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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

But this isn't how the world works. It's not Simcity where you lay down neat grids of zones and the dutiful citizens follow your orders. People will want to take advantage of cheap(er) land alongside your "road" so that they can own a house while still having reasonable access to the "street". And boom now you have a stroad.

Attempting to use zoning to stop that runs into the problem that by and large people don't want to live in dense areas. Most of them want the cheap home in the burbs. And they'll vote for those that give it to them.

This is the root problem with Strongtowns and their ilk. They love to navel gaze and contemplate the platonic ideal of how a city should be laid out. But for the most part fail to provide a viable option that people can and will choose.

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What.

No, strong towns "and their ilk" (biased much?) provide an unlimited supply of solutions to a variety of problems. If you're not seeing them it's because you don't want to see them.

There isn't a "now the city is better" red button you can hit. It takes a lot of effort to get there. One of the efforts is in fact a marketing one: you need to spread awareness of where the problems actually are and why they are a problem. Stroads are a good example; I had never realized they were a problem, but since I discovered them I've been noticing them whenever traveling and thinking a lot about the implications and how they could be redesigned in that spot.

Stroads are very difficult to find in western Europe by the way, compared to the US. In some countries they're non existent. Clearly you're mistaken about how they can and will just appear out of nowhere. Maybe things are more nuanced and complex than your three second opinion lets on.

You're wrong. People want to live in walkable cities. Property prices prove this.

And the reason people often move out with kids is that it's too expensive to own a large-enough property for most people due to the high demand for walkable places.

there's a very simple solution then. build more walkable places.

If only it were so simple. Building walkable places is illegal almost everywhere in the US due to onerous parking minimums, regulations about street design and restrictive zoning. It's still possible to build walkable places with highrises, but low-rise walkable areas like https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9181247,-87.6517955,3a,60y,7... are almost lost art in the US. There are entire major metro areas in the US with no street like this.

I wonder why nobody just changes these regulations. Sure it's difficult and you won't get a majority in most places, but I find it hard to understand why not at least some cities designate a small area as a "model community" and relax zoning and parking requirements.

This is happening to some extent (e.g. Chicago removing parking minimums near transit stations, Houston removing parking minimums in two downtown-adjacent neighborhoods) but mainly only in large cities. Parking minimums are especially onerous since they almost ensure you can only build strip malls for retail.

Exactly. And it's those policies that need to change. But because this is such a lost art, and because Americans have been raised to believe in the car-centric suburban dream, most people don't even know that this is an option. It's a policy issue, but also an awareness issue.

Walkable places are inherently more expensive because they lack economy of scale. It's why Dunkin Donuts can sell a dozen for $10 but it costs ~$20 for half a dozen at my local walkable place. Granted, there is a quality of ingredients difference but not 4x the cost.

There are plenty of Dunkin Donuts stores in walkable places. I have a Dunks across the street from my condo and another one around the corner (and several others several blocks away). (I live in this area, which is VERY walkable: https://www.google.com/maps/@41.8822495,-87.6254941,1122a,35...)

It's true there are also other, superior, options, but that's a bonus!

No, it's the suburbs that lack economy of scale. The walkable areas contribute far more per acre in taxes than the suburbs. They also require fewer resources to maintain per person because they're physically smaller. The suburbs have such a paucity of "economies of scale" that municipalities around the country have gone into debt to support them.

The reason donuts cost more at your local walkable place is because real estate prices are higher in walkable places, because walkable places are so in-demand that as a nation we've bid the prices of those places to the moon. So we ought to change our zoning rules so that the market can build more of them. That's the whole point of Strong Towns idea.

Plus the Dunkin Donuts was gifted expensive public infrastructure since, in all likelihood, they have a 10 year tax incentive that prevents them from paying almost any property taxes.

Dunkin Donuts also doesn't bake their donuts on premises (with a few exceptions). Surprise, you can get even cheaper (and shittier) donuts at the dollar store!

>No, it's the suburbs that lack economy of scale. The walkable areas contribute far more per acre in taxes than the suburbs. They also require fewer resources to maintain per person because they're physically smaller. The suburbs have such a paucity of "economies of scale" that municipalities around the country have gone into debt to support them.

Yes, Strong towns loves to say this too despite it being obviously not true.

Infrastructure stuff like roads and pipes and so on is cheap. Usually 10-15% of the budget. The real cost of government is in providing services to people. And those are invariably more expensive in the cities than the suburbs.

Show me even one city in the US that has lower taxes and spends less per Capita than the surrounding suburbs.

That's not the right metric though. Cities and suburbs are not comparable in terms of overall experience. The extra services you cite are one of the reasons why.

For one, suburbs are pretty economically difficult for low-earning households. Low earners are more likely to live in cities, therefore cities tend to have more social services.

You need to do an apples-to-apples comparison, which unfortunately is not easy.

The services (schools, police, fire) aren't better in a city. They're more expensive and usually significantly worse.

I mean City of Chicago has lower property tax rates than suburbs (due to the large amount of taxable commercial property in the city).

Tax rate is only half of the calculation so it's a meaningless number on its own. Plus, there's sales tax and other assorted fees.

At least in Illinois, valuations are determined at the county level, and the majority of sales tax is also county-level. All things being equal, more commercial property (and tourism) moves some of the burden to taxpayers outside the city. Comparing Chicago to the neighboring suburb of Oak Park, sales tax in Chicago is 10.25% vs. 10% in Oak Park, but property taxes are nearly double in Oak Park. Maybe things like rental cars or hotels are taxed less, but that's not a big impact.

Of course property tax rates are inversely correlated with property values so it's a bit tricky to compare, but the point is it's not always true that suburbs have lower taxes than the central city. Transportation costs are also typically much lower in cities (transit fares/passes are typically significantly cheaper than car ownership).

You have it completely backwards. Suburbs aren't scalable. That's why back in the 50s-70s when they were first built, they were amazing, but today, they are rife with traffic problems, noise pollution, and crumbling infrastructure.

The percentage of the population living in the suburbs is growing, not shrinking.

"O(n^2) sorting time doesn't scale." "The amount of data we are going to sort in O(n^2) is growing, not shrinking."

Notice how the second statement doesn't disprove the first.

It's illegal to build them under most zoning laws in the U.S.

Is that actually true? That's absolutely true in SF, but the Bay Area is bonkers for lots of reasons, housing prices is a well known one so I want to be careful about extrapolating from there.

It's true. The Not Just Bikes channel has a video on walkable neighborhoods in the US. They're all massively expensive because of the high quality of life.

edit: here it is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

But they choose not to. US population is roughly 1/2 suburban, 1/4 rural, and 1/4 urban. Which backs up my point.

There may be forces at work behind that other than individual home preferences.

There are entire metro areas where there are effectively zero walkable areas. People there don't have much of a choice at all!

How much of that is "choice"? People can only live in places that exist, and places that exist must be constructed in compliance with certain government standards, and the government standards for the US for the last fifty years have been all cars, all the time. In most places, it is illegal to build a house without a garage, or a bar without a parking space for every stool.

The law mandates that everyone drive everywhere whether they want to or not.

None of this is true. You can easily find dense walkable places to live. You will just pay more money for a much smaller house. Your living expenses will be higher. And you'll have to rely on public transportation which is a pain in the ass when you have small kids.

It's easy to see why people choose the suburbs.

People will continue to choose the wildly tax-subsidized option, yes.

If people in the suburbs had to pay enough property tax to recoup their share for the cost of roads, water, sewage, electric, telecoms, mail and other ancillary services to their large, non-productive plot of land, they'd likely consider other options.

Suburbs look nice in the short term, before the roads need repaving and the utilities need major overhauls; but the total lifetime cost to the public far exceeds how much tax they bring in.

Dense walkable places exist, but they are diminishing because in most places they are illegal to construct. No new walkable places have been built for nearly a half century, and many of our old ones have been bulldozed to make room for empty parking lots and jammed highways.

You are mistaken that they have a choice.

>But they choose not to. US population is roughly 1/2 suburban, 1/4 rural, and 1/4 urban. Which backs up my point.

With single-family zoning being the norm in the U.S, it would be unfair to call this a choice. The supply of other types of housing is severely constrained.

I just watched a video in response to this story that explained how zoning in North America is actually too much like SimCity, with very restrictive homogenous zoning and no mixed zoning at all. It's mixed zoning that allows people to live closer to the shops for their daily needs, and that reduces traffic.

These shops aren't on the stroad because the US is an anarchy where everything goes, they're there because it's designed that way. But the design is inefficient and dangerous.

we do have roads where we prohibit driveways onto them. They're called Interstates. somehow we don't have massive issues with people illegally building driveways onto them.

It kills me that US road planners don't even bother putting in medium-term solutions that would fix most of the issues, like a road with separated through lanes in the middle and a one-lane service road for the driveways.

Those exist in some areas of the country. Here's an example: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.5823608,-111.9504203,3a,75y,...

Lots of them in San Diego, too. Here's an example in Clairemont, which is an early post-war suburb. Note that the homes pictured are also 'missing middle' construction.

https://www.google.com/maps/@32.8276267,-117.2033566,3a,75y,...

https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

That's clearly a stroad. 1,000 feet away from where you linked to are shops and restaurants.

My problem with this is that it is the exception and not the rule. Even this is the case; that type of service road access is only on one side of the road.

This ofc doesn’t solve everything, like how crossing a super wide stroad is terrible for both cars and non-motorized users given the large number of conflict points, the long cycle times needed to move cars through fat intersections, etc.

For what it's worth, I actually lived in the pictured neighborhood, and having that simple 25-MPH max offset from the main road was so much nicer than when I lived right up next to a 35MPH road, even though the larger road was 45. It was also great to be able to walk across the street to the grocery store. The street width really wasn't an issue.

>This is the root problem with Strongtowns and their ilk. They love to navel gaze and contemplate the platonic ideal of how a city should be laid out. But for the most part fail to provide a viable option that people can and will choose.

They fail to provide a viable option because, as they point out, cities are complicated so universal prescriptions will fail. If no one in your place cares enough to come up with a local solution, then any intervention would have failed anyway, as we've seen for decades with aid work throughout the world.

Most of what they do is showing that what we have now is on a predictable, medium-term trajectory to insolvency by its fundamental financial unsound structure. Their 'ilk', so much as they have any, would be Urban3, who do GIS mapping of financial productivity within cities. So, 'navel gazing', I guess.

And yet somehow the country I live in has proper streets. I see that more often, where things are dismissed as "not viable" in the US even though they actually exist elsewhere.

You might have a parallel street immediately next to the road but separate from it. That way people or business can be next to a road but will not block traffic. It's what we often do here. Those then will be connected to the road at some point via a side street. I have never seen a multi lane road with a lot of intersections and parking space next to it, immediately adjacent to stores. We don't have 'turning lanes' either. I'm really wondering whether they are cherry picking these things for badness or whether it's really very common in the States.

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