Rowhouses are de facto banned almost everywhere in US? It’s relatively popular way of living in Finland. It’s something between a highrise apartment and your own house.
I’ve always wondered why US seems to lack those and that neatly explains it.
I’ve always wondered why US seems to lack those and that neatly explains it.
An insane amount of US urban design is caused by the desire to give people free storage of private cars on public land everywhere all the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&t=346s
When you go to sell your house, do you want the government interviewing potential buyers and vetoing the ones it thinks are likely to buy a car and park it on the street? A block or two away if necessary? Sorry sir, the high bidder for your house works in an industry that makes him a car-commuting risk. You'll have to settle for the second-highest bidder.
NYC is pretty much the only metro area in the US that fits this criteria, and thats entirely because it was the only city built up to reasonable density and scale before the postwar racist zoning laws came into effect everywhere else.
I don't understand the veto thing. Can the government of the land of the free veto my decision to sell my apartment to whoever I want with ridiculous reasons like "may want to park outside"? What interviews are you talking about, what bidding and where does one "go to sell" a house? Here you just sign the contract and get it notarized and done deal.
What happens is:
* People in houses buy cars
* They park on the street (they have to)
* New houses get built
* Those new houses' residents also park on the street
* The street fills up
* Residents pass a law requiring all new construction to come with off-street parking
The idea is to preserve taxpayer-funded parking welfare at the cost of everyone to help car owners store their vehicles for free. Often you see paid street parking but with free (or virtually free) annual permits for people who live on the street.
It pushes buildings apart, makes less pleasant neighbourhoods, reduces walkability, is more dangerous, etc. but it's what we've got becauase we haven't figured out how to transition from "suburbia" to "dense mixed use" without angering the existing residents, who vote.
I mean, you'd think "well we all get a spot I might as well use it how I please so I'll ride a bike and plant a garden in my street spot" but no, apparently that's not allowed for some reason.
It's stupid but that's why. Though often when you suggest letting a homeless person sleep on that land (via building homes) or using it for other things like a garden they react with anger.
Driver entitlement is present in many, many little ways in our lives. Even if we don't intend it to be. My mother in law visited and remarked that a person standing in the road chatting with their neighbour should move and was surprised when I said "this lane is at least 300 years old and SOMEBODY was the first to drive up and say 'get out of my way or I'll kill you' and somehow we sided with the driver. I can drive slowly it's ok".
They've been building some of what they call row homes in the PNW, but these are still detached houses (no adjoining walls). It's better than it used to be, you can fit three houses on the space formerly reserved for one or two, but go the extra mile and connect 'em together.
Good question on how you’d repair the exterior wall. Usually if it’s that bad, it’s almost a complete rebuild and the wall comes down.
I'm not entirely sure what the proper definition of a rowhouse is, but at least where I live (US Midwest) there are a lot of newer townhouses (multi-floor houses that share a wall on at least one side). There are also quite a few zero lot line houses (also called a duplex?), which are houses that share a single wall only.
Rowhouses/townhomes would be homes with two opposed zero-lot-line walls, exactly the width of the property, all in a row. If a whole-block-width building had partitioning walls at roughly the same interval, that could instead be a rowhouse-like condominium.
Sharing a wall does bring in some legal issues and definitions, which do not come into play when each structure is completely independent (but abutting other structures).
The ability to build without setbacks is a major factor in urban density. The costs of maintaining a city roughly scale with the linear amount of street frontage, so not wasting that length on empty setbacks is a great way to keep city services cheaper.
The drawback of having no setbacks is that your pedestrians have to mingle with the car traffic? The example in the article didn't make it look very desirable to me.
Also, some cities have streets with no setback and no sidewalk, where vehicle through traffic is generally banned. You could debate whether this is a good idea. Personally, I found having the entire street for pedestrian traffic, while occasionally stepping out of the way of a vehicle traveling at a few mph was more comfortable than walking along the sidewalk with vehicles traveling at 30 mph a short distance away.
Your new house just lost several inches of width, for having to build a new exterior wall, even if it buts up right against the existing wall. (Source: a realtor friend in Philadelphia)
When the author says (of #1-7) "Said bans were put in place largely for racial reasons", sure, there was tons of redlining (racially biased zoning and bank loans) throughout Baltimore, but that doesn't have to do with why rowhomes aren't built more today. Rowhomes aren't built today because they don't scale up very well, and a fire can easily gut an entire block in one night. They also don't make developers as much money to build, and they're less attractive for a city that wants to keep units from becoming abandoned and unmaintained.
In both Philadelphia and Baltimore, new multi-unit condos and apartments have been going up for at least the past 5 years, in increasingly gentrifying neighborhoods. Whenever possible they are >3 floors and mixed-use, and when not possible, they are revamped and carved into condos. They all look ugly as hell, and they're all wildly more expensive. In the Fishtown and Northern Liberties neighborhoods of Philadelphia I have counted at least four gigantic excavated lots for new multi-story condo and apartment complexes, where before there had been rowhomes.
So in truth, density is going up, but home ownership is going down, while the cost of living is going up.
I don't know what he means by "banned". It seems that given the locality of such regulations and the vastness of the US, there are many exceptions to his claims.
Prior to that the situation was much like it was in most places in the US: current homeowners interested in raising home prices ran the politics, and everything listed was effectively banned.
No. It's an invention by the author, who provided zero support to their repeated claims of everything being commonly banned. Check out how they phrased each tweet, it's because they can't support what they said at all. When called out about the lying, for example re Texas (the second most populated state), the author promptly evades.
They are de facto banned though. ~99% of all land in urban and suburban areas has FAR requirements and setback requirements that make it impossible to build a new rowhouse.
De Facto banned for normal people to build.