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Comment by ayngg | Hacker News Reader

The way it is done in Hong Kong (and other Asian cities like Tokyo to an extent) feels way closer to town centers that predate cars, where there is a lot of foot traffic and walkability which imo makes such a better experience.

I just think in America it is too car centric and not dense enough to line the incentives up for it to happen here. Land is cheap enough that malls will just build outwards and create giant moats of parking lots around them to kill walkability, and public transit ridership is too low because everyone is driving cars so service can never reach the standards in Asia. Its a shame because feels so much worse than what has been achieved in Hong Kong.

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Those town centers have survived cars in many places outside North America. In Netherland it's very common to have houses above shops, and in newer developments, either parking or public transport below ground, while the ground level is mostly for pedestrians and bikes.

It's mostly North America (both US and Canada at least; no idea about Mexico) that seems to have outlawed this style of building, and enforced extremely car-dependent suburbs, big box stores in a wasteland of parking lots, and dangerous stroads to connect them. I've heard that the main thing that's driving American cities to bankruptcy is the cost of maintaining inefficient suburban infrastructure.

It's not illegal to build what you describe in the US. I can think of dozens of such developments in cities all across America. Even our most suburban cities have tons of areas where there are apartment buildings with retail on the ground floor and parking either in the center of the building, underground, or in a central garage. Have you ever visited the country? Reading blogs and internet comments is not an accurate way of determining what a country has.

There isn't a single city in the entire history of the US that has gone bankrupt because its suburban-style infrastructure was too expensive. What's driving cities to bankruptcy is pension costs; infrastructure is a tiny fraction of most cities budgets and is dwarfed by schools, police, and other services.

I've seen convincing arguments to the contrary. That most post-war suburban development was financed by debt, and long-term infrastructure maintenance was never properly accounted for, and turning out to be way too expensive.

I've also heard from too many sources that a lot of US infrastructure is crumbling. Of course it's possible that all those people are wrong and you are right. I wouldn't know.

It's not normally totally illegal, but a surprising amount of land outlaws this kind of development. As an example, 70% of land in Seattle is zoned for only single family homes.

It isn't outlawed in most places, it's just that profit-driven property developers, often building outside city limits threw up malls quickly so they could rake in the greater immediate profit from retail spaces vs housing. They'd have been permitted in most of the USA to include apartments from the start if they'd deemed it profitable enough.

I'm hardly an expert on this, but I've heard that many places in the US have quite restrictive zoning laws that don't allow mixing residential and commercial buildings, require massive parking lots, only single family homes, and lots of roads.

It's too car centric but its externality will eventually topple that.

Infrastructure spread so thin have an enormous overhead. (Roads need to be paved, pipes leak, even cabling is a problem, see the again electric grid, also how most US addresses are only served by one ISP, heating/cooling each house separately).

Also, there is no public transit in a lot of America. You drive your car to a mall that might be a good distance away in a lot of the country, so you need the vast parking areas. Or you did, before online shopping, pandemic, etc.

On "main streets" in many towns, there have been apartments above stores since the beginning of the towns, and still are in many cases. Malls came about as a result of sprawling suburbs.

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