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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> It's illegal to build a walkable neighborhood in most of the country.

What laws make it illegal to have walkable neighborhoods in the US?

Mostly a combination of single-family zoning (illegal to build a duplex, let alone an apartment/condo building, in huge areas of many cities), minimum square footage requirements for new buildings and lots, and parking minimums (new development, often including renovations of existing buildings, required to have X number of parking spaces per Y residents/occupants).

I might be wrong but the OP might be referring to ordinances forbidding the building of dense housing. Walkable neighborhoods require a certain level of density to be feasible (e.g. grocery store needs X potential customers within a ten minute walk or it's not going to be profitable) and a lot of towns disallow the building of apartment buildings instead of detached homes.

The grocery store doesn't have to have every customer walk to it for the homes around it to have people walk to it. There are plenty of homes near good shopping, schools and other services. If that's important to you then you can buy a home near them. Having dense housing doesn't mean anything about walkability. After all, you aren't walking to all of the other homes.

> The grocery store doesn't have to have every customer walk to it

Depends how much space you’re dedicating to car parking. Once the grocery store has a giant parking lot it’s swallowed up a lot of land that could have been housing.

The more the store depends on car traffic the bigger the parking lot. The bigger the parking lot the less housing it’ll have in proximity, the longer everyone will have to walk. A successful walkable neighborhood has to balance allocated space with thought.

No, it doesn't really matter. You personally don't need everyone in your neighborhood to walk. Buy a home that is close and you have a walkable home. There are plenty to choose from. Someone lives close to the stores.

> Buy a home that is close and you have a walkable home.

That is not a walkable neighborhood. When people are talking about this stuff they're talking about an actual defined concept:

https://www.walkscore.com/walkable-neighborhoods.shtml

A home next to a strip mall might be close to a grocery store, it is not a walkable neighborhood.

Do you buy a neighborhood? You need a home that is walkable. Your neighbors will figure out what they need on their own.

That isn’t how neighborhoods work? The entire point of a neighborhood is that it’s a community with shared goals. If everyone wants to work out their own goals they live rurally.

Zoning laws.

Zoning laws

zoning laws

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