The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism” | Hacker News Reader

The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”

strongtowns.org

289 pointsDoreenMichele199 comments

Correct it's no vibrant, bustling organic downtown.

But it's still a helluva lot better than nothing at all.

The suburbs I grew up in? There were a bunch of shitty strip malls, and a single indoor mall with a single food court with zero natural lighting, taken over by teenagers after school because it was literally the only place to congregate besides the parking lot outside the supermarket.

There was no local "center" at all for community.

This kind of development would have been a huge life upgrade. Yes it's still built around parking -- but if life is already built around cars in suburbia, there's literally no alternative. Without parking, nobody can get there in the first place.

This article seems to be dismissing the better because it only wants the perfect.

Edit: to people replying this is still terrible or no better than a mall... look at the photos. This has paths to stroll along, a waterfront, trees, outdoor dining/cafes, building facades that aren't horrible to look at the way painted flat concrete is. You can hang out here and it looks nice. I think some people here must just not be aware of how horrible and ugly strip malls and 1970's-era indoor malls can be. This is objectively a gigantic upgrade for some people.

A bit more expensive but they could add a few underground floors for parking. In cold , snowy climates this might even be an advantage.

This would waste less surface area to parking lots but would add some cost.

Except this particular development is in Florida, where you can't go under ground, and hurricane building codes make building up more complicated and expensive. As a Florida resident, I would love to see more parking garages, so parking takes up less ground surface area.

It appears likely that we are going to have to write off at least half of Florida in the next century, so any building at all seems counterproductive compared to finding better places to live.

Better write off the entire thing while it has some market value.

Going "underground" in Florida is typically prohibitively expensive, but it's possible if you're willing to fudge things a bit. Disney's Utilidoor System is a tunnel system that sits above the water table by itself being mostly at ground level, and then having the parks built a story above it. The Lagoon around Disney comes from the dirt dug up to create the effect.

I believe the concept for a underground transportation/roadway layer in the original Epcot city worked on the same idea but massively expanded, somewhat similar to a modernized/expanded Chicago Tunnel Company lines.

A photo of the Epcot "Transportation Layer" concept art can be seen here.

https://www.yesterland.com/domedcity.html

If only you knew how much I wish even some of the original Epcot city had been built in Central Florida. My life would be so much different it would be unrecognizable.

That's cool, I didn't know about the Epcot concept city. It reminds me of Louvain-la-Neuve in Belgium, a "new town" built by and for a university in the early 1970's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louvain-la-Neuve

"the city center is built on a gigantic concrete slab, with all motorized traffic travelling underground. This allows most of the ground level of the city center to be car free. Most buildings are built on the slab (la dalle), and the pedestrian area is expanding even far from the city centre."

(I also learned about Louvain on HN last year, but I can't find the link now)

Though when you think about these layered cities really require a lot more cement, just so you can have your car in a basement. It was so much more efficient to have a dense city and a train station to go most places.

The conclusion of the article is that there needs to be less parking altogether, not just fewer surface parking lots. Livable places prioritize people, not cars.

I don’t see how you can reduce parking anywhere in the United States, unless you are also talking about building some street cars or some light rail or some train tracks.

The idea is that, if you have neighbourhoods with many things conveniently nearby, people do less "driving to places" and more "making use of neighbourhood features by walking to them."

Every one of those satisfied-demand pedestrians is one less driver out there taking up parking spots (and therefore generating demand for parking lots.)

Sure, that person might still need to own a car for some things (it's still America, some things will still be very far away); and so they'll still need somewhere near where they live to keep a car. But if they need their car for fewer of their daily-life tasks, then they can leave that car at home more. (Or get closer to a car-sharing service being viable for them; or, in a multi-adult family, get closer to downgrading from needing to own two cars, to only needing one.)

Some purpose built ski resort towns in France are like that - they have a huge warren of underground car parks and access tunnels between the buildings - e.g. Belle Plagne.

I can think of at least one of these "Movie-Set Urbanisms" with underground heated parking.

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.9671917,-93.3477909,3a,75y,2...

The view from the end of the street is hilarious, from the context of "2D western facades." https://www.google.com/maps/@44.96558,-93.3476714,3a,75y,294... Hopefully google never updates that picture, this comment wont make sense someday.

What is shown is not better than what you grew up in; it's the same. It's an outdoor mall, pretending to be a downtown.

The only difference is that this mall doesn't have the food court and the giant corridors; instead it's outside where the rain and bugs can get to you.

It is also near the water, which could be nice.

> It is also near the water, which could be nice.

It is also near the water, where bugs love to congregate.

Yeah, I'm sure that'll work out just fine so long as the sea level never rises. At least it's in Florida where there's never any serious storms.

Hey, at least it serves as a proof-of-concept to suburbanites that it is entirely possible to walk around outside without dying. It takes time to wean folks off of suburban malls and back into urban living: first we show them that the world is nicer than an air-conditioned mausoleum; then we show them that walking is wonderful; then we convince them to live where they can walk to work; then we all prosper!

> at least it serves as a proof-of-concept to suburbanites that it is entirely possible to walk around outside without dying.

Except for that whole "walls all the way to the sidewalk" thing. We've been getting tons of that in my town, and it's pretty much the death of walkability. It's claustrophobic and unpleasant, and people are staying away from the areas that have this in droves. The people that live there simply get in their cars are drive to somewhere nicer to do their stuff.

and you can kick out "undesirables" and control political speech.

I hate to tell you, there is a place like this near where I live (Look up The Greene). I assure you, that place is effectively an outdoor mall. I rarely go there due to traffic in and out, I really dislike walking in it (drivers in there are in a hurry to park or leave, and have little concern for pedestrians, there is no "pedestrian only" space), and if I am going to a mall anyways, I would prefer an indoor mall where I can at least not worry about getting hit by a car going from shop to shop.

It's not just the parking, its the fact that it is not pedestrian friendly at all. If they had shoved parking off to one side and made the entire area car free, that would have been a huge upgrade.

Not just effectively an outdoor mall, it's literally just an outdoor mall: The Greene's site describes it as an "open-air, mixed-use shopping center."

Isn't what you're describing a symptom of the natural and inevitable crunch into the singularity of digital indoorism?

Going outside at all is a hangover of a rapidly departing age. There's nothing out there anymore. Everything's in your home, except for food. Have it delivered, and you're solid. That just leaves commutes. Insofar as they're necessary, I agree with living in dense, hyperurban hive arcologies where everyone can walk to work/school.

Outside is gauche. It's jejune. Meanwhile, commuting's a necessary evil, and cars are one of the most dangerous and inefficient ways to do it. Update to the new meta or farm outmoded vanity betrayed by its sprawling, parking lot-shaped contradictions.

So you see developers selling their stuff based on how nice it is to be outside, and your conclusion is that people don't want to be outside?

...what? I can't figure out what you're trying to say. I tried reading it several times.

I honestly feel cranky if I have been in the house for too long. I long for a nice walk in nature, which in a city could mean a walk in the park.

I'm not sure how people can live inside all the time, it would be like that Black Mirror episode where all they do is play video games and rack up points to try and get out of it. It would be like prison.

I mean... are you dismissing the bad because there’s worse?

My takeaway is that this kind of new development looks better (“movie set”) than what you describe, but it does not meaningfully change how people use and interact with the space and with each other.

The hard part is building a living, breathing, functional and healthy community on a continent that’s been built from the ground up around cars. There are so many examples everywhere in Europe and Asia, but I can’t think of many (any?) in North America.

> There are so many examples everywhere in Europe and Asia, but I can’t think of many (any?) in North America.

Manhattan.

Pre-WWI suburbs that haven't been hollowed out by economic decay.

Manhattan has almost no middle class people with kids. At most there are some upper middle class lawyers/bankers/programmers fighting it out over a handful of decent public schools. I don’t consider that functional or healthy.

By age 45, 86% of Americans have had kids. Out of the remaining 14%, half say they wish they had kids. Just 5% say they don’t want kids—a number virtually unchanged from 1990. You can’t call an urban area functional and healthy if it can’t accommodate the medium and long term needs of 80-90% of the population.

That's because everyone wants to live there, it's unique. If a vibrant downtown existed in all NA cities it would take the pressure off Manhattan.

That's because there aren't enough Manhattans.

A similar situation plays out in cities like London - a ton of people move out to raise families; historically it's been possible for the middle class to have children and live a few zones out, but it's getting much harder for anyone without inheritance.

The problem is that there are very few cities that aren't either tiny, or endless car based sprawl.

> A similar situation plays out in cities like London - a ton of people move out to raise families; historically it's been possible for the middle class to have children and live a few zones out, but it's getting much harder for anyone without inheritance.

> The problem is that there are very few cities that aren't either tiny, or endless car based sprawl.

not to be trite, but isn't "very few cities that aren't ... tiny" sort of definitional? england only has the population for 6 greater londons, if you crammed them all together. would spreading the population across six of them bring prices down enough for everyone to have the nice flat they want? how long would that remain the case?

That’s simply not true. Manhattan is home to 1.8 million people, several hundred thousand of whom are children.

18% of Manhattan’s population is under age 18, compared to 24% nationwide.

Fewer families than a suburban area, sure, but still many, MANY families, a large fraction of Manhattan’s population.

Those kids aren’t middle class, and the situation for them is not functional or healthy. The median household income in the communities where New York County (Manhattan) public school kids live is around $40,000, half the median income of New York County as a whole. (For obvious reasons, the situation is reversed in most of the rest of the country—households with kids earn more than households without them, because they’re statistically more likely to have two earners and older heads of the household.) 75% of New York Public School kids are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. The public school system does not serve a representative cross section of the community, but people who are stuck in the city due to availability of service jobs, availability of public housing, etc. Many of whom will flee to the suburbs as soon as their economic situation improves. They’re people like some members of my family, new immigrants who lived in the city while getting established, but moved to Long Island as soon as they got their feet under them.

People have been playing up the “revival” of cities over the past two decades, but it turns out that was entirely due to college educated white people with no kids: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/where-have.... From 2000-2017, the rate of urban living for people with school-aged kids actually dropped 5%.

I went to grad school with a lot of people who went to Manhattan to get jobs in the financial industry. Almost all of them, when they had kids, moved out of the city to Connecticut or wherever. And I'm pretty sure the balance who stayed in the city after they had kids sent them to private school.

>People have been playing up the “revival” of cities over the past two decades, but it turns out that was entirely due to college educated white people with no kids

Given that cities like Boston were still losing population 20 years ago, I do sometimes wonder if the current urban living revival (to a relative handful of cities) is mostly a fad among a very specific demographic that could reverse fairly easily with a generational change.

Here in Germany a cursory search shows that the biggest cities (Berlin & Hamburg, both their own states like DC in the US) are at the bottom of the children-per-woman chart while the top spots are mostly taken by the most rural states: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_ferti...

And perhaps more "incriminating" is that last spot is taken by Berlin while the first by Brandenburg, the state surrounding Berlin on all sides (and thus containing all its suburbs).

This does not match my experience living in Manhattan. I lived in a building where many of the people had children and the neighbourhood had a lot of businesses and facilities for children. While they might have been in the minority, it would be a gross exaggeration to say "Manhattan has almost no middle class people with kids".

I did not see any of my neighbours finances and doubtlessly they were above national median incomes (this is NYC and Manhattan after all). But these were not wall street brokers, they appeared as middle-class in their lifestyle as those I know in the suburbs.

In a normal population pyramid, people with kids will compromise a significant plurality of people. Nationwide, about a third of households have kids. In Manhattan, it’s half that.

Moreover, far fewer of those kids come from the middle class. 18% of kids in New York City attend private school, about double the national rate. Of the public school kids, 75% are eligible for free or reduced price lunch, double the national average. Applying some back of the envelope math, middle class households with kids comprise about 3% of Manhattan, versus 19% nationwide. That’s huge.

Sounds like you are moving the goal posts. If you said "less than average amount of middle class families per capita" then that is obvious. You said "almost no middle class people with kids" which is in my experience misleading and almost certainly false. Given the massive population of Manhattan, even if the percentages are as skewed as heavily as you believe they are, that means there is still a significant and visible population of middle class families. Certainly enough to support a large number of businesses specifically for them.

One of the surprises I had when moving to NYC was the amount of families. I didn't expect it, thinking most of the population would be young single professionals.

You’re the one moving the goal posts. We were not talking about whether the population of families was significant “enough to support a large number of businesses.” I was replying to a post that suggested New York was an example of “a living, breathing, functional and healthy” urban community. By my reckoning, middle class households with kids are underrepresented by a factor of six in Manhattan. That’s is a hugely distorted demographic statistic that suggests New York City is inhospitable to families. Yes, 3% of Manhattan households is like tens of thousands of households. But it’s a small minority. “Almost none” isn’t all that hyperbolic.

Given that 85% of people will have kids at some point, I think that disqualifies New York City from being deemed “functional” and “healthy.” If we are looking for cues as to how to design urban environments, we should be looking at places that serve the needs of normal people. New York City is not one of those places.

> You’re the one moving the goal posts.

I'm responding directly to your claim using your own words. Again you want to change the subject, which is fine.

> I think that disqualifies New York City from being deemed “functional” and “healthy.”

I made no claim for or against that point. I responded to your claim "almost no middle class families" which I believe to be false. Feel free to walk back that hyperbole if it isn't a true representation of your beliefs. If you want to make a point about how functional or healthy NYC is you should do so without making grossly exaggerated claims to support your argument.

I'm normally in line with many of your arguments rayiner, (they're usually well supported by data which I like), but in reading through this particular thread in its entirety, it does appear that you've done a little goal post moving.

Just as a matter of full disclosure, I feel that the absence of middle class families does not make an area any more unhealthy than the absence of, say, poor black families makes an area unhealthy. This is very much just a personal opinion here, but every demographic in a nation does not have to be proportionately represented in a community for that community to be "healthy".

> Just as a matter of full disclosure, I feel that the absence of middle class families does not make an area any more unhealthy than the absence of, say, poor black families makes an area unhealthy. This is very much just a personal opinion here, but every demographic in a nation does not have to be proportionately represented in a community for that community to be "healthy".

I think for a community to be healthy, it must be designed to accommodate a normal person’s life cycle. For 90% of people, that means raising kids, and, eventually, grand kids. Current and future parents aren’t just any random demographic, they’re almost everybody. They’re up there with “people who use the bathroom at work.” A place that isn’t a good place for people to raise kids is literally unsustainable, and that’s not healthy.

The absence of middle class people in New York City, and the tendency of lower income families to leave when their incomes improve, is a strong signal that it’s not a good place for non-wealthy people to raise kids. I don’t think you can call a place that fails to accommodate such a basic life function “healthy.” New York City is literally unsustainable—it would cease to exist if it weren’t for continuous international immigration. Suburbia might be ugly and car dependent, but at least it’s a place where normal people can meet all of their life needs. (Note I’m not advocating for suburbia. I’m criticizing urbanists for failing to offer any solutions that speak to the 90% of people who have or want kids. They’re selling beautiful office buildings without bathrooms.)

Check out Montreal. It has a great downtown and decent public transit. It is also very walkable about 9 months a year.

I do like Montreal... Except for the weather :)

What the original article doesn't emphasize enough is that because the project isn't close enough to the density and viability and desirability of a vibrant and dense town center, it will not evolve into to one, but rather evolve in the other direction, toward a strip mall.

They do touch on this with a few quotes:

"As a result, these places tend not to hold their value over time, and to feel very dated after a couple decades."

"these places are also liabilities from a public-finance point of view because their drive-to, drive-away nature means that huge amounts of the land must go to roads and parking, which require maintenance but generate no direct value, and no tax revenue for the local government."

The Strong Towns website likes to emphasize urbanism from a city-accountant point of view: would you like your town/city to attract people and have a rising tax-base (aka value) so that you can afford to maintain the infrastructure, rather than lose value to the point where you can't afford to maintain it, and it deteriorates and becomes even more undesirable.

This place might be attractive for a while, but if it is only superficial with ice cream shops and brewpubs, it's just another place to drive to, not live in. When they build a Walmart and Home Depot and food court 10 miles away, people will drive there for cheaper stuff. If people live close enough to walk here, it may develop a small hardware store, some clothes shopping, and maybe a thrift store. If the people who live nearby have to get into their car anyway, it will be just a destination among many, not a livable place.

I think that is the criticism of this project: it is not good enough to become what they want you to think that it is.

> There was no local "center" at all for community.

Really? Your town didn't just put a sign in front your supermarket proclaiming the area the "Town Centre"? Centre because centre implies class and sophistication while center reeks of commoners. I wonder how much the genius "consultant" ( aka politician's family member ) got for that bright idea.

I think it seems fine as well, you can still accommodate parking in a different way. Perhaps make a multi story garage, or make it underground, but not if near the coast(flooding). And if you want less parking structures maybe make more living space there, commercial on bottom and a few stories of residential on top. Overall the models look way better than 90% of the strip malls in America.

Strong Towns is trying to educate people about what real urbanism is all about. It doesn't serve their mission to write an article saying "Well, half a loaf is better than none." They are trying to tell America what a great and nutritious whole loaf looks, feels and smells like.

This naturally involves criticism of the many half-assed attempts to do something about the situation.

That's not them being negative meanie faces. That's them trying to set a high bar informationally so that those who would like to see real remedies have some hope of accomplishing something better than half assing it.

I wish the author would hit the non-walkability a bit harder. To get from one section to another, cross a street. To get from one side to another, you have to cross several streets.

There is one area that did the same thing where I live (The Greene Town Center). I cannot simply think of why I would want to live there, and I was their target demographic! I really can't walk around inside of The Greene without having to watch traffic (I am simply amazed at how recklessly folks drive in there). If you look at both the Greene and that picture, the roads are pervasive in there.

The suburban neighborhood I live in is actually more walkable! I can walk through a park to get to the library, I have to cross a single one lane road to get to a Kroger, and I can walk within the neighborhood on the street with almost no concern for traffic (heck, it has better sidewalks then the Greene!)

If you really want to attract people to live there, make the place actually an area where you only need a car to drive to/from work (and try to bring jobs to there!). Bring Grocery Stores, Schools, a community center, local restaurants to the area. Have a park! Make it so I can walk/cycle to places surrounding the area. Shove parking/cars out of the way.

Heck, even downtowns have the same issue. The downtown in Dayton only has Second Street Market that could pass as a grocery store (don't get me wrong, that place is awesome, but it's only open Fri-Sun). I thought about living downtown, but once again, I have to drive to get anywhere anyways. I have no incentive to live downtown.

You should check out the rest of the blog. The authors focus on walkability a lot.

I first encountered this kind of shopping center in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Main Street at Exton struck me as incredibly strange - it's a strip mall dressed up to look like an urban downtown, right down to parallel parking spots on the street. Once you do park, it is actually fairly walkable.

A couple of years later, after having moved to Philadelphia, there was something I wanted to grab at a store in Main Street at Exton. There's a regional rail station a half mile from the shopping center, so I hopped a train. The absurd thing about this particular arrangement, which otherwise sounds like a great way to connect nearby markets, is that there is no sidewalk between the train station and the shopping center. The station sits where a major local road meets a major highway, so one way or another, you're crossing six lanes of traffic to get past the local road, and you have to cross two major highway four-lane on/off ramps as you go under the highway overpass, walking along a beaten grass path with only a curb between you and the traffic.

Exton Mall's another mile up the road, and while there's sporadic sidewalks between the two malls, I've never bothered with that walk.

Given the proximity of this shopping center to public transit, I don't think it's a big leap to suggest that the decision to exclude sidewalks was at best a classist choice, at worst a racist choice.

I live in a part of Philadelphia that's unusually pedestrian friendly, all things considered. I can walk to pick up groceries (except I get those delivered), the hardware store, coffee shops, restaurants, galleries, all manner of everyday things that, when I lived in the exurbs, I had to hop in the car and drive anywhere from 5-30 minutes to get to, and it's fantastic. We've also got more methods of public transit than almost anywhere in the world (not saying the coverage is great, mind you), and I've been here long enough that despite all the challenges that come with living in an old urban center, I hope I never have to go back to a suburban lifestyle.

It was clear from the moment I pulled up to "Main Street" that these psuedo-downtowns miss the point.

i'd read somewhere that these kinds of developments became popular with developers (over indoor malls) because of their success in southern california in the past couple decades: the revitalization of third street promenade in santa monica and the success of the grove in LA (as well as irvine company developments in orange county).

to be honest, the grove always gives me the fakeness willies, like it's all facade and no substance (broken only when i walk into a store and it becomes real somehow).

I've been to both of those places. The huge difference between them, the example I give, and the one from the website once you park and get to the grove, there's no car traffic in it!

The third street promenade likewise had entire blocks closed to traffic. Crossings where also very generous to the pedestrians, so you rarely had to wait to cross the street and knew that you wouldn't get hit. It was also very easy to walk to the Santa Monica beach.

Both examples were built for pedestrians.

yes, i was commenting more on the impetus for the rise of insular, faux "microcommunities" in general than on the walkability therein, which, as you point out, is better at 3rd street & the grove.

That's fair. I didn't mean to suggest you were incorrect, my point is I think folks are trying to replicate it without understanding why it works.

Racism is the wrong cause. The mall probably doesn't own the land between the mall and sidewalk, so it is someone else's problem. The city who most likely owns and controls the land doesn't report to the transit system and doesn't care about it - local voters might vote for transit but they are voting from the idea of getting "other people" (note a race thing) out of their car for either environmental or traffic reasons.

The mall developer didn't ask for them because the idea of useful transit doesn't even occur to them. Most places they build a mall can't have any useful connection to transit so they don't even think about how thing might be better with it.

Map:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/40.02105/-75.62698&lay...

Google Street View:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.0220899,-75.6249217,3a,66.6y...

Wow. That's depressing.

It's interesting that you chose that example, as I'm very familiar with the location. For what it's worth, that area is undergoing massive development and change. Not sure if you've been by recently, but they're adding hundreds of apartments directly in Main Street to finally complete the original plan of mixed residential and commercial. This is in addition to the hundreds of other apartments/condos being built within a 1/2 mile radius of that location.

The township (West Whiteland) is very aware of the issues with walking paths and sidewalks to nearby areas and train stations, and there are active plans to address it. You can check out their master plan here: https://www.westwhiteland.org/DocumentCenter/View/154/Lincol...

The other thing you might not have noticed is that the beautiful Chester Valley Trail (biking/walking) runs directly through the Main Street center, and connects to many corporate parks (e.g. Vanguard) and shopping locations in Malvern, KOP, etc. It will ultimately connect to the Schuylkill trail that runs to Philadelphia, as well as Valley Forge Park. https://pecpa.org/wp-content/uploads/3-Trail-Itineraries-Bro...

> I really can't walk around inside of The Greene without having to watch traffic (I am simply amazed at how recklessly folks drive in there).

If you're talking about the one in Ohio, I'm not sure you have reasonable expectations of what walkable means. There's not going to be many places where you can walk in the street without having to watch out for cars. But if your expectation is more like I can walk to shops and restaurants then it fits the bill. The only real difference between it and a classic downtown is that it's full of chain stores/restaurants instead of locally owned places.

I am talking about that one. My expectation would be those streets shouldn't be there in the first place honestly. I should be able to walk from one side of that mall to the other without worrying about cars.

Parking lots surround it in the first place. Do you really need to have parking 10 ft away from every shop?

Another poster mentioned the grove in LA. That is actually a pretty good model for what I'd say is a good walkable outdoor mall. There's no car traffic in the Grove, and no car traffic in the farmers market.

I'd also add in, this is different from a downtown in that is was planned. It wasn't like they had constraints based on locations, public roads, etc. If we were talking like revitalizing an actual downtown (like Oregon District), I'd be a bit less critical. But when I see planned "downtowns" that make it so the pedestrian is still subservient to the car, and it doesn't have all the amenities I actually need to live there (which I'll give that I probably have to drive somewhere to work, but still, even something as basic as a grocery store), Sorry, not really interested.

I think he's barking up the wrong tree. The problem isn't "movie set urbanism", it's just boring, old "too much parking". Too much parking creates sparseness which reduces walkability. But putting parking behind stores ("movie sets") creates a human scale street space.

While organic urban growth should be cherished, there are extreme cases, like most American towns and cities, where urbanism needs to be forcefully bootstrapped. In this case, we're artificially accelerating the evolution of a neighborhood and skipping over the early rural and suburban forms, going straight to a small urban core. I can see the long term hope of infilling those parking lots with more buildings as the town grows outwards.

If you don't have of street parking you get congestion as people park on streets - that is the reason why planners mandate of street parking.

I my recommend “The High Cost of Free Parking” by Donald Shoup to get a sense of what planners actually think about street parking.

My home town in Florida, and the town I just moved out of in New Jersey, think of street parking as a cash cow.

I've heard of towns that attempt to solve this by marking roads residents-permit-parking-only, then only issuing one parking permit per house.

Of course, it's not a perfect solution - you need exceptions for the elderly and infirm who need regular care visits; some sort of guest permit for anyone who hires tradespeople; and people who need a work vehicle have to do without a non-work vehicle, or be forced out.

And it's a whole lot more fair if you set the rule before people buy the homes, rather than imposing it later.

Just charge for parking with the goal of always having one empty parking spot per block. Everything else will work out: those who need to park there now will find a price, those more price sensitive will move elsewhere. If there is high demand someone will open up a parking garage.

All of that assumes good transit though. Without good transit everybody must have a car per adult plus a one spare per family. When you have to pay the expensive of several cars the additional costs of parking starts to hurt. Most people do not see any real alternatives to cars: transit needs to come every 10 minutes all day and get me many different places within half an hour to count as good.

Yet people continue to walk around in those areas. There's masses of onstreet parking here in Berlin and not that much off street parking, but the footpaths are always crowded.

It's the same in Melbourne - some parts have onstreet parking and lots of people, and some parts of only off street parking and few people.

If getting people to walk between destinations is a goal, you should increase the proportion of on street parking and decrease the proportion of off street parking. This will slow down the cars and increase foot traffic, since it becomes more competitive.

Also, by using the connecting space as parking places, you acknowledge the viability of using connecting places as destinations.

But if your goal is to eliminate car congestion, you aren't doing it right. Planning should optimise for humans and tax revenue, not cars.

um walking why on earth did you jump to the conclusion,

How do busses ambulances etc move through a city that has narrow streets crammed with cars.

Of course with European city's with wide boulevards might not be as bad - though of course those wide streets are designed to stop barricades and to allow for the use of grape shot to stop the rioting presents.

dedicated bus/taxi/emergency lanes

> with European city's with wide boulevards

How many European cities have you visited? A few cross-city boulevards don't define the street layout. The average street width in Amsterdam is 9.5m, in Paris is 10.6m, in Brussels is 13.2m, and in Barcelona is 13.9m; compare with Manhattan's 15.9m.

yes, and? congestion is a given. some folks just love sitting in traffic.

the important thing is to provide better alternative ways of getting around. eg walking from the nearest subway/tram/bus stop.

> You get something that is an entertainment product—it looks cute, but it’s functionally like a movie set or a theme park. Its design has the aesthetic signifiers of a traditional town, but none of the functionality, none of the deep responsiveness to the needs of the people living there.

I think he encapsulates things nicely here. Barring some exceptions, town/village life in the US is basically non-existent. There are no central squares/plazas, no pedestrian only downtowns, no local bakeries/butchers/grocers, no transit, etc. Everything is a facade designed around the car.

All of those are benefits that come from high density living.

But while they might say they like those benefits, most people will choose the benefits of low density living, such as more space (quarter acre lots with detached garages and front and back yards and 2,000+ sq ft interiors). Not to mention the benefit of being able to segregate children into different schools by socioeconomic status, by restricting different incomes from living in the same school district via zoning laws requiring large lots and expensive properties, which also leads to unfeasible public transportation.

> But while they might say they like those benefits, most people will choose the benefits of low density living,

This is heavily dependent on one's conditioning. I grew up in a late mid-century low density suburb - nothing like the exurban sprawl you see today, but still very far from walkable. I instinctively moved from that to high density older neighborhoods as an adult.

At least at the moment the trend tends to be towards demand for the benefits of increased density, as the culture has shifted to valuing experiences more than large (expensive-to-maintain) spaces.

However, with the old and still vibrant urban neighborhoods now priced out of reach for most, people who are seeking the benefits of urban living are attempting to densify first ring suburbs, which is leading to intergenerational conflicts in many suburban city halls.

> Not to mention the benefit of being able to segregate children into different schools by socioeconomic status, by restricting different incomes from living in the same school district via zoning laws requiring large lots and expensive properties, which also leads to unfeasible public transportation.

I agree that these factors are all present, and are usually enabled by planning and zoning rules, which often function as a replacement for the illegal racial neighborhood covenant system that used to be common in the US. IMO the current system is a shame, but I'm also aware that the system is working for the subset who can afford to exist on it's beneficial side, and those people tend to vote in local elections.

>At least at the moment the trend tends to be towards demand for the benefits of increased density, as the culture has shifted to valuing experiences more than large (expensive-to-maintain) spaces.

In the US, everyone in my circles acts the same way, until they have children. Then the priority becomes quality of school, which really means socioeconomic status of all the children in the school, which leads to the well known rule of thumb to buy the cheapest house in the most expensive most suburban neighborhood you can afford. Or be rich enough to send your kids to private school if you want to continue to stay urban.

And for that reason, the brief trend of urbanization has already reversed. Once the recession passed and millennials started having kids, they started moving back out to the suburbs: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/29/millennials-are-fleeing-big-...

I personally think that sucks (for the most part). But there are just a handful of cities where you can simultaneously satisfy the constraints of jobs, kids, decent schools, and reasonably priced housing. My wife and I couldn’t find anything in DC (we weren’t willing to spend $1.8 million on a house) so after years of living downtown, we finally bit the bullet and moved to the suburbs.

> And for that reason, the brief trend of urbanization has already reversed

The current flight to the suburbs is a matter of unaffordability, which is very different than the forces that drove previous waves of suburbanization.

People being priced out of desirable urban areas hasn't necessarily resulted in a reversal of urbanism, but rather an increasing pressure to urbanize the more "affordable" (in price per sqft) suburban areas.

You see this in efforts to change suburban planning codes to allow multiple dwellings per lot, or to allow bars and restaurants to be open later. Both of those are examples of initiatives that have faced pretty stiff opposition from longtime suburban residents.

Developers have caught on to this too, which is why you see developments like the one described in the article, however shallow the implementations may be.

I agree that there is a lot of push and pull, and huge financial and quality of life trade-offs that everyone is forced to make.

People want it all: 100 acres in the middle of downtown, with great suburban schools nearby. Don't forget about various shopping, parks, lakes, or whatever else your preferred lifestyle wants. Depending on your situation in life you will choose from the different available compromises.

Note I said available compromises. Legal zoning rules often prohibit some of the choices. In most suburbs you cannot buy a house within walking distance of shopping - so if great schools are important you may be forced to do without great shopping.

> People want it all: ....

what many of us want is a change to ... Legal zoning rules.

Along with the racism that they've been used to enforce, zoning rules in the US have done more to contribute to the creation of hollowed-out communities than almost anything else. Residential-only neighborhoods, total segregation of retail from residence, parking requirements, exclusion of large scale, quality rental accomodation, focus on single family lifestyle, lack of sidewalks ... bit by bit you go from towns that work to towns that are just dormitories.

Until people start having kids and more and more leave the dense areas.

There are absolutely tons of towns like that, but they're old towns that grew organically from villages. Cold Spring, NY, Shelbourne Falls, MA and Santa Fe, NM are some examples that come to mind. What this blog is talking about is really new developments and the gradual transformation of old, previously functioning towns.

I live near Santa Fe, NM and I cannot possibly agree with this characterization. Most modern (i.e. non-tourist) commerce in S.Fe is on Cerrillos Road. While I support this arrangement to a large degree, Cerrillos is a 4 mile long strip mall, in essence. In a car, it's convenient. On foot, it's a nightmare. There is a bus running up and down, but the bus rarely seems to have much ridership.

The old core of S.Fe contains almost none of the basic essential retail outlets for day to day life. There are no supermarkets, no hardware stores, for example (Kaunes is about as close it gets). You see very few people walking around other than tourists. It is true that the Rail Yards is a moderately successful (re)development of a downtown area that was previously ... well, rail yards. But it hasn't really done much to change the retail/hang out situation other than adding an REI, a brewery and a movie theater. All good things (for me) but they don't change the fact that living in S.Fe without a car will remind you constantly that you don't have a car.

One great thing here are hundreds of speed bumps on residential streets. These do provide a distinct message ("Slow the F*CK down") when driving in those neighorhoods, but they do not change the car-centric nature of the city.

I don't live in Santa Fe, but I think it's got a very walkable core. That said, it's also a very typical example of a town whose residential suburbia has ballooned without support from public transit, to the point that if you don't live near Cerillos Road, you're basically in the suburbs and absolutely you need a car.

Well, the problem is that "the core" isn't "the core" :)

It's very walkable if you're visiting or enjoying a day in town. It's very unwalkable if you need to get normal day to day or week to week shopping done.

The transit/'burbs thing is probably true, but I live so far from the city that I'm not really familiar with the transit situation.

Need to slightly amend this, to avoid showing my rank ignorance of all things S.Fe. There is, of course, a Whole Foods Market right on the edge of the Rail Yards, which very much would count as "downtown" and "in the core", and it is indeed busy and well used. OTOH, the parking lot is nearly always packed, and I'm not convinced there's a lot of foot traffic there.

Some people might even consider the Trader Joes on Cordova to be within the boundaries of "the core" (along with the Natural Grocer catty-corner opposite), but I think that's pushing it a bit.

Visit New England, many of the towns there have nice downtown sections which are walkable, and have town squares, etc.

In all fairness, the vast majority of people are driving to those town squares/greens and the shopping options are usually pretty limited--especially for day-to-day rather than artsy/crafty stuff. But, yes, many towns have a nice little center. (And, indeed, many smaller cities do these days even if the rest of the city is mostly sprawly and not so nice generally.

Really I think these "main streets shops" are designs to replace strip malls in suburban environments, which in my opinion is infinitely better.

Isn't it pretty much the exact same thing?

Yes, just tarted-up a bit.

This one is pretty much the same thing, but there are plenty of others that combine shopping/residential in one. Effectively a suburban mall with apartments on top. Not my cup of tea, but clearly a step up in walkability over a traditional suburb.

But worse, now you're at the mercy of inclement weather. Near where I live there's a movie theatre at the center of one of these outdoors shopping mall. You line up outside the building to buy tickets. It's a nod to the old-time theatre with the kiosk and ticket-taker but it's cold to queue up in the winter and miserably hot in the summer. There's no awning or overhang or trees. One good-ish thing: in the summer they turn on the outside fountains and kids play there, in the evenings people hang out outside. But it's all driven by commerce, it's not a place that people just gravitate to, it doesn't have its own sense of place, the way a small little urban park is its own place. I wish there were more tiny little urban parks, nothing major, just a small oasis with trees, grass, and some benches. But because we're surrounded by a concrete ocean, who would ever drive to such an insignificant park and enjoy it. The bench will attract the homeless, even less reason to make this space. I can't even articulate the problem - other than infrastructure seems to be going in the wrong direction.

Not exactly. They put the parking in the back. Or the center. Or whatever. Somewhere you can't see it right away.

It's different. Better! Because this way if you put the strip malls across the street from each other, it's like one double-wide strip mall, instead of two separate strip malls with a double-size parking lot in between.

I guess it's not strictly necessary to keep the car traffic between the malls, but that way, you can reduce the speed limit to 15 mph and then still hit pedestrians trying to cross. Fun!

>Too much parking creates sparseness which reduces walkability

Anecdotes and all that but for me, there is also definitely a weird psychological factor when walking past big parking lots in the city I live in. It's just... weirdly oppressive in ways I cannot properly articulate, especially living in a city that predates cars by a couple hundred years. It feels like it takes longer to walk past even if it is the same size as the surrounding blocks (or even if it's smaller!).

You might be interested to learn about the Gehl Door Average, a metric that Jan Gehl came up with (based on his book Cities for People). It measures the number of doors per 100 meters of street frontage, and is a contributing factor to walkability: https://streets.mn/2014/11/06/front-doors-and-walkable-citie...

Parking lots have a 0 GDA, and so feel weirdly empty when walking. (So do parks, but one easily-calculable metric can't capture everything.)

> "Parking lots have a 0 GDA, and so feel weirdly empty when walking. (So do parks, but one easily-calculable metric can't capture everything.)"

parks are welcoming, while parking lots are not, so you could also think of parks having infinite GDA, since you can just walk in anywhere (assuming no fences or other impediments along the perimeter).

That's very far from any kind of core. :(

Florida is almost entirely a place where you need a car to do anything. It is so absurdly spread-out that even driving at high speed on their high speed roads is a remarkably slow way to get anywhere. If people cannot park there, they cannot get there. Even if you built a real urban walkable neighbourhood with housing, stores, schools, offices, churches - a place where people could truly walk to all of their daily needs - the people that lived there would still need multiple cars per family in order to access the outside world. It would be like living on an island. Attempting to leave on foot would be like trying to swim across the ocean. If you don't die of dehydration or exhaustion first, you will probably killed by a shark/car before you get anywhere. Ironically, about 1 in 4 Florida drivers are uninsured. One fake town centre is merely a tiny, amusing symptom of a giant chicken-and-egg problem.

If it really was as a walkable neighborhood some people could get rid of the car. There would still be a lot of cars but we would have the start of people not having cars. Walkable means several possible jobs, a library, courthouse, many retailers at several price points including discount retail where you buy your daily groceries and clothing.

This is where the false urbanism comes in. Chicago for examples is in many ways a network of these islands. However they collide with each other giving a nice network effect. Its far from a perfect example, I feel its still rather sparse in design as to accommodate cars but there is less parking in general.

This plot as a designed urban center is very much like one of these islands but without adjacent neighborhoods to fill in any local gaps.

You start somewhere. If you have multiple dwelling buildings, there will be more people per square mile. Then local business come in. People from the outside may not be accommodated in terms of parking, but at least people who live in the neighborhood don't have to fire up the car to get some milk. It's not that different from a neighborhood in, say, Queens.

Put a big car park outside the residential area, and provide a shuttle bus service to get there.

I live in a place exactly like this in Florida called Baldwin Park. It's much better designed and I love living here. The main difference is a few things (and these really matter to me):

1. All the parking is parallel parking along all the streets. This ensures that the number of businesses don't need their own massive ugly parking lots

2. There are actually apartments here above the businesses, so that it's always active, the people that live here keep the businesses below in business. We have everything from lawyers to gyms to dentists right below my feet in a single square mile.

3. This is actually a community. We have multiple community events and I can just show up and be there. We have a big shopping day every first Friday of the month where local merchants will set up tents and sell their stuff. They also do some event for nearly every holiday.

4. The entire town center is walkable. A square mile of walkable businesses, a park, a pool, etc.

Is it in Orlando?

If so, that actually looks like a pretty nice area! Judging by what I saw on the map, that would be a nice place to live.

If one looks at the map, you see multiple parks surrounding the area, an elementary and middle school that appears to be walkable, a sizeable grocery store, and a lake to walk around. While it looks to have a lot of streets still throughout, it looks to be much more than just an outdoor mall.

Yeah it is in Orlando :)

It's a great place to live, tons of parks around, literally everything I need within walking or biking distance. We even have a 30 mile bike trail that starts from here.

I was just using my area as an example of how this model can work if designed well.

Just by looking at it at the map, I'm fairly jealous. It does look good for living

That's not "exactly like this". You're comparing apples and oranges.

The same author wrote about this place three years ago.

He seems to like it.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/5/31/baldwin-park-a...

Wow I actually didn't know all the history of this town, and I've lived here for a few years.

Thanks for sharing this!

The key difference in what you describe is that there are apartments above the businesses. Mixing residential and commercial in a walkable way is what makes a real community. The shopping center described in the article is nothing like that.

> Until you deal with the parking problem—which is done by building truly mixed-use places where people can meet their daily needs without hopping in the car—you haven’t created true urbanism.

Daily needs means jobs for both you and your spouse, which won’t be in some random subdivision in Florida. It means schools, which don’t appear to be there either. It means the kids’ after school activities, again, missing from this plan. And if you don’t have kids or a spouse, then you should just live in the city anyway. This is an alternative to the sprawling suburban subdivision, not a downtown block.

Developers create these “drive to urbanism” layouts (like Reston Town Center in Northern Virginia) because thats what’s workable given the planning constraints of the larger system. This happens in “real cities” too. When I lived in a newly-redeveloped area of downtown DC, we still ended up driving a lot. My work was on the other side of town. The grocery store across the street was an awful, over priced Safeway. My daughter’s school was over in Georgetown, a 30 minute drive away. Driving is unavoidable unless these communities are highly self contained.

>Driving is unavoidable

What about public transport?

Reston has public transport. Most of Florida doesn't. A shiny nickel says that the pictured development has a nod to public transport in the form of a shuttle van that loops around the parking lots and the main street once every hour or so.

1) The US is not structurally capable of building public transit. For suburban areas like this, light rail is workable. But it costs us as much to build light rail as it costs other countries to build fully underground automated subway systems.

2) These are suburbs, so there is no rhyme or reason to where things might be located. It can literally take hours to do a route that you could do in a car in 30 minutes.

I live in one of the major metro areas of Florida, and even here public transport is abysmal. We have a single train line that goes north south about 30-50 miles. And a few buses that basically ferry the homeless around all day while they sleep on it.

That's it.

Look close - that form factor doesn't leave any place for transit to run. Most things would be a long way from any stop/station. The density would support a line every 2000 meters with stops 800 meters apart I(exact numbers can be argued, range is right). That puts almost nothing near the stop/station so there won't be a transit in there.

And even if you do manage to solve all the problems you listed in a single walkable area your problems are only just beginning.

* You have to have commercial and residential delivery infrastructure which means roads that reach individual businesses and enough space to park them, and unload. This doesn't immediately mean vehicle sprawl but if the roads are already there...

* You have to support garbage trucks being able to reach every business and residential building. I love the idea of having pooled shared trash areas but in practice it just means more litter and worse public health because you've just increased the cost of disposing of rotten food.

* There are going to be people that actually want land for their hobbies like gardening, woodworking, smithing. You can push them to the suburbs but they'll still need to come into the town center to buy things and more area to cover means higher public transportation costs and lower ride density.

* You have have a system to deal with the fact that people's lives change. A family whose jobs were both previously local and close are now split and aren't walkable.

* Housing a school districts are 'sticky' to families because people put down roots in a place.

* The town needs to bring in outside money -- really no way around this one which means you need some industry (which if your lucky is walkable and fits in with the small town vibes but probably isn't) and tourism / business travel to support secondary industries who are coming in with ... cars. And since not all industry is office jobs that can be done anywhere/remotely you'll probably need to push them outside the town square and figure out work transportation.

* You'll need a public transportation system which is almost surely going to be vehicle based because buses are cheap and flexible.

* You're also gonna need a way to get people to and from the nearest airport. You could try to get a small airport just outside of the town within range of your public transportation but most likely you'll either need private cars or a greyhound style system.

The dream of self-contained communities is the "movie-set" idealism. It's like we're ignoring all the factors that lead to the current state of things and pretending that they're just not problems anymore.

Are you fellow Restonite? If so, "Hi!"

RTC and the current major development is an interesting case... RTC predates the expansion of the subway system, so drive-to urbanism was, as you suggest, a reasonable option given other constraints.

Now that the Metro is (almost) expanded past Reston to the airport, there is (was?) an opportunity to build a true human-scale urban environment (at least within the designated development area, roughly between Sunrise and Sunset Rds and just east of Whiele to just west of RTC).

However, that's not what we're seeing. Developers are dropping absolutely massive buildings (several blocks square) with little in the way to pedestrian access. The new complex on the north side of Weihle Station is NOT accessible by foot - you have to cross 8 lanes of traffic coming from the east, and if you "win" that game of Frogger, it's not intuitive how to access the new complex - it's a disjointed mess, at least visually.

The new development south of RTC (Halley Rise, where my office is located) isn't any better. The new Wegmans building doesn't align with existing roads and is several blocks wide. Getting from Halley Rise to RTC requires another game of Frogger across the Reston Parkway bridge (at which point, you have to cross the parking lots at Bechtel and Microsoft).

It's really frustrating as a resident and worker in the area. It seems the real problem is the cost of legal/political approval for development is so high that it only makes sense to do giant buildings that don't work at a human scale. There's no mix of building sizes/uses - it's just whatever the developer thinks will be most profitable today, with little regard for future evolution (short of tear down and rebuild the whole thing in 20 years).

I don’t think Metro in Reston actually solves very much. The silver line gets you to the airport, Tyson’s, Arlington, and DC. But many if not most people who work in Reston are going to be working in and around Reston or Loudon county. What is the public transit situation for getting to a school from any of the new Reston developments?

I think you’re also correct that the development around the train stations are dysfunctional. That’s a common WMATA problem. The silver line stations, and the developments around them, are monstrous concrete edifices, not human scale at all.

Agree - the Metro by itself doesn't help, it just served as the trigger to allowing massive redevelopment (with zoning and density changes).

>you have to cross 8 lanes of traffic coming from the east

I remember I was once staying in Tyson's or somewhere around there. I could see a number of restaurants in the shopping center from my hotel but there was literally no way of crossing the 6-8 lane road between me and the restaurants. I had to get into my car to drive the few hundred feet.

Tyson's Corner is a disaster. Whoever through building mini-city in the dead space between 3 highways was a good idea needs a kick in the teeth.

I mean, I suppose it was a good idea, in terms of car access, but it's been at "automobile saturation" for decades. There's literally no way to redevelop it into a liveable/walkable urban space because it's bounded on each side by a major highway (Rt7, Dulles Toll Road, and I-495). And it's bisected by another major artery - Rt123. And every other road within the triangle is, as you noted, nearly impossible to cross on foot.

That doesn't mean that this much parking is necessary, however.

I'm curious if the developer chose this much parking, or if land use requirements mandated it.

While not perfect, this type of development is already a step-up above the unwalkable so called "power center". They have great upgrade potential when we'll figure out public transport. The parking lots closest to the walkable public strip can be turned into mixed use buildings.

Solving infrastructure and public transit problems is not the job of real estate developers. It is our job as a society. There has to be political consensus on how we want our communities to be planned. The developer will then do what they can with the rules we impose.

Unfortunately, the consensus is largely that we love cars. Maybe we should be paying for influential people to spend a month without a car in a walkable european city.

> Maybe we should be paying for influential people to spend a month without a car in a walkable european city.

It is not just being walkable in European cities - it is also a lot to do with workable public transport.

Sure, I could walk the 2 miles from Point A to B, but in a bus/tram/metro/train that will take 5 mins rather than 30 walking it.

Even then though it is often only workable right in the center of town where there is a lot of good coverage. Most people will live further out where affordability is more realistic. At least for me about "half-way" out from the center of London, getting to my local grocery store is a 33 minute walk, 27 minute bus (assuming I did not have to wait at the stop at all first), or just an 8 minute drive.

Note also that the bus would be a £3.40 return ticket, which is enough for about 2.5-3 litres of petrol. A toyota prius that can do about 3.7l/100KM means that for the price of a bus ticket you could cover about 68KM (~42 miles) or for a tesla 3 that gets 240Wh/mile charging @ £0.24/khw you'd get about 95KM (~59 miles). For the case of this example where it is about a 5 mile round-trip, you'd be looking at 9 or 12 return trips to the grocery store depending on if you took the prius or the tesla, for the cost of a single round-trip on the bus.

It is doable without a car, but not easy. You get into a situation where you are trading off trying to carry 20+KG of shopping back on the (crowded) buses vs taking multiple separate trips a week (...and the £3.40 monetary cost + minimum 54 minute travel time cost). And it might be raining (not easy to hold an umbrella when you have 16 carrier bags you are trying to lug). With a car you can easy haul back many 10s of KGs of shopping in one trip, while staying dry, with just 16 minutes spent getting there and back ... and in a car you are guaranteed a seat too :)

Personally I did the trade off and found that having a car for day-to-day life is just so much easier (not just for shopping but for all sorts), but obviously I'd never drive into the centre of London (if nothing else, there is nowhere to park) and happily walk + get the tube when in the centre of town. Driving to work just feels 100% alien here :)

We won't figure out transport though: there is no place for transit to run. The streets near some stores are far from others. The parking lot is the best place, but you are still running down the middle of them far from any store.

Been seeing these kinds of developments pop up a lot lately. The research triangle of NC is getting a lot of these with all their rapid development, and I've seen them around where I live currently.

The problem is they are really nothing more than a bandaid. They don't solve infrastructure problems, and they still encourage people to get into their cars (creating traffic) and driving to some place else far from their homes.

My point is, I don't see the purpose. They look fake, they feel fake, and I still have to drive there. It's not encouraging walking that much. It feels like a theme park, but at least at Disneyland they still pull the parking way outside the main park.

One thing I dislike about this new trend is it supplants true community spaces. There is a downtown in the suburb I live in now but it is a place no one other than junkies and homeless go. A few business cling to life there but I don't know how since there is no foot traffic.

Some development company created one of these outdoor malls about 10 minutes outside of the downtown. It has a cinema, a few big box stores (including a Walmart super-center). They even got it right with mostly underground parking giving the outdoor mall a high-level of walkability between stores that have fronts directly on the wide side walks. The security keeps all of the undesirables away and there is a public playground for kids. It's like the commercial equivalent of a gated community. I find it unsettling and I wish we took public money to revitalize the downtown rather than creating these segregated spaces.

I'm confused. Every suburban city in California has the "main downtown" area facade with vast parking lots behind it. This design has been around for almost a century and works in lower density areas.

Do we all want sophisticated public transit? Sure! However, let's be realistic. Where would the public transit take you? How many residents would you need to make it sustainable?

Another thing, does the OP want NYC/SF building density in Florida? You could cram 10k people into a .5 mile area, sure. Then you would have HUGE under developed areas all around and no where for 10k people to go explore. Then there wouldn't even need to be public transit.

I’m not sure this is totally a rip from Hollywood or a kind of modern Potemkin city.

I see this in old districts too. Facade in the front parking in the back. Strip malls are the inverse. With strip malls it looks ugly but you can tell at a glance if there is parking. The older form you don’t know till you drive around the back on a typically one-way street.

The modern take is like the Emeryville Bay Street shopping center or Santana Row in SJ/Sta Clara. It’s obviously artificial but people like it. In addition at least Santana Row integrates housing into the mix.

I agree that Santana Row is particularly well done... but I think the author is reminiscing for something more like downtown Palo Alto. What he misses is a few things:

a) Palo Alto can hold onto its old town feel because it’s literally the epicenter of Facebook, google, sand hill road and Stanford university. Some random town in Florida isn’t going to have all that.

B) in places like Florida, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Houston, etc, it’s simply not feasible to constrain parking when a good part of the year no one wants to walk a half mile or more to get groceries.

There are other ways for places to be nice and not look like an early 1900s town center... I’d submit Austin as an example: it’s totally car centered but has lots of intriguing and distinct neighborhoods and plenty of variety while also being quite suburban and housing quite a lot of strip mall retail.

The small downtown can also be very restrictive and expensive for lower income families. For example, in New Jersey, and eastern PA there are quite a few quaint little towns. Oh sure their town centers are full of small restaurants and dog grooming, pharmacies and banks, but conspicuously absent are grocery stores. I know of whole towns with 10-40k residents and not one grocery store. It’s worse in places like Chicago where lack of access to quality fresh produce has been linked to higher rates of crime.

These small towns create high rates of NIMBY-ism and while they do retain their turn of the century charm, I would suggest that it’s just as Hollywood as the new urbanism but in different ways.

I think we can all agree strip malls probably weren’t the best invention and new urbanism isn’t perfect but at least developers are trying to do something appealing rather than just put up another crappy building with nail salons and vape shops.

In Chicago, is the link between crime and lack of access to decent produce one way, or the other? Nobody wants to put grocery stores (or most stores) in high-crime areas.

Hard to say. Most people who I've seen speculate tend to conclude that both are dependent variables and the cause is something else. (generally something along the lines of poor people making bad choices - whatever bad choice means to the group speculating)

I don’t know but there’s actually a name for it: food desert [1]. But think about all that we just learning about gut health and mental health.. it kind of makes sense. I think the author does make an interesting point that modern development land-use leaves little for actual buildings, but I think for many cities they have been far more preoccupied with not letting big chains in because they don’t want the sprawl that it’s created a situation where chains end up in the suburban perimeter while the core becomes even more car centric to reach these retailers. In recent years smaller footprint stores like aldi, Walmart’s neighborhood market, and lidl have been able to come into these areas. It’s possible that more last mile delivery like Prime Now could help but I think we have a long way to go before the author’s utopian vision of an ideal city is realized.

1.https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/mayor/press_room/press...

I guess we might find out over the next few years.

The new DA in SF isn’t pursuing shrinkage/theft under $950 (due to Prop 47). Of stores shutter due to losses at least we can say it contributes to the desertification.

> I think the author is reminiscing for something more like downtown Palo Alto

As a compromise, there is something like downtown Mountain View, with one dense street, and parking lots in the back lots of each block.

> I’m not sure this is totally a rip from Hollywood or a kind of modern Potemkin city.

There's certainly an interesting amount of cross-pollination from Hollywood. The ur-examples of districts built this way remain the idealistic Seaside, FL [1] and Celebration, FL [2], both of which have different bits both directly and indirectly of DNA/influence from Walt Disney's original super-idealist EPCOT city [3] ideas/ideals (not to be confused with the park that later inherited that name).

Seaside and Celebration are interesting too because they themselves have been used as movie sets influencing things the other direction. Most notably and effectively, Seaside, FL is the main set of the movie The Truman Show, lending a lot of the meta-weirdness to that movie "naturally" just in how Seaside, FL very much is.

(Fun anecdote: A neighborhood in my own city has some connections to the same developers/planners of Seaside, FL, some of the same meta-movie set feel, and it was a "requirement" by my parents when I went condo shopping to not even look at condos in that neighborhood because they knew I would never stop with Truman Show jokes/gags if I lived there.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaside,_Florida

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept)

Existing urbanism makes me stressed. Even a shopping mall visit can bring a lot of negativity. A lot of people and noisy. On the contrary, I want peace, comfort and calm. For me, saving is watching at home with my family a good film about eternal values. I use https://pirateproxy.space/ to find interesting films. It's so good when I can watch a movie in silence and family circle

Reminds me of Facadism as part of the larger pattern of cargo culting trends in development to try to gain the benefits of the "new way" without deeper changes resulting in nothing really different.

On the parking issue and related housing shortages I wonder how viable an attempted rail primary based housing development project to a major city would be in the US for NIMBY dodging. Apparently that is fairly common in Japan along with new rail line loops receiving housing developments and subway/train station centered commercial districts. In theory existing neighborhoods would scale up and add public transit as density rises but in practice they complain like hell over any changes. Optimistically successful examples could give a kick in the pants to NIMBYs as their property value drops anyway due to the competition of a new area and they realize commutter trains aren't the devil or a waste of money but reduce road traffic.

I think this is the idea behind culdesac (no private cars or parking in development, on light rail, carshare at periphery) but we'll see how that pans out.

It wont work this is single young architects work that lead to high rise disasters in the 1970's and 60's

No private cars in the development? OK, that means the housebound can't live there, because people like home health nurses can't be asked to drag equipment and other supplies from the closest parking to wherever the person lives. With many First-World countries looking at aging populations, this is going to limit the appeal of such developments.

Clearly some exemptions will be made as always, we just have to hash out which ones.

Aging populations are exactly a reason to move away from car dependence. Instead they're trapped in suburban homes with no drivers' licence, often alone.

Old people should be in communities where driving is de-emphasized, I agree. However, home health services promote independence, too, and they depend on cars to practically transport meals, equipment, and people directly to the door, in ways which would be vastly impractical if cars were outright banned.

The can only work if there are already lots of trains - or will be. Which is to say it can only work if you can use the train to get other places you want to go. If you ensure the train goes to some sort of existing mall, a couple different modern grocery stores, a nice park, and a large job center: you have a chance.

Grocery stores are very important to this. Everybody needs access to them. They are also a low margin business that seeks out locations with low rent - the railroad probably needs to have a special deal on commercial rent if you put in a grocery store to ensure this is met. A proper business plan should consider what other things get a special rent rates as a loss leader to get people on the train.

Note that in no case is zero cars the goal! Everybody will get their stuff delivered on a truck, and the trash goes out the same way. Likewise there is always a need for plumbers, both as residents and day workers. Some couples will find the train doesn't work for one of the pair. So you make sure it is possible to drive - you just ensure the train is so convenient and cheap that most people don't.

Its almost as if we built a building... then put all the stores inside of it. People could walk around without concern for the weather or cars. Hell we could surround it with parking even!

-Pre-2000's Mall designers

Screw the building lets just cram the stores up close to each other in an outdoor square with trees and surround it with, parking.

-Post 2010 Mall designers

The most surreal of these developments that I've visited is the Town Square of Copperopolis, California.[1]

It's not visually unappealing, but is a rather odd addendum to a historic 19th c. town which apparently won't suffice for tourists or affluent retirees (not enough parking). It's just as managed and tidy as the developments discussed here. Speakers on light poles blare top 40 hits from the 1950s, for some reason.

[1] https://www.gocalaveras.com/location/california/gold-country...

these are popping up in the DFW suburbs where they can be built from scratch. The standard setup is retail at street level with apartments on top and parking underground or at least concentrated in one large garage. They're not completely car free in the center of the development but it doesn't make sense to drive on the interior, there's no point. I think the streets on the inside are there mostly for fire/emergency access. It's ok I guess, the developments are like walking around an amusement park but it's retail instead of games and rides.

Another setup I see in the exurbs are planned communities. You basically take everything a neighborhood needs and build a wall around it. My sister lives in one on a lake, it's pretty neat, everyone drives golf-carts around instead of cars which is funny/interesting. Also, they have their own holiday festivals and events so the community is pretty close knit. My sister's kids know all the other neighborhood kids and all the parents know each other. The parents keep an eye out and so the kids are given a lot of freedom to roam and do kid stuff they wouldn't normally be able to do in the standard suburban neighborhood with heavy and fast traffic everywhere.

You can have largely pedestrianized areas in the interior with these sorts of things but, in general, you need to provide parking because a lot of people are going to need/want to use a car to get to them even if they're on some sort of transit route.

They also tend to work better in moderate climates. One example of something along these lines in the Bay Area is Santana Row. Very clearly artificial but still relatively pleasant.

This sort of development is crying out for a big parking garage near the highway, and an automated train to shuttle people between the parking structure and the walkable/bicyclable city core.

That, along with commercial-under and residential-over vertical zoning, is the bridge we need between traditional suburban sprawl and walkable cities. You can't walk around if you can't get there, and you won't want to stay if you can't leave.

I wonder why we don't see more developments with underground parking. Imagine a three-level underground parking space with a small public park on top. Access would be gated to residents of the surrounding buildings. You should still have some above-ground parking for deliveries, friends visiting, etc. but you can have the majority of parking underground.

Underground parking being expensive is the main reason.

Still, it is pretty common here in Northern Virginia.

When manually driven cars become a rare exception expect these layouts to change again. Instead of vast parking lots somewhat integrated with the destination, cars in surplus to immediate requirements drive themselves to "inconvenient" staging lots or back to their corporate homes. Developments become more dense again.

That's probably true, but in the intervening 75 years, cities would do well to build up their public transport.

The only thing that will cause cities to build up public transport is if people start living in more dense quarters. And the only thing that will make people start living in more dense quarters is if the cost of moving people and all the mass associated with their lives increases drastically. Therefore, the only solution is to cause the price of fuel to rise dramatically, or wait for the consequences of fuel use to raise the cost for us.

And then once people are living in smaller homes in higher density environments, a city government will be able to propose public transportation that is actually feasible.

I agree. Also cities and municipalities should charge for road usage.

The second example just seems to be a shopping mall without a roof.

He complains it is all parking, but there's solutions to that. Here in Santa Monica there's a whole row of public parking buildings a few blocks from all the popular downtown areas (beach, pier, 3rd street promenade, mall, etc.). So if you shell out the money, you can compress the parking into one block along the otherwise active walkable downtown area. In this case the developer must have just calculated it's cheaper to have parking lots.

As someone who grew up in Manhattan, though, I do kind of laugh that he considers that development plan non-walkable. I was always happy to walk across the island east/west and only took subways north/south, so his impossible to walk to shopping center part of the development looks trivially walkable to my Manhattan self...

"Walkable" doesn't mean you can't walk (although it sometimes means that, too, of course).

By most measurements, walkability refers to a pedestrian's ability to reach amenities such as grocery stores within a short time (e.g. 5 minutes). By that metric, almost all of Manhattan is extremely walkable.

Manhattan does have many isolated "deserts" where you can find yourself surrounded by just residential buildings (parts of UWS and UES, for example), or a heavy concentration of businesses, parking, industry (e.g. 11th-12th Ave around Hudson Yards, for example). Until a decade ago or so, the Finance District used to be pretty dead at night. And so on.

There's fairly low "pain threshold" in the US before people discard walking as an alternative and just go in their car. We all know the satiric image of the American who jumps in their car to go one block; in my experience (as a European living in the US), there's a certain amount of cultural indoctrination that has persuaded Americans that transportation by car is absolutely necessary.

If 99% of your trips cannot be reasonably made by walking you don't think to walk for that last 1% either

This makes me think of a lot of development projects in Detroit. They are promised to be these new urban multipurpose spaces and we don't even end up with the facade. Just tons of parking lots where there were supposed to be life.

The origin of the mixed use movement (and the rebirth of cities) is The Death and Life of Great American Cities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...). The upshot is that mixed use is the holy grail. Here, I can't tell is residential mixed in with commercial - that's how you get people out of cars.

It says mixed use - does that means there's commercial and residential in the same space? In my mind that's what makes for a city.

I love StrongTowns. They do a great service in bringing many different political dispositions together for common, practical goals of simply better living.

Often times, what they advocate for can be championed by Distributists, Libertarians, and Socialists alike. Because usually what divides these camps is mostly questions of scale and not the actual end goals.

Probably the best fit are geolibertarians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism

This style is not new. The earliest planned community in Reston VA built 50 years ago [1] uses this approach, except the housing is more integrated.

Housing above the shops and immediately adjacent produces the ambiance of a walkable community around a lake.

Still, it has to be surrounded by parking lots. There’s just no way around it unless you move all the work and the schools there too.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Anne

Or have like... A bus stop.

If you want to see real, “movie-set urbanism” go check out some of the newly gentrified neighborhoods in LA, like Highland Park. It looks like a set designer did a week’s research in Brooklyn and came back with some kind of illness that causes people to open terrible restaurants.

By contrast, long standing neighborhoods like the fashion district in downtown LA, Lincoln Heights, Monterey Park, are so vibrant with amazing businesses and food that serve their local communities. It’s night and day.

Drew Austin (aka kneeling bus) talks about a similar perspective in “The city as weakly-escaped reality (revisiting the holey plane): https://youtu.be/9HL2bh_EMyk

I don’t think the principle of hiding parking is necessarily bad though. Cohousing designs for this way to facilitate more interaction with neighbors. It’s just one aspect though among others (consensus management, etc.)

This has been going on a for a long time now. I remember working as an installer for a high end AV company in the early 2000's. We installed pricey home theaters and distributed audio for the rich suburban folks.

I remember several "planned communities" where they had small strip malls on the outside of the community, and then it was all high end craftsman and cape cod style houses on the interior. They had removed as many streets into the main center of the community as possible. In order to get to two of the houses we were working on, we had to park several hundred yards away and walk in to the houses.

Sure, it was awesome for the kids as they could go about their business without fear of high speed traffic, but it was a royal pain to heft in all the wiring boxes, tools and other stuff we needed to do our job. I also noticed, all the houses were reduced to two car garages. When I started talking to one of the owners, he gave me a litany of things they had to agree to before being able to build their homes. The strict building codes forbid three level houses, more than a two car garage, and each lot had to leave a strict percentage of "green" space - aka grass on each lot, and you were required to have a porch (you know, to encourage "community" and bonding with your neighbors) which also had a bunch of requirements you had to meet. There were other ones, but those were the ones which always stood out to me.

In short, they were trying to create some kind of a movie like community in every sense.

Sounds like we may be experiencing the revival of the folly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly

I suppose extreme income inequality, along with deteriorating urban conditions that plague public spaces, could actually push society toward a folly based, key-card access future.

Why is there no multilevel parking? All that space can't be cheap. Is there zoning laws against it?

I've often wondered that, why parking structures aren't considered more as a medium term solution to increasing density while not having to revolutionize public transit. Probably a combination of the cost to build and resistance to having one next to buildings because they're usually pretty ugly if I had to guess.

Because roads for all those cars take space as well. In a low density city it isn't a big deal (other than the expense of building all the roads), but as you move up the density levels your roads start to get full. Parking structures are common, and a useful part even the densest cities. They don't solve all the problems though and so are not a solution or even a mitigation.

In many parts of Florida, land is cheap.

Agreed - often in London the parking is underground, under the building where people live, rather than huge swathes of car park etc.

It wont work for high-rise buildings of course, but for slightly-less-central blocks that are say 4 to 6 floors, each apartment gets a parking space.

>All that space can't be cheap.

It is, and it's why dense housing can't compete. Cars are cheap, fuel is cheap, land is cheap. In the short term, other costs, such as harm to walkability, lack of community, pollution, etc are not quantifiable or too far out in the long term to make it a viable business proposition to go with density.

The trouble with "mixed-use development" is that an apartment building does not generate enough business for its ground floor shops. Which is why many of them are vacant. Or turned into low-value places like nail salons.

Very true. I estimate you need 15-20 floors above ground floor shopping to fill all the spaces. This based on observations that in Paris (4-5 stories) there is a block of ground floor shopping and then 3-5 without. Since I'm not an expert on Paris (never been there only seen picture and read reports) take that with some salt...

Also most apartment developers don't know how to rent commercial spaces. So some ground floor spaces are vacant because it was only put in to allow the apartments above and so it isn't actually possible to get a commercial lease. (commercial leases allow a lot of remodeling and have other terms different from the standard residential lease, so anyone looking that a commercial lease will refuse the space)

It's definitely a problem with the "mixed use" buildings going up on the SF peninsula. The ground floor stores are marginal, vacant, or used as office space. A 5-story building can't support a convenience store by itself.

There have been startups which tried convenience stores that were giant vending machines, but that hasn't been successful. Amazon Go didn't really work out; there are a few stores, but no major deployment. There's a startup in China which puts automated stores in a shipping container sized box, but that hasn't been successful in the US.

> these places tend not to hold their value over time, and to feel very dated after a couple decades.

Is anybody building property near the coast of Florida hoping for more than a couple of decades of value? Sea levels are rising.

We have a couple of developments in austin the "domain" which is an outdoor mall integrated with tons of apartments and a ton of actual jobs. The entertainment district serves those who live there, but is probably good enough to attract people from north austin who dont want to go downtown. It is disappointing to see classic strip malls continuing to be built in the suburbs with massive parking lots, when this dense form of living works so well. https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Domain/@30.4006016,-97...

There is another development "mueller" which took the old airport and turned it into a neighborhood. It is much less commercial but the parks make it amazing. There are a ton of amenities, but the amenities are car centric. There are some jobs, but not quite enough. As a kid with a bike though there are multiple pools, movie theater, ice cream shop, pizza within biking distance. The small backyards means that everyone gathers at the park to play. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Mueller,+Austin,+TX/@30.29...

Both of the developments are heavily influencing the areas around them

Austin is trying to fix old neighborhoods with an updated land development code. The NIMBYS are out in force - they absolutely love the neighborhood character of their car dependent semi suburbs.

I live in "northwest hills" which was developed in the 60s-80s. The developer didnt do a bad job (lots of multi family, missing middle, and SFH), but all the commercial is heavily on one side down a steep hill, which means most of the SFH people are physically separated from the multifamily/commercial area. That means huge parking lots and everyone driving. The commercial should have been pushed more into the SFH area. The city is trying to increase density via zoning and the neighborhood is going crazy. There should be commercial along mesa between far west and spicewood springs rd. The city is upzoning it to 4 plexes which is a step in the right direction.

https://www.google.com/maps/@30.3499372,-97.7681162,15z

The main issue he cites seem to be parking taking up so much space. Wouldn't a parking deck solve this? Build a 6 story garage and the 18% goes to 3%.

Parking garages are enormously expensive. They can cost up to 50k per space. For instance the parking garage at the Chinese theater cost as much as the theater itself

Wow, really? Did not know or expect that. Not intuitive that they should be that expensive. In my mind they are just giant blocks of shaped concrete and should be extraordinarily simple to put together compared to something like a mall.

What makes them so expensive?

https://watrydesign.com/insights/top-10-issues-affecting-cos...

So his issue is people needing someplace to park their cars?

They arranged the buildings in an aesthetically pleasing way to disguise all the parking, I say bravo.

They really nailed the angles on those photos.

The very existence of personal transportation in the form of current size vehicles works against "walkability". It is clear one cannot have both.

American Village in Okinawa is exactly like this. Outside of Naha, getting around Okinawa strangely feels like an American suburb.

I blame Okinawa's abysmal public transit situation on:

1. The US administering the island until 1972, while Japan itself was undergoing very effective reconstruction and public works projects post-war.

2. The mainland Japanese government treating the Okinawans almost like unwanted red-headed step-children.

And yes, the southern third of the island has the building and traffic density of an urban area with the inconvenience of American suburbs. Almost the entire population has at least a kei car, unless you work in a snack bar/kabakura (where transportation is often provided, and your job involves getting shit-faced drunk every night so you can't drive home anyway).

American Village is also my least-favorite place to go on the island: the traffic to get into that area is abysmal, especially after 4pm, and during the summer the brutal heat, sunlight, and humidity makes walking around between the buildings unappealing. Ashibina Outlet Mall is similar, but at least has slightly better overhead cover to protect from the sun.

I guess they resolved the heating issue with an even more American institution. Stepping into Aeon Mall Rycom is a like a localized version of my youth in New Jersey.

I thought that it was a ripoff of the town from the Truman Show.

People with jobs and families like these neighborhoods because they provide a walkable downtown main street with access to jobs. Strongtowns is becoming Jacobin like in its militancy against compromises that serve real people in the real world.

I’m bullish on autonomous electric vehicles making these kind of neighborhoods perfectly sustainable and, for many people, preferable to higher density walkable neighborhoods.

The structure of America being car dependent is that the "youths" who mayor Bloomberg recently commented commit 95% of murders don't have cars or gas money to get there. The car dependent lifestyle is to create areas where undesirable elements are excluded.

In many areas "youths" gather in shopping malls and so forth and generate a lot of petty crime, vandalism, shoplifting, playing loud music and generally making everyone uncomfortable. Dead malls and downtowns have declined because of excessive presence of "youths". For example, Halloween in San Francisco's Castro got cancelled permanently because "youths" showed up and started shooting at each other. If you make it hard to get places, these "youths" tend to not show up and keep everything nice, peaceful and upscale.

Without the "youths" problem, America would have a far lower homicide rate and public transit, bikes, walkable neighborhoods, free public festivals and all that stuff would be far more popular.

Woah

Reply on news.ycombinator.com