial behavior). Either the type of business needs to be somewhat regulated or the hours in which commerce can occur need to be better regulated to encourage people to do things like replenishing inventory in the evening as opposed to early in the morning.
If by early you mean "slightly before the start of bushiness hours".
Nobody is waking up at 6am to turn wrenches at 7. Yeah, I guess if they start up at 7-8am that puts a damper on your ability to sleep in until 9 on weekdays but is that really something you find yourself wanting to do all that often? An automotive shop sounds a heck of a lot better than any establishment that is open late. I say this as someone who lives baseball throwing distance from a small business that maintains a fleet of excavators and trucks. If you live in a relatively developed area something is going to be making noise, garbage trucks, delivery trucks, nearby construction, etc.
At the time it suited me fine. It is clear to me though that we still need suburbs. For some at certain points in their life they need the quiet. We have too suburbs though. I think many folks could live in denser environs.
Its backwards that cities are more expensive than suburbs. Density should lower costs. High populations should lower costs. There should be both economies of scale and network effects. I think, to the writers point, we regulate the wrong things.
[1] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
It's also nice for people in the neighborhood when there's a coffee shop, grocery store, etc within like a 200m walk.
These were not supermarket-style shops. You would walk in and be served directly over the counter in most. It's a shame that this was all destroyed by big supermarkets and globalism, because the quality of the products and service was superb, and they all sold locally produced food and goods, supporting a lot of local economic activity rather than having massive supply chains to source everything from China. The staff weren't minimum wage and disinterested, they were experts in their fields who cared about their businesses and customers, and had pride in their jobs and skills. Their destruction is one of the reasons why so many of our towns are struggling.
Doing nothing but knocking down a wall and putting up a sign is a sure way to get shut down by the city, along with some likely hefty fines.
Edit: another barrier is building insurance; if a building is all residential, and someone wants to convert ground level space to commercial use, the insurance company has to re-assess the risk and premiums they charge due to the increase in people coming through, if nothing else.
Sounds like a great reason to blacklist that developer for, say, 5 years.
The answer is that the apartment above the grocery store is an apartment for someone who would have lived in a place less desirable to them otherwise.
That said, having lived above a restaurant, I personally will never again live in a building shared with a food-related business. Even the cleanest tend to have a poor record controlling pests; and when they exterminate, all the critters will flee into your apartment.
A grocery store a couple doors down on the same block, though? Ideal. Pharmacy on the ground floor of my building? Absolutely. Shoe store? Jewelry store? Toy store? Hairdresser? Why the hell not?
Many of the most popular neighborhoods in New York are built out like this. The convenience is part of what makes them so popular.
The cockroaches are a downside, as are the bottle deposit machines running (and crunching glass) at all hours, but you're mostly right.
Surely a better example would be a night club or a coal plant.
I've thought I should open a suburban bodega right in the neighborhood. But with lot sizes being fairly large and households being fairly small, i doubt I would get enough traffic since I couldn't compete with discount grocers and Walmart.
C'est la vie, I bought a muscly convertible to enjoy these interstitial commutes.
Should there be an industrial kitchen in the grocery store, zoning and building codes are used to insure that should there be a fire, it won't impact those living above, even though it absolutely increases the cost of construction (and sets minimums on what the cost of housing is).
(EDIT: I misread sarcasm in your comment. But my reply works the same either way :)
People who don't like pests. People who don't like truck deliveries early in the morning or late at night.
Grocery stores are a mild example and I get the point you're making, but there are downsides to living above one. I've met people who listed one of those reasons for not living above one when I lived in Brooklyn.
It's mostly the pests though. I know a couple of people who lived above restaurants and grocery stores who said never again because of the amount of roaches that get into their place.
Maybe there are building adaptations to reduce the problem, that stores in that area don't do?
This same principle doesn't seem to apply to people who buy cheap(er) houses near an existing airport, though...
If anything, it was pretty easy to walk down an buy some daily food items.
Certainly it's not the greatest option if what you value most is total quiet. But with that, a residential-only street frequented by cars is a bigger nuisance than a corner shop with very low car traffic around it (all parking was ~300ft away).
Assuming this is sarcasm, you don't need to have no zoning regulations. Existing zoning types like "residential mixed-use", which usually have restrictions on the type of businesses that can be operated within them, could be expanded. If the area is sparse enough, mixed-use could just be a business district you could walk to, not necessarily one right underneath you.
> Who doesn't want to live above a grocery store?
Again, assuming this is sarcasm. In many places, if the grocery store is clean and has things that the residents above actually want, a lot of people would like living above it - so much so that today, it's considered a "feature" of premium real estate and apartments in big city high-rises.
Of course nobody wants to live above any poorly kept space. If a poorly kept space were to appear below your home, you have the option of moving to a place that isn't like that.
Years before I met her, my wife lived above a grocery store. She absolutely loved it: the entire store was effectively her fridge, and she didn’t need to get dressed for the outdoors to buy food. Listening to her talk about it, I really hope that we’re able to live above one together someday.
This feels to me like a lot of urbanist stories: it really is nice, once one has experienced it.
Anyway not sure most residents even know where there but we have tons of hazardous chemicals at the site including drums of JP8 (jet fuel) stored outside near the “common areas”, giant totes of cyclohexane in a shed on the parking lot. Inside we also have a polymer production line where one has to wear anti static shoes and all the equipment doors are blast rated because of the explosive hazards. We also have a ballistics range in the building shooting up to .50 cal armor piercing rounds.
We also have regular evac and containment drills in case something goes terribly wrong. This is all fine and good as I’m well aware of any risks working there but the residents a few walls removed might have a different opinion if they took a stroll through our facility.
Point being, sometimes a few zoning regs can be a good thing ;)
Younger people who aren't in (have graduated) college seem to be a little more reasonable.
As a native Lynchburger who subsequently spent about 15 years in the Raleigh area before moving to San Jose a few years ago, ... I never felt this way growing up in Lynchburg. Yes, Lynchburg is approximately 50% white / 50% black, with approximately 0% any other ethnicity, and the majority of the white population is either exurbs or specific segregated parts of the city. But even though I grew up in Boonsboro I went to RS Payne Elementary downtown and then EC Glass for high school ... in HS, I freely wandered around that part of town after school (usually while waiting for sports practice of some sort). I never felt endangered. Nor, afaik, did my [mostly white] friends.
That's a stupid anecdote, but I think it actually used to be better than it is now, and that mass & social media have created so much fearmongering that more people are hyper-insecure and wary of any unplanned interaction with anyone not in their in-group.
The parking garages that indicate the number of available spaces on a level are a good counter to this: I find that most able-bodied folks will see the bottom few floors have few spaces open and go for a higher one.
It's probably exacerbated because for people who grow up in low-density areas, the idea that the vast majority of people will just ignore you is a foreign concept. If you're in a small town and you see someone you know & like, you go up to them and chat. If you see someone you don't like, you bully them or get bullied. If you just ignore them, you likely get moved from the "like" to "don't like" category. If you extend this model out from a town of < 10K to a city of 1M, it collapses very quickly, but not before generating some very erroneous predictions.
I grew up thinking that every time you walk through a dense urban neighborhood, you have to be on your guard lest you get knifed or shot or worse. Ironically, I didn't get this from my parents; my mom used to ride the subway alone into Manhattan for junior high, and my dad grew up in Zamboanga City. But when your hometown has only 13,000 people and literally zero crime, you're shuttled by car everywhere, your peers all live in the suburbs too, your only image of the city are the news reports about murders & drug dealing, and your one urban friend is a black dude from Dorchester who regales everyone with stories about how somebody got shot on his front step and that's why his parents insist he wake up at 5:30 AM to get bussed to a suburban school, you get a pretty biased perspective.
There's a pretty strong selection bias maintaining this illusion too: people who are still in the suburbs for this reason will never come in contact with urban dwellers who aren't actually murderers, out of fear, and similarly the majority of urban dwellers aren't actually going to move out to the suburbs (and even if they did, their past lives in the city are just abstract tales to people who haven't experienced it). So much like other geographically-based stereotypes (like "immigrants are all bad hombres", "California is falling apart", "suburbanites are all boring Stepford Wives with nothing to do but gossip", "Appalachia is filled with uneducated hicks", and "religious people are wackos"), this remains a stubbornly persistent belief despite the reality.
Almost had to draw not due to people, but 2 strays. Learn to draw from the hip. If you're looking for self-defense, learn to shoot from the hip. Weaver position is great if you are in war. Hipshots are good if you're truly defending from within 15 ft. Center-mass accuracy is all you need.
Social science statistics are terrible. If you look at the statistic without controlling for anything, it's wrong. If you try to control for other factors, you can generally make the result be whatever you want.
There are multiple overlapping reasons for this.
One is that statistical controls, like statistics in general, don't reveal causation. If you want an effect to disappear, find something that correlates with the outcome and use it as a control. The effect disappears regardless of whether the control causes the outcome. The outcome can cause the control, or they can both have a shared cause, and you can still use it to erase the original effect. For example, do the demographics of the area affect the crime rate, or does the crime rate affect the demographics of the area?
There are also arbitrarily many things that could be controlled for. Taking some of them into account will make the original relationship weaker. Taking others into account will make the original relationship stronger. Looking at only the ones that move the needle in the direction you want it to move lets you move it in that direction.
If you really want to make something inconvenient disappear, just use the metric as the target. Audi claims its vehicles are safer than some competitors. Partisans collect data from two similar areas with a different rate of Audi ownership. The number of fatalities involving Audis is higher in the area with a higher number of Audis. Does this disprove Audi's safety claim?
When you have a politically charged issue like this, you can't pretend that one side's numbers are true and the side's aren't, when the truth is they're both biased and therefore both invalid.
This is a strong candidate for an adversarial collaboration, but to my knowledge this has not actually happened.
But every now and then, you get studies that don't do any of that. And then a funny thing happens: correlation disappears, regardless of who commissioned the study. Both sides vehemently object to these findings, which to me is a good sign that they are closer to the truth than anything else.
I am pro-armed-self-defense personally, and regularly carry concealed. But it would be a delusion for me to think that by doing so, I contribute to crime reduction.
Neutrality bias is actually still bias. A lot of honest people do this by mistake, thinking that there should be balance and then seeking out things that create it and disregarding things that don't.
But when A says +5 and B says -5 and the truth is +3, the truth is still +3, not zero.
Sometimes things really do balance out exactly, but it's not very common. Round numbers are inherently suspicious.
As with police in the US, the aggressor in an armed society have to be much more aggressive to get what they want and live. Robberies would drop. The criminals not willing to shoot first would find something else to do or transition into ones that shoot first. The violent crime that remained would be much more violent. This includes not only robberies, but also drunken disagreements, informal loans that have gone unpaid, etc. I don't think this is is a direction we want to go in. I mean, I appreciate the aesthetic, but I don't think it would work out very well.
As to the topic of crime, cities with high gun ownership tend to have lower crime. The US, for example, has far fewer hot home robberies, where hot means robbing while people are in the home. The UK has a higher percentage. The difference comes down to the risk of the homeowner fighting back.
US gun deaths per 100,000 per year - 4.62
Intentional Homicide Rate per 100,000 per year.
UK - 1.2
US - 5.35
Fatal Shootings involving police officers (not adjusted for population so lets be kind and multiply 3 by 8..).
UK (2015/2016 latest year I could find) - 3
US 2015 - 1052.
I'll take heavy gun control (guns are legal here, they are just controlled - If I wanted a license I could apply for one - requirement is legitimate reason (member of a shooting club qualifies) and no criminal background, 700,000 people have the license to own a gun with more than 1.5 million guns in private hands) thanks.
Sure we have a high burglary rate but that isn't to do with guns, it's do with more than a decade of destroying police budgets.
Figures from wikipedia/UN.
Oh and the one that amuses me in a black way, guns kill their owners (suicide) at a higher rate than they do anyone else in the US.
Also in the interests of clarity,
UK suicide rate 7.6 per 100,000 US suicide rate 21.8 per 100,000
with academic research showing that easy availability of firearms increases suicide rate.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2018.3044...
> US gun deaths per 100,000 per year - 4.62
The majority of which, as you point out, are suicides.
Also, measuring "gun deaths" is like measuring "blue car accidents" an an argument for restricting blue cars. A better metric might be something like "homicide rate" except that then you have to reckon with the fact that the US homicide rate is higher than the UK homicide rate even if you remove the US firearm homicides entirely, proving that the difference has causes other than access to firearms.
The same is true of the suicide rate. Even excluding US firearms suicides, the US still has a higher suicide rate than the UK. Moreover, preventing suicides by restricting access to firearms is certainly not a real solution -- it implies leaving people in such a despondent state that the only thing preventing suicide is lack of means. Addressing the underlying problem is still necessary, but is then also sufficient and obviates the supposed need to restrict access to firearms.
this is certainly one of the reasons I'm still here today. Not such a bad thing, no?
The point is that it's not. Getting to the point where access to means is the only remaining form of prevention implies that five other things have already failed in ways that never should have happened.
Those things sometimes do fail in practice, but that's what needs to be fixed. Because what about everyone who uses a different means?
American police assume the suspects they approach will be armed, since they have a Constitutional right to be. Does that stop the police from attacking, or do they just approach with caution and, when they attack, do so with overwhelming, asymmetrical force?
In a theoretical US where the majority of people are armed and the threat of any attempted crime being met with armed resistance is a near certainty, one would have to assume that the justice system either doesn't function, or else would be extremely lenient to vigilantism. It would have to be a valid comparison if common citizens are filling the role of the police, because somehow in that scenario vigilantism isn't being counted as a rise in crime.
In any case, the point I was trying to make was not about the police per se, but the fact that the presence of an armed populace is one that can be tactically adapted to. Simply putting more guns in the hands of more people doesn't mean crime goes down, it just means crime involves more guns and more violence.
As one might expect of historic homes, with their wood exteriors and cost of maintenance, many home owners have more than one gun. Crime is relatively low. This is especially true given there is no clear geographic demarker like a river or an interstate to stop crime.
As you travel a few blocks west up the common road, you get into burglaries and violence. You also find less licensed to carry individuals there. The unarmed are the prey of the armed.