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Comment by madamelic | Hacker News Reader

Mixed use zoning is just about the best case situation for everyone.

- Less reliance on cars, which results in less parking, which results in less traffic... it becomes self-perpetuating.

- Better walkability

- Knowing your corner store clerk or at least having a rapport with them

- Healthier citizens, due to them walking everywhere (Go to NYC and see how few overweight people you see... not many unless they're tourists. I gained like 10lbs after I moved out of NYC, you get exercise constantly in that city)

- Happier citizens, due to them walking everywhere, things are nearby, their life is more integrated...

etc etc.

I think basically all spaces should be residential / light business mixed. This idea of sprawling suburbs with light business being 10 - 30 minutes away is horrifying and bad for everyone health-wise, time-wise and economically.

---

Where I live, the city doesn't really hesitate to shut down sections of roads for festivals, farmer's markets, whatever.

Currently we have a bunch of one ways because all of the restaurants took over half the road for outdoor dining... and honestly, it's pretty nice. The traffic is slightly more congested, but meh... don't drive through the center of the city as a transit option, go around.

View on HN

As far as I can tell, "zoning" is just a bad idea. There's no such thing in the UK [1] and it still surprises me that it's quite a common approach. (As a kid I thought it was a game device employed to make urban planning in Sim City manageable. I still wonder if that series of games hasn't increased its prevalence.)

Instead, in the UK you require 'planning permission' to change the land use of any building. This is discretionary and may refer to some overall plan realting to the feel, density, etc. of an area but is not prescriptive over specific types.

As a result I don't know anyone in this country, urban or rural dwelling, who can't walk to a shop or a pub, though I'm sure some such unlucky places exist.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#United_Kingdom

> I don't know anyone in this country, urban or rural dwelling, who can't walk to a shop or a pub

The average walking distance to a pub has gone up a lot in recent years due to closure, and walking on rural roads at night where there is no footpath is horrendously dangerous even if you carry lights. It's a nice idyll but it's no longer really true.

What you say about Simcity is absolutely true though. It doesn't correspond to traditional UK or most European cities at all. Medieval mixed walkable core, maybe not driveable at all; industrialish area down by the wharves now repurposed as offices and residential; Simcity-ish bit on the outskirts where somebody decided to build a grand scheme, like La Défense.

Zoning is starting to leak into urban planning a bit more, when huge housing estates are built with no shops, pubs, or facilities. As far as I can tell demand for housing outstrips everything else.

Is it true that walking on rural roads at night is horrendously dangerous? I was thinking less traffic means its probably safer than the collisions that happen when pedestrians step off the pavement in town.

I found something that kind of supports this notion but isn’t really conclusive

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Wonder if you have a link to share?

Interesting about the average walking distance to a pub going up. My rural friends and family must be lucky as they don't seem to have been affected (and here in London you're unlucky if it's more than two mninutes).

I'm not sure about the data for pedestrians being hit on rural roads, though the UK has very low rate of per capita pedestrian fatalities overall, among the lowest in the EU according to [1]. Anecdotally I have never felt unsafe walking on rural raods. I can see how some of the narrower "A" roads (major single carriageway roads with no central reservation, sometimes heavy lorry traffic) might be, though these usually but not always have pavements for pedestrians and if not there's generally an alternative.

Either way, compared to my (admittedly limited) experience of suburban and rural America there is still a big (and welcome) difference. I hope that any downward trend can be arrested/reversed.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/sites/roadsafety/...

I think generally speaking people actively avoid walking on country lanes unless there's absolutely no other way of completing the journey. Some are extremely dangerous with sporadic, fast moving traffic (60mph limit on single lane roads with no pavements or usable siding whatsoever - and people will speed on top of that) and often extremely low visibility turns. 16% of pedestrian deaths sounds quite low until you factor in that most people simply don't use them as pedestrians - in a more extreme way, only 1% of pedestrian deaths occur on motorways but that in no way makes them suitable for walking on.

Not that I make a practice of walking on country lanes in the US either, but when I've been on long distance walks in the UK and had to walk on a road for a stretch, there does seem to be a disproportionate number where there's a hedge or a stone wall inches from some twisty turny road surface. I've definitely walked stretches of road where I've felt very exposed, especially if the light was starting to fade.

>Is it true that walking on rural roads at night is horrendously dangerous?

No. It's not. You just can't expect drivers to see you so you have to take care and step more or less off the road if there isn't a wide shoulder available for your use at that spot. It's not a big deal because cars aren't that frequent.

It's really no different than any industrial workplace where it is expected that the lighter traffic will make way for the heavier traffic.

AFAIK, there's no such thing in city planning as "Medieval mixed walkable". Rather, business of the same guild worked in close proximity, so that one wouldn't undercut the others (AKA a price cartel). It's why we have meatpacking districts etc. Maybe it's different in UK, though.

What I had in mind was places like Dubrovnik as an extreme example, or York as a less extreme - walled cities in which all the old residential/commercial activity happened. Necessarily dense and walkable. Smaller versions can be seen in "market towns" e.g. Cambridge: central square with occasional street market, surrounded by 2-4 storey buildings with shops on the ground floor and apartments above. Some of which have been converted into offices.

There's a big split between European cities which decided to rebuild exactly as it was after they were bombed flat (or the few that largely escaped), versus those which decided to modernise and become car-oriented. Cambridge vs. Coventry.

On similar shops operating in close proximity - it makes sense to cluster in order to maximise the number of customers you have access to.

Imagine two ice-cream vendors on the beach, selling identical ice-creams for the same price.

Since number of sales are a function of how far people have to walk to your stand (and price etc), you want to make sure you are as close to as many people as possible.

If your competitor is closer to them, they will go there instead, so you either need to be very far away or right next to the competitor. If a person could visit either of your stands, the competitor can 'steal' them by simply moving their stand closer to yours, so that the customer previously in the middle is now closer to them.

A discussion on the general case is here [0].

This principle obviously doesn't extend flawlessly to the real world, but is a significant contributor to, for example, the clustering of car dealerships today.

[0] https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/583157/ice-cream-ve...

...walking on rural roads at night where there is no footpath is horrendously dangerous...

Do you have to walk on the road? One might have expected that in rural areas one could walk through fields and forests.

In truly rural areas you can, but I think the areas being referenced are more semi-rural, with single track roads, and fenced off private land or dwellings on the sides. I’ve done that sort of walk a few times and it’s terrifying, especially when you know half the locals are going to be charging round at 60mph because they know the roads.

Most fields and forests aren't walkable.

The context here is UK rural areas which are not quite like other places. Imagine a road that can fit 1 car, with wider places every few hundred metres and 2m+ hedges on both sides, immediately next to the road. Apart from specific paths you can't really go into a field.

Random example https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/narrow-road-high-hedge-18153...

Not all counties will look like that, but quite a lot of them to. Imagine a network of this kind of roads going on for many miles. You really don't want to walk them at night.

That is helpful context. Wow, they really don't want to see their neighbors. Safe roads require unobstructed sight lines.

For pedestrians, yes that type of road is fairly dangerous. But for cars it's not too bad, drivers know they need to pay attention and nobody is going at high speeds. It's also easier than you might think to see oncoming cars, especially when it's dark and their headlights are on.

Fortunately/unfortunately that type of road is becoming slightly less prevalent, as efficient modern farming means hedges are maintained less than they were historically and they either get chopped down or neglected and end up growing into larger trees that are much easier to see through.

TBH it doesn't seem too safe for cars either. You couldn't possibly see deer or other animals until they had already jumped into the road. Any normal hazard like a car stopped for a flat or lumber that fell off a truck is more hazardous in this situation.

Honestly, these are not common occurrences in England. Cars that are stopped like this are required to post a warning triangle ahead, and lumber just doesn't fall off trucks (lumber isn't very common anyway as the country is mostly devoid of forests).

There's usually nothing but fields or woodland behind the hedges. Have a poke about on google maps. https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.0386913,-0.0888581,3a,90y,...

While I agree that they're bad for sightlines, they're also traditional and may be on private land, so getting rid of them from minor roads would be a hugely unpopular undertaking.

It's interesting to discover a seemingly avoidable hazard to which the British are sentimentally attached. Perhaps it's not quite comparable to our attachment to firearms.

I found myself walking on one of these roads as the sun began to set last summer and it was actually quite terrifying.

We’d made a long loop walking through the hills in the Cotswolds, and the guidebook would have had us crossing a large pasture to get back to the start. At the gate we were confronted by a couple of rowdy young bulls who seemed to have little interest in letting us cross their field, so we took the road instead. Thankfully we could hear cars coming from far away and could position ourselves for maximum visibility in the curves, but it certainly felt like one of the more dangerous miles I’ve ever walked.

On the main topic of this thread, one thing I did note during our two weeks of touring the British countryside was that the network of walking paths and tiny villages made even rural places much more walkable than in the US. One fairly isolated farm we stayed at had a hand drawn guide to getting to multiple nearby-ish pubs via footpaths through the fields. A comparable place in the US would have been 100% car dependent.

I spent some time in the Dallas-Fort-Worth area, staying at a typical suburbian region. This was before I had a car or driver's license.

It was shocking to me how isolated I was. There was a gas station that I could walk to, but even getting to the fast food place that I could see from my house was dangerous because the neighborhood was surrounded by wide roads and fast cars. Whenever my hosts wanted to get fast food, they'd drive there even though it was literally a stone's throw away.

The wider area was even stranger. A high school that you could only really reach by car. A 'proper' city nearby (Fort Worth) where it seemed like nobody thought to make it accessible to pedestrians. multiple cut-and-paste neighborhoods just like the one I stayed at, completely isolated and only accessible by car. And consistently a Walmart/Kroger's/<random shops> area every 20 mins or so, with one 'bigger' shopping area that had no character or charm but at least it had a movie theater and restaurants.

After that experience I understood why having a car is so crucial in the US, but I also started respecting more how difficult it is to avoid things like obesity or pill addiction. it felt so eery and unnatural.

> You really don't want to walk them at night.

I used to walk such roads at night.

I was taught, to keep safe:

- Carry a torch (flashlight outside the UK ;-) with good batteries, and don't wear dark clothing. Turn on the torch when you see headlights in the distance, make sure it's pointing somewhere visible.

- Walk on the right-hand side of the road (cars drive on the left in the UK). It's marginal on single-lane country roads but cars still tend towards their normal driving side. Better if you can see surprise vehicles coming towards you rather than from behind you, and they can see you facing them.

- Wear retro-reflective clothing / strips if possible.

As long as cars can see you, they slow down to pass just as they will for a car driving in the opposite direction. Which at night they first recognise by headlights, from quite far away and around corners, so light is what they're looking out for.

Definitely don't be dark, as that makes you invisible to cars at night until very close.

> The average walking distance to a pub

This is commonly referred to as "Staggering distance" :-)

> As far as I can tell, "zoning" is just a bad idea.

Spend a week in Houston, TX and see if you still hold that opinion after. That is one of the least walkable cities in the US and doesn’t utilize zoning as far as I’m aware.

It's a myth that Houston doesn't have zoning. They don't have use based zoning but they still have plenty of requirements such as parking minimums and lot sizes that serve as de facto zoning.

Ah that's right, use-based zoning. I still don't see how removing all zoning would de facto make cities easier to get around in, particularly when the US has a long history of private interests working against public mobility projects. The reason Americans are so dependent on cars was largely influenced by big automakers.

I tend to think that the outcome of removing zoning in the US would be very case-by-case. In a desirable urban neighborhood with height restrictions and a historical building commission, it might be possible to add a lot more density and storefronts without zoning. On the other end, I don't think a developer would add a story to a suburban olive garden along a busy road. If anything it might be cheaper to build sprawl without zoning.

> On the other end, I don't think a developer would add a story to a suburban olive garden along a busy road. If anything it might be cheaper to build sprawl without zoning.

I think this is exactly Houston’s situation and why it is such a disaster from a walkability standpoint.

I remember being in mexico city, and in one neighborhood, they would talk about "las minas", which were mines, right next to and in a residential area. Most of the people in that area got their water for showers from groundwater.

be careful what you wish for.

In theory sure.

In reality, the financial system is oriented towards big capital. My aunt ran a coffee shop that was established by grandparents in 1939. It was in the lobby of a office building in he central business district of our little city. The building was bought by a Chinese investor. Like other similar stores, her rent went up 5x and she shuttered.

I live in a mixed use urban neighborhood. 50% of he storefronts are vacant or populated by death businesses like karate dojo’s.

Investors have proven willing to keep homes and apartments empty as well. The behavior seems bizarre to me, but it seems you have to set tax policies to discourage it.

Because the real estate is being used as a value store for people moving money from overseas, engaging in money laundering, or as a hedge against other bets. Once exchange value is given priority over use value in markets for things like housing, you run into all kinds of nonsensical arrangements and deleterious social consequences.

And that is why you need tax penalties such as long term unoccupied property taxes and non-resident investor taxes to counter incentivize such behavior.

I’m skeptical that taxes themselves can resolve the problem. The people who engage in these tactics are already quite good at gaming them. Housing would have to revert to circumstances like Japan, where homes are largely a depreciating asset.

Replace portion of income tax with simple property tax. No complicated stuff like "unoccupied property taxes and non-resident investor taxes".

Even better than property tax, land value tax.

Charging tax on property (building + land) mostly just disincentivizes more intensive buildings.

The land value should be taxed, but it isn't a simple answer. Large buildings imply more people which mean more use of city services. I'm not sure what the right answer is, but I am sure simple answers that would fit into a comment box here are wrong.

If you want to tax things to cover the cost of more people then it makes more sense to tax the people.

You obviously need to tax enough to cover the costs somehow.

Tax is also incentive. You want to tax things you want to discourage more than things that you want to encourage.

They should be, shouldn't they?

They're physical luxury goods that deteriorate as you use them, like cars. They appreciate largely because of nearby corporate and government investment (in office complices, schools, utilities).

That people make money off of them suggests that the government isn't being nearly aggressive enough about capturing the value it's creating here.

Yes, I agree entirely. Removing socially necessary goods like food, housing, and healthcare from financialized speculation would resolve many that issues countries like the US face.

It is really weird. My home is a wood-frame house >100 years old. Although some aspects are better than new construction, it seems weird that the underwriting is basically the same as a new property given the term of the loan I just refinanced. Even insurance is almost the same!

I can travel a mile down the road and due to a "bad" neighborhood, many properties are literally negative value. They sit till they burn because demolition is more costly than the value of the land.

Markets don't price risk well. Housing markets definitely don't price capital investments or liabilities more than 5 years out well.

Well, in NL you were allowed to squat a property if it was vacant for more that a certain amount of time. Then the local Liberals (Mark Rutte) outlawed squatting and it’s basically like the parent comment described.

If you are big enough theres some weird accounting incentive to keep it vacant. You can keep claiming it as an asset that brings in 10x dollars, even though your cash flow is 0x, so actually renting for 8x really hurts your asset value or some nonsense that im probably getting the details wrong about.

Right, which is why commercial lending is a farce in my opinion. It's more or less built on wishful thinking of future gains, leading to a lot of vacancy.

At least in residential lending the problem is that the FHA has specific rules on what it will and will not guarantee, distorting the market in favor of mostly single-use residential.

Really we should pull that and the mortgage deduction, because at this point both distort the market in favor of people who can afford to own property.

I suspect mortgage deduction will be gone in a few years. With Trump's tax reforms very few people take it, and so they won't be for it. If they eliminated it entirely now too many people remember it as good, but give it a few years to sink in that only the rich (or those living in California, which is itself a point against it elsewhere) take it, not you can get rid of it.

Let's hope!

The answer is more boring than financial conspiracy. Rents are sticky and both evictions and finding new tenants are a pain in the ass. Especially for a commercial space, better to wait a while for the 10x tenant than to settle for the 8x one.

It's not a conspiracy, just a murky business.

Real estate is the most "advantaged" businesses out there. They tend to support local political figures heavily and get heard.

Real estate is its own beast.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/03/how-kle...

tl;dr: post 9/11 criminal money laundering activity switched from banks to real estate

It’s also related to financing reality. Commercial real estate is refinances every 10 years or so based on the expected rent. The math works out such that it’s far more reasonable to leave a unit empty with a higher rent than occupied with a lower rent, since the refinancing terms dominate the amount of lost rent.

I think this happens more often in places like San Francisco where the gains from investing in property is mostly appreciation and it's hard to get rid of a tenant. In this case it makes little sense to deal with the hassle of having a tenant who might live there for a very long time to potentially increase your returns by 2-3% per year.

Teaching karate is a death business? In my limited experience the martial arts are overwhelmingly about defense and fitness. Making them predominantly a life business. A donut shop would be a better example of a death business.

I think they meant a business that is destined to die. Could be wrong though.

The way I read it it was referring to the type of businesses that arise in already dying residential areas, due to the rent being cheap, etc. and individuals can start their yoga studio or karate doja and such. The businesses themselves aren't bad, but they are a symptom of a neighborhood in decline. Don't know if that is true, but that's how I understood it.

Also, these businesses don't need walls or public restrooms. If the floor is concrete, CVT, carpet, or whatever they still just roll out some padded mats. No one cares what the ceiling looks like or if the heat works. No remodeling required to get their tenancy started, and none required to replace them with a more lucrative business. Landlords are not afraid to sign up such tenants even if the rent they'll pay is low. A tenant like a dentist or coffee shop requires more complicated improvements, will be charged higher rent, and will signify that the strip mall in question is not dying.

The stoa was the ancient greek strip mall, and I suppose doing philosophy involves little to no remodelling. I can imagine the early stoics putting up resiliently with the misfortune of being moved on from each venue every time a better-paying tenant came along...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23767947

Haha that's a funny image. I can't imagine that freelance philosophy pays much better now, so from now on I'll consider a professional philosopher to be another "death tenant"...

Sorry, if you see a development with any vacancy, a martial arts place, and a subway/Chinese joint, that’s usually a dying development.

so all of the suburbs

Unless it also has a DVD copying or vacuum repair shop, in which case it's a front for money laundering, and the other businesses are window dressing.

Assuming you're in America, most areas are not dense enough to accommodate mixed use zoning unless they start building up. The other half is getting priced out like your grandma.

Density is a function of zoning laws. They should just fix the zoning and make sure it has adequate density to support business.

I think citizens can vote with their dollar where they want to live. I hate suburbia, but I’m also not into super central downtown living. I want something in between. I’m ok with a townhouse and no backyard, as long as there’s a park nearby. I’m up for living with neighbours in a dense area, but only if I can get something for it, like shared neighbourhood amenities and small businesses in walking distance.

Montreal is a good example for North America. Not all of it is perfect, but a lot of it is mixed zoning.

You’re talking about the average European small town...

Why do you need high density for mixed use?

I live in Houston which is by no means very dense, and I love the lack of zoning laws.

Houston doesn't have explicit land use zoning, but things like deed covenants that specifically limit land use and are enforced by the city, or extremely onerous parking regulations for high-density land uses, basically result in I Can't Believe It's Not Zoning.

Pretty much. Modern mixed-use developments are basically born again shopping malls. We don't have the density for "real" mixed use, so it's just a development project like any other; I'm sure there are real, integrated, mixed-use projects, but the ones I see in small urban/suburban areas are detached from the surrounding area and often detached from public transport, basically to sell overpriced apartments to lifestyle-minded HENRYs.

Is that really a problem though? I'm imagining a mixed-use development surrounded by many blocks of single family homes and a large parking garage nearby, like a mall, that makes it easy for homeowners to access the development. (I think this is what you mean by born again shopping mall)

I live nearby one such development, and it's awesome (when there isn't a pandemic). There's a great variety of retail because they can rely on both local residents and homeowners who drive in, and it's thriving (when there isn't a pandemic).

More apartments have been built up around the development as it's grown, and while it's very detached from the urban center there is a bus route that connects it and the other apartments throughout the suburb to the light rail system.

Mixed use neighborhoods of the past generally offer business diversity and lots of mom-and-pops.

A lot of the new mixed use developments where I live in Seattle are basically malls in how sterile and unvaried the commercial bits are. (New American upscale brunch restaurant? Check. Fad group fitness club? Check. Bank and starbucks? Check.)

What is real mixed use vs fake mixed use?

while i agree that there is a trend in that direction, they are still better than the status quo of separated developments.

The only way this story makes sense to me is if some other business took over the coffee shop space and paid the 5x rent.

It's also possible the new landlords internally drove out the tenant to not have to deal with the hassle of having a tenant. This could make sense if they wanted the building as a store of value and didn't care about the rental income. If nobody is there nobody will accidentally start a fire while cooking.

It would probably make sense for the city/whatever to incentivise against that.

OK, that also seems possible.

You this kind of thing in San Francisco, where decades of regulations banning and mandating everything anyone has ever thought of, makes doing nothing with a building sometimes the only remaining strategy.

The problem is people want to call it "mixed zoning" but still have Karens on the central planning committee making stupid rules, e.g. they'll have "businesses" next to "residences" but a given plot will be explicitly designated as one or the other.

What you really want is the small businesses which start off being operated out of the proprietor's residence. A hair salon in a converted living room, a restaurant serving food from the owner's home kitchen. Something that can start off as a side business yet can advertise without getting into legal trouble and grow into more if it's successful.

You get a few of those in an area and someone decides it's a good place to knock down a house and put up a five story building with condos on top and a coffee shop and a bakery on the ground floor.

You have to let it grow organically like that or you just end up with abandoned "commercial" buildings because businesses fear moving in when they know their success would lead to increased rents as a result of the limited amount of designated-commercial real estate in the area.

“Karen’s on the central planning committee”

cries in San Francisco

So apt.

It truly is the golden era of officious busybodies.

Tangentially related, but a colleague just got their replacement of kitchen cabinets shut down by the local government for not having a permit. It’s baffling to me that the government requires that you get permission to do significant modification to the inside of your own home, especially for non structural work.

What the heck? How would they even know? Neighbours reported seeing them carrying new cabinets in? The store reported it to the government? That's just weird.

Neighbours reported seeing them carrying new cabinets in?

Something like this actually happened to a former colleague of mine. They installed a safety rail on their front porch. Someone complained.

That’s at least outdoors

True, but children can run much faster than a permitting process.

Maybe in the cabinetry case there was a giant van with a company logo parked out front.

Either way, permits shouldn't be required for non-disruptive (and a van being in someone's driveway is not disruptive), non-structural changes to a house.

He gave the old cabinets away on Craigslist. Must’ve seen the posting and cross checked it against permits.

I’m aware that zoning and permitting laws have been an issue for a while (like a lot of Millenials I haven’t been able to afford to buy a home), but it does feel a bit authoritarian for the local permitting office to look for signs of “black market” modifications to one’s own property.

Where did that happen?

West LA, but after relaying this story to my family in the midwest I found out that my sister in law had to get permits to replace internal drywall. It seems like lots of local governments think they should have their nose in how one modifies one’s own property.

Welcome to home ownership. Location everywhere.

Most places like not places like Oakland, Berkeley and Santa Cruz County, this sort of thing depends on the neighbors. It's inane what neighbors will go running to the city for. Or not. Friend of mine in the east bay completely gutted and remodeled his house no problem. In San Jose neighbors complained to the city about a disused dishwasher in my garage.

Outside of the parent's offensive sexist, and racist 'Karen' statement...

I really don't think people have perspective these days. You think this is the era of officious busybodies?! Seriously?

It's just that these days, things aren't covered up. Or, are seen more due to the Internet.

For example, you think cops are MORE violent now? MORE racist? HELL NO! No, no, no!

They're MUCH better than they were. Much. All of that needs to be stopped, of course, there's zero call for it. However in the past, you wouldn't even hear of it. A black man would be beaten to death, and it wouldn't even make the news!

Go find an older black gentleman from rural Alabama from the 50s, and ask him some questions. Compare that, and police treatment, to now.

So with respect to 'busybodies', I think you need to think back to small town American (and Canada, where I'm from), a mere 50 years ago. Canada is pretty much atheist now, and the US certainly is, compared to back then.

And along with all that religious baggage, came the 'holier than thou' lot. Said lot would always work to dominate committees, town councils, you name it. Religious groups would constantly rail on TV series, movies, even newspaper comics like the 'Far Side' would get hate mail, over crazy silly supposed slights.

The media was controlled, out of fear of retribution.

Oh no, nothing you complain about now even remotely compares to that. And while I say "You literally, clearly, have no idea.".. don't feel bad. Feel lucky you don't.

Yup see “shop houses” [1] in Southeast Asia for how it should be done.

Shop house is a flexible creature. It can be a business, but is also easily converted into living quarters, if necessarily, or a parking garage, or whatever you want. It’s just a flexible, convertible space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shophouse

Interestingly, in the area of Iowa and Minnesota where I grew up, where a lot of the towns were founded just after the Civil War, the shops on main street were mostly brick storefront on the ground level, with residence above. Very few shop owners live in the apartment these days, for more than the last 50 years the apartments were rented out, usually quite cheaply.

I did have one friend that ran a shop and lived above -- it seemed great -- but he owned the building and had done a lot of modernizing of the apartment. It doesn't fit the suburban dream, though. No yard -- the green space for my friend was the county court house square across main street from his shop.

I think many older North American cities have these features

Ottawa, Canada has these too on Bank St. Toronto has many of these streets also, for example Queen West. These are generally the most vibrant neighborhoods.

The solution to having lack of backyard space is to have public parks. Montreal has this more right than any other city I’ve seen.

Exactly. That’s partly why I love living in Vietnam. The neighborhoods are so vibrant and full of life. Everyone is out on the stoop. Neighbors all know each other and buy from each other.

Of course, from my apartment I hear karaoke late at night, roosters early in the morning, and construction, always construction.

So there are drawbacks. It would be disruptive, especially in suburbia. But I would love some middle ground between crazy Saigon and cultural desert suburban Atlanta.

I’m in Da Nang myself at the moment :D

Where do all these roosters live? I kept an eye out for them wherever I went in Da nang, but I never saw any of these roosters. Definitely heard them every dawn though.

Even Tokyo works a lot more like this. It's a beautiful mess, but in addition it has some of the best public infrastructure.

https://missingmiddlehousing.com

Can anyone explain how the term "Karen" isn't both racist and sexist at the same time? I hadn't heard of it until a few months ago, and now it seems everyone is using it to refer to a certain kind of "middle class white woman". A term like that to describe a certain kind of middle class asian or black man would be very offensive. Are the days where we try to exercise civility and empathy gone? It feels like society has gone from "let's tolerate people" to "let's ridicule people we don't like, without logical argument".

Blaming the disappearance of tiny businesses in residential neighborhoods by saying "It's all those middle class white women" seems both very shallow and specious.

It's definitely sexist and racist. I think usage of the term shot up following the incident a couple months back where a white woman explicitly tried to use faked fear to weaponize police against a black man telling her to leash her dog in Central Park. Combined with the current prominence of Black Lives Matter and some older similar incidents of white women calling police on black people, the racist sexist meme has really taken off.

Amen. Childish name-calling like this and "ok boomer" are being used to dismiss anything a person says because they're older.

You are really tempting fate with this comment...

I don't disagree that this hazard is real, but I also see the term used in non-racist, non-sexist ways too, sometimes with disclaimers that "obviously this isn't just white women and not all white women are like this". I realize I am likely in the minority thinking that context matters, but I want to provide my sincere stance that I think it's sometimes reasonable to call someone a Karen, assuming proper care is taken not to imply anything sexist or racist. I understand the term as meaning "busybody" more than anything else; in fact, you can use it to describe a person of any race or sex but you cannot use it for a non-busybody.

The problem is, people used to have non-gender, non-racial terms for people. For example, a person might be called an 'asshole' or 'bonehead', and this could be a person of any colour, any sex, age, etc.

Yet now, it seems all sorts are labeling people based upon sex, colour, ethnic background, etc. It is, quite literally, the definition of sexual, racial, age discrimination. It is linking "external characteristic" with "way a person acts".

I don't care what anyone's political stance is, but if you are using terms like 'Karen', you are 100% contributing to sexism, racism, etc.

Just call someone what they are. "Asshole" has worked fine for millennia.

I agree that the term "Karen" has its genesis as an insult, and one designed to effectively aggravate the people it describes. It's not surprising to me that it's a word people reach for when they want the impact that words like "asshole" have lost. I don't know why you would call someone an "asshole" if you want to be genuinely mean.

"Asshole" is as common as salt in our everyday language, but "Karen" is the spice.

> Just call someone what they are. "Asshole" has worked fine for millennia.

Except that Karens and assholes are different. Karens can be assholes, sure, but a Karen is a specific type of asshole. Football hooligans may be assholes but they're generally not Karens. It means something different, and there isn't another word that means the same thing.

Unless a 'Karen' can be an elderly aging Asian man, it's sexist, ageish and racist. Here's a few other such terms:

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

A lot of these terms link specific behaviour, to specific ethnic/sex/cultural groups. I guess they're OK too?

I find it utterly disgusting, that some people think some things are 'one way'. That racism is OK, but only "one way". Sexism is OK, but only against men. The list goes on.

Let's see how long you last, if you see a lazy black person (they exist, like lazy people exist everywhere)... and you spout out "Bluegum!" Is that OK?

No?

Then why is it OK with 'Karen'?

You'd don't cure social ills by creating more of them.

"An eye for an eye, leaves the whole world blind." is highly accurate, I think.

For what it is worth I have seen Karen used as aggressively agender and aracially like referring to an obnoxious customer who was a black man as a "Karen".

https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/karen/ https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Karen

Maybe you're seen this. I haven't, and many people seem to have the specific definitions listed above.

> Unless a 'Karen' can be an elderly aging Asian man, it's sexist, ageish and racist.

Well then it's a good thing that it can.

> Let's see how long you last, if you see a lazy black person (they exist, like lazy people exist everywhere)... and you spout out "Bluegum!" Is that OK?

That is a racial slur. Its meaning is defined by race.

A Karen is defined by behavior.

An elderly Asian guy can totally be a Karen. We don't have another single word at the moment to convey the same behaviour in a different way. You can propose one and try to convert the usage though.

From what I understand the specific behavior is actually and intrinsically linked to the idea of a white woman in America and has historically existed for quite a while among black circles (from the 1800s at least). Discussing Karen as if it’s new belies the actual history of it. [0]

0. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/14/891177904/whats-in-a-karen

What a weird assertion, when you link to an article that asserts something entirely different.

The above NPR, states that a Karen is a new label, started in the 2010s (which is just last year, even). It also shows how the Karen label is different from other, prior labels.

It delineates how a Becky is different, a "Miss Ann" is different.

We've historically had labels like this for people, which are racially linked. But this is 2020, this is a NEW label, and other NEW labels keep popping up.

We need to collectively STOP this. No more racist, sexist, ageist, anything-ist labels. It's all wrong.

(Not saying you were defending label use... just clarifying my position)

I’m arguing that the idea of a karen is not new, sorry to be unclear.

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

Slurs are not new. And as I mentioned, what you showed were not Karens, but 'white women who act poorly in certain ways'.

"Kaben" has unique connotations, a specific meaning. While I agree that "white women have had slurs" before 'Karen', I'm going to have to disagree that it's germane here.

> Can anyone explain how the term "Karen" isn't both racist and sexist at the same time?

It is. There are plenty of decent people named Karen who do not deserve to have their name appropriated as an insult.

Better to say "entitled jerk" or something similar. That way, the only person you're insulting is whomever you're calling a jerk.

> Can anyone explain how the term "Karen" isn't both racist and sexist at the same time?

Because it’s tied to behaviour. Stop behaving like an a-hole and you stop being called a Karen.

You can’t stop being black or a woman.

That’s the key difference.

> Because it’s tied to behaviour.

We wouldn't call illegal gardeners a Hernandez, or terrorists from the middle east Mohammeds. Those are behaviors too.

What makes it wrong is picking an ethnic name to associate with that behavior. Karen is a euphemism for suburban, white, female.

Except for the second part: you’ve never been discriminated against for being white.

The sexist part doesn’t really fit for me either, as we generally reserve insults for genders too. Bitch vs bastard are prime examples.

By the way, the male version of “Karen” in my part of the world is much worse.

It’s both racist and sexist but the people advocating it’s usage don’t actually care about either issue. I think it’s filed under the general hypocrisy that you cannot be racist against white people.

Using a name meant to paint a picture of a suburban white woman is no different than describing someone as a Jamal, Yousef, Goku, Carlucci, Vladimir, Shenequa, Herschel, or Juan. If a news outlet used any of those names to describe a person in a news story they’d be immediately flagged as racist. And yet we see the term used to describe white woman gracing articles on the front page of even the NY Times.

I've always seen it as referring to a certain kind of insufferable, entitled customer that demands to see the manager. Usually presumed to be a middle-aged white woman, yes, but the weight was on insufferable behavior, not demographics, at least originally. Suddenly people have started complaining about it as being heavily about race/sex and being bigoted, when the original was just codeword for asshole.

There are too many people named Karen for it not to become offensive to those people at least.

Middle-class white women also suffer the Karens. They might suffer less on a per-encounter basis but they have lots more encounters with Karens so it might even out.

If you haven't suffered the Karens, you might be a Karen...

When could society ever be characterized by an ethos of "let's tolerate people"? ISTM that now anyone might receive for criticism for objectionable behavior, not just poor black young men.

Blame the writers of "Will & Grace".

It's not obvious why you have to call out the nationality of the investor.

There's some relevance in that investors like that are likely to have no ties to the community and no interest in anything other than profit. Of course many local investors are the same way.

Investors from outside of the community may not have interest in anything other than returns. “Investors” from an autocracy where future property rights can’t entirely be taken for granted may not be interested even in that; they could just want to hedge their government risk by parking some money in non-seizable assets located outside of the country, and then minimize any resulting management headache.

Do investors inside the community neccessarily care any more than ones outside it? It brings to mind the stupid xenophobia of thinking being oppressed by "their people" is better than having open elections where an immigrant can run.

Investors inside generally have different incentives. They are close enough to drive by and see how things are doing. Wreck the building and they will notice. Investors from outside can be fooled.

Also if the investor is just looking for a place to save money outside of their unstable country they may be better off losing money on the deal!

> Like other similar stores, her rent went up 5x and she shuttered.

Want to know the best way to protect against exceedingly high prices? Increase supply. If the market had enough supply to meet its own demand, then that situation wouldn’t be possible. The number one thing that holds back the supply of real estate is insane zoning and planning regulation.

The idea that permanently preserving nonsense like the “character” of neighbourhood, at the cost of affordable housing and business rent has to be one of the most anti-social mobility, anti-equality, openly classist ideas we have in our society. “But what if somebody builds an apartment tower next to my expensive Victorian house?”, good! Maybe there’ll be less people sleeping on the streets and in their cars because of it.

nti-social mobility, anti-equality, openly classist ideas we have in our society

But on the flip side, deciding that newcomers know better how to manage already occupied land is basically colonialism...

I hope you’re being sarcastic because otherwise this is incredibly contrived. Colonization is one country taking over the governance of another, typically without providing any representation or property rights to said nation/tribe/country/people...

Building housing to support population growth is not even remotely similar to that. Permissive zoning laws (or even better, no zoning laws) don’t even prevent existing residents from using their property their property the way they always have. The restrictive regulations are about making sure that all nearby residents also continue to use their property in a particular way. The idea that buying a house in a particular area somehow entitles you to make sure nobody else who owns a house or property in that area does anything to change it just seems completely insane to me.

A neighbour saying “you can’t build affordable housing on your property, because I like your property the way it is” sounds a lot more similar to colonialism to me.

> The idea that permanently preserving nonsense like the “character” of neighbourhood, at the cost of affordable housing and business rent has to be one of the most anti-social mobility, anti-equality, openly classist ideas we have in our society. “But what if somebody builds an apartment tower next to my expensive Victorian house?”

I'm sure there's that too, but a lot of it is a result of an "unholy alliance" of democracy and economics. For most people their home is the single most valuable asset they have. So they have an interest in maximizing the value of it. One way of maximizing the value is by increasing scarcity. And thus you have the well off people (as in, the ones who already own property in the area) packing the local planning boards, preventing higher density development. Or home owner associations with all kinds of anal rules how your house and yard is supposed to look and what you can do there, etc.

Of course, these types of incentive problems are everywhere. E.g. in my country, like I suppose in many developed countries, there's an under-supply of medical doctors. So how many doctors do we need? Hmm, lets ask the experts, the national medical association. Who of course has no interest in inflating the wages and job opportunities of their members..

I always thought it was explained by local government elections generally having a low voter turnout, and homeowners having the strongest incentive to vote. But I’m not really sure that’s it, if you look at places like LA, local elections generally have very poor turnout, but in SF its actually not that bad.

The cynic in me thinks it’s just run of the mill political corruption. The cities where these problems are the worst have essentially been run by the same group of politicians for quite a long time, and they’re generally elected on platforms of caring about societies less advantaged groups. But time after time they get elected and incrementally make things a bit worse before being elected again. Which could suggest that you win in politics by simply saying the right things rather than actually doing them. But I don’t find that sort of “people are just dumb” line of reasoning very compelling.

In any case, the problem has gotten so bad in many places that’s it’s not possible to fix over any reasonable period of time. If you too imagine the most extreme approach of simply abolishing all zoning and planning regulations over night, housing prices and rent would certainly sharply decline. But then you would have a new problem of millions of mortgages being underwater.

You accidentally described an even more practical solution than increasing the naturally limited (e.g. good commercial spots in the city center) supply: make neighbourhoods unattractive by building communist era style apartment blocks in beautiful areas to drive prices of victorian houses down...

Why is karate dojo death business? Do they kill a lot of people?

It's the kind of business that mops up empty commercial space, usually on a "until we find a better tenant" serial short-term rental agreement. See also kiosks, nail salons, vape shops, "outlets", pop-up shops etc.

Perhaps the work required to convert a vacancy into/out of a dojo or similar is relatively simple? Sure you might need to put in a pair of locker rooms and/or and perhaps an office, but it's mostly empty space. Would something like that generally even have showers/plumbing needs?

In many US metro areas, these are the first types of tenants who move into small strip shopping centers along secondary roads running through smaller suburban towns and cities.

I'm in NE Atlanta metro; it seems that you can't pass a traffic light without seeing a nail salon, a gas station, a cell phone store, and Subway. And these have been there for years right from the building of the building.

Because a dojo needs lots of space. If it's not an elite dojo it means the prices for commercial space have crashed in this location.

Generally, I like this a lot. The key is that for it to work, you must build taller, but it doesn't have to be all that tall. I've lived in several places that had great walkability, and they all had one thing in common: They were built before the invention of the automobile.

The best for walkability was Berlin, which, in the inner part, is mostly 5-6 story buildings. Within two blocks there were numerous stores and about 8 restaurants and a few bars. I also lived in an older suburb of mostly single family houses, but the lots weren't that big, and every house was two stories.

The key to walkability is that you need density. For a business to get much foot traffic, you need a good population in the walkable catchment area, and for that you need density. To get density, you need to build up. Unfortunately, building up is more expensive. Another thing that's helpful is alleys. If you put the garage behind the house, you don't need as much frontage width for driveways and garage doors.

I’m not sure about your argument of “you have to build up”. Lot of places in Europe have strict limits regarding how high a building can be and they do have lot of small stores around, Berlin, that you mentioned, is very strict on this. A few examples: Hamburg residential areas seem to have ~4-5 floors max. Groningen has neighborhoods where apartment building are limited to only 2 floors (So just two apartments). They both have enough density to have small businesses around.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the US situation you’re comparing to, and people there just build flat, so even a few floors is already building up? That would be strange though...

~5 floors is as high as you can go before needing an elevator.

You can do six, but the sunlight at the top really has to be great for it to be worth it...

5 floors is also about the limit for wood frame construction, you need a more expensive building style to go higher. Obviously consult a civil engineer for details.

What this means in practice is you don't build between 6 and 10 floor buildings because the numbers won't work out. (obviously there are exceptions)

I don't think I've seen a reasonably modern building around here (Vancouver, Canada) over 2 floors without an elevator. I expect we have accessibility rules that require them for anything other than individual private residences.

Much of Europes dense inner core multi-storey construction predates lifts.

At the time the buildings were constructed, 5-6 storeys was a practical limit.

Not just people, but food, water, and waste travelled by stair (or, in the latter case often, air).

> Maybe I’m misunderstanding the US situation you’re comparing to, and people there just build flat, so even a few floors is already building up?

Yes, that's exactly the situation in most neighborhoods in the U.S. One or two story single-family homes with large setbacks on all sides.

~4-5 stories is totally sufficient to be "dense" compared to most of the US. Cities in the US sprawl absurdly flat. Consider that Paris is one of the densest cities in the world, and famously has almost no tall buildings.

Paris also has famously tiny, cramped and frankly unlivable appartments. Has had for ages. The three musketeers even contained references to it...

If Paris is a model for the world, I don't want this world.

By curiosity I checked some numbers to compare. Paris density is just crazy! When compared, Berlin (mentioned by cameldrv) really has a low density for the huge capital it is, at around ~3.9k persons/km². London seems to have around 5.5k, New York around 10.2k, while Paris is at a crazy 20.7k!

Numbers from https://versus.com/en/berlin-vs-london-vs-new-york-vs-paris/....

It's a bit exaggerated because Paris proper is only a small part of the urban region. It's more appropriate to compare Paris to Manhattan. Both house around 2 million people at 20k people/km², and both are in sprawling metropolitan areas of 10-20 million depending where you stop counting.

Yes, but Paris proper is notable for achieving that density with only two tall buildings, both non-residential.

Edit: And a considerable amount of land given over to parks, museums, churches, and other non-residential spaces.

As dmurray commented there's differences in what is counted. Another difference is that Paris proper has relatively small parks, whereas Berlin has several huge ones as well as lakes.

So yeah, Paris is dense, but if you compare block by block the differences are smaller.

Even the (by far) most dense borough of Berlin is only at 14,373/km²[1], though. That's considerably lower than almost all of the Parisian boroughs[2]. Even the whole city's average is 20,000/km². From the point of view of most American cities with some obvious exceptions, the difference is probably indeed not that noticeable though.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verwaltungsgliederung_Berlins

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris

A very large portion of houses built in the past 70 years in the U.S. are single story. My point was that even going from single story, single family housing to two story, single family housing makes a big difference in density, and that can enable walkability.

I specifically don't mean that you have to build up to Manhattan levels to get walkability. Personally, I find the skyscraper jungle of Manhattan to be a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there, at least at my stage in life.

If anything, perhaps Manhattan levels of density are not great for nice retail businesses. If the average building is 8-10 stories, there is relatively little ground level space available, rents are high, and so there is little room for experimentation. The 5-6 story Berlin (and to some degree Paris) level of density is maybe a sweet spot.

Now, this doesn't necessarily work as well for families with children. However, Berlin manages to be decent for this by having very wide sidewalks, a lot of parks, and hinterhofen. Some parts of Chicago and Brooklyn manage to achieve a similar effect with single family housing by having tightly spaced three story row houses.

Like I said, ultimately a lot of cities that are nice to live in in this way are that way because they were built before the invention of the car, so people valued this much more than they do today when the alternative is to get in their car and go to some big box store with a huge parking lot that doesn't need to be very near by.

I see, that makes sense, thanks for the additional details, I see that I was missing context to understand your initial comment.

Single family detached housing on fully separated lots of 1-2 storeys, and very often only a ground floor, is typical through much of the US. That describes a startlingly large fraction of San Francisco, and even larger "dense" neighbourhoods (Richmond, Sunset) are typically 2-3 floors, where ground level is garage parking ("soft story" construction, a major earthquake concern. Only in NYC and environs do you find generally denser construction.

A 5-6 storey standard would likely more thaan double SF's housing capaacity.

Heck yeah, there used to be an amazing sandwich shop just up the street from me. Was super nice being able to walk half a block to pick up something from them. Unfortunately they relocated to a more densely-populated area, but it was good while it lasted. There are other food shops nearby though! Very cool having this :)

The idea of separating business and living into distant zones and forbidding trading within residential areas has always infuriated me with its absurdity. Who could possibly come up with it? It only makes sense when it's about noisy and air-polluting businesses, grocery/whatever stores and offices are absolutely great to be dispersed within residential areas!

> It only makes sense when it's about noisy and air-polluting businesses, grocery/whatever stores and offices are absolutely great to be dispersed within residential areas!

Grocery stores (even small ones) can be very noisy, especially with extended business hours these days. I used to live In an apartment above a grocery story with a small parking lot for a long time. This was also in a mixed zone area (mostly residential, a few shops, barber, etc).

At 6am, trucks start rolling up and delivering food (although they are only supposed to do that at 7am, on some days they’ll start at 6). That means very loud beeping from the trucks backing up and shouting to the grocery employees above engine noise. Throughout the day, there will be random noise (honking in the parking lot, people slamming their cart into the barrier, etc) and sometimes people get drunk in the parking lot and start shouting (usually until 11pm, the grocery store closed at 10). And once in a while, their security system went of and the police show up and make some noise at 4am. With an open window (which you had to have in the summer — air conditioning is an exception in the part of Europe where I lived) you can hear all that noise almost as if you are standing next to it.

I never minded it too much since I’m a very heavy sleeper but I can definitely see that some people would get very poor quality sleep. And no landlord ever wants a store to be built above their apartments because it lowers the value dramatically due to the mentioned reasons.

Parking lot, employees, carts. Sounds like a small supermarket you're describing there

My nearby grocery store closed recently. Same with the baker and another grocery store before it. It was small was tended to by the owner and his wife and had one parking spot that wasn't just the regular street ones.

> At 6am, trucks start rolling up and delivering food (although they are only supposed to do that at 7am, on some days they’ll start at 6). That means very loud beeping from the trucks backing up and shouting to the grocery employees above engine noise.

Exactly the same takes place in purely residential areas anyway because of garbage trucks. That's no problem if you shut your window however, modern windows isolate noises pretty well.

Garbage trucks don't show up every morning, do they? The parent poster was describing a situation where multiple trucks roll up in the early morning every day. I think it's pretty clear the two scenarios aren't really comparable.

> Garbage trucks don't show up every morning, do they?

I'd say at least half of the mornings they do. One day the one which takes generic garbage, another day it's glass (obviously, the most noisy), another day it's plastic, then mixed garbage again etc. That's about 20 minutes of loud beeping + garbage noise. But that's fairly quiet if the windows are well-shut.

I lived directly behind the loading area for a large grocery store for a few years and personally I thought noise concerns were overblown. After the first week or so I was just used to those noises and slept right through them.

Granted, that might not be something everyone can deal with, but I imagine a lot of people can.

P.S.: It was great having a (24 hour!) grocery store that close. I thought of it as my personal walk-in pantry.

It's true; light sleepers are the bane of civilization. If they could just relax, we all could.

The corner store kinda sucks. We always used to go when I was commuting and my wife was pregnant because we were strapped for time.

But now that the governor says to go once a week she makes the trip out to the big, nice grocery store and we get better food for less money.

Different strokes for different folks. The corner bodega in my old New York neighborhood was open late into the night and made a good bacon egg and cheese sandwich.

The important thing is that we should not legislate these out of existence.

I don't totally understand the economics of how those work in NYC. Just sheer density and throughput? Family-run shops staffed by extended family working unofficially (avoiding payroll tax, minimum wage, etc.)? Some mixture?

In the "is DC a real city?" angst, people occasionally claim there aren't any such shops in DC. But there are, it's just that the sandwiches are priced at $10-14, so people don't think of them the same way. DC shopkeepers get defensive about it, and put together spreadsheets showing that with rent, labor, etc. you just can't break even selling $6-8 sandwiches in the DC market.

1. High throughput

2. There is definitely some level of small-scale tax evasion/paying under the table in NYC. Grey market is a lot bigger, some places will not charge tax if you pay cash.

3. Small square footage. Most deli counter setups I've seen in New York, there's basically enough room for a person to swivel between a counter and a grill, and that's about it. Less square footage means less space to pay rent on. There's almost certainly no seating so you save even more.

4. Most places like this will probably make most of the margin on drinks and snacks that are also prominently displayed, most delis also sell lotto tickets, smokes, etc. I will say that I didn't have the healthiest snacking habits before moving out of New York.

This is all anecdotal growing up in New York in the '00s. Things have certainly changed since then, in some neighborhoods the deli is an endangered species due to increasing rents. And they have never been everywhere; a deli could not afford the rent on 5th Av next to Bergdorf Goodman.

>I don't totally understand the economics of how those work in NYC. Just sheer density and throughput?

People like bodegas, they are everywhere and like someone else said: tax evasion. Bodegas love cash, and you learn to carry it otherwise you are going to have to meet a $5 - $10 min (which they aren't supposed to be doing, but do)

> which they aren't supposed to be doing

What is restricting them now? I knew it used to be part of the merchant-network agreement, and based on my quick searching that was due to US federal law. Then Dodd-Frank changed it to allow minimums up to $10 [0][1][2]

[0]: https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/merchant-minimu...

[1]: https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/merchants-who-v...

[2]: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/merchants/minimum-tra...

Some people actually like cars/driving, some people dont want random people walking in front of their house, and not everyone wants their city to turn into NYC

Sometimes it feels like the people on this site have only lived in SFBA/LA/NYC and nowhere else in the United States. Cars/suburbia work pretty well in most places

Mixed use zoning isn't about becoming like NYC, it's about being able to walk to the cornershop at the end of the road to buy a pint of milk. Maybe there's a cafe and a accountant's office there too.

Or dense towns and more countryside and parkland.

Suburbia straight doesn't work. Requiring a car for transit means kids have to continually be chauffeured by adults to anywhere meaningful. Lack of local business means there's limited economic potential for the city - it's all in one tax district and redistributed around. Sprawl increases the cost of providing services like fire and police. You're taking on some significant burdens in exchange for not having your neighbors walk past your house.

Canadian cities have suburbia, and public transit. Many have buses on main streets, which are typically a 2 or 3 block walk from side streets.

Suburbia doesn't mean "have to have a car", it is just many like having cars.

This sort of speaks to the prior poster, stating that many here are from big cities. Suburbia isn't low-density. It's only low-density compared to 'downtown'.

Try living in actual, real rural areas. Where I live, houses are a mile apart! Yet bizarrely, we have fire stations, police, high speed gigabit internet, and more.

And it isn't super expensive either.

I grew up in a Texas town of 100,000, and it didn't have a single bus route until I was 14. The closest shop was a small bakery six blocks away, which was a godsend since that was the only shop within five miles. When half the usable space is parking, it's low-density. When you have houses plopped in the middle of a hundred-foot-to-a-side rectangle, it's low-density.

I acknowledge that it is, indeed, a gradient. But lots of points on that gradient are huge negatives to the people living there.

I think what you're describing is a lack of public transit, not the impossibility of it. And I'm not 100% sure why 1/2 the space would be parking, this seems like a fairly large exaggeration. More likely lots of the space, was lawn? Space between houses?

I've lived in lots of cities where minimum lot size was an acre, which is 200x200ft. Public transit all around, grocery stores all in walking distance (few blocks at most), with loads of corner stores, etc.

I think that as I mentioned in another comment, zoning laws are important. Too much? Too little? It becomes broken.

But for example, large-scale developers typically can't build here, without dedicating some space to park, to retail, without making an actual community out of the place.

And people in most rural areas I've lived, typically aren't bad off for it.

This may be a cultural thing, or a historical thing such as, how cities were build, and therefore, how they are now.

edit:

An added thought here.... when I visited the US, I noticed that a lot of grocery stores were often larger. I've seen some where it's literally a few minutes to walk end to end, when inside.

Maybe this is the difference?

Most of the grocery stores here are smaller. Maybe we just have smaller grocery stores, but more of them?

Yes, that's precisely the issue with American towns, and detailed in the article. Half parking is not an exaggeration - Walmart in my hometown is a three-acre store with 600 parking places. This is not unusual - the Home Depot is similar. burger king is similar - more parking than space inside. The houses bring down the average. Lawns are in addition to this. It's hard to overstate exactly how sprawled the median American town newer than 1950 is, where you do have entire subdivisions without a single store. Sometimes multiple subdivisions in a row. No thought is given to community.

The article is calling for the exact type of mixed zoning you're familiar with - occassional shops mixed in with the houses. It's not like that, but it should be.

>Some people actually like cars/driving

I live in a small town but in a very spread out relatively densely populated country. Still with the closing of the old bakery and little grocery store due to the people who ran it retiring I have to go to a nearby city or supermarkets on the outskirts for stuff.

I'm not saying this out of spite or annoyance because of that. It's not that far. Hell i'm even moving soon. But I do see it for what it was. A good thing to have around. It made for local economic activity, it had locals meeting up and having talks there, not driving all the way out if they were missing something minor and very local events were advertised there. There's no reason, 0, nada to do spatial planning to purposefully have people driving more and longer. It's not good for the environment, it's not good for the people, economically, what have you. If you love driving you can do so without a reason. And no by advocating for having spatial planning that allows for local small stores people aren't pushing for everyone to live in a big city either.

>If you love driving you can do so without a reason.

At least for the time being.

Yeah I wouldn't like driving to another city to do my errands either. I think the OP meant having a grocery store literally right next door to you

I think you have to be a lot more specific, perhaps make a map with distances for walk/bicycle/car and a list of concrete things you find yourself doing in every day life. For me I always find the these too long/another city can mean so many different things.

Yeah gp. When I said "another city", I meant more than 20 min away by car

Restaurants, accountants, lawyers, and such may do fine with mixed use zoning, but retail simply can't compete without economy of scale.

Mixed use zoning is good for specialty retail like niche/designer clothing. Also even for things like groceries people (like me) will be willing to pay a slight premium for being able to get those goods from a short walking distance.

Ah, but the more niche it is, the more likely they depend on car traffic to bring their customers in.

I'm fortunate to live within walking distance of a supermarket. It's nice to get fresh produce and things that we run out of or need on a whim. A little Ace Hardware store serves in a similar way. It seems like the fairly sizable population of retirees in the nearby apartments provide these stores with a lot of business.

I don't expect those stores to have everything, but they really reduce the number of car trips that I make.

Here's a crazy idea: no zoning. Let people decide what they want to do.

That is crazy. I do not want a concrete plant to open next to my house. Or a Yoko Ono Scream Therapy franchise :)

But yeah, the insane detail that many cities have in their zoning plans is stifling.

The link[7] monkeypizza included elsewhere in this thread is what I'd like to see as the norm

[7] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

Eh, I hate the city myself but people love Houston. Seems like 0 zoning isn't really an appreciable problem.

What I wanted to do was move to a place that had rules which would keep the neighborhood the way I like.

If you're not paying neighbors to keep their land the way you like, why should you have any say in that?

Note that they have a say in what you do with your land, too.

Is it OK for someone to buy the house next door, and build a cafe? What about a night club, which has loud music and closes at 4am?

How about a rendering plant? Or installing a large propane storage facility?

Is there nothing you'd consider unsafe, unwanted, beside the house you just paid $500k for? Which is now worth $200k, and makes it horrid to live there?

These laws, like all laws, are necessary.

Where the problem sits, is when they go too far, or not far enough. There is a sweet spot for everything!

That is a pathological way of thinking about it. You could also think of it as a collective pact.

Poking into peoples' property for minutiae is also pathological, and plenty of Americans have horror stories about HOAs fining them for silly things like the height of the lawn not meeting regulations.

It's one thing if you can opt out of a collective pact by picking another jurisdiction, but local busybodies are so widely spread that land legally allowed to be developed even in a short but dense, traditional American style, is so scarce that it fetches a premium, so now there is nothing between the extremes of "quiet cookie cutter suburb far from everything" and "busy noisy neighborhood of tower blocks."

If I moved into a neighborhood that had rules that I liked, and now you want to replace it with a free-for-all, should you have to pay me?

Houston is like this. I like it, but I grew up there, many people are so scared that it means a oil refinery or something could pop up next door one day but that stuff rarely happens. The market naturally seems to fill most of the voids in terms of demand, so it’s not like you have to go far to find a liquor store or something specific. That said, we built our cities in Texas for cars.

My adult life has mostly been in Dallas which is very different. I’ve attempted land development myself so know more than a layman but Dallas and especially surrounding suburbs have what feels like an insane level of zoning. I say “attempted” because there have been a couple dozen times where I see a building or raw land parcel and feel it would be perfect for some use. Do some research and find it wouldn’t be allowed. On some occasions I have a specific aesthetic (tasteful, but I like unique/artistic structures) that I’d like, only to find the town requires all buildings to be made/finished of no less than 80% red brick or paint 1 of 6 predetermined shades of brown. It’s killed my endeavors every time and honestly, makes the DFW area an architecturally soulless Place to be IMO. Just recently, maybe 2018, the state banned these local aesthetic requirements. But I think locally it’s still a fight to get something too far from the city planners vision built.

...paint 1 of 6 predetermined shades of brown.

You've answered some questions I've had about Dallas...

Europe is as you described.

Just had this conversation with an architect friend who lives in Palo Alto. The whole idea that there is a "residential zone", "commercial zone" etc needs to go away. Now with people leaving cities in droves there is an amazing opportunity to introduce mixed zoning into office areas by converting many of the empty offices into lofts. This will solve our urban housing problem. Despite what people are saying now about remote work I don't think the majority of people will leave cities long term. Cities offer facilities, infra, amenities, network and culture. We need to make cities livable and walkable.

The issue is that the residential density of suburbia (the vast majority of Australia, Canada, NZ and the US) precludes mixed use zoning.

Meh. There's plenty of density for "a strip mall every four blocks". And you can make that structure totally walkable instead of requiring cars. The important thing is not to jack the rent through the roof.

Most suburbs don't, for no obvious reason. I did complain to the Mayor a few years ago that the grocery store four blocks from my house has only street access and no sidewalk access.

I'm not at all sure why the author seems to think that converted garages are great business incubators. That's a terrible idea. It's what my uncle did for his cabinetry business, but that's largely solo. I can't imagine wanting significant business traffic on residential streets.

If you mean zoning that requires first floor retail or whatever, sure. But mixed use zoning also means zoning that just doesn't ban small business, multi-family housing, and single-family housing coexisting on the same block.

The causality in your statement is backwards, because the lack of the latter kind of zoning is exactly what prevents inner suburbs from densifying organically. The current zoning in most of (at least US) suburbia is what artificially caps density.

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