As an aside, the article refers to "the suburban wine room." I have yet to see someone with a "wine room"; is this commonplace? A regional difference, perhaps? It also refers to "his-and-hers walk-in closets"; I don't know any guy with his own walk-in closet excepting those that live in apartments that came with one.
Houston doesn't have explicit zoning, which is true, but this doesn't mean that it's necessarily any easier to build dense housing if that's what the market demands.
- Deed restrictions effectively work as zoning by limiting what a given parcel can't be developed into, and they are city enforced; this restricts dense development, particularly in wealthy, high-amenity, high-convenience neighborhoods that might otherwise be more densely developed by natural forces.
- While Houston does not prohibit land uses anywhere, it does mandate a minimum amount of parking for various types of land uses and lot sizes. Mandated parking will drive up the cost of dense development because the minimums are set very high, and it means you either have to give over valuable floor space for parking, you have to build very expensive underground or structured parking, or a combination of the two. By indirectly driving up the cost of dense development, minimum parking regulations makes less of it pencil out.
If dense living was not in demand and undersupplied (which I believe it is), dense apartments would not fetch more per sq ft than a house in a low density suburb, at least not successfully.
This is an absolute necessity in Houston. It is the 4th largest city in the US and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses 1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.
Building dense housing without parking in Houston would create painful externalities for everyone on the vicinity, in a more pronounced way than any similarly sized US city.
The trick here is that many of the rules are designed for maximum possible need, leading to a sea of lots that are never actually full. It’s silly to build all strip mallS with parking lots that will be comfortable in Black Friday if every store has a major holiday sales bias.
Building too much parking also has painful externalities, as walking, even from store to store, becomes problematic, and maintenance for those oversized lots is not free. It’s just that those externalities are legislated in as the status quo, so they are invisible unless you look somewhere else.
Turning that around: a lack of public transport options creates painful externalities on new construction (mandatory large parking lots) and the city (must put in multiplane roads for every new block).
> It is the 4th largest city in the US and has almost no public transportation. Building an apartment that houses 1000 adults guarantees that 1000 cars that will need to be parked nearby.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy; the more you prioritize car use with requirements for large garages, large surface lots, and large, wide, high speed roads, the more you make transit and walking slower and less effective, and the more you drive people into cars.
Houston has very high parking requirements that are actually even higher than what you are describing; even for "micro-apartments", an apartment size characterized by ~2-300 sq ft total space that could probably only fit one person comfortably, the Houston code requires more than one parking space per unit. https://www.houstontx.gov/planning/DevelopRegs/docs_pdfs/Req...
One market-based hint that the parking requirements are too high in most cities is that developers nearly always only build the minimum; if more was required you'd expect more people to go and above minimum requirements.
What am I missing out on by not being in the city centre? Shows? I don’t go to them. Restaurants? I have a dog with separation anxiety and a 4mo daughter - I’m not going to any restaurants. Street festivals? Spare me. Art and modern “culture”? Thanks, but no thanks.
I’m perfectly happy for other people to pack themselves into noisy, cramped apartments if they like, I just don’t understand why the HN crowd seems to automatically assume that’s what I should want.
Suburbs are great. Long may they continue.
I live in a city and (in normal times) work in a suburb ~20 miles away. my commute is pretty painless; it's just a straight shot down the interstate in the opposite direction of most other people. but once I get there, it's amazing how unpleasant it is to drive around in a place that was built from the ground up to accommodate cars. even the shortest trips involve driving to a highway, traveling on it for one or two exits, then getting off and driving to your destination. I have no idea how people get around on bikes there. there are several shopping centers that are only connected by a limited access highway. I often joke that in that suburb, no trip takes more than fifteen minutes by car, but none are shorter either.
I live on the outskirts of a midwestern city and only know a couple people who live in such homes.
Though I'm not from a wealthy background, so most of my family and friends (even in the suburbs) are in 1000-2000 sq ft houses where sometimes a 2nd bathroom is a nice amenity.
But we do have (usually unfinished) basements here which add at least a few hundred square feet of utility space to a house. I couldn't imagine life without one!
But, I grew up in the suburbs and now live in the city. I love both. I love that there are interesting places to walk to, coffee shops, bakeries, bars, restaurants, book stores, etc... but I miss the freedoms of my suburban childhood like a yard to play in, a garage for power tools and bikes, being able to be loud indoors at all hours, being able to have house parties or even just entertain 2-4 friends at any time of the day or night without annoying the neighbors, block parties, and even just knowing my neighbors well. Yes, I suppose I could do that in an apartment building but maybe because we live so close we don't want to know each other :P