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20-Minute Neighborhoods

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202 pointssimonebrunozzi256 comments

I live in Montreal. It’s like this. The key is the zoning doesn’t require a ton of setbacks, parking spaces, single use neighborhoods, etc

My brother was visiting, and I showed him a broken book. He mentioned it would be nice to repair. I said I’d check if there was a bookbinder in walking distance. He was skeptical. Google maps showed three within a 20 minute walk, in different directions.

Pick any service and it’s like that. The area is dense, quiet, leafy, unpolluted, full of parks, small yards, three stories high, but full of commercial arteries such that anything you want is a quick walk away. Whole swaths of the city are like that.

The areas are enormously popular and tourists love them. Yet such neighbourhoods are illegal to build in the whole rest of north america.

I love Montreal, but it seems you are describing the Plateau/Mile-End rather than Montreal as a whole.

But I agree, from the North American cities I visited, Montreal has the nicest, livable higher-density housing areas.

Fair though it’s more than the plateau. Mile end, rosemont, little Italy, mcgill ghetto, outremont are all like this. And then while other areas don’t have quite as many criss crossing streets, they are still very walkable and mixed. (Cote des neiges, st henri, ndg, westmount etc)

I’m sure I’m forgetting some neighbourhoods too. Mostly describing those I personally walked around a lot. The mountain gets a way a bit for those in the second list, whereas the areas around the plateau are a square grid of similar neighbourhoods in all directions.

High taxes, but surprisingly low cost of living.

"hard to be a consumer but easier to be a human" was what I've heard about the city.

I'd take that tradeoff.

Nice platitude but I’m not sure what it means.

I live in Montreal too and we'll have to work hard for it not to become just like everywhere else in North America.

New construction projects are totally different from the places that were built a long time ago, like around Masson, Ontario, St-Laurent, etc...

Griffintown makes me sad.

Yes! I remember when they started building around the ÉTS (Griffintown?) There was no life there, just a sea of condos with no services. Verdun was a much more lively place.

You described the key issue: "such neighborhoods are illegal to build in the whole rest of North America."

I don't think it's productive to think of the suburbs as "bad" or "wrong," because that just turns into an angry debate about whose lifestyle is better.

What I think is productive is to recognize that we shouldn't be legislating that there can only be one way to live, and we especially shouldn't be prohibiting that the traditional neighborhood development patterns that have worked for thousands of years. If we actually had a free market, there would be both a fair amount of auto-oriented suburban development, and massively more traditional, walkable neighborhood development.

Would your "free market" also mean that the people living in the suburbs pay the true cost of living in suburbs? Including higher taxes to offset the higher infrastructure costs and the higher impact on the environment?

Of course, if it didn't, it wouldn't be free market. The government would still have their finger on the scale.

Sure, as long as people living in dense areas pay the true cost of living there. No more free or subsidized fares that only pay a fraction of the operating costs and zero of the capital costs of transit. Be ready to pay carbon tax on the steel and concrete used to construct tall buildings that the wooden suburban house doesn't have to pay. Maybe move some jobs out of the city to the suburbs; it's not fair that suburban commuters subsidize city people's lifestyles with the goods they buy while there for work and the taxes their employers pay on the property they work in.

You can't just make up "externalities" for something you dislike; I guarantee you, anything you like has lots of "externalities" as well that may cancel out whatever you're trying to charge someone else for things they like.

Gas taxes, tolls, and other user fees pay far more of the total expenditure on roads than transit fares pay for their infrastructure and operating costs. Be careful what you wish for, you may not like what you get.

Yeah that’s not even close to realistic. Almost all wealth in modern USA comes from services with are mostly in or close to the cities. Slightly suburban yes, what’s called suburban in the U.S. nope. Almost all wealth transfer is from cities to rural and coast states to inland.

Why are you changing the topic to rural areas? We’re discussing whether suburban living (defined as car dependent urban design rather than literal suburb) is subsidized by people living in the denser, transit dependent areas or vice versa. Farm subsidies and military bases and whatever other rural subsidies you had in mind aren’t relevant for this discussion and suburban (and low density urban) people work in the services you claim almost all wealth in the modern USA is generated from.

OK, It depends what you meant with suburban. If you mean the suburbs close to the big cities, sure they are part of the wealth generation. A large part of people living in those suburbs are using public transport to commute to work.

The issue with cars is that it is impossible to build enough roads. The more you build the more convenient it becomes so more people drive etc. And of course the other externality of carbon pollution.

I think you're forgetting that house foundations are enormous slabs of concrete, especially on a per-resident basis.

Not really, a 1000 sq ft apartment with concrete floors and ceilings has the same amount of concrete used as a two story 2000 sq ft house in an area that uses slab foundations. The house also has no steel and did not require extremely heavy equipment to build.

The net direction of subsidy from rural to suburban to urban is complex to calculate and subject to dispute.

For example, urban centers are net importers (of food, processed goods, building materials, etc.), and benefit disproportionately from heavy freight on roads.

An example of a serious but less obvious negative externality imposed by urban centers is the bulk import of population, since urban centers always reproduce below replacement rate. The urban centers basically take most of the intelligent people from non-urban areas and then ensure they don't reproduce.

More road space means people living further from one another. People living further from one another means exponentially more energy consumed to move mass further distances. Hence roads cause a huge externality of pollution.

That's not what exponential means.

Cities also rely on roads, just in a different way; they require road networks to bring them food and manufactured goods, transported at greater distances than similar products in rural areas.

You need less road space to distribute resources to more people in dense areas. For example, the resources to deliver everything people need in Manhattan is less than if you took all those people out of Manhattan and spread them around in detached houses.

By exponential, I meant when you increase the distance between them, you multiply everything consumed by an extra factor. More pipe for water and sewer and gas, more wire for electricity, more road for more intersections and wider roads, more miles driven for garbage trucks, more schools, it has a knock on effect of all consumption.

And it’s just as simple as that - the more you consume, the more you pollute. The more you consume space, the more you consume everything since the further everything has to get pushed (assuming you’re still expecting all the trappings of modern life). I am guessing that the extra space I am consuming now is probably a luxury that future generations won’t have, assuming population levels of people who live an American lifestyle hold steady or rise.

"Expecting all the trappings of modern life" is key.

Isn't it mainly tied to "density"? All other parameters being equal consuming only local resources at a rate which doesn't extinguish them solves the equation. On the pollution side of this: even if is is strictly the same (quantitatively and qualitatively) aren't natural surroundings more able to cope with it ("digest") if produced on a larger area, more sparsely, somehow diffusing the load?

We may, however, be unable or unwilling to adequately reduce our expectations.

Why are these things transported further to get to cities than rural areas? I could see the argument if most of these things came from most rural areas but that largely isn't the case. Many manufactured goods are imported from other countries. Very few rural areas grow all the food they need. Instead they will specialize in a few areas, sell there surplus and buy goods from other areas. For historic reasons many large cities are located at places where these types of trade goods had to go through already to get from one rural area to another.

Paris ... even paris suburbs and French small towns are like this.

That’s the reason I truly adore and love Montreal. It’s the best city in Canada in my mind. If it wasn’t for the brutal winter, I think it’d be the best city in Canada by everyone’s view too.

So, I like this, and enjoy neighborhoods (usually in old inner cities) which approach this, but one thing I don't see often acknowledged, is the difficulties of homelessness for this concept. People often don't like to say it out loud, but one of the principal drivers of the urge to retreat inside your car, is the fact that it puts a barrier between you and the crazy guy shouting on the streetcorner. We have not yet found a system that effectively removes the angry shouting, or urinating, or otherwise crazy-acting person from the sidewalk, or bus, or urban train, that is not uncomfortably close to a police state.

Not saying it cannot be done, I'm sure it can, but I haven't seen it. One of the principal obstacles to any pilot plan of this sort, is that it is a magnet to those people who don't get social interaction any other way (because few people wish to be around them), so it is at risk of being descended on. Plus, some people (the sort who otherwise are quite in favor of public transport in the abstract) don't want to be thick-skinned enough to deal with even one such person.

Me, I'm kind of a jerk, so I don't mind; it's all part of the human experience. I have the ability to tell such a person that I'm not talking to them today (unless I am), without being wracked with guilt for the rest of the week. But a lot of people (who otherwise would be in favor of this idea) just cannot (or do not wish to) be thick-skinned enough to cope with this.

I live in a neighbourhood that’s super walkable with a ton of commercial street mixed with residences. The homeless only congregate at one small area. It isn’t really an issue.

There are tons of commercial streets and only so many homeless. But when you have fewer streets, you have more homeless per street.

Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Things may be different in the US. In particular the bay area.

> Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada.

Very cold winters seem like an effective (and brutal) deterrent against long-term homelessness? Though, you say the homeless people in your area congregate in one place, do you have some idea why?

Higher foot traffic, some homeless services, maybe police action elsewhere?

Specifically am referring to the plateau mont royal neighbourhood. There, the homeless congregate on mont royal avenue. It is long, has a metro station, plentiful bus routes, a monastery that provides homeless services and food, a library across from the metro. Lots of stores and foot traffic all throughout the day.

I’m in Halifax now for a few months and the homeless people (who congregate on spring garden) seem more aggressive for whatever reason. In Montreal they were never a bother.

There were definitely long term homeless as I saw many of the same faces over the years. Could be a lower number, but I think part of the issue is shelter.

For instance SF has no more homeless per capita than NYC, but they have a massively higher number of unsheltered homeless, which causes a lot of problems both for the city and for the homeless.

But NYC also has many more “homeless amenable” areas than a place like SF, which has a fairly small walkable area. My central point is if you built like Montreal and NYC then the entire city is walkable and the problem is less concentrated and thus much less bothersome.

(There are homeless elsewhere in Montreal. But in my specific neighbourhood only one street has them)

> I’m in Halifax now for a few months and the homeless people (who congregate on spring garden) seem more aggressive for whatever reason. In Montreal they were never a bother.

It's a different society. Spent a little bit of time in Montreal. Used to think only the language was different but it goes much much deeper.

That's where the services for the homeless are. Why bother walking all over the city when the drop-in shelter is right there with your social housing waitlist ticket?

> Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Things may be different in the US. In particular the bay area.

It's difficult to compare these places, when I lived in Toronto the homeless situation was nothing like what I saw in downtown SF, even around Bloor & Yonge at night.

You'll find the situation is much more grim in the US in major cities and exactly like the OP describes. It affected me slowly over the years, I'm still recovering.

True I remember visiting Pittsburgh and staying in this gentrifying neighbourhood across the street. It was an odd mix of upscale bars, luxury cars and run down shops and homeless people everywhere. I had to go into a hospital to have my eye looked at and was shocked at the appearance of those there. I’d never seen such bad teeth in Canada or disheveled people in the waiting room. Of all races I might add.

And it was definitely unsettling, I had a man follow me from the bridge back towards my neighbourhood at night.

But, I also note that Pittsburgh has relatively few such walkable neighbourhoods (though it is much better than the Us average!). If it was more like NYC or Montreal the homeless population would be more diffuse.

I’ve been to NYC a bunch and it always feels much safer. Not only were there fewer homeless per street corner, but there are always large amounts of normal people walking around, so you feel safe with numbers.

(To be clear, other than the one person following me, I felt safe in Pittsburgh. The ones in the neighbourhood I was in were not aggressive. But it was different than Canada or NYC in that they were much of the foot traffic)

NYC has spent decades bribing its homeless residents to relocate to other states[1]. Not every city has a giant tax base of hedge fund managers and Goldman Sachs executives that gives them the luxury of simply paying to have their homeless problem sent away.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/12/03/new-york-...

Can’t read due to paywall, but it says nyc is just shipping homeless to newark. That’s still nyc metro.

Also nyc doesn’t have low per capita homeless numbers. It does however shelter them better than, say, SF.

> You'll find the situation is much more grim in the US in major cities

No need to cross international borders. Vancouver BC is on par with downtown SF for this.

Toronto has gotten noticeably worse in the last few years, unfortunately. Still not as bad as SF but on its way.

This would probably be the case for the imagined suburban neighborhoods in the article. Select cities in the USA (notably NYC and LA, perhaps SF as well) have disproportionate homeless population because people travel there to live a homeless lifestyle. I personally know people who moved hundreds of miles away to one of these cities for easy access to drugs and opportunities for prostitution.

Your average walkable suburban center would likely have a pretty limited homeless population, and locals would be familiar enough with them to recognize whether or not they are a potential threat.

Along the same line, the issues get worse if you are a woman. A lot of my female friends have concerns of people trying to grope them on public transport, or men making catcalls or wolf-whistles or otherwise harassing them as they walk.

One of the nice things about being in your own car, is you generally don't have to deal with kind of stuff.

I agree that there are a lot more women who feel threatened than men, perhaps for good reason.

This problem has its roots in deinstitutionalization. Many centuries were spent building a social system of asylums to house people incapable of participating in society for one reason or another.

However, the absolute power of the asylum operators over their charges inevitably lead to gross abuses which caused the entire centuries-old system to be abolished and replaced with nothing.

I have no idea what could possibly be a solution here. There will probably always be some number of people incapable of reasonable self care. There is also no system honest enough to be trusted to have absolute power over the lives of dependent others. This problem seems intractable.

It wasn't replaced with "nothing" because the problem is still there and needed to be handled. Since no better solution was given it was defaulted to the police. But the police are trained to handle criminals, so they end up treating homelessness like a crime.

This is what people talk about when they say defund the police. They want to downsize police to the point where they only deal with crime and use the freed up funds to run mental health centers, halfway houses, drug treatment centers, etc...

The police are "nothing" - they are the default handlers of antisocial behavior, but in no way are they mental heath specialists.

wrt mental health centers: what happens when people don't want to go to those places? Either they'll be in exactly the same position of being handled by the police, or the police will be too busy in which case the public will suffer (which usually changes the electorate opinion on matters).

Or, and this is a controversial view, maybe some homeless people could be helped through cheaper access to cars. As part of my job I have recently sat through many days of cases at a local courthouse. In our rural area, judges are loathed to revoke a driver's license because they know that doing so renders a person effectively unemployable locally. If someone doesn't have access to a car, and therefore cannot find work, perhaps there is a place for giving them better access to a car.

(Anyone saying that the answer is better public transport, that isn't an option here. Rural area. Most work is in farms/oil fields/military. 24/7 bus service over thousands of square miles just isn't ever going to happen. No car or no cellphone = No work.)

Depends on what you mean by "access" to cars. Simply giving away free cars won't work because they are expensive to operate and maintain.

I once lived in a city (Part of Vancouver) where the local health authority paid for cabs to drive seniors to medical appointments. Paying from them to be driven by cab, something environmentally worse than them driving themselves, was cheaper than dealing with missed appointments. I could see a situation where a city might pay for a homeless person to be driven each day if doing so allowed them to hold a steady job.

this is a complex issues for sure, now the questionis what are these cases about?

if its stuff like parking tickets, broken tail lights, low-grade speeding then i totally agree woth the judge

if its drunk driving or driving while under the influence or things where you put others in danger then... why is the driver doing those things if their livelihoods depend on it?

Just food for thought

Rural areas existed before the invention of the automobile. Rural communities can still be dense and support active transportation (walking, cycling, etc.) for many people's daily activities.

Most people don't live in rural areas though, so the kinds of solutions (free cars!) that might work there are not appropriate for urban and suburban areas.

> Rural areas existed before the invention of the automobile.

Yes, and farming was ubiquitous and highly labor intensive then. In 1940, the US had about 13 million farm workers. Today it's about 3 million.

Farms were also much smaller.

I know a few amount of people who should never drive a car. That is they are so bad that drunks are better drivers. Some are just old and the body is failing, others never had the mental ability to do it.

At least in cities there can be (but often isn't) useful public transit.

The Nordic countries also deinstitutionalized but they are light-years ahead of most other countries in tackling this problem (though still far off the goal). The biggest problem is that you simply cannot get something like it through the political system in the US: Humane prisons that are there to rehabilitate instead of parking or punishment, actual free healthcare all the way through the system, state-run centers that provide shelter, food, social helpers, etc. (that isn't just parking people with a roof over their head to hide the problem). I don't believe for a second any of this would have the interest of (enough) voters or a snowballs chance in hell of passing politicians as long as An Eye For An Eye and The American Dream are still there. They are IMO incompatible with such a humane system.

There was this bbc show were they host was trying to find the most humane method of capital punishment. He found a few that would be acceptable.

He tried to introduce them in Texas, they were like the whole point is that they suffer.

Edit: I think it was this one: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband...

Leaving aside the politics of whether we should care for the less-fortunate, I think this is only a problem of perspective and not of reality. In practice, there is safety in numbers, so cities with more people walking, out and about, tend to be safer (and feel safer for residents). When everyone retreats to a car, the street becomes a place that you shield yourself from, and disengage from, thus making the street feel less safe, and encouraging more people to use cars. Encouraging walkability and transit improves the sense of safety on streets, but it takes the willpower to do it in the face of what is essentially a panic response.

Safety in numbers doesn't apply today anymore. When someone goes batshit crazy on my train saying something racist or rapey, everyone else in the crowded car goes silent and tries not to make eye contact with the crazy person. We live in a world where anyone might be carrying a gun, drugs in their veins, or a bloodborne disease, so no one is intervening for anything unless it's their kin on the line. The street can be a scary place if you are one to be stalked by these sort of people. I've known several people who have been stalked to and from public transport and their house in this city. It's dangerous if you are a woman and walking alone, legitimately.

Idk where you live, but often places where carrying a gun is normal is far less like that. Women often carry weapons when possible (you probably just don’t know).

You’re far less concerned about being stalked when you have protection.

Personally, I’m far more willing to intervene or suggest someone to stop something when I am carrying a weapon. You can protect yourself so you’re willing to say “hey man, let’s not scream on the bus”

ok, idk where you live either, but I think we've got the reverse correlation in the world: those places in the world where people are likely to be caring guns are far less likely to have successful public transport systems, and the few they do have tend to be disproportionately used by the poor and destitute.

the other obvious problem would be, presumably, that if it's genuine 'crazyness' that you're concerned with, as opposed to anti-social behaviour or drugs that tend to accompany the lack of social capital and safety nets in the US, then a gun wouldn't actually be a disincentive.

on the other hand, I'm surprised how people don't vote road rage or idiots behind the wheel as arguments against car driving.

For a tragically relevant example of genuine crazy behind the wheel: see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2017_Melbourne_car_a...

obviously then you've also got the downside of living in the area with guns.

see gun death, murder, and car death/injury stats in US vs elsewhere, for example.

disclaimer: I live in the green areas mentioned in article, don't own a car.

You’re going to pull your concealed weapon on somebody while you’re on a crowded bus? Now I have two things to worry about...

I am the opposite. If I am carrying a weapon I am more likely to stay quiet - it's a huge responsibility that should not be taken lightly. Intervention has a way of escalating, so I avoid anything close to stirring the pot when I am armed.

Obviously I would (not with a weapon) step up in certain situations, but someone yelling shit on the bus? Definitely not going to engage that person, it's best to ignore and let it go.

You might enjoy this book:

https://www.amazon.com/When-Violence-Answer-Learning-Takes/d...

"Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is, it's the only answer". Kinda ups your bar about what you will let slide vs address.

Finally, shooting/stabbing/etc someone even if 100% justified has a way of wrecking your life. Your employer or coworkers find out about it? Have fun at work. Your family finds out about it? Have fun at family gatherings. Etc etc.

Probably a bad example about the bus, no I’d probably stay silent (and do). But if I saw something highly dangerous I would be more willing to step in.

I’m sure everyone reading my comment in their head is imagining something different. I was imagining some one being assaulted, and wouldn’t have drawn a weapon - just spoke up.

Frankly, I don’t think pulling a gun in a crowded place would almost ever be a good idea. Unless there was already an active shooter and even then, retreat if possible.

> In practice, there is safety in numbers

That is only true when the perpetrator is a rational actor. No sane person would start a fight with a group of, say, ten people. But a lot of the people causing problems in public spaces today are not in their right minds.

I was homeless for several years and I also have had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy long before that. I still write about homelessness.

I got myself off the street by moving into a cheap, small rental in a walkable neighborhood where my life works without a car. The need to own a car in the US is part of the burden that helps push some people out into the street. If we had more walkable neighborhoods where more people could make their life work without a car, that would help prevent homelessness for people who are currently at risk.

In the US, we straight up just need more housing. We have underbuilt for a long time and that helps push costs up.

We also need more small-ish scale housing in walkable neighborhoods. We have largely zoned those out of existence.

One reason crazy homeless people gravitate to big cities is because that's where they can get services. If you generally help people make their lives work across the US, then you would likely see less of this pattern.

Better social safety nets are also required. I have heard that it isn't uncommon for someone who's on the street to have mental health issues which are untreated by society. In the US this seems to have been the result of replacing one hell for the unfortunate (abusive mental 'health' jails) with an even greater hell of apathy (nothing at all).

Have a pair of uncommon disease.

Between them, I was losing my mind.

Was very close to being on the street when I finally got a correct diagnosis. Got treatment, and my mind cleared up. It wasn’t a mental condition, but every doctor wanted to treat it that way.

This was with great insurance and lots of money. Doctors just don’t like complex cases.

My ex worked with homeless people and was frustrated that so little could be done for them. One of the biggest obstacles was outright refusal to seek or accept any form of mental health care, even though many programs exist for them.

There is a pervasive fear of being locked up in a psych ward, and those who do get medicine (via Medicaid or other assistance programs) stop taking it, because treatments for severe issues usually have very unpleasant side effects. It can take weeks of trial and error to find something that works, and all that time you are somewhere between a zombie and (as it was described to me) like going through pregnancy without the baby.

You either force people into care, or accept that many will scratch out a living on charity and trash without getting mental care. There isn't a middle ground between forcing and not forcing people to change.

"Many programs exist for them"

If an individual is unwilling to accept involuntary medication, there are not many/any choices of programs.

In my opinion there is a distinct lack of mental health treatment options that treat patients with dignity. Those that have existed or still exist generally struggle to get funding.

If such programs do exist, I was unable to find any after weeks spent frantically searching for options for my medication resistant schizoaffective friend.

"Many programs exist for them" is also basically bullshit on the face of it. When I was homeless, I didn't have the right issues to qualify for a lot of the programs supposedly aimed at me.

I was homeless with my adult special-needs sons and none us were drunks or addicts. There were programs for homeless single moms with minors but none for homeless single moms still responsible for adult children who couldn't care for themselves. There are programs for addicts and alcoholics but not for people who are homeless because of their medical situation.

Etc.

It's a fiction that "there are lots of programs for you and you just don't wanna get better." And even people who aren't homeless find mental health issues hard to resolve. That's not remotely some kind of solved problem.

It is definitely a downward spiral sort of situation. The gravitation of such people to the few remaining areas that are still "20-minute neighborhoods" or something close to it, increases the pressure on them such that people move out (to neighborhoods which are suburban or at any rate less central).

It also causes businesses (especially small ones which cannot afford private security) to move away, which erodes one of the objectives of this approach, which is to have small businesses of many sorts in the neighborhood. People may, in the abstract, like the fact that the business is tolerant of the poor and mentally ill, but they don't want to walk past them to go to that business. Definitely it's a bad, self-reinforcing situation.

Portland is a city with a significant homeless population that also has a lot of little neighborhoods that are similar to the 20 minute concept.

You don't see the homeless population in those areas at nearly the same rates as downtown or near the areas where encampments are.

Thus your assumption that these areas will attract homeless populations would appear to be inaccurate.

It's not necessarily a need for more housing, but more affordable housing and possibly rural communities built around portable housing units.

In my area there is a lot of housing available, but the housing market rate has gone up so much that people with available housing don't want to rent it out to people with poor credit that have been adversely affected with financial issues, and if they are renting it out they aren't going to go below market rate. They'd rather it sit on the market for a year or more, all the while they can claim tax breaks and funding.

There is a lot of rural land as well. If you're homeless or struggling, unfortunately there is almost no place you can go in America with the exception of a few places like Slab City where you can basically inhabit some land and setup a basic shelter. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of landowners somewhere that maybe owns 1000 acres of land that they use for their leisure or the government, and they definitely don't want you on their property even if you're a nice individual just looking for a place. In America, you're expected to work and buy your freedom of the necessities of a basic shelter.

> It's not necessarily a need for more housing, but more affordable housing

No... if you simply increase supply to actually meet demand, prices will fall. This affordable housing nonsense is a complete red herring. Affordable housing is a lottery solution that helps a handful of folks... and in many cases isn’t even affordable. America needs to stop trying to fix all these issues with these one off solutions and look at the bigger picture. Just build more homes. Go look at places like Japan where housing is affordable... it has nothing to do with mandated affordable housing which NEVER works.

It isn't a supply and demand issue IMO. If more housing is built then it gets bought up by property managers and they just raise the prices and make it unavailable to people based on the American social credit system. If you're on unemployment or facing some hardship and have poor overall credit but good rental history and enough monthly income for rent, good luck finding housing that isn't in terrible shape, in a low crime area, and an ethical landlord.

However, if rural areas allowed individuals to have access to small plots of land and utilize cheap portable housing units where they could work on sustainable agriculture and community programs to promote self-sufficiency, and social safety nets to address issues of people with disabilities that may not be able to care for themselves without assistance then I believe the homeless crisis could be greatly adverted and also give purpose and fulfillment to those struggling with inner-city homeless issues.

No, then you’re not building enough. If you build enough supply to meet demand then prices would fall. This isn’t speculation, this is simple law of supply and demand taught in every economics course. What you’re talking about is just not based in reality.

> It isn't a supply and demand issue IMO.

With all due respect, you’re wrong and haven’t read about it enough then. Think about it like this, over the past few decades we’ve built fewer housing units than our population needed. This allowed demand to keep rising faster than supply, this pushed prices up. If you reverse that trend and make housing easier and cheaper to build, this trend would reverse.

There's a certain city in central NC that I generally avoid because of this aspect. Every time I've visited friends there, I was asked for money in a confrontational manner. Every time I've left my car, it seemed reasonable to expect vandalism or a break-in upon returning. (I'm not a flashy person. I drive a 12 year old Civic. I keep nothing valuable in the cabin. I keep to myself.)

After a few of these negative interactions, I decided to generally avoid visiting ever again. It's not that I have a problem dealing with it: It's very easy to say no, or to run if needed. It's that I simply shouldn't have to deal with this BS in the first place! Please, just leave me alone! I'm leaving you alone.

In places like this, I lock the doors upon entering the car. Depending on location, I also keep the engine running, in case the car must be used in an evasive or defensive manner. (People have tried my door handles while stopped at lights, so the car is set to lock when driving too.) Be aware of your surroundings, and casually pay attention to how people are watching you.

I am very glad to live in a different nearby city, in a more sprawling area, that has much less of this activity. Due to the sprawl, it is not nearly as economically motivating for trolls to congregate.

So specific to not just say the city haha. Let me guess, you're talking about Raleigh and you live in either Durham or Cary?

is raleigh really that bad? it seemed quite nice when I visited.

I don't mean to imply that, it is a nice city. The parent is actually more likely referring to a city further west.

Theft is a problem. Car thefts are way up in Denver, stealing catalytic converters.

But is being asked for money really that horrible? A lot of people are suffering, even if dope sick that's torture and money would fix it.

I guess depends how 'confrontational' but I've noticed those who treat these humans as less than, that's where the most problems are.

An example, contractor who did my bathroom. The contractor stopped at a stop light with tents and he started taking pictures (in the posting to fb as a meme type of way). And he got accosted for it. I don't feel too bad for him - it's not a freaking zoo. Those are the type of people who attract bad confrontations in my experience.

most people won't even make eye contact or smile. That goes such a long way. I can't imagine being in that position, it'd be like some sick twilight zone, everyone looking away you.

For sure though there are a small % of just mentally unstable, tweakers, etc.

But easily over 95% of the unhoused people I've talked to or walk by are nice, real humans. I tend to nod, give any extra change or food. I've also had similar positive encounters in much bigger cities like London too.

A counter example, Paris has more pick pocketer types who are far too invasive/physically grabbing. But flat out crime is different than what I'm talking about.

>People often don't like to say it out loud, but one of the principal drivers of the urge to retreat inside your car, is the fact that it puts a barrier between you and the crazy guy shouting on the streetcorner

As a former, long-time resident of an older inner city, I can say that not a single person I've ever encountered has made vehicle trips to avoid homeless people. Convenience, time to destination, and other concerns "drive" these decisions. For anything within that 10 minute radius, everyone walks. It's simply more efficient than driving.

> I can say that not a single person I've ever encountered has made vehicle trips to avoid homeless people.

I can think of many times where people I know have chosen to drive to avoid homelessness problems (or, more specifically homeless unstable drug addict problems).

I literally just moved out of a west coast city due to the homelessness problem, and homeless camps changed my commute habits on bike and foot. While I am OK going by a homeless camp on bike/foot solo, I stopped taking my family through them after some sketchy encounters. I was lucky that I didn't need to change my bike commute with my kid due to camps, but that was because I could take some alternate routes to his school. If I wanted to completely avoid homeless camps on my bike commute, I would have had to increase my commute distance by about 30%. Not only that, but it's whack-a-mole. The smaller camps move around alot. Also as a bicyclist, you notice that the bike lanes are problematic near any campsites due to broken glass and needles. I am positive many people consider this when deciding whether to start or to continue being a bike commuter, at least in west coast cities with big homeless populations.

I know many people that still live in the city, and people that moved away. Of my coworkers, all but one with kids moved out of the city when we went full remote, all cited homelessness and school quality as the top two issues. Homelessness is absolutely a big deal when making livable neighborhoods that people want to be in, whether or not you can find ways to "make it work" is beside the point.

Most western cities doesn't have these kind of areas as there simply aren't homeless people enough to live there. With a working social security net it wouldn't need to be accounted for in the planning at all.

No disagreement at all, but given the choice of sticking it out and doing needle sweeps of the playground before letting my kid play, or moving to a city that doesn't have that problem, guess which one was the easy decision?

In other words, don't conflate my lack of desire to spend another year dealing with homeless people as a lack of desire to find real solutions to homelessness. It's a 20 year problem, my kids will be grown up before it's not an issue anymore.

Yeah, encampments of people and areas strewn with needles are a little more to deal with than the occasional homeless person or group. My city had its share of homeless and drug, and we'd find the occasional needle, but it was part of the fabric of the area, not its definition.

I lived in the inner city and in some of the neighborhoods I lived in you simply wouldn't walk around. Not at night, not during the day, not anywhere other than from the front door to the car.

You must have lived in a different kind of inner city than I did.

It was convenient and efficient not to be assaulted.

> "We have not yet found a system that effectively removes the angry shouting, or urinating, or otherwise crazy-acting person from the sidewalk, or bus, or urban train, that is not uncomfortably close to a police state."

you're advocating unnecessary force. it wouldn't just be uncomfortably close, it would be a police state, where force is used to gain compliance and instill arbitrary order. mincing words like this is an attempt to avoid cognitive dissonance (i'm a good person so i'd never advocate a police state!). it's the same coercive impulse that gives us poor policy decisions to all sorts of non-obvious situations, including this pandemic.

when faced with a "crazy" person, it'd be better to control your own fears and realize that that person is quite unlikely to be a threat to you. control yourself, not others, and default to compassion and humility under uncertainty. being fearful is nearly as bad as being belligerent, in that they both serve to distance and disconnect us from our humanity.

>you're advocating unnecessary force.

I don't think this was the intent of the comment you're replying to. Personally, I interpreted their position as exactly the opposite: they're very anti-unnecessary force, and frustrated that we can't implement a compassionate system to deal with the problems at hand.

> when faced with a "crazy" person, it'd be better to control your own fears and realize that that person is quite unlikely to be a threat to you. control yourself, not others, and default to compassion and humility under uncertainty.

As a woman, I appreciate the empathy here, but question the logic. I cannot "control" the fact that I have breasts. The multiple times I've been agressively groped by homeless men has been entirely out of my control. The threats of assault I've received when ignoring catcalls were also out of my control (and luckily the homeless man who charged at me and threatened to stab me was held back by a good samaritan, because I assure you, that situation was entirely out of my control.)

Homeless people are harmless 99% of the time. But when you pass 100 homeless people every day, that 1% genuinely does matter.

I’m a big beefy man. Lived in a bad area. Got the meanest looking dog. A few times that dog definitely stopped things from escalating.

My daughters get lots of lectures on the topic of having a dog or being with a group.

My oldest adult daughter kept thinking I was stupid and paranoid.

Until a group of men tried to force her into a van. So yeah...

I had a large, scary looking rescue dog for years. Sweetest cuddle bug ever. But she looked tough as hell, and it was amazing how the reactions of people differed when I walked with her versus without her.

I appreciate that you take the time to teach your daughters those sorts of safety precautions. Personally, I went through an, "Ugh, my parents are SO paranoid and judgemental" phase as a teen. But their wisdom has gotten me out of some tricky situations in the past, and now that I'm older, I will be forever grateful for it.

others had noted a workable "compassionate system": more housing, plus supportive services. no coercion necessary.

about handling unexpected situations, the control aspect is about how you respond (e.g., quelling fear so you can think more quickly and nimbly), not how you directly control others. self-defense classes for women will emphasize this, and improv classes in conjunction can help develop mental agility under pressure. sometimes we can't do much, but it can be surprising how much a handful of techniques can work. i sympathize with your anecdotes, but is this a problem you only face with homeless men?

for context, most assaults (of any type) are perpetrated by non-homeless men (usually someone you know). my own experience aligns with this general trend (catcalls by the homeless but more serious stuff by non-homeless men).

tangentially, homeless folks are at much higher risk of assault than non-homeless folks. this is something i've anecdotally witnessed in my own neighborhood - projectiles thrown, tents burned, even murder. i once had to call 911 for a homeless guy after he was assaulted with a knife by a young, non-homeless couple.

>others had noted a workable "compassionate system": more housing, plus supportive services. no coercion necessary.

I didn't see the commenter you replied to dismiss these options. They just expressed frustration that a working version of this solution seems to be far off, and that in the mean time, the issue at hand can't simply be ignored in day-to-day life.

> about handling unexpected situations, the control aspect is about how you respond (e.g., quelling fear so you can think more quickly and nimbly), not how you directly control others.

This can be a helpful coping mechanism on an individual basis. But this seems like a poor solution to the overall problem. Is the government going to spend billions on sending women to improv and self defense courses? That doesn't seem possible.

I think this advice also falls into the same realm as the advice to "dress more modestly." It's putting the responsibility for action on the women getting assaulted. In my opinion, the problem doesn't lie with women lacking "mental agility." It's with the severely mentally ill men assaulting these women.

>i sympathize with your anecdotes, but is this a problem you only face with homeless men?

Unfortunately not. However, the rate of harassment and aggression I've experienced from homeless men is far higher than the average man. This is backed by statistics on the rate of violent crime and sexual assault among the homeless.

Of course, there are plenty of violent, aggressive men who aren't homeless. But these people aren't generally living in large camps at my local park and intimidating me from using public property.

> tangentially, homeless folks are at much higher risk of assault than non-homeless folks.

This is absolutely right. The rate of sexual assault against homeless women is simply heart-wrenching.

But I think the critical piece of information here is that most of these assaults are committed by other homeless people. Large camps of people with severe mental illness, drug and alcohol problems, and nothing to lose tend to veer toward violence.

Having spent a lot of time volunteering with the homeless, and having close friends who work at shelters, the stories of violence and assault that occur in homeless camps are gut wrenching. When people advocate to just "leave people alone" and "have compassion" in regards to the homeless and their growing camps, I don't think they understand the underbelly of violence that occurs in many of these communities.

i mean, it's pretty difficult to look at the totality of the parent comment and conclude that they were just simply frustrated that we don't have a compassionate solution yet. "aggressive rant against homeless people that concludes with fascism" would be a more cogent description.

given the obvious housing shortage, the responsible solution is ultimately a matter of political and public will, and the powers that be don't want to spend money on the problem when it's been rapaciously isolated to the less affluent parts of cities. i'd be kicking back and not worrying about it too if i could export all the homeless into the various affluent hills of LA and not have to experience it regularly.

so the right people to be angry at are not the homeless themselves but the administrators, politicians, and their wealthy donors who collectively have all the power and money they need to fix the problem, and yet are doing approximately nothing (more) about it. i'd readily sign a petition to impeach mayor garcetti over just this one issue (but sadly not just this one).

> "It's putting the responsibility for action on the women getting assaulted."

no, it's not. it's admitting that there is a range of potential responses, and pointing out one proactive response (not a responsibility). the inverse-converse isn't implied nor can it be derived from that statement.

beyond that, it sounds like your experience is exceptional in that you're somehow exposed to more negative such experiences with homeless men than the average woman (let alone the average person), and perhaps fewer such experiences with non-homeless men, which makes it maybe a greater-than-2-or-3-sigma kind of exceptional.

lastly, housing the homeless can reduce the inter-homeless violence you mention. it's the compassionate solution that also has positive externalities for the public.

> We have not yet found a system that effectively removes the angry shouting, or urinating, or otherwise crazy-acting person from the sidewalk, or bus, or urban train, that is not uncomfortably close to a police state.

Huh. The whole damn Europe. You 'remove' then by having a safety net. Which is one of a few things I'm really glad to pay taxes for.

Clearly not as Canada has a massive homelessness issue in Vancouver and a strong safety net.

Canada's safety net is better than the USA but it's not as good as many places in Europe.

I lived in Amsterdam for a year and in that time saw maybe 2 homeless people. One law they had was if a building has been empty for over a year you're legally allowed to squat there and the owner has to go through a lengthy process to evict. This stops people buying investment property and leaving it empty. If this was on Vancouver it would have massively helped their housing problem as all those apartments used for offshore assets could be used by squatters (though this would bring its own set of issues).

You’re saying there are less homeless on the streets of Amsterdam because they squat in empty houses?

Suburban areas are not free of homeless people merely because of zoning. The suburbs have a police state that harasses, tickets, fines and/or arrests people for homeless activities like illegal camping, being parked too long, public urination and panhandling. Big cities tend to be more permissive (or the police are focused on bigger crimes).

Well I definitely don't want to live somewhere where there's bigger crimes...

This was the thing that I loved most about living in a semi-rural town in Japan. Everything I needed on a day-to-day basis was 20 minutes away by bike or train. I could be in the center of a major city in an hour if I hit the trains right, but 30 minutes in the opposite direction took me to landscape that looked almost exactly My Neighbor Totoro. It was awesome.

This is my favorite thing about Japan. The layout and transportation perfectly matches my ideal, I’d love to live there for some amount of time.

Japan is a paradise as far as I'm concerned. I generally hate US cities but would be happy to spend the rest of my life in any Japanese city I've visited, large or small.

I don't think we will ever see that level of efficiency, cleanliness and safety in established US cities. The culture is different. More importantly, I think, is that US cities have a skeleton which is generally not conducive to the transportation network seen in Japan.

I think that the current push in the US to add ADUs('granny flats') in suburban neighborhoods will show us the limitations of our current layouts. Cramming more density into an infrastructure limited area will likely result in lower quality of life. The solution, IMHO, is to undertake larger projects where entire neighborhoods are bought out at fair price(at huge public expense) and redeveloped according to modern urban design patterns. That will likely never happen due to the obsession with the past and unwillingness to allow change.

ADUs help though because they are a step to more density in areas that don't have enough. Most suburbs have enough population to support good transit - but there is a big chicken-egg problem: without good transit nobody will ride, and without a lot of riders you can get enough money to support good transit.

You can't prove this on small scale though, good transit is about the places you can get to: the jobs, stores, churches, restaurants, friends, and whatever else you might want to do in your city. A fast bus (not to be confused with the typical slow meandering buses most people are used to) every 5 minutes that doesn't connect to any other buses is useless. A bus every 10 minutes that via affordable transfers to anywhere can get you anywhere can get good use. Plumbers and the like still need to drive, so private autos will still be 30% of all trips, but a good transit system can be useful in the suburbs if you can just get there.

Did you note I stuck affordable in there? The ideal transit system should have the majority of the riders on a monthly unlimited rides family pass.

Supposing you have enough population - an older and more developed suburban area - you actually don't need to buy out entire neighborhoods, in many cases you could get pretty far by just buying out a few homes or strip malls and connecting small scale streets through the gaps - even ped/bike only streets if you want.

The main problem with that is that it's still not worth it in most cases. For most neighborhoods there's nothing to walk to because the population density is too low to support businesses or services. There's too much fragmented farmland separating out all the little pods of cookie cutter houses and strip malls, so the only configuration that works is to have a little pod of commercial at some highway intersection while all the residential to support that is sprinkled around a 10 mile radius of fragmented development.

A big part of this has to do with zoning laws. In Japan, zoning is largely done by gauging the externalities produced (e.g. noise, pollution, foot traffic, building height, etc), whereas in the US, zoning is largely done by function (housing, commercial, industrial, etc).

So in Japan, you have many neighborhoods that have a house beside a tea shop beside a tailor beside house. In the US, it is very rare to find such mixes.

We recently built a tool for this trend: Our tool analyses travel times in cities from different points of interest like super markets, parks, doctors etc.

For now our tool is only available in German but you can take a look at our translated front-page and explore our tool in one german city:

Front page [google translated]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

Demo [don't use the translated front page for navigation]: https://15-minuten-stadt.de/cities/Frankfurt%20am%20Main/

If you would like to get in contact, shoot us an e-mail at nils.seipel@flux-impulse.de

This is amazing, thanks! Not sure how exactly you calculate, but couldn't you extend this tool "automatically" (I know there are pitfalls) to all places in the world which are well covered by OpenStreetMap?

The calculation is very easy apply on any city you can find in OSM data artifacts. Will do this in the near future!

Any plans on doing this for non German cities? I'd love to see this for Dakar or New York or Mumbai

yes! we will definitely do this in the future for cities worldwide.

Not exactly this, but here’s a website which calculates isochrones (regions included in a certain travel time) based on OSM data: https://commutetimemap.com/

Ok we have done this now for 3 non-german cities. The 20-km boundary of the box are our system limit atm. Would love your feedback on it!

https://15-minuten-stadt.de/test/New%20York/

https://15-minuten-stadt.de/test/San%20Francisco

https://15-minuten-stadt.de/test/Tokyo/

Interesting to see how the 'local recreation' measure on Manhattan can change so much just depending on which side of Central Park you are.

Also, Treasure Island ranks surprisingly well in SF!

Not exactly this, but here’s a website which calculates isochrones (regions included in a certain travel time) based on OSM data: https://commutetimemap.com/

great! there is also the python package osmnx[1] to calculate isochrones by yourself. Also check geoff boeing's blog[2]. if you are into geo spatial things.

[1]: https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx [2]: https://geoffboeing.com

See my reply below, we updated the site with 3 non-german citys. Would love your feedback on them. I try more some more cities in the next days.

This is great! Are you doing a pan-european version?

There's soething similar for the US at https://www.mapnificent.net/ if anyone's curious

Nice work guys! I was just wondering whether this is the case for me. I live in Frankfurt and I think it is really the case. The travel times by public transport are a bit long though to other parts of the town. I.e. I live in Gallus and need roughly have an hour to Ostend or even almost an hour to Preungesheim, including walking to the station though. So for such a small city that is quite weird, but I guess the green map shows that I should be happy anyway.

This is one of those things that the soviet cities did well.

They called this microraion (microdistrict): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict

An interesting side-effect is that house/appartment-hunting become much easier and less stressful because no matter which district you will choose there will be services (groceries, pharmacies, clinics, child-care, schools, parks, etc) withing walkable/very-short-ride distance, which allows population distribute and grow more-or-less evenly, without segregationist tendencies like in the West: "I need to buy there because of the school", or "I need to buy in that area to avoid the immigrants/ethnic/black/brown people from the other area", etc.

> West: "I need to buy there because of the school", or "I need to buy in that area to avoid the immigrants/ethnic/black/brown people from the other area", etc.

How to microdistricts prevent class or racial clustering?

I feel like class and racial diversity wasn't really something the USSR had to work with.

That's all well and good if you work in the subset of industries that can exist in such cities. Is there a meat packing plant within 20 minutes? Is there a farm? Is there a harbor? Is there an airport? Is there a powerplant? Is there a military base? Not everyone is lucky enough to work in office-based industries. Some jobs need huge structures that cannot be integrated within a 20-minute walking distance. Such jobs are equally important. Any city planning must address everyone, not just office workers.

I work on a military base. We make lots of noise. I like making that noise. I like getting paid to make noise. I don't want live beside it 24/7.

Ideally if you have some big geographic dependent job center, you would have transit to move workers from this city center to this job center. That transit could be anything from a sad bus that shows up once an hour, or a subway that shows up every 90 seconds, depending on local political climate most of all, depending on need. For example, the subways in NYC don't really help you out if you need to get across town. They are designed to funnel workers from where its cheap to live elsewhere in nyc, to where they can find jobs in midtown or lower manhattan, like a big toilet bowl. Los Angeles also built the green line to service people working for the defense industry around LAX. Planners recognize needs for movement and have this data, but I'd say the biggest barriers are locals not wanting to see a train and the working people it carries, and a lack of strong federal support in recent decades (in contrast to highway funding).

For these jobs you have industrial areas outside of the city skirts and good public transportation to/from the city neighbourhoods, good as in: accessible, fast and ubiquitous.

That's how The Netherlands do and I really like their cities.

>> For these jobs you have industrial areas outside of the city skirts and good public transportation to/from the city neighbourhoods

So... zoning. How is that any different than cities today? How then is the "20-minute city" any different than a city today + better public transport?

My point is that people calling for integrated cities with services all within walking distances need also to accommodate the dirty/loud/dangerous jobs. Outsourcing such things to beyond the city limits is simply a repeat of current zoning policies using different names. The "20-minute city" concept boils down to just another call for better public transportation options. Ok. Cool. Do that. Just don't pretend you are doing anything revolutionary.

Yes zoning, but only for some things. You don't need to have all office spaces in downtown. You don't need only big supermarkets that are in just a few neighbourhoods.

If less people have to move over long distances, it makes easier for the ones that need to.

So...a car dependent city then. They tend to have their office buildings distributed fairly evenly throughout the metro area and have a supermarket in pretty much every neighborhood. Every daily need and lots of non-daily needs are less than 20 minutes away.

Just admit that you want public transit and high density and stop trying to weasel around saying so. All of the benefits professed about dense living already exist in most car dependent cities, with the only difference being the mode of transportation used. In a car dependent area, industrial areas are also part of the 20-minute neighborhood without the downsides of having to live a 20 minutes walk from them.

Outside of a handful of cities (mostly on the West Coast) that failed to expand their infrastructure when their populations grew, people in car dependent areas already live in 20 minute neighborhoods. You just disagree with their lifestyle and transportation choices. If someone comes along and builds lots of 100 story skyscrapers when the transit system can only support 10 story buildings, the same issue will befall your beloved dense public transit dependent city.

No. It's about not needing a car. Also, as many mentioned here: in Europe and U.K. you have less dense areas or small towns where you have everything you need there. While in some places in US you might only get groceries in a 30 min drive to Walmart. Changing a 30 min car drive to a 45 min bus ride doesn't solve the problem.

Someone who is driving 30 minutes to a store lives in an area so rural they don't even live in a town or in a town so small no business could be profitable. A person living in a similar area in the UK would also have to drive. A 30 minute drive on the highway is over 30 miles - more than the diameter of most cities. Subtract a little time for parking and time spent on city streets and you can still get pretty much anywhere in an entire city in less than half an hour door to door. Most people in the US already live in a 20 minute (or less) city.

You also just made my point - "it's about not needing a car". Why do you care that someone uses a car? The person living in the suburbs spends around the same amount of time transiting to their daily destinations as someone in a dense area does. So for someone who doesn't mind driving (i.e. most people), your proposed solution to their "problem" (which they don't have) offers little benefit but comes with downsides like smaller (or no) houses.

> Why do you care that someone uses a car?

Because the elderly and young can't use them, the poor sacrifice too much to have one.

> Why do you care that someone uses a car?

I don't care if they use a car, I care if they need a car to do basic things such as: grocery shopping, going to a café, to a restaurant, to a park, to meet friends and so on. I really care if a car is a basic necessity for life, it's stupid, I came from such a country and it's just stressful, stressful to drive in traffic, stressful to maintain a car's upkeep, taxes, parking spot. All of that eats your money so you can have a care idling 95-99% of the time, it's a waste of resources, both financial and mental.

> So for someone who doesn't mind driving (i.e. most people)

How can you state that? Do you have data to corroborate this statement? What culture are you talking about?

I believe you see all of this too much with a US-centric myopic approach, the kinds of cities being discussed already exist in other parts of Earth, have you lived in one of them?

What I’m trying to tell you is that in most of the US, none of the things in your first paragraph are issues.

Traffic is only an issue in big cities, and even then in most of them it is only an issue in rush hour (i.e. not when running errands). Most small and medium sized cities never have traffic. Same is true for parking; that’s only an issue in big cities that have underbuilt parking. Most people in the US do not struggle to find parking during regular errands.

Modern cars require very little upkeep - a few hours once a year for a regular checkup is all that’s required.

Taxes is unfair, that’s an artificial government action that has little to do with how a mode of transportation works. I could just as easily say that you’d never use transit if the fares were raised to cover 100% of operating and capital expenses.

You accuse me of being biased towards the US, and I admit that I am, but you are biased towards your city, and I’m trying to tell you that your issues aren’t really issues for most people in the US. HN is dominated by Bay Area residents, where the local government hasn’t built anywhere close to the amount of new infrastructure of any mode required, so it’s only logical they hate traffic and therefore cars, but the Bay Area does not reflect the typical American city.

I hope you try to learn more about what life is like in large parts of America and to not assume that everything is like a handful of areas popular in the tech industry.

To your final point asking if I have personally experienced transit oriented development, the answer is yes. I have lived in cities in the US that heavily fund transit and have made it illegal to build new roads or low density housing. I found that when I lived in such an area I spent just as much time traveling to destinations as I did in a much larger car dependent city, but the things to do were much more limited. There were lots of restaurants and bars and nightlife, but any actual errand like a hardware store or anything else that couldn’t fit in a small first floor retail space required traveling to either the sketchy industrial area or the suburbs. I also paid hundreds of dollars in taxes earmarked to the transit system and my employer was forced to pay hundreds more on my behalf for an unlimited use transit pass, which is significantly more than the operating expenses I paid for my car. Since moving, I now pay less for transportation and spend less time traveling. It is rare I spend more than 20 minutes in transit time to go anywhere, so I by definition live in a 20 minute neighborhood. The same was not true in my prior transit oriented area unless you don’t count time spent walking to and from a bus stop and time spent waiting for the bus to come.

It isn't zoning when it happens naturslly

>Town is built.

>convenience store is willing to pay a premium for land that puts it in close proximity of potential customers.

>meat plant is not because they aren't banking on Joe Schmoe strolling by going "huh yknow what I could use 35lbs of beef"

Meat plants are not placed near customers. They are placed near employees. The goods are then shipped wide and far. "Natural" zoning did indeed see slaughterhouses inside major cities, right in the middle of residential areas. Zoning and health codes then pushed such industries outside cities. They are now placed wherever labor is cheap.

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

"Two thousand men worked directly for the Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., and the rest worked for companies such as meatpackers, which had plants in the stockyards.[24] By 1900, the 475-acre (1.92 km2) stockyard contained 50 miles (80 km) of road, and had 130 miles (210 km) of track along its perimeter.[20] At its largest area, The Yards covered nearly 1 square mile (3 km2) of land, from Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue and from 39th (now Pershing Rd.) to 47th Streets."

Is it helpful or relevant for me to add that the slaughterhouses in my city used to be right in the middle of town? They're still there actually, just on a smaller scale and the city has grown so much that that's not the middle of town anymore.

> My point is that people calling for integrated cities with services all within walking distances need also to accommodate the dirty/loud/dangerous jobs. Outsourcing such things to beyond the city limits is simply a repeat of current zoning policies using different names.

No, it is not current zoning policy. It is literally different policy, the one in which you dont make undisturbing business illegal and push only dirty/loud/dangerous businesses further away. Those two are different policies with different outcomes.

I don't know what it is with tendency to abstract away all differences between very different policies and talk about all of them as if they were the same as extreme.

> The "20-minute city" concept boils down to just another call for better public transportation options.

People actually want to walk, skateboard or bike to services they need for their daily lives.

>> People actually want to walk, skateboard or bike to services they need for their daily lives.

It was -13 outside my place this morning. Icy. Dark. I haven't seen a bicycle on the roads for at least five months. I have absolutely no desire to skateboard anywhere.

Because if there's one thing we all know about the Soviet Union, it's that they had no farms, factories, harbors, or military bases.

For fun, 20 mins from the center of Copenhagen:

Is there a farm? Yes

Is there a harbor? Yes

Is there an airport? Yes

Is there a powerplant? Yes

Is there a military base? No (or maybe, depending on definition)

My personal threshold is probably closer to 5 mins, otherwise I'll not go, or order what I need. We joke that we live in a 800m rectangle 99% of the time, save for trips to the airport.

That's super interesting to me. I live in the middle of the US. There's a grocery store about 2 blocks from me, but that's by far the closest I've ever lived to one. 40 minute drive to work. 10 minutes by car to Target. 20 minutes to the nearest shopping center. Public transportation isn't really a thing in my town. There isn't a bus. The city I live on the outskirts of has a bus system, but no one uses it. No one is going to the same place at the same time. Everything is just too scattered.

Walkability does not equal a safe or desirable apartment. Westlake in Los Angeles has a "walk score" of 91, very high meaning you can get all your needs met without a car. Doesn't make it a paradise, this area is high in crime and homelessness, and no one with a family moves there unless they don't have other options, which is why it is primarily populated by recent immigrants from Central America who have few other options.

These services seem important, but people sacrifice them all the time, because they prefer space, safety, and school districts, to the novelty of walking to a convenient store. The most expensive houses in LA are up in the hills, where it takes you 10 minutes just to drive down windy roads with zero sidewalks before you even hit a shop of some sort at the bottom. Being able to walk to your errands is just not prioritized in American real estate over the three S's. People willingly take an hour commute for these things.

"the novelty of walking to a convenient store" <- this sounds funny

Not sure if sarcasm or figure of style of some sorts. If neither I recommend traveling to European/Asian/UK/Commonwealth cities where walking, convenience and safety are all combined seamlessly for large parts, if not whole, cities.

I have always been mystified by the logic of disallowing a mixture of commercial and residential zoning through a city. What is the advantage of having tracts of single family homes that are miles away from a central shopping area, vs. mixing smaller stores throughout the residential area?

It just makes no sense. Was this sensible in the 1940s?

As a British person when I played Sim City growing up I used to think 'this isn't very realistic - huge squares of a single type of land-use and a grid of roads at right angles' - then I visited the US for the first time and actually yeah it is realistic for there!

Well, if you go West it is. The East is much like any European city - a warren of too-narrow roads. Which makes sense, as they were founded (by Europeans) when that sort of thing was common all over the world.

Here in Iowa, which became a State in 1846, we have a nominal 1-mile grid of secondary roads covering the entire state. To make easy access to land for agriculture. It was planned and executed by surveyors, business people and pragmatic colonists.

It's common in the mid-west. In much of the far west, it stops because lots of land has insufficient water and can be too rugged to be developed with roads at the road-every-mile level.

The survey lines in Ohio are a particularly interesting mishmash of proto-PLSS grid and colonial style metes-and-bounds.

The car made it sensible. Seemed like a good idea post-war.

In the early days it was. Most people still lives in the old areas, and your house wasn't that far from all the advantages of mixed use. So it seemed like you got a quite street yet were close to everything. Then we made the exclusive zones more than a few blocks wide and it took a while to realize that isn't a good idea.

I think the advantage some people see (which is a tradeoff) is that separate zoning means you can live on a quiet residential street that is away from the hussle and noise.

The "advantage" and original purpose of euclidean zoning was segregation and the exclusion of racial minorities.[0][1] You'll still hear these benefits repeated in euphemisms in this very thread as "space, safety, and school districts."

[0] https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/

[1] https://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/2019-...

I'd say it's no longer specifically about race anymore, but about socioeconomic class overall. Especially with the ease of being able to search household income statistics for various zip codes and whatnot.

A secondary reason is also due to the increasing issues of mentally ill and drug addicted homeless. For various reasons, the simplest way to minimize interacting with the aforementioned groups is to live in a far flung suburb, where everything is spaced out, separated by highways, and not conducive to homeless people.

I totally agree with that. I wish we used a type of zoning more like Japanese zoning, where instead of exclusive zones, you have maximum level of allowable nuisance in different zones. This is a good writeup that has been discussed on HN in the past: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

One of the key impacts that planners worry about, aside from the obvious noise and smell, is visitors.

Homeowners in residential zones expect that the streets are used rarely, and by people they personally know.

Businesses generate traffic. Worse, much of that traffic is outsiders.

Sometimes you will see mixed or light-commercial zones immediately adjoining residential zones, where the key criterion is that the business “does not normally receive visitors.”

The challenge is density - it's much easier to do this if you have more people in a relatively small area. More attractive for businesses, more people to share the costs of parks and other public facilities, etc.

But then the type of people who want these sorts of neighborhoods often picture them as purely single-family homes. The two things are completely at odds.

"25-30 dwellings per hectare" (12/acre) is considered "medium density", and as you say, not compatible with an entire neighborhood of single-family homes, which are 10-12 dwellings per hectare (4-5/acre)

https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatibl...

It doesn't require going fully urban, though. Lots of medium density examples that are below 3 stories. I particularly like the example in that article of "The Boulders at Green Lake development" which is 36/acre.

25-30 dwellings per hectare is 3-4 ares per dwelling. That's easily big enough for single family dwellings. Hell, you can fit a 8x12m home on a 10x20m plot with a 6x10m backyard and a 2m wide front garden, and you will have 40 ares left for roads, sidewalks and curbside parking. Make the houses semi-detached and the place will even look good.

Sure, it's definitely doable without a ton of density. The problem is neighborhoods like the one I currently live in (suburbs of San Diego), where everyone has signs up in their yards declaring their total opposition to changing the zoning to allow 2-4 unit properties. That would destroy the "character" of the neighborhood, you see.

And when you don't change zoning, the existing houses still get demolished, and replaced with ultra modern McMansions built out to the setbacks, which totally ruin the character of the neighborhood anyways. Then you have this terrible mix of tiny little old houses with yards and great big 3 story Borg cubes scattered throughout.

I would argue that mixing is a good idea. 300sqm per household is not a great upper limit for families nor affordable for people with smaller incomes. But houses with 4 apartments of various sizes on 600sqm lots can be quite nice. Add to that single-family-homes with 2.5 stories on similarly sized lots in a 1:2 ratio and you got a nice quarter. If you make the roads broad enough, that is. Feeling cramped in can really destroy the appearance (and take away space for public trees).

> The challenge is density - it's much easier to do this if you have more people in a relatively small area.

I don't understand why people think this.

I live in a town of 13k people in the UK, low density - 11 people per hecate - mostly single-family homes with large gardens. We have a little town centre with good restaurants, bars, theatres, churches, shops, tea-shops, coffee-shops, book-shops, specialists like a delicatessen, a dedicated butcher, flower shops, sports equipment shops, and so on. Everything you need day-to-day or really week-to-week.

It doesn't need density. I'm not entirely sure what it does need apart from just getting on and doing it... but I don't think it's density blocking it.

It's not density, it's walmart and places like it. Walmart is now the coffee shop, book shop, delicatessen, butcher, flower shop, sports equipment shop, optometrist, etc, in these similar sized American towns, which once had all of these things as well

Yeah, Wal-Mart and other super groceries like this are the seed of the problem. It goes like this:

1. You have a handful of nice small towns each with their own little commercial center with a small grocery store and a collection of other shops and restaurants.

2. Wal-Mart wants to move into the area. Their efficiency is driven by logistics and scale. They don't want to open a small Wal-Mart in each town that they have to drive trucks to. So they pick one of those towns and put a mega-Wal-Mart there.

3. People in the neighboring towns start going to that Wal-Mart occasionally because it has a few things the smaller local grocery store doesn't have.

4. Business dries up at the local grocery stores. They already operate on razor-thin margins so it doesn't take much to put them in the red. They close.

5. Now even the people who don't want to go to Wal-Mart have no choice.

6. People tend to visit the other shops and restaurants as an additional errand tacked on to their necessary grocery run. Without a local grocery store anchoring those trips, people no longer stop at the restaurants or other shops. Those satellite businesses close down.

Ta-da, now you've got a bunch of dead towns with no functioning city center and one bigger town with a Wal-Mart. Traffic gets worse for everyone. Wal-Mart rakes in the cash because instead of them having to pay for last mile product shipping, customers do it for them by driving thirty minutes from their food desert dying town to the nearest Wal-Mart.

Did I mention that all the people who used to work at these small stores and restaurants now have shitty jobs at Wal-Mart and awful commutes?

I think the worst part is while it is easy to see how this came to be, I don't know how you put it back. It's like saying how do you unburn down a forest. You can't put it back together. One shop opening in the otherwise empty commercial corridor on main street is going to look failing and close down with the rest of the block remaining vacant. Local planners then turn to razing historic commercial blocks to turn them into some cookie cutter chain since no one local has any capital anymore to start a business.

Option B: instead of cookie-cutter chains, it's health care. Cancer centers, physical therapy, and other related things. But all owned by the local health conglomerate, so prices are all obscenely high.

I think the probable reversal of the cycle is:

1. Towns revise their taxation and zoning laws so that more classes of business are permitted in residences. They also start issuing more forms of local credit(the technical means to do so are only getting better), excluding big-box participation and restarting the cycle of capital accumulation locally.

2. Costs are lower and incentives are now aligned for more small businesses to survive in marginal areas.

3. Big-box stores increasingly become commodified and unbundled, themselves; the shift from Main Street to Wal-Mart to Amazon is one of the warehouse turning into a store and then back into a warehouse. The services of shipping logistics and delivery become less of a centralized process. Now the local businesses are using the big-box to their benefit.

The reason why Wal-Mart succeeds is ultimately premised on policies that let capital centralize itself according to a national and global framework. But that's only one way of "seeing" the economy, since following that policy, as we know, creates a mix of expensive star cities and dying no-hope towns. It's improbable that the future will simply be a restatement of the post-1970 trends, given what we know about history - something will change.

I don't have an answer but I do my part by refusing to shop at WalMart or any big box store. I'm lucky to live in area where there are decent local businesses to support.

7. Wal-Mart increase its margins.

Their margins have been ~3% for the longest time. Don’t know if it’s possible to go lower and still have a business.

I meant the opposite, without competition they will make more profit.

4.) and 5.) don't quite add up to me. if people moderately to strongly preferred the local grocery store over walmart, surely they would accept a modest price hike to keep the local store in business? these steps only make sense if the people didn't actually care that much about the local shop to begin with.

We didn't. We went to the local grocery store because driving half an hour for groceries all the time wasn't a great option. WalMart when it came to my hometown as a kid was a great liberation - we finally could buy all the things we wanted to buy without a major day long trip to the nearest big city.

Note that Sam Walton was still CEO of walmart at the time I remember. Since then the quality of thing you can get at WalMart has gone down (remember when they used to look for made in the USA products?). I wouldn't be as excited to see them in town now. Though they are still better than the high prices we had to pay locally.

Increasing the efficiency for the consumers appears to be generally a good.

The bad is that the consumers end up stranded in areas which are unsustainable satellites that are no longer fit in a more globalized, technically advanced, specialist filled world.

The fact that these small towns continue to exist, rather than being bought up and shutdown in an orderly consolidation process, is a failure of our society to require planning and execution at scale.

I disagree with the cause-and-effect here.

Large lot sizes and setbacks makes everything far apart. This increases how far people need to travel for basic necessities like a grocery store, a bank, or an optometrist.

If you have to drive 25 minutes to get to anything, it makes sense for the Walmart to also have a bank and an optometrist and a Starbucks inside so you can do all of that on one trip.

Having lived in both countries, in my experience UK towns are a lot more dense than American suburbs.

But the UK can do it for towns at the same low density figure (like mine) then why blame density?

Maybe your town is an exception? Maybe there isn't an ASDA or Tesco or Aldi close enough to put all those small business out of business due to them not being able to match economies of scale?

Generally, if you give everyone cars, and you give everyone a Costco/Walmart/Target/etc, they're going to use their cars to drive to the big stores and get cheaper prices.

> Maybe your town is an exception?

Seems bog-standard to me. There's a big Tesco and a big Aldi. Still lots of small shops. Obviously Tesco and Aldi don't replace bars, restaurants, theatres.

Frankly, I think Americans just don't believe it's an option. They don't really have any obstacles except their own imagination. I think if you showed them my town they'd all say 'ah right yeah I get it... not really a big deal... it's just some shops and restaurants and things in the centre of an area of housing that everyone can walk to... yeah we can do that but really sure why we haven't tried so far now I think about it...'

We don't have to guess what this looks like. We can just look at pre-car neighborhoods in the U.S, which were a lot more dense than modern suburbs, but not necessarily extremely dense. The largest U.S. cities in 1920 included places like St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore [0], each of which have several neighborhoods with a gentle mix of single-family homes alongside two-, three-, and four-family flats and traditional corner stores.

If you let neighborhoods develop organically, then this is what you get.

[0] https://www.biggestuscities.com/1920

density is not really a challenge, it's just a question of city laws and zoning.

if you allow 5-6 story apartment buildings and eliminate onerous process and requirements (like parking minimums, setbacks, design reviews, "environmental" reviews, etc etc.) then you will see these neighborhoods being built.

There's a point at which it's pointless to build single family homes. This [0] for example.

All the space between the houses is basically wasted. Much better to build townhouses and start putting the garages underground/on the side of the houses.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TvqhU0a2H_Uta3-qXBVmgKOqask=...

The problem with townhouses is there is always someone who won't let you do something you want to do.

That's more of a problem with HOAs than with townhouses. You don't have to have an HOA to have townhouses and detached houses sometimes have HOAs.

I have a non-HOA townhouse, and there's basically nothing I can't do with it that I could do with a detached house short of knocking down one of the side walls.

This one is easy: people like the idea of this but still want a 4x3 300 square meter house on a quarter acre block. Or in the US is often an acre lot within a city, which is crazy to me.

And this just doesn’t scale. This is why communities are completely car dependent.

Singapore is mentioned in this article but guess what? Living is much denser in Singapore. Obviously they’re constrained by geography. But it get a lot of benefit from this.

Where space isn’t an issue people in the US and Australia at least have consistently chosen space and car dependence over convenience.

Be fair: people don't get a fair choice to anything else. Every try to rent in a dense neighborhood? Biggest you can get is a 3 bedroom apartment, which is enough for the poor, but not for anyone with a bit more money. If you are never home anyway, and don't have kids it works, but once you want a family you will want more space if you can afford it. In Europe larger apartments are available (and at a reasonable cost).

Every try to get around in the US? With higher speed roads everywhere, and strict zoning ensuring nothing is in walking distance you have to drive everywhere, so you need space for your car.

Everybody wants it all: 100 acres, and walk to everything. That isn't possible for many people (a super rich person could perhaps pull it off, but only one per city as a second trying would make even the most dense downtown too sparse). When the above factors eliminate the city as a reasonable compromise, then it is no wonder people go the other way. If I have to drive everywhere I may as well drive a bit father and get more land.

NYC is the only place in the US that can honestly claim any sort of exception to the above, and they are not doing much to expand the part of the city with this claim (at their costs to build transit it would be stupid of them). Other cities try and have some small areas, but overall the city doesn't really leave anyone a serious alternative for those who aren't trying to make a statement.

While expensive, though cheaper than NYC, Seattle and Portland can claim walkability too. Portland has the better public transit in the city and from suburbs in, Seattle has much more going on though, between the two.

But I also think, most people really just dont like living in a downtown. Yes, there are plenty that do. But not everyone. It's really weird to keep pushing this idea that if you dont want to live in a dense area, there's something wrong with you.

You make a lot of sacrifices living downtown, some you don't notice until living there for a while and it wears on you. It can range from annoying to legitimately toxic to live in certain apartment complexes. After a while you start wishing you had more separation from your neighbor blasting music, your other neighbor's screaming kids, the teenagers smoking weed and leaving trash in the stairwell, the people airbnbing and drinking all day in the pool between kids taking cannonballs, or the homeless encampment outside the door that makes noise, starts fires, and raids the gated garage regularly for bikes, despite the surveillance cameras. Maybe those apartment walls start feeling very tiny and claustrophobic when you have a partner or children in there with you, all working from home. Maybe you wish it didn't take you 15 minutes to walk from your door to the first patch of grass where your dog can piss. Or you wish the bus didn't have to run in city traffic and take an hour and show up late, or that you could park closer than a 10-30 minute walk to your door.

As much as we say how beneficial urban living is, the built urban environment we've crafted is toxic. Apartments are built thinwalled, small and cheap to cater to 22 year olds with an offer from a salary job and no one else. Cars are given the priority over transit, and suburban commuters are given priority over local resident car owners who might have to spend 30+ minutes after work hunting for parking in their neighborhood. The only new parkland you see in the 21st century seem to be a handful of grossly expensive freeway caps, or pocket parks, which pale in comparison to park development in the 19th century. Cities with good parkland are riding on the coattails of their better thinking 19-20th century planners. Schools are underfunded and charters loot the public school purse. Homelessness, crime, and the mental health crisis on our streets are not being addressed at any level of government and there is no signal that these things will be addressed anytime soon, since there has been zero plan of any kind. And on top of it all, few get jobs in cities that make any of this city life actually affordable.

Once you get past the age where living in cheap uber distance of the bars matters, cities can be a legitimate drag due to how they've been designed over the past 100 years.

Damn, you hit the nail on the head. I grew up in a rural area of florida. I competed in a business competition thing in high school that sent me and other classmates to Cincinnati. My first "big city" experience. We were all like, "Whoa!" The first few days. After day four or five, we were all complaining about missing trees. In my 20s, traveled, lived a few big cities, Seattle and Portland being the prominent ones. Yea, outside the cities it's nice. But the city itself, concrete, asphalt, homeless, random assholes just being assholes... it gets boring as you get older. Too much of the actual living experience is peacock posturing. Why live in the downtown to escape to nature through a shitty commute? I find it better to live on the cusp and visit a small city if I need to, escaping everyday into a tree infested woodland a small walk away.

Sure, theres probably a better city planning philosophy that can address this, but the feasibility is probably remote. Not just economically, but by discipline. After 2 or 3 decades, there's barely any of the old guard that gave a shit about the new great plan. They're going to do their own thing for their own prestige or benefits. Shitting on the original plan. That's reality. So we have the system we have. Some want dense urban environments, some dont. Those that do want it, paint and tidy up your own home your own way. I dont care. But dont come to my side and demand I adopt all your ideas because trees are scary and need to be chopped down for a starbucks with apartments.

I like visiting cities but I almost certainly wouldn't want to live in one long-term.

For example, I really like visiting NYC but when I lived in Manhattan one summer as an intern in grad school (admittedly as a poor student and in a considerably different 1980s NYC), I was pretty much non-stop pestering friends in Connecticut and New Jersey to come out and visit on the weekends because the city was totally getting to me.

We also support that less dense living through subsidies and regulation. Without the subsidies and regulation, it may be that people would choose differently.

Part of the problem is that some of those subsidies are invisible to the average person. It's not a line item on their bills; it's more subtle. For example, the infrastructure required to service low-density settlements:

https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-h...

If a drive down a highway cost as much as a train ticket, I think US cities would indeed be very different. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/10/think-buses-an...

I'm definitely a city person, and there have been some well-meaning comments from non-city people wondering why people like me are opposed to their lifestyle. I don't mind people choosing to live in the suburbs or rural areas, I just want them to pay for the giant ugly highway that lifestyle requires. I want my taxes to go to city parks and schools and streetcars.

Side note - I am aware that state and federal DOT funds most highways, but the city has to pay for the induced demand for car infrastructure that those highways create downtown. On the flip side, the state and federal DOT contribute minimally to the cost of me taking the subway.

It's hard to say what people actually prefer when the laws often constrain what may be built. For example, the building I live in could not be rebuilt without zoning variances today. It has no off-street parking, but if it were a new building, it would require a parking space for each apartment. The building is quite close to the edges of the property, and if it were a new building, it would need larger setbacks that are likely impossible to achieve. This is the norm in my dense, highly-desirable neighbourhood, where tiny flats are expensive. If someone wanted a large, detached house and yard, there is plenty of that available not far outside of the city at more reasonable prices. People pay the premium to live here precisely because they care about being close to things more than they care about having space.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/11/4/the-myth-of-re...

Indeed. Singapore does a very good job with the limited land it has. But nobody but the ultra-wealthy live in "landed home". It's a 700 sq ft 2 bedroom apartment for a family of 5 in a housing block with 600 other units. That's the typical middle class housing. Not sure that would fly in most Western countries.

The funny part is having a big home on it's own land somewhere away from all the people is seen as luxury by quite a few. Basically suburbs.

Detroit's mayor has embraced the idea of 20 minute neighborhoods. One of the advantages Detroit has is that so much must be built back why not do it intelligently? Since 2016 Detroit has created several twenty minute neighborhoods. Some of it has involved walkways that connected smaller neighborhoods into a single cohesive neighborhood.

One of the biggest problems is finding people to open supermarkets. There's a single Whole Foods for all of Detroit. So they provided financial incentives, the big chains swooped in and built markets on eight mile which is at the city's edge. Those supermarkets serve the suburbs more than residents of Detroit. That doesn't help people in the majority of the city.

https://detroit.curbed.com/2016/6/15/11946166/mayor-detroit-...

I'm presently in a 20 min neighborhood in Europe. You know how long people have been here? Since before the Romans. How long have cities* been in Australia? Couple of hundred years? Maybe that's really what this is all about. The train lines run into the cities on centuries-old routes, lifestyles have been built up for eons. The 'New world' has understandably got growing pains.

* my first edit said 'people', not cool. Now I'm curious about what kind of cities the Aborigines had.

Over 50,000 years... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Australians

Ah I can't believe I said that. Apologies, thanks for calling me out

People love the idea like they love the idea of getting in shape or learning a new skill. The vast majority who love the idea hate the slightest inconvenience and effort required. You'll get excuses by the bucketload why it just won't work for them.

People say one thing and do the opposite. It's just the way of the world.

I found that living where there is a non-car option increased my physical fitness. Instead of knowing I should exercise but making an excuse I just walked to the bus stop every day. This was just a couple blocks needed to get to the offices, but a lot more walking than I'd do before because it no longer was something special to do it.

Too bad I've been transferred to a different office now, one with not transit and nothing in walking distances.

From a very young age I made the decision to never drive. No clue why but I was just like “this seems dumb” and went with it.

Now I’m nearly 40 and the positives have definitely outweighed the negatives. For example, I’ve never had a commute longer than 20 minutes by bicycle.

Honestly one of the only good decisions I’ve ever made.

Living in the center of a big European city, this sounds like normal.

I think it is normal in big cities - the problem is people want this in suburbs as well, which often lack the density to support the idea.

They don't lack the density, they just shifted how these needs are met. In Europe, you can have a teensy town of 2000 people and a cafe and bar and all your shops in walking distance still. In the U.S., this used to be the case until the 1950s or so, when automobiles made it possible to develop larger, regional stores that service a number of towns for all their needs and could dominate over the competition (Walmart today is what used to be a dozen separate services in one hulking brick and mortar).

I wonder how this relates to the "15 minute city" concept discussed in (at least) many European cities like Paris: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201214-how-15-minute-...

The concepts seem _very_ close, yet there is no reference in the article. Shouldn't these agents align globally, or am I missing some significant differences?

They are generally the same thing, with flexibility for local conditions and preferences.

In my opinion, the most compelling expression of the idea is found in the work of New Urbanist architect and planner Leon Krier.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Krier

Merely scrolling through the Google image search results for Krier will provide an excellent introduction, as the concepts are so user-friendly. These are the neighborhoods I’ve always looked for, and there are some.

We expect a much stronger focus at the neighbourhood level will deliver very high social, environmental and economic returns from small outlays. But, for this to be achieved, much greater urgency is needed.

This strikes me as a "pushing a boulder uphill" approach and that tends to do poorly. A "water runs downhill, so let's try to be downhill" approach is vastly better.

Instead of arguing that "We need more bus service and it's a pittance compared to trains" make a stronger case. A budgetary argument of that sort is a pretty weak argument. It's not compelling. It's essentially manipulative and it tends to not work.

Instead of decrying the urgency of the case, give people easy steps to take in the here and now. Tell individuals what they can do as individuals to participate in the growth of 20-minute neighborhoods. Tell businesses what they can do.

The article indicates that the suburbs in question are already densifying and then follows up with a defeatist attitude along the lines of "...but we are still so very, very far away from what needs to happen, boo hoo hoo!" instead of saying "This is already happening to some degree and here are some easy steps to take to help reach the critical tipping point and make this happen!"

The writing is not that compelling. The approach to the problem space is not that compelling. The arguments aren't that strong.

A better approach would be to profile cities and neighborhoods that have achieved this, even if it was a long time ago. What were the ingredients? How can you add just a little something to existing infrastructure to make this pop?

This isn't hard. You just need to give people the answers they already mostly want. You need a recipe for how to make this happen and then a lot of people will be all over it like gang busters.

If people are failing to make it happen, it's because they don't have the information or mental models or solutions they need. If you give them that, a lot of people will run with this.

You really can't add little things to existing infrastructure because you can't smoosh buildings closer. People want 3000 sq ft homes on an acre of land on a quiet street and to drive to their shopping and to drive to their walmart, and no bus service can service a neighborhood like this because either the stops are so far apart it's a 5 minute walk to each one, or it stops so frequently that it takes an hour to get across town, or a compromise of both, leading situations where driving is nicer than taking the bus. And even then, a bus service is not going to reach everywhere you want to go, because house-to-house travel is the absolute longest possible. Even on a decent feeder system, going from the suburbs to a normal part of the city takes forty-five minutes to get into the metro because of all the parking lots, for all the cars, that people own, because the bus service takes too long to get anywhere. The only way to start is to build a dense neighborhood where people can live and work within it, as a new neighborhood, with collective parking and minimal concessions to car traffic. It has to work as a system, or it doesn't work at all.

Before life got in the way, I wanted to be an urban planner. There are always relatively small projects you can do to improve walkability, encourage use of bicycles, etc.

The reality is "planned neighborhoods" of the sort you are talking about typically fail. That's not how good neighborhoods come into being.

Good neighborhoods grow organically out of good policies that foster such neighborhoods and they evolve over time.

Jane Jacobs said something about the big developments that get all built in one go along the lines of "It was always dead, but no one noticed until the body began to smell."

Yes, it has to work as a system. No, it doesn't need to get "born" all at once, like a human child or something.

The book "How buildings learn" brilliantly documents that wonderful old buildings are typically wonderful precisely because they are old and that means they've had time to adapt and evolve. They weren't usually brilliantly designed from the get go. They had a lot of wonderful touches added to them over time in most cases.

This tends to also be true at the larger scale of neighborhoods and cities.

20 minute walk is big difference than a 20 minute cycle. Almost every typical American neighborhood is 20 minute cycle-able. Very few do it though

You are neglecting the part where major roads in the suburbs are aggressively unsafe if you are on foot or on a bicycle. There are places that are theoretically ten minutes away from me that require biking along the edge of a four-lane street with no side parking, no bike lanes, and no sidewalks, and a constant stream of cars to fight with. Biking or walking through that shit is super dangerous; I stay in the parts of the city that have roads that have some hope of the car-drivers acknowledging that the road belongs to cyclists, too.

I think college campuses are great examples of 20-minute neighborhoods.

i commented about this subject yesterday, i don't think it's a bad idea, but i personally can't imagine living without a car. It wasn't a popular opinion but i still stand by it. Maybe i'm just afraid of change, but i hate the thought of having to rely on public transport. tfl in my experience is a slow, noisy uncomfortable nightmare.

Anecdotally, i remember seeing a prediction from the 1950's about mile high skyscrapers containing fully contained "cities". I'm not sure what happened to those..

The promise of a 20-minute neighborhood is not trading 20 minutes stuck in traffic in your car for 20 minutes stuck on a crowded train. The promise is that most everyday needs can be met within the radius of 20 minutes of "active transport" like walking, cycling, or scootering. Frequent public transport service just further extends that radius.

How such an arrangement would work in London, for example, is beyond my comprehension.

I'm not sure what you mean? London is one of the places I can readily imagine this existing.

Where I live in Seattle, an area that isn't even in the downtown or Capitol Hill core, I am a maximum of 15-minute walk from two parks, a library, three shopping areas, two grocery stores, health care offices, and a major transit center. At the transit center, two bus routes that go to different parts of the city (an important thing, since two bus routes going to roughly the same place are basically the same bus) arrive every 12-15 minutes virtually the entire calendar day.

Does that not sound like something that many parts of London already have?

Not that i'm aware. Many shops i need are in large, industrial areas, far away by foot. And 20 minute walks everywhere simply eats up my day. I hate using the buses, driving is far, far easier and faster.

Wait, what part of London are you from?

I lived there for a decade and only knew a single person who had a car (because they had to commute out west towards Slough).

Driving in London does not make any sense, it's expensive (congestion charge, parking), slow and impractical. Especially when London is made up of what is basically dozens of villages, all with their own high street.

I lived in many different parts of London and never had to walk more than 15-20 minutes to get anything I ever needed. Rarely I'd have to hop on the tube to get something specialised (which would probably not even be available outside of a large city like London).

What part of Seattle are you in? I could imagine this maybe in the Roosevelent/Ravenna area, or perhaps near Northgate/Greenwood?

Think “bridge is out.”

I don't think this is about 'no one should have cars', but that no one in the city should NEED a car to get to 95% of their long tail of errands. I pay a premium in my area right now to live walking distance to shops, restaurants and a grocery store even though I still have to drive to work every day. That proximity is valuable even if it doesn't mean I don't need a car at all.

Honestly I think America's lack of walkability is a major contributor to our health crisis. Even if you still drive every day, walking to dinner or the grocery store would have a hugely positive impact on people's health in the long term.

I don't think it's possible to be both dense enough to sustain local stores that can be walking distance and at the same time have the infrastructure that allows everyone to have a car. My evidence is that no such place exists, and also, simply the amount of space that car related infrastructure takes such as roads and parking.

Also, once people have access to a car, they're going to use it to shop at big box stores to save on price, starving the local smaller stores of business.

What happened to those is people want to have the flexibility to move around independently of their jobs. You can still see those in Montreal -- one tower my friend lives in has offices on the middle twenty floors, grocery and shopping on the bottom three, parking in the five basement floors, and the top twenty floors are for residential (with a restaurant on the top two, because imagine the view!). It's not a bad place to live and work, but, he just happens to not work there -- his workplace is a tower three blocks away.

You have to do it, not imagine it. I didn't imagine I'd sell my car when I moved to my current house. But seeing the bus every day while I drove for a few months convinced me I ought to at least try it - two months later I sold the car that I hadn't used in a month.

Sadly I have to move.

A WIP tool, browser or offline, to evaluate what amenities are within a 15m walk or bike ride: https://a-b-street.github.io/docs/side_projects/fifteen_min....

And a whimsical arcade game based on the concept of Santa delivering presents, but having to stop by a (hopefully nearby) cafe to fuel up once in a while: santa.abstreet.org

It sounds like all this needs is faster transportation. I remember when I first got a motorcycle in SF I could get everywhere so much faster and I enjoyed the city so much more. My commute went from 45 minutes to 20 minutes. I know motorcycles are not for everyone, but I think low powered electric scooters could be a better solution over buses. Maybe I'm just bitter from the 38 in SF.

I think faster is not the answer, as Ivan Illich theorised it, speed is part of the issue.

"Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few."

Speed should be on an automated train of some sort. Humans are not capable of controlling a vehicle going faster than they can run. We fake it all the time, but if you are honest you will realize they are mostly get lucky and are not safe.

Go to South East Asia. They are scooter masters. The roads there are so efficient at moving people. American roads are congested with unnecessarily large vehicles in cities. Personal scooters are a decentralized transportation solution that works very well in Asia.

I've been there, (India), there are cars everywhere too, though scooters are common.

Scooters are not safe. They are everywhere, just like cars are everywhere in the US. That doesn't make either safe. They allow for more crowding than we get in the US, but they are not great transit in general.

Buffalo is a 20 minute city, I believe if you include it in the list of major US cities it has the shortest commute.

It's thought that all the infrastructure planning that happened back when the city was growing in population in the 1950's and 60's is helping keep commute times down now that the population is much lower. Basically infrastructure planned for many millions of people but has a population of 800k.

Super interesting read. Think that a fair amount of inspiration can be taken from dense university and college campuses that essentially can be dubbed as sub-30 minute neighborhoods.

Looking at UBC in Vancouver, B.C. is a solid example, it is outside of the heart of Vancouver on the Western shore, yet has created a neighborhood that could be considered a 15-minute neighborhood.

This is awesome, I love the idea of a 20 minute max commute time for anything important.

>This means ensuring minimum density levels of around 25-30 dwellings per hectare

But does this mean that its all apartment blocks? I want a yard and some space between me and my neighbors, I really don't want a shared wall or tiny spaces like in Europe or Asia.

But does this mean that its all apartment blocks?

No, it doesn't.

It means you need some apartments or similar in the mix, but it's really not that high a density level.

These links might help you get a better idea of what we are talking about:

https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatibl...

https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

30 dwellings per hectare comes down to 3230 ft2 (333 m2) per dwelling. That's certainly enough for a free standing house with a yard. Your neighbors wouldn't be far though, but that's basically the point.

Edit: I forgot to consider public spaces: sidewalks, roads, greens. So no, it probably can't be all free standing houses.

It can be, because you don't have to limit yourself to one story. If you are willing to go to 5 floors you can get a lot of space, and it is only slightly more expressive than the same usable space all on one level (stairways don't count as usable space). Though if you can go up to 5 floors that allows a lot more space than most people have.

I used 5 floors as the limit because I've been told above that you need more expensive construction to support the building - consult a real engineer to verify.

20-min? Forget about it. Five minutes is the maximum.

If you have to travel twenty minutes, you might as well order it.

Edit: I'd only want to walk 3 mins I think, not 5.

Just reading the title, I thought of a new social app where people create neighborhood groups with random people/friends of friends with similar interests that expire after 20 minutes. Might be a cool idea.

Love the idea but people will never support it in the Bay Area besides maybe parts of San Francisco and Oakland

What towns like this exist in U.S? I desire something like this.

Boston has some neighborhoods like this. They are very expensive.

Why don't like about this concept is how it forces a certain "gettoisation" of the neighborhoods.

It certainly doesn’t in Montreal. We have tons of neighbourhoods like this.

I can't really see that - what are you thinking?

Do you mean that the neighborhood becomes isolated from other neighborhoods, or that poor people move in, or what?

The author and I must have wildly different definitions of "outer suburb" if thirty dwellings per hectare seems like a reasonable density. Most areas that I'd consider a suburb have a density about one tenth of that. They're still twenty minute cities, but that's because 95% of the adult residents own a car.

> They're still twenty minute cities, but that's because 95% of the adult residents own a car.

The '20 minute city' was always about 20 minutes by walking, not car. The whole thing is exactly about not needing cars

The viking guy that 'stormed' the capital created quite a presentation on this very idea. https://rumble.com/vcc263-the-new-heaven-on-earth.html

I think his idea is a little bit different

Yes. He's a dreamer.

Sacred dimensional energies and Tesla coils.

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