Seems like parking is a side effect for people's preference for larger houses and yards. Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically.
The issue with suburbia is the framework, much more than the housing types. The battle over housing types is more about within existing city grid systems, doing some piecemeal replacements of single-family houses to duplexes, triplexes, and apartment buildings. Suburbia produces multifamily housing easily enough - not that much objection to new condo/townhouse subdivisions. We just don't celebrate that much, because they are still ultimately subdivisions.
Completely unnecessary. Want a front yard, back yard, and garage (attached to a laneway)? Plenty of that was build pre-WW2:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0&t=1m8s
The Oh the Urbanity channel has a video on the (mistaken) idea that "urban living" = Manhattan / Hong Kong apartment blocks:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmz-fgp24E
Examples (Streetview):
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/125+Hampton+Ave,+Toronto,+...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/70+Jackman+Ave+Toronto,+ON
See also:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ&t=9m28s
Fifteen minutes pedalling in one direction is downtown, fifteen minutes in the other is farm land.
All the streets in question have big(er) and small(er) houses, with both semi- and fully-detached houses. Some areas have more of some kind than another.
Next time I'll re-arrange the order of the links so that the big(er) stuff is first:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...
There are two subways stations (Keele, Dundas West) with-in 2km of that location. You can have sizeable fully-detached houses at densities that support walking distances of various amenities and mass transit.
The idea that urban living necessitates "smaller houses and share walls" is a red herring as demonstrated by a whole bunch of housing stock built pre-WW2.
EDIT: I just did some quick Google Maps measuring on that 159 Geoffrey St, I estimated about 60x20 floor plate, maybe less. Lose some space from the stairs, two mostly full floors and maybe a finished attic, probably close to that 2,500ish sqft.
* https://juliekinnear.com/toronto-houses/51-geoffrey-street/
Currently for sale in the same area:
* https://www.properly.ca/buy/home/view/JHfk2xo4TU6BZrfBk2c3gw...
Notice the 'high' prices: this is because this neighbourhood is in high demand because urban living seems to be cool again 'with the kids'. But back in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s the prices were much, much lower because all the 'cool kids' (WASPs) were flocking to the then-new suburbs and leaving the dirty city for the immigrants (Poles in the case of Roncesvalles; Little Portugal is the next area over, and Little Italy next to that). Since the late-1990s urban living started becoming cool again. Of course such urban/walkable neighbourhoods aren't built any more, so a finite resource gets its price bidded up.
Nice to live in a world where a $2M house is a normal home price. I definitely don't live anywhere near that. So for me to live in that kind of an area, I'd probably need...a much smaller house and probably a shared wall.
Also, just curious, what does a 2,700sqft single family house in London go for? Or Copenhagen? Or other very walkable European cities? Super cheap because they're not the US I presume?
This might be one of those cases where random links were copy pasted without consideration for the actual claims.
Or it could be because the same silly tropes about urban living are trotted out regularly (which is why Oh the Urbanity made their video) and some of us counter them with the same silly replies we've posted numerous times before.
There are a number of examples in the posted links that are not "smaller houses and share walls", and I could find more if I didn't value my time. I could also find a whole bunch of "smaller houses and share walls" in suburbans developments in my area to show that "smaller houses and share walls" is not exclusive to (so-called) urban living; see for example "Why American Yards Are Shrinking":
* https://cheddar.com/media/why-american-yards-are-shrinking
Small and big things are found in both cities and suburbs.
> * https://cheddar.com/media/why-american-yards-are-shrinking
> Small and big things are found in both cities and suburbs.
This seems like a non-sequitur, how does this relate at all to my comment?
What doesn't make sense though is driving in urban environments, especially single-occupant vehicles that make up the vast majority of motor traffic in major cities. Keep the suburbs. But I think it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in for all but the folks who need it (e.g., people with mobility issues, or families with small children). If you're able-bodied in an urban environment, you should be the last person to be driving around regularly.
This is the wrong approach. Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever. If you want people to use transit instead, then improve it until it's a better option than driving is today.
They recently added a pedestrian island in the road near where I live. It is not unnoticeable. With paint lines, high reflective markings, and literally a concrete wall.
Literally on day 1, a car made an illegal left turn and hit the clearly marked island at 20mph faster than the speed limit. It jumped the 3 foot high barrier, but the pedestrian on that island was saved.
Make car life in cities miserable.
Otherwise, what you're describing sounds like someone looked at this well-circulated cartoon and said "hey that's a great idea! Just raise the planks by 15 feet!" https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestria...
Would you say they encourage a vibrant street culture of cafes and shops?
The ones I've seen, especially in Berlin and İzmir, are loud and a hassle to cross. That's because walkways and bikeways over multi-lane roads are car infrastructure. They are there to prioritize high-speed automobile traffic with few interruptions. I'm happy for the one going up at my gym, but I know it's there to ensure bike/ped political forces can't endanger the trunk road underneath. True pedestrian infrastructure there would involve a major speed and size downgrade to the road, which is unacceptable, thus the political defensive move to pay out the nose for something car advocates would never normally fund.
Pushing a stroller for the last few years, plus spraining my ankle a few weeks ago has given me a little taste of what trying to use sidewalks is like for people with even tighter mobility constraints, and this in an area that is relatively accessible without a car.
Make life in cities miserable, is more accurate. The reason is that transit is worse than cars always. If you make travel in cars worse, then all you did is make life worse for everyone.
And in reality it simply means that fewer people go there, because going there is miserable. The city starts converting to low income because anyone with income goes elsewhere.
As long as 'always' is restricted to a certain lifestyle and worldview, and doesn't take into account the excellent transit systems that exist around the world.
> And in reality it simply means that fewer people go there, because going there is miserable. The city starts converting to low income because anyone with income goes elsewhere.
That's incredibly naive, and I think a lot of European cities are direct counter examples to this. It often makes things a lot less miserable for the people who actually live in the denser urban areas that were previously overrun with cars.
Why not?
All of this will make driving less pleasant and convenient, the cost of making walking safer and easier. As it is driving is "artificially" easy, the consequence of decades of it being prioritized very highly. It needs to come down somewhat.
I've never seen an urban center where "free and cheap parking is widely available", or one with a speed limit above 25.
Another factor is that urban speed limits vary widely in how much they are actually limits. Research is clear on the fact that road design has at least as strong an influence on driver behavior as posted limits do. Without rigorous enforcement & given the wide streets common in these places, driver behavior tends towards interpreting the limit as the minimum speed they are entitled to, rather than the maximum to be attained only when safe.
And finally neither I nor anyone else here know what you've seen so that's a very silly limit to place on the conversation.
But that’s exactly what it means. It’s not available to people. Someone else already parked there.
Have you tried to park on the street in NYC?
Parking is most certainly not widely available. If spots exist but all of them are always taken, that means zero availability.
If you go to a restaurant with 100 tables, all of them full and a 2 hour waiting list, would you tell a friend on the phone "Yes they have lots of tables available"?
Highly efficient uses of space, like dedicated bus lanes, directly transfer road space from cars to improve transit. This necessarily makes driving "worse" in the short term, until enough marginal drivers shift to the now-improved busses, leaving the car lanes quicker and less congested.
In most cities, cars are physically obstructing better transit, which makes traffic worse for everyone involved.
Why not?
>Improvement to public transport is the only win-win policy measure in the diagram. As a matter of fact, all policies that reduce the need for an automobile to access jobs and services by improving the effectiveness of other modes are generally seen as contributing to alleviating social exclusion, insofar as they improve the situation of households without a car (Shaw and Farrington, 2003, p.109). They should have a positive impact on environmental sustainability as well, insofar as they encourage a modal shift from the private car to less polluting means of transport. However, transport researchers generally agree that “pull” measures that encourage voluntary reductions of car use – or “carrots” – are unlikely to effectively bring about change at an adequate scale and speed (Huby and Burkitt, 2000, p.390); therefore it is generally pointed out that there is a need for complementary “push” measures, which aim to reduce car use in a more direct and coercive manner (“sticks”).
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Giulio-Mattioli-2/publi...
Or see this thread: See https://twitter.com/giulio_mattioli/status/16250810050893660...
Making driving worse is good, actually.
Or...it requires that governments stop prioritising car-based travel over all others, i.e. they should provide carrots for all forms of transport in equal measure, according to the long-term costs of providing it. I live in a area with far better cycling/walking/PT infrastructure than probably most suburbs in my country, yet I'm still regularly struck by the degree to which infrastructure dedicated to moving people around in private automobiles takes up far more space and taxpayer budget than all the others combined.
I honestly don't know why anyone would ever want to do that. To me, it's only done out of necessity, and is a driving force in motivating people to get the hell out of that situation asap.
But the cool thing is, some people can choose that, if that's what they desire, even though I can't understand why.
At most, what I've seen is people saying we should not be forced to build _only_ this type of dwelling in a given place.
Life naturally fills the ecosystem it finds itself in to carrying capacity. The sustainable limitations here are financial, ecological, and regulatory. I think we're hitting up against those constraints right now. Unless they want to pay us more money, we're going to have to sacrifice the environment or car centric regulations to continue growing. If we decide to just stop growing, then we either need changes in regulations to further disincentivize growth or allow a ton of suffering to happen.
Why?
Maintenance was outsourced, and at a lower price than I could pay for myself (100 households at once get a good group buy price!)
Everything on the exterior of my house was taken care of.
The complex has 2 shared green spaces, one for dogs, one for people. The large green space for people is bigger than the yard in my current single family home. All year round weatherproof commercial yard furniture was already on the property.
Every year my windows got cleaned, the deck power washed. Landscaping was professionally handled, trees trimmed, pests removed, all w/o me having to worry about any of it.
I'd buy another unit in complex with that design again w/o issue or hesitation.
With proper construction techniques (which sadly that complex didn't have), sound is not an issue. Sound dampening is a solved problem, and I've lived in other complexes that had the same sound leakage from connected neighbors and I have from my neighbors right now in the house on the lots around me.
The next thing you know you've been trying to get the broken communal door/gate/sewer/extractor fan/lights/electric/gas/whatever fixed for months if not years and no one at the management company is even returning calls, and you sure as hell can't fix it yourself since you are not legally allowed to do it (and you can guarantee that if you were to do something yourself the dormant management company would suddenly spring to life and sue you to hell and back). Then next summer they hike the management and maintenance prices 500% and there is fuck all you can do apart from suck it up because now you can't sell because no one wants to pay the high fee, and you can't not pay it as you'll be taken to court for non-payment of contract within days (and P.S. their contract says they can hike the prices as they please because wow look at that cool yard for dogs! I totally forgot to read the entire contract.whatevs.)
TL;Dr it is great while it is all working fine. IME after a few years once the initial glean and glow has worn off and things start to naturally wear out and break, it will go to shit. It will start small with broken lawn furniture that doesn't get replaced, then before you know it the roof is leaking and there is nothing you can do apart from hope the people you pay to look after the place but are not responding to emails or calls actually do something.
But hey good luck with your place anyway.
HOAs are member voted, it is a thankless job and improving things is as simple as running for the board, every time someone has wanted to take over they have been welcomed on. The HOA there has been going strong for almost 25 years, doing a great job managing the place.
The HOA did indeed fire their previous management company for incompetence, since the complex is in a large metro area, there is no shortage of competition in that field.
Edit: Oh and it isn't like people I hire myself are super reliable! I've had vendors working on my house ghost me, sometimes in the middle of a job. And there is also the cost of my time in learning about different fields (e.g. yard irrigation), collecting multiple quotes, and trying to do background checks to ensure the people giving the quotes do good work.
Unless it's just the knowledge that there's people on the other side of the wall bothers you, but that seems silly.
Doing either of those things makes your standard of living worse.
I live in a city, share walls, and am less than a 10 minute walk from my office. My coworkers come in early and leave work late to avoid traffic. I'm home before they can get their car out of the parking garage and I can easily go home for lunch. I think my standard of living is therefore higher than someone who must drive to work.
If all the jobs were distributed widely across a place that was pleasant to live, I’m not sure we would be talking too much about all this.
I do agree, though, that money will make a person do crazy things.
Not at all. New construction in NYC has excellent soundproofing. Even that is actually more a side-effect of changes to fire codes than a specific demand for soundproofing - buildings constructed with soundproofing as a specific goal can be even more insulated.
If you're in one of those buildings, it's actually quite difficult to hear your neighbors during any normal activity.
Maybe if it was 4 inches of solid lead and even then particularly sensitive people might still feel a normal sized subwoofer placed against the wall on the opposite side.
I kind of like the idea of a city community with nice little shops close by, but every city I’ve been in has had too much crime, congestion, and noise to make it livable for someone who likes quiet and solitude.