People are happier in a walkable neighborhood: the US community that banned cars
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I am not sure the "building from scratch" approach can really move the needle in terms of livable and sustainable urban environments. Like, how many centuries before natural replacement rates would achieve a transition?
The key challenge much of the world is facing (certainly the most polluting part of the world) is to rehabilitate the vast numbers of existing housing stock, and reinvent better uses of the existing urban layouts as people are stuck with them.
An exception where such green-field ideas could have impact would be in the context of developing world urbanization (i.e., how not to do the same mistakes others did) but there other considerations (cost) enter the discussion.
Same thing applies to houses; you can't "build cheap housing" directly - you build new housing and the older housing decreases in price.
Which is why I have no problem with a brand new apartment building being built and having a luxury bent, even though it might be built on top of a walmart or something; the people living there free up space elsewhere.
Correct. Developers build to what the market wants. But that doesn't mean they build to what people want. If given total freedom, developers often chase the upscale market, rich people wanting high-priced units. That is where profit is to be made. That is what the market wants. But that is not necessarily what a city actually needs.
If you make housing construction unprofitable, then fewer people will build houses.
Also, people act like a glut of luxury housing would be a problem. It absolutely wouldn't. It would displace and therefore depress prices for midrange units. If the developers end up losing money selling their new luxury housing at a loss, then they've effectively just subsidized the US housing supply.
That's much less expensive for taxpayers than having the government subsidize + force people to build housing that sells for less than construction costs.
The one large house + not enough houses problem is due to income inequality. Making houses scarce increases the price of houses for everyone, so it exacerbates income inequality (it is hard to increase your income and educate your kids while living in a tent). Worse, most affordable housing projects that are currently being proposed deed-restrict the housing (otherwise, unless the initial purchaser is an idiot, they'd immediately sell at a large profit). That prevents poor people from profiting off of the appreciation of property in their neighborhood that and therefore increases long-term income inequality. You also get situations where the low income housing owner can't afford to use local amenities, or maintain their house (which they bought for far less than the cost of initial construction).
The second issue (hoarding of vacant houses) can be solved with a vacancy tax.
History supports both those arguments. Can you name an example of a city where supply has exceeded demand (measured in months of housing inventory on the market) for an extended period of time (multiple years, so longer than the 2008 crisis), and that also has a housing affordability and homeless crisis?
Similarly, can you cite an example of a market where housing has been freely built and sold at a profit over the long term, and that also has a housing supply problem?
Though I do propose such changes as part of my "urban planning is 100% wrong, simply replace the direction of every single cap and you will get a better result plan", this has not caught on with anybody but me.
Also, rich people still get around maximums by joining together adjacent units. For example, SF board of supervisors (think city council) member Aaron Peskin did this with two units so that he could have a bigger more luxurious living space, even though nobody else is allowed to bend the permitting rules that way. (SF has permitting rules that disallow making two units into one, but it does not have any limits on maximum unit size, as far as I can tell.)
My personal opinion is we need to get rid of the split zoning and instead have the higher density residential zones include the allowed uses/buildings from the lower density and then get rid of single family altogether and have the lowest density zoning be something like a 4 story town house (while allowing someone to buy that land and build a single family home if they want). We also need to make the split much less harsh between that zoning and much higher density zoning so there's always an excess of land zoned for higher density but occupied by lower density, older buildings so that every time we tear down something old and cheap to rent we end up with more luxury units that will transition into more old and cheap to rent units over time.
If they want redevelop a 4plex into a single-family home; that requires more investigation and a variance.
So what you need is for the city to ensure there's always a decent supply of excess land zoned for each density level owned broadly enough that oligopoly BS doesn't come into play so that the profit maximizing choice is to always buy a plot of land with less density or with an actually uninhabitable building on it and build more density and they need to do this at every density level in their code. That's the big picture problem with North American cities. There are sub problems to this (like how we are providing parking wrong, suboptimal public service design, especially transport infrastructure) but the above is the big picture biggest problem
The answer is obvious.
Don't live in those no-growth places.
The obvious answer is to change the environmentally and humanitarian disaster of no-growth politics of low-slung suburbs.
The flip side of this is when demand outstrips supply, so you have people paying several thousands per month for a studio in a walkup in Hell's Kitchen. But to be very clear, it would cost even more if not for the new high-rises within that square mile.
another way to look at is why should someone drop the price on the property if adding new housing doesn't decrease demand. one could make the case that building new luxury housing will free up the expensive housing for people that still can't afford it.
In other words, I am either in the market for a $5M apartment on Park Ave or I am not. If a new building gets built, it doesn't make me go "well hmm, I never thought about living in NYC, but now that there are 50 more apartments available, I think I will".
What DOES happen is that ~50 people who were previously competing for the same handful of pre-war buildings now just bought into this new place because it's nicer. All of a sudden there's less buying pressure on the existing inventory so the seller has to drop the price (ie, if ppl aren't buying my apartment because the same $5M can get them new construction, maybe I gotta drop it to 4.7M)
In the case of Culdesac, they removed roads, parking, garages, and lawns. For people that want and can afford those things, there are plenty of options already.
Never heard of restrictions on minimum house size and amenities. Is this a widespread thing?
Would an expression of “smaller, lower amenity housing” be the standard mobile home neighborhood?
Mobile home parks are one way to have lower cost housing, but far from the only one. They are much less common than in the past, as they are being regulated and bought out of existence.
But things like utilities, etc will be a "per unit" cost not a "per square foot" cost, but selling the unit is pretty close to "per square foot" so the temptation is to inflate that as best you can to make the per unit costs as minimal as possible.
Mobile homes parks are a way to bypass certain slumlord laws; because the slumlord only rents the "land" and the mobile home is owned by the tenant, and lots of slumlord laws don't apply to your own home.
But for a given building “type” (single family home) the utilities are basically flat rate, with maybe electrical being the only one really increased, at not much cost.
https://www.mercatus.org/research/research-papers/do-minimum...
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/6/19/do-minimum-lot...
https://x.com/jayparsons/status/1712110658601255211?s=46
Short summary, mid-range apartments (grade B, not new but not decrepit), are seeing the biggest decrease in rents when there's a ton of building going on.
This has been one of my great frustrations when trying to get more affordable housing built.
If you wanted to do the reverse, that's what you'd need to do - unless you're making a new city from scratch.
They certainly did, depending on your definition of vast. "According to estimates from the U.S. Department of Transportation, more than 475,000 households and more than a million people were displaced nationwide because of the federal roadway construction."
https://www.history.com/news/interstate-highway-system-infra...
We don't need to make new cities from scratch at all, we simply need to allow gradual redevelopment of the urban cores.
It’s quite possible that some suburban areas will experience the same boom and bust, now that dense cities are no longer polluted industrial hell-holes.
Housing in general is screwed in the US because of the investment angle. Both companies and regular citizens alike will fight fiercely against anything that could decrease the value of their homes - no matter how much it is in the interest of the long-term health, happiness and finances of their city.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/15/accessory-comm...
In most places in most American cities and towns, you can't just go build a commercial extension to your house like that, you have to jump through a lot of hoops, and for a low margin business, it's probably not worth it.
Making that kind of thing legal again (it used to be pretty much everywhere) will help transform more areas of more cities into something a bit more walkable.
The positive aspect to this, though, is that a group of pro-housing locals can make a huge difference in the conversation and see real progress. It is really meaningful and fulfilling to see housing built that you helped advocate for.
as long as you ignore their perspective, you will get pushback.
My objections are different from most. We need to re-wild as much as we can of lawns. We need to construct more wildlife corridors so carnivores like coyotes and foxes can come into suburban and urban spaces to feast on the mice and rats. we need to drop nighttime lighting down to much lower levels so that nocturnal creatures have a play second live and reproduce.
Cities evolve and change, and if you prevent the physical form from changing, they still change. The composition of people changes radically, over time, as the wealthy are still able to move in, and the working class is pushed out.
Ideally, cities would change a little bit, everywhere, gradually, but we've prevented that from happening with zoning in so many places in the US that it has screwed so much up...
The walkable city implementation should be the result of the demolition of an urban space and reconstructed in the vision of the 15 minute city. I take this view because I live in an old mill town in Massachusetts. Because of house hunting in the area, I would say a good half or more of the housing in town is really crap tenements with a thin layer of vinyl siding on it to make it look better. there is nothing you can do with these properties to make them energy-efficient or nice to live in without totally gutting the property down to including the exterior and roof. The area around these houses is not very livable as it's usually asphalt..everywhere. Not a spot of lawn or trees to be found.
instead of building over green fields, the city should use these Brownfield properties as a land for the 15 minute village. yes, this would push people out of the existing houses so prior to that demolition, they should be construction of social housing like they have in Helsinki to make room for the people displaced.
rebuild cities livable as defined NIMBYs and then you might find greater acceptance of what you propose to change.
* Modern requirements means building an ADU cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least here in CA).
* ADU significantly increase property value, and loan/insurance requirements are tougher for rental properties, making ownership harder.
* ADUs are rentals, which are 100% loss for the occupants. Building affordable condos would do much better at helping people build wealth. ADUs drive gentrification, from the point above, making ownership harder.
And in any event, ADU's are great. They add a lot of housing in a very incremental way.
Condos are good too, but a lot of states need to reform their condo defect laws.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/05/21/adu-grann...
Of course they're just one of many things cities can do to confront their housing shortages.
If a 2000+ years old city can do it, surely American towns can.
People look to Amsterdam now as a pedestrian and bicycle paradise, but that's a recent development; until a couple decades ago it was as car dependent as anywhere.
Is it possible that Dallas has the largest urban forest in the US, because it has the most urban sprawl? (I know nothing of this urban forest claim).
2) Shade trees lower the temperature for the air under them, by as much as ten degrees.
Even just sitting around outside in a shady backyard with lots of vegetation, a pool, and umbrellas we were still sweating profusely this last summer.
They are most certainly not.
Many car-dependent cities, large and small, are depopulating, quite rapidly. (Some at over 10% population loss per year!) This depopulation doesn't come from a city's urban core(s), usually; but rather specifically from the areas of these cities worst affected by car dependence — the sparse fringes of suburbia, and the exurban developments. (The people living in these places have the most car-centric, non-urban-infrastructure-reliant lifestyles to begin with; so when they get a better job offer somewhere else, they are unfettered from simply packing their things in their car and moving. This makes these suburban fringes and exurbs much more vulnerable to depopulation during low-employment periods, housing-affordability crises, etc.)
For many cities, these depopulated fringes and exurbs have nobody left in them at this point to care what happens to the area; and so, in response, these cities have often been literally shrinking, de-incorporating these exurbs from themselves, in order to avoid paying infrastructure costs indefinitely for roads and pipes and wires that nobody is using.
And after 10-or-so years of this state of de-incorporation and abandonment, there is nothing of value left in these places to directly move into and reuse. A perhaps-surprisingly constant amount of maintenance is required, both of buildings and of infrastructure, to keep both from falling apart.
• Suburban SFH homes in North America — usually stick-built, and usually in boreal-forest conditions — that have gone un-lived-in for more than five years or so (and not left in the hands of any bank’s or property developer’s maintenance company), are almost always a total write-off, not worth attempting to repair: they're inevitably mostly rotted, the rain having gotten in at one point and made a home for humidity and mold/fungus, destroying the structural integrity of the framing. (You might be able to save homes that have sat in desert climates like Arizona, but these have their own problems related to fast oxidation of metals, incl. electrical and plumbing. Maybe concrete+plaster Mission-style architecture can be saved; but after 10 years of disuse, you'd still need to gut the building to get it livable again.)
• An exurban "low-CapEx high-OpEx" asphalt road grid, that hasn't been driven on in 10 years, is no longer drivable: asphalt does not survive 10 years without maintenance, even if nobody is driving on it. It's likely been undermined over time with huge numbers of small sinkholes — sinkholes that will become innumerable potholes when the first person brave enough to drive down the weathered road runs over them. The roads would need, at least, to be mulched up and spat back out by a road re-paving machine (with a refill and resurface of the undermined subbase + subgrade layers in between) to make them safe.
If you're going to have to do both of those things to make conditions livable again in that area — raze all the buildings, and recycle all the asphalt — then you may as well do all the razing and asphalt-mulching all at once, first — and so end up with a fresh and empty terrain and a pile of materials, ready to be re-laid out in whatever (hopefully more compact!) fashion you choose.
Personally, I live in (equally-car-dependent) Canada, so the example I'm personally familiar with is "most towns in northern British Columbia."
While the design and execution of the project look great, the key is that it's legal. If building like this was legal, by right, in more places, then the market would naturally transition to something like this if people desire it. Right now, any deviation from zoning has to be fought for with time and money, and as a rule of thumb, everything that gets built will stay that way forever. If successful, desirable, small scale projects like this lead to zoning being loosened, then hopefully the existing urban layouts will no longer be stuck.
isn't the "third place" concept not widely known/accepted? (1st place: work, 2nd place: home, 3rd place: communal spaces) The availability/quality of these 3rd places _directly_ correlates with QoL/happiness of people. I would get severe depression when I only swap between home/work/car, thats not a life, thats surviving, in isolation.
At this point, entire generations have grown up in unwalkable suburban life, using cars as the only mode of getting from point A to point B from the day they were born, with a strip mall as the only place to go - and even then only if you have to run an errand or get the occasional meal out.
Having been been isolated from a real third space like public plazas since probably the 60s or 70s, it's no surprise that today's suburban generation views them with suspicion, confusion, and disdain. They like their strip malls just fine thank you very much, and anyway, how would they park their car?
They all know what a park/playground is
Municipal parks, like the kind you can find in Savannah GA, are nice third spaces. But I think there are very few such parks in suburban America that are not also mostly playgrounds. I would not count nature reserves as real third spaces.
Except you're probably not allowed to drink beer there anyway, because a law against drinking in the park provides a convenient excuse to keep the park clear of homeless so everybody else can enjoy it.
The vast majority of parks I see around me aren't just a playground. Those mostly seem pretty rare.
Reality disagrees with you. Just search for parks on Google maps for SV and you will see so many where playgrounds are just a small part and the rest of the park is for everyone - https://www.google.com/maps/
My favorite ones: Las Palmas, Cuesta, Washington. And if I want to drive for ~15-20 min: Shoreline, Rancho San Antonio, Baylands.
I don't get why so many in the comments think suburbs only have strip malls as the places to go. I've lived in many suburbs, they've always had a lot of places to go. Libraries, parks, running trails, recreation centers, sports fields, publicly subsidized water parks or pools, town square areas, public golf courses, public disc golf courses, etc. In my current suburb almost all of these kinds of features are connected by separate bike trails and transit.
There's a city park at the end of my suburban street with pavilions, playgrounds, a fishing pond with a dock/platform in it with picnic tables, picnic tables and grills dotting the tree line, a paved running trail, and a few different sports fields. No driving, not a long walk. This is the experience for pretty much my whole suburban city, not some one-off thing.
Indeed, that suburbs offered better access to many of those things than did cities (especially poor parts of cities) used to be one of the big arguments offered against suburbs. The argument was that suburbs had those things due to racism--suburbs were mostly white and so governments built those things in the suburbs.
Any grocery stores? Cafes? Restaurants? Bars?
There are a few restaurants and a corner store at the edge of my neighborhood. I can hop on the bus right outside my house and go to several different supermarkets, a farmers market, several cafes, several different kinds of bars, loads of restaurants, trampoline parks, movie theaters, arcades, bowling alleys, classical/music theaters, and more.
Connecting from the bus to the light rail, I can access the sports complex downtown for my favorite teams, a nice zoo, a few different universities, several suburb town center areas, the large state fairgrounds, a few different bar scenes, and one of the largest airports in the country.
Were you really trying to suggest suburbs don't have grocery stores?
You haven't really lived in US suburbs then. I live in one and within 0.6-0.8 mile radius, we have 3-4 parks and 2-3 libraries. Within 15-20 min driving distance, we have amazing parks. We meet other people regularly in such places without having to buy anything. And thanks to California weather, those are accessible except when it is raining.
So please stop your FUD.
The place where I grew up had a town center with offices above shops, and plenty of open areas for people to gather; it was designed for being a "third space."
Then (a few years before COVID), it went under new management who was livid that so many people were spending time there without shopping and they did various things to make it much less desirable to go there if you aren't shopping. About 30% of the stores/restaurants went out of business in a year. Turns out, for the right sized pies, a large slice of a smaller pie is worse than a small slice of a larger pie.
we have public open spaces as large as some EU nations
feel free to tally up parkland in North America by acreage vs the EU...
Take for instance, Pioneer Square in Seattle. If you look at the structure of the parks, buildings, sidewalks and streets it should be very nice. Lots of nice trees, wide sidewalks and it's pretty flat and easy to walk around. But in reality it's filled with awful people which ruins it.
American third spaces used to be bowling alleys, community centers, and Elks / Masonic Lodges. There's a shift away from those and now our third spaces are gyms, McDonald's, and malls.
Wherever old people congregate is a de facto third space.
https://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-mcdonalds-old-p...
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/mall-st...
If a person insists on zero disruption, they likely will avoid shared spaces all together, since even shared private spaces can't provide protection from all disruption all of the time.
Every society makes its choices and some of those seem weird when you look on the other side of the fence. The US is unique, sure, but so are other countries.
This is not common concept to me neither.
What we tend to have is third spaces that are policed in some manner. Often by commerce, as that does a pretty good job of keeping away those considered undesirable without literally calling police. Some call this privatization, which is accurate but overlooks that the money-based gating of access is a key feature.
My "quality of life" is 1000% better than if I required a crowded train to take me to an urban "communal space" in order to enjoy nature.
What do you mean imposed by law?
One town over has many more 6+ story buildings and townhouses. So folks over there have made a different choice about what kind of situation they want to live in. Is their town more walkable than mine? Not really but it does have even more variety on Main St due to increased density - great. They were clearly able to do the thing you're talking about because they wanted to.
// It is a compelled choice, even if only for a minority of the population.
I think we agree here, the point is that the law aligns (rather than contradicts) the desires of the local population. Which is different than people dying to replace their colonials with tenements but the government not letting them.
To some extent "everything" is compelled choice. I am precluded from building a cement factory in the middle of Bryce national park, but that probably is in line with the majority of people's desires.
The original comment above asserted that laws are forcing our communities to look as they do. My point is that the laws seem to by-and-large enable us to have our communities as we wish them to be.
This type of construction does not fit in the zoning requirements of many American suburban areas. That is a walkable community by your own description.
Building walkable communities does not require high rises.
Seems like zoning reflects people's desires and provides a diversity of lifestyles which is good. If a community/development wanted to be more walkable, they can make the zoning call on a very local level.
Prices increase, and some people cannot afford to live there. Where do they go?
If they move to your town, they are now "dissenters" for being the less-than-50% part of the population that might vote for things like higher density or mixed-used developments.
It's difficult to vote your choices in a place you don't already live.
You also describe a spectrum of types of places to live in a close geographic area that is not at all representative of most of the US. Being two-towns-over from Queens puts you in a majorly urban metro area with a level of density somewhat unique to older American cities and the Northeast in general.
In my experience the towns and neighborhoods with close density building (not necessarily high-rises, you can get way high density with single and double story development than the average Target/Costco suburb), are seen as very desirable in the housing market and generally command very high prices. Places with a Main Street, with local shops and restaurants, with walkable housing and mixed development.
These are the "cool neighborhoods" that people visit but often can't afford to live in. If supply of these places met or exceeded demand I would think they would be more affordable to buy housing in.
Your own single-family home but so close to the neighbors that it's basically "I'm not touching you!" with enough space for the HOA-paid lawn service to squeak their mowers through twice a week.
Perfectly manicured grass, and no trees except a few sproutlings along the road because they were all cut down to raise the fill for the new roads and houses.
Your friend could live half a mile away as the crow flies, but they live in a different gated HOA community than you do, and you'd have to trespass through yards to walk directly there, so the route by road is more like 5 miles.
Every task you may want to do requires getting in your car and sitting at three traffic lights minimum.
The car pickup line at the elementary school overflows onto the main road everyday at 3pm with hundreds of Chevy Tahoes each picking up one child. These children may live within a few miles of the school but sending them out to walk or bike along the 50mph six-lane road that connects all of the gated communities is of course outright dangerous.
Shops and restaurants are dominated by chains because there's so little spontaneity of finding a new place, and not enough concentration of population or foot traffic for cool local businesses to find a niche.
...
I'm totally cool with living out in the woods, in a true rural lifestyle. I also like being places where maybe my personal living space is a bit more closed in but I get something in return for that. Walkable amenities. A sense of neighborhood or town community. Walking and biking trails. Cool local restaurants and shops and breweries that couldn't survive in the low-density rural environment or in the suburban hellscape.
It's that weird in-between that the US loved to build for the last 50 years, and is still building in a lot of places, that just seems dystopian to me.
Edit: And ironically lots of us Americans love visiting both of those other ends of the spectrum, and talk about what a lovely time they had, and then go back to their gated HOA suburb and get ready for the next day's school run.
Yep, bingo. People asking whether we really want these kinds of development only need to look at the price of housing in desirable walkable town centers. The home-buying market craves more of it.
I’m in a fairly small town but the price of a townhouse walkable to downtown is easily double an equivalent single-family detached suburban house a 10 minute drive away.
That's a form of third place. You don't need to be actively sharing it with other people but everyone still agrees that it's shared.
Density does not mean Manhattan levels of density. Manhattan has 28,000/km^2, Atlanta has 3,500/km^2. That's an order of magnitude difference.
I mean this with all of the respect I can muster. If your first thought is "I prefer to live in a rural space where my nearest neighbor is half a kilometer away" Congratulations. You live in a RURAL place, this does not apply to you. In fact, you should be cheering for denser living spaces. It is not the five-over-ones that are taking over the precious rural landscapes, but the endless sea of concrete and asphalt that is suburban living.
To non-North Americans. The standard U.S. and Canada experience of "living" in a city, is you live in a quarter acre of land in a winding suburb where it's at least half a kilometer to get out of your neighborhood onto the local collector. It's going to take you at least another half kilometer to make it to the arterial that takes you to the giant box store that has a bunch of stuff you need.
It is impossible for a plurality of people in North America to get the basic necessities without a car, let alone any other niceties.
We lived in the suburbs of Houston for two years, and it was terrible. Nothing was walkable. The community had a walking path around a drainage reservoir, but walking to a business? lol, I hope you have two hours to spare.
Roads were HUGE and empty but had low speed limits, so most folks sped and drove dangerously. By dangerously, I mean "driving 20+ above limit with one hand on the 12 and scrolling TikTok on the other".
Nothing but chain restaurants for miles, with some exceptions here and there.
Basically zero sense of community unless you had kids or went to church. Meetup events? social sports leagues? Events around town? lol.
We moved into Houston proper this year and it's been unbelievably refreshing. I'm typing this from a bar that's five mins away walking distance. I can run and ride my bike to places that are interesting. Shit, I can run and ride my bike without worrying about a distracted driver mowing me over. There's stuff to do here. There are events for everybody. It's great.
I do take issue with one statement:
> “We look back nostalgically at college, because it’s the only time most people have lived in a walkable neighborhood."
Come on, dudes. The reason why people opine for their college years is because they were younger, didn't have to work, didn't have families and could spend most of their time having fun.
Getting rid of cars is not necessary. New York City is probably the most walkable city in the United States and it's full of cars. But the sidewalks are enormous, consistently open, construction projects are required to provide routes for pedestrians. I grew up in a place in Southern California that was pretty walkable, but most of Southern California is definitely not. The biggest difference wasn't whether or not cars existed. Aside from the sidewalks, it's more that you need to limit the number of arterial roads, their size, and the blocks a vehicle can expect to traverse before hitting a stop. Aside from everything being so far away, the biggest factors preventing people from just going for leisurely strolls without a specific destination is the danger posed by roads that take a long time to get across and cars doing highway speeds on those roads. It worked out where I grew up, even though it was a suburb, because the roads were small, we weren't near any highways, plus I lived on an actual cul de sac, but the end of the road only blocked cars from going further, not pedestrians.
I like where I live now. A proper town that got eaten by a major city so it's a "suburb". Because it was always meant to be a functional stand alone city, it has everything you'd need within a reasonable walk or bike. You can bike the whole town. I can walk to 3 grocery stores and the basics, but there's a proper (in my opinion) segregation of concerns. I think the town could use a basic bus system for the kids in town and then it would be perfect, but NIMBYs alas.
I'd honestly prefer something like this. Which i guess when why I live in a small town. I really prefer driving everywhere. I like space, but I don't like the idea that lacking a car means you starve to death.
All of the pictures in the article totally tell me a different story: it looks like a generic concrete wasteland. The hero picture has an ugly chain link fence and what looks like a parking lot in the foreground. The picture of the interior of the model apartment is nothing more than an arty shot of a door (?)
I'll be honest, it looks like a post-apocalyptic brutalist concrete jungle to me. I wanted to like it, but there's no way I would live in this place.
https://www.google.com/maps/@33.414666,-111.9021188,3a,75y,7...
This is the closest grocery store though, inside the neighborhood: https://maps.app.goo.gl/MW4Aj44NVUiBFpEW7
I want to live in a city built that people choose not to drive because the other options are better, faster and more convenient.
Walkable cities need to outcompete the status quo!
The story of culdesac is about parking not about banning mobility!
Parking is insanely expensive to build. The only way the city would let them not build parking was for residents to agree to not own cars. (I think this is a clear 14th amendment violation but thats just me.)
Read Henry Garbar's new book for the full story on parking: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/09/1174962751/paved-paradise-exa...
Shocking that folks selectively willing to live in an area with specific rules are happier living in the area with specific rules they self selected into.
I am all for people being allowed to self select into communities that fit their lifestyles.
To be clear: this is a compliment. I think it's good that people are allowed to have a variety of living environments and try things every now and again.
Care to expand a little? What exactly is a clear violation?
I think the relevant case is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_County_Board_v._Rich...
Where the SCOTUS said yeah this is bad but it's okay because we want to encourage non-homeowners to take the bus. This was decided before there was lots of clear research on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Allowing homeowners free and easily accessible on street parking encourages more car ownership.
Unless you're claiming that the 14th amendment would require the developer to include street parking? But that seems like quite a stretch.
Tempe, Arizona is not a practical place I'd want to be without a car, due to the high heat.
In my area, an Uber trip from my house to the grocer, my office, or the local school is $10-$15.
IMO, "walkable city" means not just that you can technically walk to a large number of places, but that you can do so relatively unimpeded.
I suspect Manhattan (and the densest parts of the other boroughs) have enough density, business, noise to offset the benefits of being walkable.
But, I'd guess there are plenty of residential neighborhoods in NYC that are close to being "15 min cities" on their own.
It's more a freedom from a car-dependance, than it is about being rid of a car altogether (although many do that).
I don't think that view should become the basis for anyone's understanding of people's general view. It is sort of like browsing r/qanon and thinking that's conservatism.
> On that topic, I immediately discard the opinion of anyone who uses the word "stroad"
That's not a great way to approach conversation.
A road is to connect remote places, it is to be used by cars and they travel fast.
A street is the space in between buildings of a town or city where people go about their business. Some use cars, preferably most don’t cause they take a lot if space. But the street is for people, the inhabitants of the town.
A stroad is a place where people live in terror and then die.
I like cars, I have one, regularly drive it and like to go fast when on highways and such. But they are dangerous and terrifying tools in the context of a town/city, especially for kids. If I’m driving near people, I drive carefully, slowly and the street needs to be designed in such a way that it induces that kind of driving.
That's called "renting", and over 100,000,000 people in the USA do it.
Also, the Culdesac is next to a light rail station.
I don't know about Hungary or Japan, but South Africa has extremely high car usage. Unless he lived in a very expensive area where you can also work (e.g. Melrose Arch or Parkhurst).
Yes it was expensive, but car free living is going to be expensive until cities actually prioritize it. We've already funded car infrastructure for so long, and urban cores directly subsidize the rest of the area, even in areas where the urban core is poor. It's not absurd to expect a redistribution of funding.
As regards funding: the Gautrain cost a fortune for the number of people it serves! Funding would help, as it would help anything, but I don't know if it's the base problem.
12 million cars for 60 million people, about 1/5. By comparison, the US has nine cars for every ten people.
I suspect there are a lot of South Africans who are too poor to own a car.
Just because people live densely packed together does not mean that they will decide to strike up a conversation and get to know each other. It does not mean that there will be five people lending a hand when you need help. Quite the opposite. Americans take for granted their culture, which in these aspects is better than what you will find in many European cities.
Actually thinking about it, packing people densely together might even foster a culture that is more insular, cold and hostile than what the typical American is accustomed to.
Because that street is filled with people jogging, taking sunset walks, and children playing. People sitting on chairs in the shade talking.
We're supposed to reject this because we need to support the freedom for people to barrel down residential roads.
That begs the question of why people were driving down the residential road if there was a faster more efficient road available?
In my personal experience this has happened in my neighborhood. For context there are two main roads get congested at rush hour so drivers take residential roads.
Some of the residential roads had speed bumps/the zigzagging blocks to slow traffic added during Covid. This caused drivers to divert more traffic to the residential roads where there are no road impediments. Getting road impediments on residential roads requires money or political clout to get the city to do it so it’s only on the roads with really nice homes around me that have them in place.
According to the article so far 36 people live there. out of the expected 1.000 people who will reside there when the development is finished in 2025
I think you should wait till everyone has moved in, and then give it a year or two, and then write an article about how people are much happier there.
I have confidence that results probably would not change that much since the development is custom built and hyped as a car-free place to live.
It will attract people who are looking for that and you would think they would be happy.
However, you cannot use this as an argument that people in general would be happier with such changes, since you start out with a highly biased sample.
I have nothing against walkable neighborhoods. It is nice Personally, I have zero desire to live Phoenix Arizona without a car. I have lived there, and it gets insanely hot during the summer.
(a side note: Arizona already has major trouble getting enough water for everyone who lives there already. I dont think expanding the population is sustainable idea)
The amount of electricity people need to run AC is enormous. Which might at times be a matter of life or death. When I was there I believe a law was passed that it was illegal to shut off electricity if the temperature was above a certain threshold since some people were not able to handle the heat.
Arizona is insanely hot.
Then you argue that places are really cold that need to be heated which may be expensive.
How about you chose a more hospital area that is not really cold and not really hot.
You know where people live without big bills for heating or cooling.
Expansion does not need to stop.
Controlling expansion is key in most cities. The city planning office must approve construction. (or some part of the government has to approve it)
With that it would be natural for the party wishing to construct to detail how they will ensure the water they need.
Many cities are restrictive as to how much construction they will allow.
There are already recently constructed houses in near PHeonix that presently does not have water. They have been cut off by the city.
This is due to a disagreement on taxes, city zones and a few other things. That community must now pay to have tank trucks come by, and a tank truck can haul a lot of water, but when you must supply it to a whole community a tankers worth does not last that long.
Even on the East Coast, however, people will drive 50 MPH down tree-lined residential streets, such as the one I currently live on in Lancaster, PA, and there are plenty of people here who drive massive pickup trucks that never seem to be picking up anything.
Though I will say that while Lancaster city itself and a lot of the surrounding townships are themselves walkable, they're like little islands of an archipelago. It's not easy to get between one or the other without using a vehicle because of the stroads and highways.
Lancaster does have an Amtrak station, though, so you can get to NYC without a car and then walk around there.
Small towns have much less wealth than metropolitan areas.
Is there an alternative venue similar to HN where people who value freedom and individual liberty can discuss topics like this without getting demoted and silenced?
What happens when someone needs to go get groceries at a walmart? Or go to a la fitness? (i'm using brand names on purpose instead of grocery or gym since a "local bodega" that could be able to fit in the complex would unlikely have what i need). Merely having a checkbox saying that thing exists within the 15 min radius isn't enough.
tbh i just don't see high quality of life coupled with car-free happening in the USA due to how big it is.
I wouldn't call those places walkable. 15 mins is 1.5 mile radius.
"People are happier and healthier, and even wealthier when they’re living in a walkable neighborhood."
From my experience(so sample size 1), walkable neighborhoods in the US are usually not the affordable ones.
Banning cars seems like a bad design...just design cities where cars are de-incentivized(small lanes, less parking, high fees, special permits, whatever) and provide some infrastructure for those that really need them.
Public transit takes decades to take hold - because you have to build the lines and then wait for the density to increase around them. If you try to go the other way, the people have to use cars first and then the car is perpetual.
But if you are willing to work those decades, you can finally get something pretty impressive - the San Diego Trolley runs 7.5 min separation on its main line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BDMmgpvIDk
"The best time to start something was yesterday, the 2nd best time is today" can be applied here. If something taking a long time is a deterrent, it will never get done(or take 20 years to get it done).
In addition to cutting car ownerships costs borne by residents, there are savings at the community level. Less road maintenance, less real estate used for parking (and put to better economic use), etc.
Very few people want to literally ban cars at neighbrhood/town scale. Most just want them de-emphasized, with certain roads closed/redeveloped for foot/bike/transit.
How do you make it to the hospital if you can't ride a bike in your current condition?
i know of a cohousing nonprofit that did this in central MA in 2007: big parking lot down at the end of the drive, then it’s about 35 houses with footpaths and green space and common areas and whatnot all built together; motor vehicles are not permitted.
it’s a nice place! the biggest thing i notice is that there are a few packs of kids running around all the time, and nobody has to worry about anyone getting hit by a car.
I mean, yeah, it's great that you have everything necessary within walking distance, but sometimes you simply need to make larger trips...
I feel like there should be some kind of middle-ground...
For example, not havig a car is fine until your place of work is 10km out and using public transportation takes 1h whereas driving by car takes 10 minutes. Taking a bike or e-bike works, of course, unless it's raining or snowing or stormy, in which case you really want a fully enclosed (and heated) ride.
I'm sure you can find some "but in that case just do X" for all those cases, but the point still stands that all these issues only exist because you ditched the car, even if it's just a small electric one.
Designing a city/suburb/community that outright bans cars (by not providing any parking spaces) only works for a very small minority of the population
That's the thing: when your grocery store is a short walk away, you don't buy groceries for the whole week. You just duck into the store on the walk home or you walk over at lunch. You buy things for that evening or a few days at most. Having to plan for a whole week of meals seems normal to us, but it's an adaptation to the fact that we live too far from grocery stores. With our large fridges, cabinets, pantries, and chest freezers, we basically turn part of our homes into well-stocked convenience stores so that we can go out as little as possible.
I don't think this is a common setup for any developed country with 2 income households. Likely the daily-run for groceries occurs in areas where women are homemakers. Is that part of the pitch? There's no way we're going back to that, or daily grocery runs.
Also, having these small produce-oriented grocers does not imply that people are doing daily runs. In my city I only see them in posh, upscale neighborhoods. In some larger metropolises like NY I've seen them also in less gentrified places, but they tend also to be specialty stores.
They're a fraction of the size. If average weekly needs and wants were met by those, that's where people in those neighborhoods would shop all the time. Everything else would be redundant. But instead they seem to fill a missing middle.
> maybe you don’t go to the grocery store literally every day.
Great, vindication.
Chicago, NYC, Lisbon, Berlin, Barcelona, etc. They all have their versions of these stores. You don't need to go anywhere else unless you want to for some reason.
You buy groceries more often, but less of them. Or you bring a wagon or those metal carts.
Furniture etc. gets delivered. Because everyone gets deliveries, the cost is lower because they have stable demand.
With good transit, you take it to the station or rental car if you're doing a road trip.
Bulky purchases are relatively rare and can be accomplished by delivery service, renting a van, or using a cargo bike (one of which makes groceries and transporting small children easier as well).
Vacations - rent a car, take the train, etc.
Anyways, few people want to outright ban cars. Look at the Netherlands - most families still have a car, it just doesn't get used daily. It's a convenience instead of a necessity. Maybe they use it to commute, but not to take kids to school or run small errands.
The average cost of owning a car in the US is around $10,000/year. Even the ability to cut from 2 cars to 1 car (for a typical family with two working adults) is a MASSIVE economic benefit.
There are efficiencies both in terms of time and money that come from bulk shopping that you’re not considering.
I lived car free for about 5 years in Seattle and it fucking sucked walking to the grocery store every day or two. In the winter it rains frequently so my groceries would always be wet by the time I got home which added even more time to dry everything off.
And I'm not claiming car-free is a panacea. I just want to stop subsidizing car-based infrastructure to the extent that we do.
Hell, we still own two cars for convenience (though I walk to work and my wife rides a bike). Though when the next car ages out, we'll probably trade it for an electric cargo bike.
The great thing about good cities is that they make it easy to meet people, but they're also decently large so there are enough sub communities that you aren't forced to conform entirely because you might otherwise get kicked out of the only community available to you. This is a village problem (although villages being far less dense make it easier to hide the non conformist stuff you might be up to).
This development combines the worst of both worlds. It's too small and cut off from the rest of Phoenix to give residents access to a large set of sub communities, and it's too dense to keep your stuff to yourself.
Ideally they would be built around transport hubs. A lot of the outer London suburbs originated as basically railways stops in fields, where the suburb grew around the station.
There are places where a car is nice, or even necessary (sports requiring large equipment for example, trips with the family), and then there is over using cars and building cities that require cars even if it can be done differently.
There's also several stories (I believe SimCity might be one?) of video game developers attempting to make representations of places in their game - and then removing all the parking lots as they realized it would make a boring experience.
To make more parking, they'd have to tear down buildings or take away roads. Combined with a poor bus system, it ends up being a bad experience.
I'd much rather have a better public transportation system in my city, it'd be much easier than having to tear things down. More people in the city are pushing for this, so hopefully it'll get better.
For trains that is great but you still have to get to/from the trains. Heck even bus stops require a 5-10 minute walk some times. So it's the walk to the bus stop, planning if the bus doesn't show up, the transit time which could include a lot of stops, and so forth. It really adds up to a lot of time lost.
When we talk about “frequent enough” 15 minutes is an eternity, honestly it is the bare minimum for what could be considered frequent.
Frequent is every 5-6 minutes. I’ve had commutes where the headway was 2 minutes. It doesn’t matter if the train/bus is late or doesn’t show up at that point.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/05/america-a-nat...
There is this really strange mythology that persists around this. America is not built on small towns or cities any more than other countries, in fact it is generally much less so.
80% of the US population lives in urbanized areas. [0]
Your citation is counting towns, but that doesn’t reflect the way Americans actually live, and if you think about it, that makes sense, the US can’t have millions of million plus cities. City population size is going to follow some sort of geometric/power law distribution.
To answer your question, no one is advocating banning all cars outright.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...
For comparison, look at India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_India?wprov=sf...
Urban could mean anything and is not defined in the wikipedia article explicitly ("definition needed"). The article even says it's changing constantly. So it's not very useful when they give %'s without even saying what it means.
Edit: Whether these boundaries are arbitrary or not is irrelevant as that is the tax base paying. Also the MSAs are defined as 10k or above. That's a really small tax base for such large infrastructure. Even my city of 250k would struggle a LOT providing any level of service like you are talking about. You need a 1M+ metro area to even consider it, and then providing full coverage is going to be difficult.
If you look at this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area?...
226 million people live in the 108 metro areas over 500k as of the 2020 census.
Fairview NJ may “only” have a population of 15k, but that doesn’t mean it is too small for public transportation.
Don’t be disingenuous, that was never my point. As stated in my other comment, 223/331 million people lived in metro areas over 500k as of the last census, aka 67%. most people live in reasonably large cities.
>Whether these boundaries are arbitrary or not is irrelevant as that is the tax base paying.
I’d recommend you look a bit deeper into how public transit is funded, because this is patently false. The largest transit agency in the us, the NY MTA is a state agency. Public transit systems are generally funded by a combination of federal, state and local funding, often that local funding is a county or some other metropolitan transit funding district.
>You need a 1M+ metro area to even consider it, and then providing full coverage is going to be difficult.
Easy example of a city that has good public transit and is less than 1 million: Bern, metro population of 660k (just checked google maps and saw multiple bus routes with ten minute or less headways, along tram and trains networks).
I don't think you can compare the U.S. to Germany. Germany has like 6x to 7x the population density and is a much smaller country.
Edit: Generally state funded projects benefit everyone in the state, including the interstate system. A local transit project that only affects one city not so much.
Funding services at the county/state level is stealing? That’s frankly an unhinged take.
How do you think roads get funded?
>I don't think you can compare the U.S. to Germany. Germany has like 6x to 7x the population density and is a much smaller country.
1. Bern is in Switzerland 2. Size of a country doesn’t matter, what matters is settlement patterns.
The bus system in LA isn’t impacted by the existence of Nebraska.
15 minutes is not frequent enough.
BTW I'm talking about diesel buses and electric trolley-buses. They're all loud.
The sirens from the emergency vehicles on the other hand, those are probably part of the reason why I'm tired all the time.
Unfortunately I don’t know of an easy solution to this. Perhaps vehicles should be required to rebroadcast emergency sirens internally? Or maybe it will solve itself when electric cars reduce road noise.
Further, in those other cities, public transportation is clean and something everyone uses. In USA cities outside of NYC, public transportation is largely considered a service provided to those too poor to own a car. As such it's always shit.
This kind of thinking makes no sense, you can have public transit (or even private taxis and bus lines) that fully solves this issue. Heck, many NJ beach towns have private "Jitney" lines that do well.
God forbid we have the absolute luxury of parking by the door.
Unrelatedly this is actually the irony of the 15 minute cities fracas in my mind: america is already full of fifteen minute towns. 15 minutes from leaving the door to your destination in a car. That kind of thing can feel freeing, but it is really a prison that ties you to making money if you want mobility. In contrast I see older folks and disabled folks moving around all the time in my walkable city with ok transit. Their mobility still requires money, but much less money.
Courteousness is a bit more difficult to address with just road / public space design, but designing to encourage more driver / non-driver interaction can help.
edit: a very non-american way to force people to pay attention on country roads is to make them BARELY wide enough to accommodate two cars. This forces attentiveness, because you don't want a head-on collision. Sounds problematic, but actually kinda nice in practice.
Agreed, but I wouldn't call them a "pipe dream" — Musk's timelines may all be pipe dreams, but the tech exists (and isn't just from Tesla) and can be used where legislation allows. On the scale of changing urban infrastructure, even if these take another decade, I'd expect them to be widely available faster than new train and subway lines.
Bike infrastructure should be an easy win, if only it wasn't for the political aspect that makes many see cyclists as "other". I'd be inclined to vote for people who promise more of it.
In some ways rideshare has given a preview of this model and it simply is not the future. Cars can't save us from cars.
This is also true of non-self driving cars, yet we structure our resources around this case. Car use has extreme & predictable peaks with long down periods between them. If we couldn't prevent it the first time what are we doing differently to prevent it the second time?
And again rideshare has given us a slight preview of this. The taxi constraints incentivize having cars near their predicted users. We'll either need to build and maintain waiting-car storage in central areas (eg parking), or accept idle circulation in down times.
Could you unpack that? It doesn't make much sense to me. We don't want them driving around all day, we don't want them to drive home, and if it's a communal usage type thing they need to be stored outside of peak hours.
* My parents live 50 miles away, impossible to reach to on public transport with kids and related paraphernalia
* My young kids are in different school/childcare settings requiring us to drive
* We do regular large supermarket/DIY shops that cannot be taken on public transport
* We explore different rural and coastal areas with our kids that aren't practically reachable by public transport.
In the UK, anti-motorist lobbyists have been successful in pushing for punitive measures (e.g. roadblocks AKA "LTN", road narrowing, modal filters, road closures, mass-surveillance-based road charging AKA "ULEZ", absurd blanket 20mph speed limits on inappropriate roads) and we need to push back.
Reject propaganda pushed by The Guardian and similar metro-leftie publications. It's deeply unrepresentative and manipulative.