College campuses are designed at human-scale – cities can be too
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
Density doesn't mean everyone is forced to live in a studio apartment either. I live in Tokyo in a 3-story house paying less in rent than I ever did in Atlanta, Seattle, or Ann Arbor. The biggest difference is the expansive train systems, allowing for clusters of shops and restaurants that are accessible without a car. And not a parking lot in sight (good riddance)!
In my city there is a single city block which has no roads (special vehicle access only) and consists of a bunch of high rise apts buildings with restaurants on the bottom level.
I stumbled on this area by accident and I was blown away, it was like I had walked in to an alternate universe. There were a group of kids playing in what looks like your typical suburb parkland except this is right in the middle of the city which would normally be packed out with cars and concrete. Makes me wish more of the city was like this.
I think you meant "expansive"?
> I live pretty far from central Tokyo and for between 200-350yen one way I can get to Shinjuku / Shibuya / Ikebukuro / Ueno and everywhere in between. So that's 400-700yen round trip for a night out.
> In Seattle or Atlanta? You'd be extremely lucky if your destination within a 15min walk of a bus stop or train station. In Atlanta good luck not getting mugged while waiting for the bus at night. Uber typically costs $10-15 one way (although to be fair you can split the cost between friends if you're travelling together).
> Or if you own a car in the US, you can reliably get from A to B, but you're paying between $5-10/day for insurance (whether you use the car that day or not) and $10-20 to park if you're in a city.
It has higher density than SF, Yet is provides lots of public space and it is not car hostile either.
Not everything has to look like either Manhattan, or Surburbian Sprawl like most other cities. Boston is unique in that area as well, especially around Brookline, Allston, South End, and Cambridge/Sommerville areas as they were built pre-car era.
It think Brooklyn and Boston (especially Cambridge) are the most 'human' scale it gets in the States, and they are fine places to live.
SF is not there yet. The density (is pretty low if you go off downtown) and hills make it a bit hard to create the european feel.
[edit: this isn't a snip, i'm considering moving there and legit want to know]
If you are coming from SF it doesn’t sound crazy but at least got tech, salaries are far lower.
That said, a lot of tech and related industries aren't in the city proper. Indeed, it's relatively recent that tech companies started moving back into the city proper after almost completely vacating it. And suburbs range from fairly expensive to, if not cheap, moderate. (I live about an hour west and my house on multiple acres is probably worth in the $400-500K range.
On the topic of cars, I would say that much of Boston and Cambridge is fairly navigable without a car. But it's not a car-free culture like NY largely is. People I know who live in the city but wither commute to jobs outside, visit friends in the suburbs, do outdoor activities in NH and elsewhere all own cars. You can manage without one. I did as a student. But it's pretty limiting, even with Uber, ZipCar, and so forth, if you want to leave the city on a regular basis.
Housing + Transportation as a percent of income:
Boston: 26% + 12% = 38%
Chicago: 27% + 16% = 43%
Henderson: 34% + 25% = 59%
Seattle: 30% + 16% = 46%
Atlanta: 29% + 19% = 48%
Miami: 32% + 20% = 52%
Denver: 24% + 18% = 42%
Edit: to be more concrete, you can today buy a spacious 2 bedroom condo in the South Loop right by the El for about $300k (I know because I used to own one). This would basically get you a broom closet if looking for something by the T in Boston (if you're lucky).
It will not get anywhere near the feel of European cities, I've lived in both. Until they fix their serious housing issues with homeless / mentally-ill people camping on sidewalks and creating a hostile environment around the downtown core, it will never attract people to walk or bike.
I lived around SoMa for a decade and I HATE cars with a passion but slowly found myself walking and biking less and less as the years passed. I hated having to constantly scan my surroundings so I don't get mugged / attacked, random ill people screaming or spitting at me and having my locked bike stolen.
The best part about living in European cities was how safe it was to walk or bike to critical places.
Which SF (and all other west coast cities) can do by...building more housing.
Stop this bullshit of apartments in a small slice of land area and then single-residence detached housing as far as the eye can see. Build gentle density, walkups and row houses and four floors with corner stores. Don’t crowd density near main thoroughfares.
Build it and house your residents.
Once you’ve done that, the remainder of folks who have genuine mental and substance health issues—as opposed to the people who picked up drugs as a way of coping with the crippling depression of being unhoused—can be cared for properly.
I laugh when I look at the length of projects happening in and around SF, like the Caltrain electrification project (2016-2021?), Van Ness Improvement Project (2016-2022?) and the Downtown Rail Extension (2018-2027?) that got delayed over and over again.
Corruption, incompetence and greed is such bureaucratic red tape in SF that it reminded me so much of the public infrastructure projects happening in Eastern Europe (Romania) where they siphon so much tax money.
Can you imagine how expensive SF would be if it actually got its act together? It boggles my mind to imagine.
Yup. I lived most recently in Atlanta, where they're on the right track with new projects (and a Microsoft campus to the west), so I expect it to be a much nicer place to live 20-30 years from now. But I'm 25! I don't have time to wait until retirement to enjoy my life!
Seattle is streets ahead of Atlanta, with some promising light rail expansions planned in the future. Again, on a 10-20 year timeline.
I have grown to despise cars so much that I thought it was time to give Japan a try. If I ever leave Japan, I'd sooner move to Germany or the UK than return to America.
It's so strange to me how much I hate relying on cars now because I grew up in Canada and spent the majority of my time driving around everywhere in a suburb. I used to like driving when I didn't have to do it for every little thing but now I despise it and I better understand my environmental impact of constantly starting that engine up.
SF will never get it together in its current form. The easy tach money being dumped into it breeds perpetual greed and stupidity. The money will have to run out and it will have to crash and burn before they get serious about not sucking. They will have to go through a Detroit phase.
Yes there are some single men in their 20s with table saws in their living rooms but they're the exception and not the rule.
Leaving aside where their job actually is... (Which, in the case of many cities may well not be in the city in the case of tech-related jobs.)
People tend to bias their activities to what they can do relatively easily. If you don't own a car and don't have a lot of space, you're probably not going to take up some space-intensive hobby or head off on a lot of weekends to hike or canoe. Maybe you'll lean a bit on friends with cars--though that tends to get harder as people get older and busy with their own activities. And maybe you'll rent a car now and then. But mostly you'll fall into activities that don't have a lot of overhead associated with them.
I still stand by the broader point though. To the degree that you don't really have the space for hobby/recreational gear and that it's harder to transport the things you need for activities, the less likely you are to do them.
Lowe’s is about 15 minutes away, and is the only place to get serious wood. For small things we’ll walk there and back. For medium things we’ll walk there and UberXL back ($15), for large things we’ll zipcar or rent a UHaul ($25).
We don’t have private outdoor space, but we live in a very quiet neighborhood. For woodworking we get very far with a dremel and a jigsaw. :)
I also don't think people understand the density and scope of Brooklyn. It's 5x the people of Boston in a smaller land area, but it's very few traditional skyscrapers. The brownstones really do a lot to give a homey feel to many areas.
There was a huge construction boom in the last 5 years, and then COVID cratered demand for the kinds of people who live in those buildings. They’re currently listed 20-30% below what they were going for before.
The brownstone market has been affected too, but the good ones have not gone down much in price.
(This is discussing rent, not ownership).
City Tower, for example, has been listing several incentive-free rents in the $2000s. We were moving during this time and actually looked into it to confirm, because we didn't believe either. (I know, it's crazy!)
A lot of these big buildings are very new, and are sitting way below projected occupancy.
They just need cash flow to pay their debts.
In contrast, most brownstone owners have only maintenance and taxes to pay. So they have fewer units to move, can afford to sit on vacancies, and have a relatively unique commodity on the market.
It’s been fascinating to see this all play out!
I actually don't know how densely populated commercial zones are factored into population density so maybe that's irrelevant.
IMO if it's less than 3 stories I wouldn't call it a brownstone. I guess park slope has some shorties but those are weird outliers.
> it is not car hostile either
Car hostility is a feature not a bug. Even at smaller scales.
Brooklyn suffers from the Els that were removed in the 1970s and never replaced, btw.
> hills make it a bit hard to create the european feel.
I feels a hellavalot like Lisbon, actually. Hills and coastline are great for forcing us foolish humans to use land efficiently.
(My theory is that hills actually helped, not hurt, economic growth in Japan, Korea, and somewhat Taiwan in the end. It's like the opposite of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse curse.)
I bet it helped California too, and would help more if it weren't for the Central valley release valve.
Eternal shame upon Seattle for leveling hills!
One other point I'd like to add that makes BK more 'human scale' compared to SF is the speed at which cars travel. BK traffic (for the most part) moves significantly slower than SF traffic. There aren't as many uninterrupted stretches of road in BK where motorists can speed up to 50 mph. This makes BK (and Manhattan where traffic moves significantly slower than both) a safer place to walk and bike. Furthermore, the hilly topography of SF creates unique blind spots that the flat expanse of simply NYC doesn't have.
Railways are allowed to grow organically in Tokyo and Japan:
> Outlying and suburban areas are served by seven private railway companies, whose lines intersect at major stations with the subway system. More than sixty additional kilometers of subway were under construction in 1990 by the two companies.
Interesting. While I haven't lived in Japan, I have spent a month there.
Obviously there aren't nearly the number of parking lots as in America, by far. But you can totally find large garages in some areas (parked in a large 7 or so story garage in Yokohama once), malls with large parking lots out in areas like Gunma, and even "hidden" garages in Tokyo (or other cities like Takasaki, even) where you pull into a little open garage area, and then there's an attendant who helps you drive the car onto a lift which is basically in the center of the building, which then "automatically" (or manually by the operator) stashes cars in a multi-level car park hidden inside the building.
Plus tons of teeny 2-car or whatever lots do exist, they're just scattered.
I realize in terms of scale that's still quite less than in America, which makes sense. But there are definitely parking lots and garages in Japan. :)
But a few years ago, I started traveling around Japan more than I had before, using only trains, buses, and occasionally taxis. Once one leaves the major urban areas, I discovered, life is nearly as car-centric as in the suburban United States: almost everyone drives, the main roads are lined with big-box commercial businesses surrounded by parking lots, and a lot of people live in places that are unaccessible except by car. Even if a place is served by trains or buses, they might run at only one- or two-hour intervals, making a trip to the grocery store a half-day errand.
An interesting business I learned about recently is individually owned parking spaces that are leased out in fifteen-minute increments to people who reserve them through a smartphone app [1]. My own house in Yokohama has a small parking space that we never use, and my daughter has suggested that we sign up to lease it out through that service. Some of our neighbors have done so already. The business is feasible because there is no free parking anywhere nearby.
I know someone who works for a company that runs a similar business for bicycle parking spots [2].
In Japanese only:
In Paris however, you either live in Paris itself (roughly the size of the Yamanote line) but it's crazy expensive especially if you have kids and need a bigger appartment, or you live in the suburbs that are mostly just housing and train (RER & Transilien) is unreliable.
If you want to live in the "15-minutes neighborhood" with everything, but can't afford to live inside Paris or down town of a big metropolis, you need to move to a middle-size city but then getting a job in your area is more difficult.
It'd be interesting to find a good metric to be able to compare cities and explore this.
Would be a nice research if someone could test different cities and neighbourhoods indeed.
I can find those same jobs for 2x the salary in Atlanta any day of the week.
That said, many companies that hire American SWEs tend to pay better, especially if you have experience working at a big Silicon Valley tech company. Pre-covid there were quite a few job postings for senior developers above the $100k usd mark, which will get you quite far in Tokyo.
Things are also different because relatively few married women are in the work force. From that, you could say that the average pay in Japan is much higher. In the US, wages stagnated for a couple decades and cost of living skyrocketed in the US as women entered the work force until it now takes 2 salaries to stay afloat vs only one in Japan (we'll exclude the unofficially high poverty rates).
At the same time, US workers put in 41.3 hours per week for men and 36.3 hours per week for women (working 14% less time accounts for an enormous part of the earning difference between the sexes). In contrast, while the law officially puts the work day at 8 hours with statutory paid leave going up to about 3 weeks, most workers take little to no vacation and "voluntarily" work many more days and 30-50% longer hours per day than the US worker (though at the same time, productivity per hour may not always be high).
One reason, I think, for this misunderstanding is that Tokyo is laid out quite differently from American cities. Space is used very efficiently and you can live quite far from central Shibuya / Shinjuku / Chuo while maintaining a 20-30 minute commute by train.
Another factor is that in Tokyo, most people do not own a car. Commuting by train is significantly cheaper than owning a car, and many companies will even pay for your train pass.
I have noticed a correlation between excessive building costs and campaigns and the two industries whose prices have most outpaced inflation the last 20 years: healthcare/hospitals and education/colleges.
Alumni returning to their colleges after 20-50 years may notice the following phenomena: there are a lot more buildings (with donor names on them) but there is an incredible number of empty rooms at any one point in time... many more than when they went to school back in the day. (This also manifests in a lot more time-consuming walking to get around due to the lower density of usable space.)
This trend is neither wise nor sustainable nor just. And college administrators should be held accountable for it, not given a pat on the back for raising money and spending it (despite the nice line on their resume). Alternate metrics of success should be culturally encouraged and measured.
How could this be done? I don't know if LEED certification (which is an award given to buildings meeting various sustainability/efficiency criteria and has Gold/silver/bronze-type ratings which are thus indirectly a bragging right mentioned by anyone in academia who gets buildings built) measures actual building utilization... I suspect not. Typically LEED covers initial construction and is awarded at the end of construction, and thus could not include use-after-buildout metrics/grading, but LEED or something like it should attempt to measure something like that, and that should be a sign of true administrative competence (and also efficient use of donor funds by the way.)
I wonder if the very sensors which are used to shut off lights when people aren't around and any "energy/CO2 savings metrics" from those sensors could be cheaply repurposed and inverted to also measure the creation of just such a building utilization metric (look how much carbon we wasted and continue to waste heating/cooling a building people aren't using?)
Coddling legacy builders sense of value.
Paraphrasing James Madison, he wrote the future owed a debt to the past for their achievements.
I disagree, and align more with Thomas Jefferson; the dead do not rule the living.
Having to shoulder the burden of war and industrial debt on a “generational distributed ledger”, which is so clearly biased to favor entrenched power is unsustainable.
Indeed, that’s is, IMO, why most empires fail, and revolutions take place.
Think of Bill Gates in the 90’s vs now. He has far more influence than he ever had, and a large part of it is because of the money he was able to put at a huge tax advantage into his foundation. He probably has a direct line to dozens of heads of state. He probably influences policy across many countries. True, he has used that influence for good, but he got a lot of it at a massive tax advantage.
Cutting tax deductions would likely eliminate a significant portion of that spending, leaving those depending on it pretty much screwed. And that doesn't even include outright shit like police funds coming out of "asset forfeiture", leading to heaps of abuse.
From an European point of view, so much of what I wrote above is... mind boggling.
There are certainly other things like 'in-kind' donations which may reduce tax obligations without necessarily providing a commensurate value, but putting money into bona fide charitable works are not among them.
That is one of my contentions. Although it is technically no longer his money, he still has a significant amount of control over how it is spent, and that money increases is political power and influence.
And it is not just Bill Gates and a foundation. If I donate $50 to a charity, it is unlikely I have any influence. It is truly not my money.
If however, I donate $50,000,000 to a charity, I exert a lot of control with that money. I can have a huge influence on the direction of the charity, and even likely get somebody fired or appointed to the board of directors.
I am not saying those donations should be illegal, just that we should see that it is different qualitively from a regular donation and not give it tax advantages.
I will be 40 later this year, and I continue to live next to the University I started attending over 20 years ago: the University of California, Santa Barbara. I mean, right now, campus is empty due to COVID-19; but, right before the world switched to "everything from home", I am pretty sure that we had almost no free capacity... campus keeps buying and renting building as they need more classroom space, study space, and living space. Yes: there are a lot lot lot more buildings, and the footprint of the campus is much larger; but the entire campus is packed with people... the #1 thing that feels weird about it is not that the campus feels empty, but that the campus feels completely and utterly full despite all the new construction. The core areas of campus now have a ridiculous number of people swarming through them constantly, and people are now sometimes living four to a room in buildings where, when I was a student, there only had started to be rumors that someone might be in a triple somewhere (again: despite there having been a very large number of new housing projects built in the last couple decades). I just can't track anything about your point here with my lived experience.
If there wasn’t a need for more and more rooms in a college, they wouldn’t get built. It’s not some conspiracy.
My concern is not of a conspiracy, but of misplaced incentives that have gone awry. (And which are slated to get even worse if we start periodically forgiving loans which I have mixed feelings about.) My perception is that college/university prices have drastically outpaced inflation since inflation shrunk in the early 1980s and the quality of education provided has not concomitantly increased.
At least some analyses from the National Board of Economics Research show that from 1987-2010, "expansions in borrowing limits drive 40% of the tuition jump and represent the single most important factor [of tuition increases from 1987 to 2010]" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21967/w219..., page 4.) and "We also find that increased grant aid contributes 17% to the rise in tuition"
Tuition increase is not directly related to the subject of campus design and spending on campus buildings, but is part of the origin of my skepticism and critical eye towards college/universities as a societal model, the thesis of the original article.
For comparison, I went to a university with a much smaller campus, and it was still at least a ten-minute walk from one end to another. And it was fine.
there are 2 ways you can define "walkable"
1. it is physically possible to walk there - e.g. there are paved sidewalks
2. it is convenient to walk from the place you are to the place you need to be
i think that the misunderstanding here might be that you and the comment above are thinking about 1 while the problem is actually 2
to pull a quote from the article:
"students who live in dormitories are able to work, eat and worship all within walking distance of their homes"
there's also a link to this concept of a "15 minute neighborhood"[1] where everyone can walk to their basic daily needs w/in 15 minutes, or beautifully summarized as “Put the stuff closer together so it's easier to get to the stuff.”
so the proposed problem is that the set of things w/in that "daily needs" category, AKA the "stuff", might grow, due to the increasing diversity of the population you're servicing, to a point where its not possible to give that to everyone
[1]https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/6/7-rules-for-cre...
Huge retail shops (Wallmarts/Targets).
Non-profit retail (Goodwill).
Restaurants (Coffee shops, family restaurants, Olive Gardens)
Utility buildings. Utility Workers.
Housing; low- medium- high- and no income. Plus some for the 0.01%.
Schools; Pre- elementary- middle- high-schools and College.
Office space.
Pools.
Gyms.
Hospitals.
Doctor offices.
Animal shelters.
Green spaces.
Cinemas.
Amusement parks.
Fire departments.
Police departments.
Community centers.
Jails.
Courthouses.
City/County/State/Country centers.
Temporary housing (From hotels to short-term rentals)
Commercial shipping (by rail, road, and sea)
Car storage (travel between distant cities)
And perhaps most importantly, competition (that is, alternatives) for all of the above; since campuses tend to be monopolies for many offerings.
And remember, we're discussing building cities like campuses - there is no "just off campus" space available for competition.
We're discussing campuses the size of Manhattan Island, without most of the roads (which will hugely impact the ability to deliver goods and take away waste; just see how New York is taken over by these two activities at night). Also, without suburbs, so the housing (and all of the support necessary for that population) needs to be that much more dense (and affordable).
You're absolutely right - manufacturing needs to be solved.
This idyllic myth of presented a college campus is only true for the students.
As Jane Jacobs observed many decades ago: you don't live in a city, you live in a neighbourhood.
* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobs-st...
You design the urban environment where, with-in a fifteen minute walk, you have grocery stores, butchers, coffee shops, dry cleaners, pubs, a library, dentists, doctor offices, elementary school, bakery, flower shops, etc.
It's not that hard: we were doing it for a long-time before WW2.
You can have big houses:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...
And small houses in it:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/100+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...
All with backyards and (laneway) garages. Throw in some (medium-rise) apartment buildings while you're at it:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Fermanagh+Ave,+Toronto...
High enough density for pubic transit, which makes car ownership optional and not a necessity.
Certainly some areas could use high (near major transit hubs), but towers don't have to be planted everywhere.
The fact that so much land was wasted building low-density (North York, Scarberia) sub-divisions (not even getting into McCallion and her disaster of Mississuaga) now means there is high demand but limited supply. Of course now the regions of Peel and Durham (etc) have 'found religion' with regards to density.
Old Toronto is 8,210.4/km2 (21,265/sq mi):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Toronto
Even Etobicoke may not be very low-density in places like Long Branch and Mimico.
I'd love for some of those design patterns (grassy streets, walking paths more than roads, etc) to percolate outwards into the rest of Golden.
There are fairly string rules for college and if you step over the line, you can be expelled and trespassed from campus with much lower burden of proof than a criminal trial.
I have noticed as density of a people living together goes up, there is more need for conformity. Singapore and Japan have some of the nicest high density cities in the world, but they also have one of the highest rates of people being conformant.
One final issue is pandemics. College campuses have had a horrible rate of transmission when students have been there, so much in fact that a lot of schools kept students from returning to campus for schooling making them take online classes.
Cities of hundreds of thousands to millions of people have easily thousands and thousands of varying jobs, different size and scale employers, a huge range of skilled and unskilled labor, a vast array of specialists and specialty employers, and even several entire campuses - a massive amount of different requirements. It's not reasonable to expect everyone to have employment within close range, so immediately people need cars to commute. It's not reasonable to put some large employers evenly mixed with housing - no one wants the garbage facility or any of a host of companies next door. Many companies also have huge inflow/outflow requirements like trains, shipping, power, waste, again complicating the picture, since people need to travel larger distances to reach them. Zoning laws didn't just pop up to prevent campus living everywhere - they popped up to solve the issues that occur when living and industry was co-mingled.
So while I'd love to have all of life be as serene and pretty as a top university, I also prefer to have specialized jobs and places to do such work, and I don't see how these can possibly be merged.
Before the suburban boom, we tried human scale with dangerous or large-area jobs with company housing, stores, etc. and it resulted in high prices and monopolies. Given the choice, I'll pay for the roads and sit in traffic.
Once they are home, they both benefit from shops, restaurants, gyms, green spaces and what not within walking distance. Their kids benefit from the same. They themselves benefit from not having to drive their kids everywhere.
Depending on the school, it's possible to live in the dorm the first year, and possibly move to another form of housing or off-campus as time goes on.
Many students put up with the dorms and roommates because they don't know any better at first. When they do know better, they work out other arrangements with a little more room (and fewer rules)
Imagine a city that required you pass an IQ test, submit your high school grades and an essay, ask for the last 2 years of tax returns and credit history, scanned your social media posts and reviewed all your hobbies and extra-ciricular activities before they would consider letting you become a resident. Then, once you moved in, they would monitor your speech and other activites to make sure they were up to community codes and standards. College campuses make suburbia look like Burning Man.
It's not a good example for someone to think of at first.
But 54% of London households own at least one car. [1] That's in the same ballpark as Manhattan. And everyone I know if the UK outside of London own car(s). Europe generally is less car-centric than the US but lots of people still own cars.
[1] http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-ar...
There is a "rule" about how cities get "stuck" on the transport type they use when they reach a certain size. Hence NYC and London are (mid distance) train centric. Newer cities in the western US are car heavy. Singapore is metro rail.
In the suburban sprawl in which I live, the 10-12 feet between houses seems too close. Yet as much as I long for space, I will always be tied to some metro, with access to healthcare and cultural outlets.
I think people that make this argument against apartments fail to appreciate the difference that a quality construction makes.
I lived in early 2000's apartments where I could hear my upstairs neighbour blasting drum and bass in the stairwell. However, I could hear literally nothing once I closed my apartment door.
I have also lived in a 1930's terraced house where I could literally hear my next door neighbour coughing.
Construction quality matters a lot more than how cramped or not your housing conditions are.
As well as amenities, green spaces etc there is always a requirement for buildings to be of ‘human’ scale for it to feel liveable.
Also there are benefits to organic growth over centralised planning as growth can adapt to requirements of a place. Centralised planning tends to be too rigid and once a failure becomes apparent it is difficult to re-plan without sacrificing some other amenity.
Basically a Le Corbusier disaster.
>Also there are benefits to organic growth over centralised planning as growth can adapt to requirements of a place
That's certainly true and is basically one of the things Jane Jacobs argued for. Note, though, that doesn't necessarily lead to dense housing/inexpensive housing which is what many of the urbanist folks who comment here care a great deal about.
Because of their scale and walkability, college campuses meet human social needs in a way that is impossible for many of our nation’s towns and cities."
This is a very important understanding for future city/urban planners!
Hopefully this doesn't sound rude -- I just mean to say that a college campus's child-unfriendliness isn't a reason not to copy the model, since it's easily fixed.
Because everyone travels by car, children in suburbs are completely dependent on adults. There are few things to do, and many kids are end up stuck at home or carted from one over-scripted activity to another by overwhelmed parents. Their social lives are strongly circumscribed, with little chance to make cross-age connections. Kids have a much better time in real walkable cities, where they can be more independent and there are more available resources and activities relevant to every kind of interest and hobby.
Those suburbs are optimized for wealthy able-bodied adults age 35-60 who like driving their cars. Everyone else is a second-class citizen. Yuppie parents of school-aged children say they are moving to the suburbs for the sake of their kids, but it is more about their own convenience and biases/preconceptions.
You are right that San Francisco is expensive, and this causes many families to leave. But it is not any more dangerous than suburbs or other cities (and significantly safer than rural areas), it is dense enough that there are many other kids around (many parts of the city have more kids within walk distance than a typical suburb), and kids will not be harmed if they see weirdly dressed (or weird undressed) people sometimes.
The biggest mortal danger kids face in the USA is cars. Followed by guns and various kinds of home accidents (drowning in pools and spas is a big one).
Not sure how recently you may have been to San Francisco but it is not a place I'd take my kid (I live in the bay area) let alone live there with kids. The level of filth, crime and sadly mentally ill on the streets is not something I'd want to subject any child to.
> Kids have a much better time in real walkable cities
What makes the walkability "real"? I'm curious what has led to the HN meme that one can only walk places in Manhattan or comparably dense cities?
We live way out in nearly-rural suburbs. This is as walkable as it gets. The kid can walk to big parks nearby, libraries and movie theathers, shopping, etc. I walk to my office and just about everything is a short walk or bike ride away.
> Those suburbs are optimized for wealthy able-bodied adults age 35-60 who like driving their cars.
I'm in that demographic and feel exactly the opposite. These suburbs are for kids. It's a picture perfect place of safe independence for growing up. They can walk to each other's houses and play in the parks etc independently.
I am raising 2 small kids in San Francisco. It seems fine.
Smashed car windows are frustrating and disappointing (there are clearly some organized groups fencing laptops or whatever, and the police should get off their butts and do some more serious investigatory work). But the city does not feel at all physically unsafe, relative to other places in the USA. Cars are the biggest danger by far, just like everywhere else in the USA.
We have some mentally ill homeless neighbors. When (rarely) someone is shouting obscenities into thin air we cross the street and stay out of their way. The rest are harmless, though still sad to see. I don't chat with them as much as I used to, because they aren't the best at wearing masks or respecting social distancing during the pandemic, and we haven't been walking around the neighborhood nearly as much.
> picture perfect place
Yeah, this is the problem. People care about things being picture perfect way more than they care about where their kids will enjoy living, or where they will grow into the most kind, resilient, and capable adults.
Yuppies often have a pathological fear of dirt and poverty, and have conditioned themselves to feel discomfort or even nausea when thinking about it. If your kid steps on dog poop sometime, or has to sit near a smelly person on the bus, or has a weird conversation with a homeless guy at the park, it isn't going to do them any serious or permanent damage.
Eating, sleeping, working, and socializing is all, just from a distance/time/transportation/logistics standpoint, markedly optimized over "real" life.
And people are much happier in college towns. Even in far flung rural areas, major college towns are massive draws and economic engines.
Why do all those minimum wage professors accept their lot in life? Living in a college town is a huge positive.
Much of the value proposition in moving to spaced out neighborhoods requiring cars is that you filter out people who can’t afford cars or driving longer distances.
Most people I'm aware of move out because they have some innate claustrophobia, like a little more nature, want to have a garden, want to have a workshop.
Is there some low key xenophobia prevailing in the burbs? For sure. Are a lot of them bothered seeing homeless people because they're no longer used to it? For sure. Do a lot of them vote against policy that might alleviate poverty because it's easier to judge the empoverished from a distance? For sure. But I really don't think that's the fundamental motivator for people to move.
Everyone needs an Oasis. Some people find it in the stacks at the library, some in their own bedroom and some on 1/4 acres of manicured lawn and bushes.
It’s not xenophobia, or any other ideological hate for others. It’s simply the result of optimizing for your own kids’ outcome. The country dismantled mental health care facilities and the law doesn’t allow for involuntary committals. The country’s drug policies and lack of economic opportunities created addicts who may not be able to be helped. Overall, we don’t have the stomach for the necessary wealth transfer needed to fix broken families (providing poor parents with sufficient wages and time off and healthcare so they still have time to be at home with their kids).
As an individual, there isn’t much you can do to in the timeframe of raising your kids to solve these issues. So you do the next best thing (if you can afford it). You run away from the problem as much as you can. Which also helps exacerbate the issues. And it’s all part and parcel of the increasingly wide wealth/income/opportunity gaps.
Now that we have the Neutron bomb
It's nice and quick and clean and gets things done
Away with excess enemy
But no less value to property
Said noone ever.
The walkable city model ignores the driving factor for commuting, the rest is just bike shedding.
https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.htm...
Indoor residential space: 400 square feet per occupant + 200 sf fudge factor
Indoor retail space: 25 sf per-capita + 25 sf margin
Indoor office/misc job space: 200 sf per office worker + 50 sf margin
Indoor schooling/daycare: 150 sf per student + 50 sf margin
Indoor supporting infrastructure: 20 sf per capita
> Hospital requirement is only around 1 sf, so I'm just adding an arbitrary margin to account for rarely-visited indoor locations (e.g. churches, community centers), storage for city vehicles (fire department), waste management, etc.
0-18: 24% ("student age")
19-64: 63% ("working age")
>65: 13% ("retirement age")
Residential + Retail + Office + School + Infra
[600 * 1000] + [50 * 1000] + [250 * (1000 * 0.63)] + [200 * (1000 * 0.24)] + [20 * 1000]
600k (Residential) + 50k (Retail) + 157.5k (Office) + 48k (School) + 20k (Infra)
875.5k square feet per thousand residents
Now, let's consider what a "walkable distance" is for an average person. I'm very happy to walk anywhere within a 10-minute radius (1/2 mile), but can probably live with 20-30 minutes if there is good bike infrastructure. For now let's just discuss the walking case. A 1/2 mile radius is 0.78 square miles, so a perfectly walkable space would contain all of the services I need within 0.78 square miles, or 21.7 million square feet.
How many people can we fit? Filling all of this space with single-story structures would allow us to fit 25,000 people. There are some obvious adjustments we need to make. First, we can realistically build 3 or 4-story structures for residential and office space. Next, we have to adjust for necessary road infrastructure (emergency services, delivery, waste management, etc). New York City dedicates around 50% of its land to roads and open spaces. Using suburban road densities, we can spend 10% of our land on simple 2-way streets. The remaining 90% can be spent on buildings and outdoor space. Let's say we dedicate 30% of the total land to buildings (6.5 million sf), which leaves 60% outdoor space (13 million sf). This is a fairly comfortable estimate based on looking at a map of my college campus. How many people can we fit? Let's assume some densities:
Residential: 4-story buildings
Retail: 1-story (could possibly go 2, but makes delivery logistics harder)
Office: 4-story
School: 2-story
Infra: 1-story
600k/4 + 50k + 157.5k/4 + 48k/2 + 20k = 284k square feet per thousand residents
This means our 60% open, fully-walkable space can support a bit over 23,000 people, for a population density of 29k per square mile. For reference, this is slightly higher than New York City.
So, what happens when we bring parking space back into the mix? A 150-car parking lot requires an acre of space, or about 300 sf of parking lot per car. Imagine your city needs two parking spaces per car (one for home, one for work). Even if each family of 4 owns just one car (this seems like quite an underestimate), the parking requirement for our city of 23,000 people is 11,500 spaces. This amounts to 3.45 million square feet of pavement alone, just for parking! In other words, 0.123 square miles of our 0.47 sq.mi. walkable area is now parking lot. Now, how much extra road do we need to facilitate moving all of these vehicles? I'd estimate we need to dedicate at least as much extra space for driving as we do for parking, so now 0.25 square miles (53%) of our outdoor space is now dedicated to personal vehicles. Sure, Amdahl's law of parking infrastructure allows us to reclaim half of this space back if we decide to build multi-story parking structures or hide them underground, but this is a huge waste of resources considering that our city doesn't even need passenger transport of any kind!
In summary: Using some very conservative estimates and medium density, a walkable circular area of 1/2 mile radius (0.78 square miles) can quite comfortably fit 23,000 people with adequate space for residence, office, retail, schools, and remaining city infra. If we dedicate 10% of the land for minimum-necessary roads (emergency services + transportation of goods and waste), we still have 60% of the land remaining for green open space and walking. If we want to add cars, we easily lose over half of this walkable space to parking and additional road. In all of these estimates, I tried to favor cars as much as possible.
1. Rarely required services might have a small footprint, but that's because they service a very large area. You're not going to have hospitals after every mile. You're going to have one for a small city and a few for larger cities. This means that getting to the hospital for most residents is not going to be walkable.
2. Many businesses of a similar kind seem to cluster together. Eg lots of (competing) shops will be in the same location instead of being spread out. This means that you'll have disproportionate amounts of some businesses at the expense of other services in your area.
3. Jobs and specialization. If you've specialized in a field that is only hired in some specific places, then you're going to be doing a longer commute unless you can move close to your job. If it's a high paying job then chances are that this will be a very expensive area - some people will accept a longer trip to work to save the money.
I think this kind of analysis is great. It would certainly help if cities were more walkable, but I don't think that we can go without driving infrastructure.
Home Depot-like stores, at least over here (DE), don't cluster much, whereas supermarkets are well known for clustering.
Cities in Asia show that point 2 doesn't have to be a problem. Shopping clusters around the train station. Restaurants and groceries are more dispersed. Everything is reachable by foot in <10 mins.
I would like to make a more detailed design and simulate it. The simulation could even include things like sunlight entering living spaces and workspaces and sunlight on walking paths during commutes, over the year. A new city could maintain such simulations as it builds and develops, and end up with much higher quality of life for all residents.
Before I moved recently, I was paying around $900/month for a studio apartment in the city center. From there, it was a short walk to any number of nearby restaurants (including a corner store on my block), a <5 minute walk to the nearby commuter rail station, a <10 minute walk to the nearby city subway station, a <15 minute walk to a major regional hospital, and about a 30 minute walk to my office (this was generally the longest trip I'd have to make with any frequency, and honestly a walking commute was pretty nice). I did keep my car around largely because I have friends and family outside the city, but if it weren't for that it would largely not be necessary. Within the city, the subway system gets you pretty far outside of the immediate walkable area near my old apartment; my only complaint is that there are parts of the city that aren't as well-connected by public transit.
Philadelphia is an extremely human-centric city, which makes sense as it was established well before cars were invented.