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Comment by awillen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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

"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).

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.

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.

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