Let's Build a Traditional City and Make a Profit
andrewalexanderprice.com
andrewalexanderprice.com
This is probably sounding very wrong and boring to many people here who extol city living, enjoy the energy and vitality of the bustling city center. Public transportation, walk-able streets, stores, clubs, coffee shops, restaurants. But I would like that on vacation only for about a week or so. Then I want to go back to my boring suburban home with grass, trees an flowers around.
See, I grew up in a city and experienced that. And it was ok. But I like this better. I wonder if there is an element of that -- rejecting the places we grew up and deciding the opposite environment is better for it. I imagine a lot of people in US grew up in the suburbs and many now feel attracted to the city.
ETA: To be fair, the architect/contractor/developer going for the cheap option is pretty common. Especially when it comes to something no one can see like insulation inside walls.
Before I was 10 I lived in an urban area. It was pretty much exactly this. After that we moved to an ultra-rural area. When I was old enough I swore I would move back and I did, but within a couple years realized that there are lots of downsides exactly as you describe here. I'd add that close proximity to near constant violence is also a problem in many urban areas.
I finally left when my downstairs neighbor was violently stabbed in his own apartment.
This was in one of the low-crime areas.
I'm in an older (~1930) building in Belltown and have only heard my neighbor above me one time (I think a chair fell over or something). Honestly, the biggest source of noise for me is outside in the summer months when I leave the windows open.
It's not a really old property - ~200 year old townhouse converted to flats about 120 years ago.
Walls are roughly 1m thick sandstone.
I live in one of the older apartment buildings in SF, built in 1907. (Not much exists older than that, for... reasons) I can tell whether my upstairs neighbor drops a quarter or a dime, and I am regularly woken up by the next door neighbor's iPhone alarm clock. The whole building shakes slightly whenever a Bart train (which is pretty far underground) goes by.
Walls are roughly 1cm thick plywood, apparently. And yet it still costs a fortune!
I live in a 100 year old brick tenement in Brooklyn, though, and hear very little of our neighbors myself— occasional creaking floorboards, and some sounds from the staircase near the front doors, but that's about it.
Much of my suburban experience is that grass and planting are choirs that are outsourced - and that few people actually use the pools and playgrounds.
I'm a bit frustrated when friends talk of the desire for a pool when they never go to the pool (that always seems empty) that they pay dues for.
Pool is used pretty often by the family (so far).
I enjoy the cutting the grass. My yard takes about an hour to do the whole cut/edge/trim. I view it as exercise and time to think.
That's kind of interesting, but it's how I view my commute (mostly walk|bike given bearable weather) in NYC.
I hire a guy to come by every two weeks and mow my lawn. He charges me $30 each time. I used to do it myself, but I decided to spend my time doing other things. If I did it myself, yard maintenance is unbelievably cheap and not all that time consuming, a half hour every 2 weeks. I probably didn't even get through 3 gallons of gas over an entire season and I've had the same lawnmower for 6 years. I don't water my lawn, it's pretty brown right now.
I use the pool system (we have 4) a handful of times during the summer, but I don't mind paying for it as part of my fees since at least I have the option. The pool houses double as community centers and party spaces which is nice. I can take cheap yoga classes in one year round, I think it's $5 a class.
I don't use the playgrounds and don't have any kids, but my wife and I make extensive use of the private park and trail system in my development. The central park is about a half-mile long (almost exactly long as NYC central park is wide), wooded, filled with trails (a circuit is about 2km), a small lake, adult exercise equipment, tennis courts, a field hockey pad, a basketball court and a few open green spaces. But there's something like 20 more miles of trails and smaller parks and green space all throughout. It's all immaculately maintained.
At one end of the park is a small amphitheater where they throw a summer concert series. We get our own 4th of July fireworks show too.
If I lived in a dense Manhattan style city, I'd probably end up spending it all on building fees, higher rent and significantly higher grocery prices.
Outsource? Bah, I grew up mowing acres so I can manage my lot that is measured in square feet. I'm not paying someone for a task that takes 30 minutes. What's next, pay to have someone load the dishwasher? There is no mower maintenance: it's battery-powered.
Pools? I know of one house within a several mile radius of my own house that has a pool. It's right down the street, the dogs and I walk past it all the time. I've never seen anyone in it, and I'm not even sure that they fill it with water anymore. It's Seattle, you'll never use a pool.
Playgrounds? The park 400m from my house always has someone using it even in the dark and rainy Seattle winter. The wide gravel trail a block from my house always has traffic. Even during a run at 5 a. m. on a dark, rainy December morning, the mutt and I will see someone out there on the trail.
Maybe it's Seattle, maybe it's just my neighborhood, but folks do get outside and utilize what's available to them.
What's striking is how hard it is to take what's already present and build up, to modernize or expand existing infrastructure. Construction in a city is expensive, and a great many existing buildings break various codes (ADA, asbestos, etc) in ways that are more expensive to fix than from-scratch development is.
When building new is cheaper than retrofitting, people will tend to do it. Putting up a new building in Boston's financial district would likely mean knocking half a dozen valuable apartment buildings, and won't ever happen. Putting that office building up five miles away is cheaper, and Boston is already seeing a number of industrial parks on its outskirts for that reason.
The exceptions are places where land costs a fortune (NYC), zoning is impossible to deal with (San Francisco), or the sprawl is already so atrocious that "outskirts" is a death sentence for a new venture (LA).
Subsidies for expansion certainly matter, but even without them there are substantial incentives to choose sprawl over infill and development.
Cite: Franconi, Ellen, Kristin Field and Michael Deru, 2013. Building Performance Modeling for Gaining Investor Confidence. http://www.ibpsa.org/proceedings/BS2013/p_1401.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_discrimination
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictive_covenants#Exclusio...
Look further and you'll find that US housing policy in the 20th century intentionally encouraged suburb construction and disinvestment in the cities.
Personally I dont think the suburbs are going anywhere. Im absolutely fascinated by the possibilites of electric, autonomous vehicles, and the small house movement. To me, those elements in combination might strike a reasonable balance between the desire to have ones own space, and the transportation requirements.
There's a lot of "I can't imagine living elsewhere" and a certain attitude that I find really funny.
I mean, I grew up here and love living here but boy oh boy, you can't even imagine living elsewhere? That says something sad about your imagination, doesn't it?
I understand the aim of what's being advocated here, and I really enjoy visiting cities like this (it saves on car rentals). But there's significant reasons people have spent a century or so trying like hell to escape these kinds of cities. Sprawl is a problem, but modeling cities after 15th century Italian towns is a mistake as well. I'd love to live in a place like this I suppose if we're all boutique shop owners and grocers this might work. But most people aren't these days. We actually have to get places that aren't necessarily right in our town.
One of the significant reasons we started moving away from this kind of development, even before cars became common, is that it traps people inside of them and prevents people from getting into and out of them. He uses Barcelona as an example, but he uses the Medieval part of Barcelona, not the 19th century bits.
So now we have to build extensive mass-transit. I'm thrilled as peaches to do that, but it's unbelievably expensive to finance. One of the reasons so many roads get built and expanded is that local governments can finance road development by forcing developers to build the roads or they won't get the zoning for their new mall or suburb (and the increased tax revenue is intended to cover long-term maintenance).
Brand new, above ground, subway/metro runs around $250 million per mile [1] in the United States (built on existing right-of-way). No developer can finance that. A brand new rural/suburban road runs $4-6 million per mile, and $8-10 million in urban areas [2].
I wish that humans had managed to develop a way of life and an advanced economy that made this possible. But we didn't. It sucks, but even if the car had never been invented, cities would no longer look like this.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Line_(Washington_Metro)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tram-train
Or do what actually happens in cities, namely hub'n'spoke: tram lines to each city's central station, high-speed/capacity lines between cities.
But the residential picture in these areas are a mess. That's why lots of cities have turned their medieval quarters into glorified shopping malls with hotels attached. None of the locals particularly want to live there.
1. They make a line that goes from one big Tokyo station (Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ikebukuro...) to outside, that used to be farming lands
2. They pretty build mini-cities around their train stations (like Futako-tamagawa for example) with shops, housing, that's all walkable or bikable for people living a bit further
The result is a small human-size neighborhood with an easy access to Tokyo (because they built the train line). One example is Futako-tamagawa.
For example, Phase 1 of Line 9 in Seoul cost around $875m or $52m per mile. This is in one of the densest urban environments on the planet.
That's 1/5th the cost of the per-mile system cost that I linked to earlier. Which was built on open and reserved right-of-way, all above ground, and didn't require massive infrastructure rerouting or other kinds of issues you might face doing the same work in a dense urban environment.
If a developer was putting up 1,500 housing units, I'd bet they could afford to split the cost of the mile of mass transit rail running by their development if it ran ~$50m per mile.
Some back of the envelope math.
Wholesale costs on new housing is around $80-90/sq ft. So a 3,000 sq ft. home costs the developer ~$250,000.
A quarter acre of property (fairly standard these days for new suburban development) in an undeveloped or rural area runs around $5-20k. So we're probably looking at a per unit cost of $300,000.
Financing construction of 1,600 units like this is $450m.
400 acres is under a square mile, but let's add in roads and green space and things and this development would easily be 1 square mile.
Let's say we want to put a subway stop right in the middle of this and run the track right on through in exchange for zoning the development.
In Korea, that'd be $50m.
In the U.S. that'd be $250m.
The developer isn't going to eat that, so they build it into their per-unit cost.
In Korea, that's a $31,250 additional per-unit cost. So my housing costs are about $330,000 per unit.
In the U.S. that's $156,250 per-unit. My housing costs are now $456,250 per unit.
The going price for single family homes in this area is $600,000. I can make a 45% ROI in Korea, while in the U.S. I'm only making 24%. My goal was to try to make 50% ROI.
24% is a pretty slim markup. Even if I boost the sale price of the houses (advertising easy access to the subway as justification), I'd have to hit $870,000 sale prices to hit 45% ROI and $900,000 sale prices to hit my target 50% in the U.S.
Are there enough buyers for that? Maybe. But it increases the developer risk substantially such that they may not bother at all.
i.e if you built a new city like this, within 15-20 mins public transit of nyc you would get much closer to the ROI your looking at.
Hell now that I think of it Toll Brothers is doing that in Hoboken. A 900sqft 2bdrm costs just under 1m.
It's too expensive here, but it's such a great town.
http://www.landwatch.com/Tioga-County-Pennsylvania-Land-for-...
Not individual .25 acre lots, but a committed developer can probably get it rezoned however they need.
It rises rapidly the closer in towards major cities.
If you're a large scale developer (of the sort that the county would hit up to help with transit development), you're probably going to buy a few hundred to a few thousand undeveloped/agricultural acres and get it rezoned.
This is a little better, $500/.25 acre and only slightly further than an hour from Pittsburgh. That's commuting distance for many people.
http://www.landwatch.com/Somerset/Cambria-County-Pennsylvani...
And here's some just an hour outside of Philly at $825/.25 acre.
http://www.landwatch.com/Montour-County-Pennsylvania-Land-fo...
In a dense city like London, which doesn't have the wide roads and car-focus of US Cities, transit is important and the value of residential property here is very highly correlated with distance to transit hubs. For a developer, it can make a lot of economic sense to develop transit to new developments.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battersea_Power_Station#2012_re...
Getting the developers to foot the bill has significantly increased the financial hurdle for developing that part of London.
The Battersea project is a poster child for why developers can't shoulder this kind of expense.
I'm not aware of any evidence of this being true. If it were, I would assume that living in one of those places would be cheaper than living in other places (because it's less desirable to people), but the opposite seems to be true.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Barcelona,+Spain/@41.39479...
Look at Barcelona. It's a Roman colonial town so it's old. Can you guess which part was built first? How about which parts were built in the 18th 19th and 20th centuries?
As nice as the medieval quarter is for shopping, nobody really wanted to continue on with that kind of plan. By the 19th century (before cars) you ended up with a grid of broad roads and open boulevards. These things didn't happen to accommodate cars, they happened because medieval city plans scale poorly. It turns out cars fit really nicely within this plan.
Look at London. With 1/3rd the population density of Barcelona, it's cramped, and tight everywhere. Basic logistics costs are high because getting goods into and out of the city is difficult and time consuming. It's one of those weird cities that developed right along the traditional medieval plan like what's being advocated here and it's an expensive cramped and often unpleasant place to live. Even if London suddenly started building up and increasing density, the city road system couldn't handle it. It has to spread out because this kind of city plan scales poorly.
In some very old towns, ones that never really continued to develop, so they're left with the medieval "bones". Getting things like groceries to the shops is a circus of people physically moving hand trucks throughout the city. What's more expensive? 50 trips back and forth throughout the city with handtrucks? Or backing a truck up to a loading dock and spending 15 minutes unloading a few palettes of goods?
Other than tourists, this is why nobody likes to live in Venice, despite it being one of the specific examples given here as a model city. In the slow seasons, Venice is one of the most beautiful, walkable cities in the world. It's perfectly human scale. But it's a terrible, expensive place to live because every item in your local grocer had to be hand carried there.
> If it were, I would assume that living in one of those places would be cheaper than living in other places
Expense isn't just because of popularity. There are fixed costs to existing in places. Just like it's very expensive to live on an island, despite there being relatively few people there. These kinds of city plans are inherently expensive, they create almost an island in a way.
However, cities have other benefits, mostly in terms of job availability, and that attracts people to them. Because earning money can outweigh almost any other downside.
Hence all the hand-wringing over "gentrification".
Really, this is just a return to the long-term normal of cities. Cities are centers of power and wealth. It was a weird American aberration that, for a time, "inner city" was associated with poverty and decay.
This kind of development is constrained to really make car ownership a reasonable thing (I know I know, he has photos of 3 or 4 cars in some of his examples). So getting into and out of this kind small scale development requires something like rail for interconnections -- I agree buses or trams would be better for intraconnections.
There is a reason there are a lot of them - because they are a good product. There are bad ones and great ones, but most are good enough.
Some people like the hustle and bustle and meeting new people every minute. Others like a life of semi-solitude and private pursuits. The attraction of controlling what happens on your own patch of dirt is so strong it has to be inbuilt.
The key to suburban living is careful neighbourhood selection. When it comes to families, coffee shops and cinemas mean nothing, but parks, walks and schools mean everything. It's hard for young single people to grok that, but it's very true. The forces that make you choose a suburb for a family are much, much stronger than those that choose an inner city district.
The takeaway, as always, is match your living to your lifestyle.
But are there? I mean, worldwide? Seems to me that there actually aren't that many, they're just concentrated.
Some people like the hustle and bustle and meeting new people every minute. Others like a life of semi-solitude and private pursuits. The attraction of controlling what happens on your own patch of dirt is so strong it has to be inbuilt.
But are you actually more alone in the suburbs? I mean, except for the airgap that makes up for the shitty sound proofing that american homes seem to have, you're still surrounded by neighbors.
What we do here in my corner of Europe when we want to control our patch of dirt and be more isolated is that we buy a house in the countryside. This [1] is isolated, not a cul-de-sac with six houses.
[1] http://casa.brick7-pt.com/media/pt/93001_93100/93081_50beb62...
The bummer about suburban sprawl is, even if the answer that first question is "no" right now, you'll need to move in a decade or two if you want to maintain that level of quiet. Eventually your suburb will develop every square foot as densely as it can.
This is why suburban sprawl is so wasteful - it spreads out, but never up.
It's only wasteful if you have laws and regulations that prevent it from changing. Areas, and sometimes entire cities, re-invent themselves in different ways. In a normal, free environment as the needs arise the density will change appropriately.
On a side note, take a few hours off and try find some old photographs of cities (or towns if you go far back enough). Compare those to what the city looks like now, and you'll know what I mean. Everyone can be an arm-chair critic and talk about what's wasteful or not according to their beliefs. But things have evolved to this point over many generations, and many individual choices.
This is a very badly thought out statement. The only way a suburb could not increase in density over time would be if it were to spring from the head of Zeus fully formed and populated at its inception.
The way reality works is, a bunch of land is owned by whoeverthefuck and is just green space and farmland until people start building on it. They don't fill up the entire suburb all at once. They'll build a few houses or a development, people who appreciate all the green space will move there, and the process repeats until the amount of green space starts to dwindle, the nature of the buildings themselves might change as land's value changes and the roads change, apartments are built instead of houses, etc. etc. The suburb's density increases.
I've witnessed this enough that your denial strikes me as strange. If you want to argue that the end result of such a process isn't great, I happen to agree...
Walks? The suburbs are terrible for walking. The pedestrian permeability of suburban streets are low, so walking to the store or to school often means going far out of your way, or crossing an arterial highway. This forces suburban residents to depend on their cars, even to places that should be a 5 minute walk.
If suburbs were redesigned to encourage walking, this wouldn't be a problem. The question is, how do we design an area equally suitable to walking and driving?
Last time I was in the US, back in May, I found myself staying in Murfreesboro (Civil War buff here!). But I wasn't right in the city center, such as it is, but rather on the outskirts, the suburbs. There were about 50 restaurants within half a mile of the motel, but to get to them, you either had to take your car, or take your life into your own hands walking across a six lane highway, which was the major access road to the Interstate. Of course you cross at the lights, unless you're completely suicidal, but here's where it all goes bad.
There were no pedestrian lights at the intersection.
There were no islands in the middle of the intersection.
At any given moment for the half of the road that was leaving the intersection, there was nearly always traffic flowing (no pedestrian lights you see)
That meant that you could cross the first half of the road, whilst that half was stopped waiting to get into the intersection. Tricky, what with turn right on red after stop, turn left on arrow and so on, but it could be done. But now, when you go to cross the second half, you have to watch behind for cars turning left into your road, as well as watching forwards for cars turning right. Both need to be clear, both rarely are. There is often not a gap between those cars running the amber light, and the cars from across the intersection starting, which means that a pedestrian can find themself stuck in the middle of a six lane highway with flowing traffic going passed on both sides of them. Fun!
Even after having run the gauntlet, you get to the other side, the one with the shops and restaurants, only to discover that there are no sidewalks - you either walk on the unpaved verge, unlit, with holes dug by groundhogs and rabbits, and metal stakes put into the ground for some long forgotten reason but never pulled out, or you walk on the road.
So much for walkability in the suburbs.
I'm tired of this myth that young families obviously want to move to the suburbs. My young family certainly doesn't. And all our peers with similarly young children talk about is wanting to stay, despite the temptation of cheaper square footage out in suburbia.
Because just like you're saying of suburbs, among cities there are "bad ones and great ones". I think many Americans have never actually experienced good cities, because we don't have that many of them, and the tourist parts of many of the good ones are not actually the nice places to live.
> coffee shops and cinemas mean nothing
My three year old would certainly disagree. This morning, like many mornings, it was he who suggested we should walk together down to our favorite neighborhood coffee shop. Naturally, we saw friends we know along the way, and played in our favorite park.
> parks, walks
Both of these are vastly better here in my city than in any of the surrounding suburbs. It's not even remotely a contest. You can't walk out in the suburbs, other than in tiny little circles that don't go anywhere. When we visit the suburbs for a week, my kid starts asking why we can't walk to X instead of getting in the car again.
Children especially suffer from this, because they're completely dependent until they can drive. There's no gradual ramp-up in their scope of freedom. And old people likewise suffer, because once they can't safely operate high-speed machinery, they're as dependent as children.
And the health statistics are obvious. The biggest statistical threat to your children's long-term well-being are metabolic diseases, all of which are lower in cities than in comparably affluent suburbs. Our suburban relatives tend to lose a few pounds when they visit for a week, without even trying.
> schools
This again comes down to "bad ones and great ones". We live Somerville, MA on the edge of Cambridge. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a scientist. The level of intellectual stimulation, educated role models, general bookishness, and community commitment to art is nearly impossible to beat. We have our pick of educational options, including respected public schools, a constellation of private schools, and a deep and vibrant homeschooling community full of the aforementioned scientists and other assorted PhDs.
So while I don't expect everyone to want to live in the same kind of place, and I'm happy that other people are happy in suburbs, having kids is orthogonal to the question. For me, being a parent makes me more thankful to be living in a vibrant city.
I'm sure some people actually prefer suburbs. But many others would admit that they would choose to raise their kids in a city if they could afford to. It's obviously extremely desirable to very many people, otherwise it wouldn't cost so much.
> See, I grew up in a city and experienced that. And it was ok. But I like this better. I wonder if there is an element of that -- rejecting the places we grew up and deciding the opposite environment is better for it. I imagine a lot of people in US grew up in the suburbs and many now feel attracted to the city.
After nearly 20 years of on and off living in Italy and Europe, I'm still pretty happy with denser cities. I like being able to walk to the basics, even though we're now in the Italian version of a suburb. We have kids, and as a consequence, use the car more. But we still ride the tram downtown every now and then, and often walk over to the grocery store or park.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078X...
Fewer regulations and more freedom to experiment would be beneficial.
Specifically I want a house similar to the one I grew up in. It had a pool. It had a semi soundproof family room on the opposite side of the house from the master bedroom. That meant my sister and I could have our friends over for slumber parties and stay up all night and basically make as much noise as we wanted and not bug our parents. My dad could practice his instruments (guitar, bass, drums) and not annoy the neighbors. We also had a garage full of tools. And we had a large dog.
Since I left I've only ever lived in apartments. I haven't been able to listen to music or watch a TV at what I consider a "good" level for an action movie where you "feel the explosions" etc. I've resorted to headphones when I'm by myself but that's not so fun when guests. I've never been able to play Dance Dance Revolution or Just Dance or any other video game that would have me making noise on the floor. Rockband Drums and Rockband singing is out of the question as well. Having a big dog with no yard seems kind of cruel in some ways so I've never had a dog.
So yea, +1 for the suburbs.
At the same time I like the city. I like being able to take public transport. I like all the variation, restaurants, events, museums, meetups, bars, etc. I hate the cookie cutter suburban shopping centers with their same 10 stores every 5 miles (one Bed Bath and Beyond, one Best Buy, one Tilly's, one Michael's, one Target, one Walmart, one Payless, etc...
Other than being rich enough to buy a house in a city or a penthouse it seems unlikely I can have both.
A small tangent, but this line of thought has always bothered me. There are millions of dogs in shelters, both kill and nonkill - there's no way your small apartment is crueler than that! Dogs are happy anywhere with people.
When I rented an apartment, a few floors down a couple had a German Shepherd, it was really unhappy and depressed all the time, it lived in a 50 square feet balcony.
It's really sad, but I can only adopt so many animals. Fortunately there are no kill shelters in my country, and shelters neuter nearly all the animals (my two cats are neutered).
I'm more worried about children in shelters (my GF works for the institution tries to find foster families for children that cannot be adopted, it's a really tough job):
That said, with Skype, remote work, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, I guess who really needs to go anywhere these days anyhow?
Until these "new urban" environs offer that, it will be difficult to attract most parents with children to move there.
http://www.lincolninst.edu/pubs/1308_The-Property-Tax-School...
It's 10 minutes by car to the center of the nearest city, Rennes (pop. 200,000), with good hospitals and good schools and pretty much anything you need: http://i.imgur.com/3DkTrwC.jpg
And 5 minutes from a smaller town with a small supermarket, bakeries, and bi-weekly farmer's market that covers everything needed for daily life: http://i.imgur.com/GDSpg3f.jpg
In comparison, a suburban home in San Mateo, CA, where I lived for a year felt very cramped: http://i.imgur.com/9Nkm3wO.jpg (quick collage from Google Maps, might not be exactly at scale)
Of course, San Mateo is just 20 minutes away from an international airport and destroys Rennes in job opportunities in the tech sector, but it seems that suburban homes in the US are all built on this same cramped model regardless of their location.
I don't have kids yet so I'm probably missing something though; my brother with two small kids just moved from a downtown apartment to a small house and seems to be enjoying his small garden a lot.
All the conveniences you list are likely in both housing plots you show. The difference is familiarity. I can go about ten minutes in multiple directions from my house and pass four or more super markets, a dozen or more doctors offices, a full blown hospital and a few satellite facilities, and countless places to eat and such. Yet I make jokes about being past the banjo line because being just a few streets off the main roads its completely peaceful.
and its not unique by far, fortunately being in the tech world I can work from home and I do so at least once a week. As more employers realize the savings of letting employees work from home i expect this type of living to become even more popular.
I could go join friends downtown, live behind locked doors. Hell they even have to buzz me in the lower door! Yet I can't be down there an hour without hearing a cop go by and frankly I don't need the noise and worse, the filth.
When the day comes (inevitable, in my opinion) that energy prices make it impractical for the average person to transport themselves 20+ miles a day to work, school, shopping, etc, the dynamic will change. All but the closest suburbs will become for the wealthy only and urban housing will become dense by necessity.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/23/p...
In the modern era of stagnating wages, this is the primary way a working family can give themselves an effective "raise", by living in a cheap area and working in an expensive area. It should come as no surprise, therefore, all the megacommutes people are doing as a result.
The last time I went home, the suburbs actually gave me a melancholy feeling. Having grown up in perpetually-sunny SoCal, the never changing weather actually gave me a sense of stillness and stagnation, as if nothing ever changes (good in some ways, bad in others). The northeast's jarring seasons combined with NYC's ambitious culture, on the other hand, seems to inspire action and progress - life is moving on with or without you. Purely a personal perception, I understand.
Though, on the flip side, when it's time for me to settle down and raise a family, I highly suspect I would want to return to the suburbs for that. Raising a child in NYC seems insane. Though to be fair, NYC does have its shares of suburbs in the outer boroughs.
I think people like you and I will soon be looking to escape to suburbs that offer a mix of both worlds -- rather than being a 15-min drive to the nearest strip mall (like where I grew up), I want a ~1600-2000 sq ft detached home (it can be a townhouse) within a 15-min walk to a walkable area of shops and services, and with a train line and/or cycleway to get me to the business district. Don't really know where that is though.
That said, you have to admit, the art/music/gatherings in the country are much less frequent and much less varied than in a big city.
You'll always have the suburb option. I think the question is more around the extent of 'automobile-centricity' we want.
Also: it's got some great restaurants and about 80% of my diet comes from food that's made within 25 miles of where I live now. To get to a restaurant, we take a brief stroll through the woods.
Smartest thing I ever did was move here. I've spent my whole life trying to work with governments (mostly federal) to use technology to improve service delivery and if I'm honest with myself, it's been mostly discouraging. But since I've moved here, I've met with the mayor and we're beginning to do amazing things.
What makes an amazing place to live, though isn't the lack of automobiles (as the author of this post seems to believe), or great architecture -- but rather an attitude of community. That you all have a shared role in the success of each other's life environment. Human beings are wired for that, and both urban and suburban environments tend to separate us from that.
Took a look at real estate prices relative to the area, confirmed - wow 4x higher prices than anything else in the area. Pretty amazing feat of real estate marketing to turn a chunk of rural Georgia into the equivalent of California home prices by leveraging sustainable growth. If developers can build a community like that and turn a profit at the same time that's a pretty promising future
A large portion of the generation who grew up in cookie cutter 90's exurbs have absolutely no desire to live their adult life in areas with those types of development patterns. Developers and city planners need to get with the program or the american suburbs are going to go through serious decline soon
And this speaks to my overarching point: Small, dense communities work. Dunbar's number. When you have a group of people, all of whom know each other's names (we're wholly organized on Facebook, actually), the social cost of being an asshole is REALLY HIGH (as a recovering asshole myself, it's part of the reason I moved here). You can't honk your horn at somebody without the risk of that being your neighbor.
But most people don't have horns. They get around by foot, bike, or sometimes even a golf cart.
Is the farm run like a co-op?
More about Serenbe here: http://terrain.org/2012/unsprawl/serenbe/
Lots of consultants, a few commuters (people carpool) and even a few farmers -- my neighbors are making a killing raising sheep at ManyFold Farm.
I can still see Sim City moving around on the backs of my eyelids.
Easy to say, I guess.
Traditionally there has been software like Esri's CityEngine - http://www.esri.com/software/cityengine - which procedurally generates[2] urban geometries based on user-defined typologies and land-use. However CityEngine is just a geometry generator, and therefore far too basic to be used for contemporary design which must also negotiate factors like building daylight accessibility or positioning transit nodes for optimum walkability.
A decent urban simulator therefore needs not only a procedural city geometry generator, but also simulators for walkability, building operational energy use and environmental simulators (ventilation, solar radiation etc). MIT's Sustainable Design Lab is developing the first (I believe) serious integrated urban modelling platform: Urban Modelling Interface (UMI) - http://urbanmodellinginterface.ning.com/. Unfortunately UMI doesn't at this point include a way to procedurally generate urban geometries.
A combination of CityEngine (with a much friendlier UI) and UMI would provide the kind of complex simulation environment that I think a realistic urban simulation game would require.
[1] https://github.com/saeranv/cactus (Almost have a proof-of-concept ready for this).
[2] Using a shape-grammar engine - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_grammar - which operates in a recursive manner and is thus a reasonable imitation of actual urban growth.
SimCity has so wholly established the popular concept of what a city simulator should be that everything else, from Cities XL to Cities in Motion, is inevitably built on that template.
Don't get me wrong, the SimCity series is great, but the domain of urban simulation could be vastly wider than what fits within the boundaries of the Maxis tradition. Different things could be abstracted; other things could be simulated in greater depth.
I'd love to see, for instance, less reliance on detailed buildings and more reliance on realistic building plans. Or less direct control over construction and zoning, having to go through councils and referenda, or backroom deals to get things done (imagine all these things having various stats for rolls like an RPG).
Background: Sydney is a well developed city with a population of 4.5 million. It is built on a coastal basin, bounded by the Pacific ocean on the east, a mountain range (Great Dividing Range) on the west, a river/green belt on the north and national parks on the south, with expansion happening in a south-west direction. Real estate prices are high compared most other cities. To the west of the Great Dividing Range is the beginning of the flat interior of Australia. The first significant town to the west of the Great Dividing Range is Lithgow.
Running east to west, the Great Dividing range is delineated by a steep climb at the suburb of Glenbrook, and a steep descent at Mount Victoria. There is a winding highway and railway connecting these two points, so the trip from Lithgow to Sydney is slow. As the crow flies, the distance between Glenbrook and Mount Victoria is about 45km.
The plan would be to build a tunnel under the Great Dividing Range, install a high speed train in it, and cut the travel time between Sydney and the west of the range to minutes. Tunnels longer than 45km exist today, so it should be doable from a technical standpoint. The project could be paid for by the increase in land value to the west of the range.
As an aside, there are ongoing proposals for a high speed train (HST) along the eastern seaboard of Australia, linking Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane, all major cities. The seaboard is rugged and heavily populated, so some proposals have the HST to the west of the Dividing Range. A new city, to the west of the divide, could act as a junction between a north-south HST and a connection to Sydney, providing a ready made economy.
Even if the train follow the existing highway it would do pretty well - it's almost entirely straight and flat.
Sydney is getting a 2nd airport. Air travel is easier to build, easier to expand and requires no private property resumption, wildlife corridors, bridges or tunnels.
There is also zero population density between the two cities.
It won't happen.
We lived in an apartment in Palo Alto, and doing the most basic things was impossible without a car - grocery shopping, going to the office, going out for dinner or to a meeting. Even bikes weren't really enough. Eventually we caved and had to pay the extra expense of renting a car through a car sharing site.
San Francisco was really not much better - to get there, the only viable option was either to drive or to take the CalTrain - always extraordinarily crowded in the busiest hours, not to mention slow and with long waits in between trains. Getting around in the city on foot also presented an ordeal, but at least MUNI and BART helped somewhat.
This added a huge expense for our company that would have been completely unnecessary in other cities - including the rental price and fuel, the car ended up burning about $800/mo on its own. Not to mention the amount of time wasted driving around to get basic things done like visiting the bank or the supermarket.
It became clear to me why companies like Uber were making a killing in the U.S - public infrastructure was so badly supported that there is just no way to live without access to a vehicle. I can't imagine what it must be like for the working poor, who must pay for the expense of a vehicle just to subsist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Prototype_Communit...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLCHg9mUBag
https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/ Beautiful renderings: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/high-density-...
Also, use thumbnails or a CDN FFS.
Other planned city resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_city
Except when they fail to load, unfortunately. Content this size should really be hosted on S3 or equivalent, but the author probably didn't expect this scale of traffic.
We don't build even mediocre cities anymore because, for the most part, we've made them illegal.
For instance, just building narrow streets is not "all we need to do" as the author states.
Full text available on Archive.org (but it's worth buying a copy for the illustrations alone): https://archive.org/stream/APatternLanguage/A_Pattern_Langua...
I think traditional, walkable cities are a great idea whose time is more than overdue in North America. Places like Quebec City are a good example, but what really fascinates me is Tokyo, a behemoth of a city with so much that is walkable with one-way streets and wide sidewalk areas, and you can get to anywhere easily via buses and rail links. All these simple one-way streets, connecting to arterial roads with 1 lane in each direction, connecting to highways, create an absolutely massively distributed road system.
If you think i'm exaggerating, pull up Tokyo in Google Maps and pick a spot at random in the surrounding metro area and go to Street View, you will always always land on a one-way road, often with people walking on it.
However, my vision for the perfect city is quite different than OP's.
My ideal city:
* Density is between 5k-8k per square mile (twice as dense as Palo Alto, half as dense as Cambridge, MA)
* The density and layout should support a high walkability index. There should be a grocery store, barber, coffeeshop, pharmacy, etc, within a half-mile to a mile of most housing.
* Housing arranged in blocks, with a shared yard for all people on the block. So each house would have a small patio owned by the home owner. Behind that would be a collective yard/green area shared by all the neighbors on the block. This shared area might have a basketball hoop, swimming pool, jungle-gym, soccer nets, BBQ pit or whatever the residents wanted. It would be behind all the housing, and thus insulated from the city. The block should be small enough that pretty much any parent can look out their window and see their kids playing. Basically, any parent should feel perfectly safe just letting their five-year old kid play outside in the common backyard with other kids.
* The road system should be optimized around bicycles, scooters, and microcars (like the Carver or Automoto, because bicycles are not so good for older people in the winter). Roads would have two narrow lanes in each direction, a left-hand lane for 25MPH scooters and roadbikes, and a right-hand lane for slower bicycles and roller bladers. Cars would only be allowed on main arterials, driving a car on the bike roads would require a $10 per day special pass. Optimizing around bikes and mini-vehicles allows for getting between point A & B very quickly, but limits congestion, pollution, and the expense of a full-sized car.
Things I don't like about OP's dream:
* it feels to claustrophobic. I like green space.
* walking is just much slower than biking, so I prefer biking.
* it is really not pleasant to have both bikes and mopeds using the same narrow streets. One of the least pleasant aspects of traveling in a a classical city core is having the mopeds buzz by you at 20MPH.
* row housing looks nice from the outside, but severely limits the amount of sunlight coming inside. I greatly prefer standalone units that have windows on all four-sides.
* In general, I think that very dense, old school cities can be more pleasant to visit for a little while, than to actually live in long term. There is a reason why most people in those countries do not wish to live in such housing or build more housing like it.
The biggest problem in general with doing a city-as-a-startup is jobs. Due to the winner-takes-all nature of the economy, the highest paying jobs are concentrated in a few metro areas where the big winning companies reside. I'm not sure how you bootstrap the economy of the new city.
Or just determine the maximum number of cars you can support, and auction off the permits. (That's what they do in Singapore.)
In practice, it's going to be a lot clumsier than that (say, take last year's number and add 3%), but auctions and long-term planning can still rein in sales.
I have chosen to commute a 1 hour plane to work (I work in 3-4 days spans and then several days off, so it´s doable) because I rather go walking everywhere, or if I have to take a car, it only takes 3 min to get there.
- More dense cities are more pleasant to live. - More slow paced live. - You meet people you know all the time (you don´t stop to talk to unknown people usually), which is nice and necessary. We are social animals after all. - You usually end knowing most neighbor businesses owners and clerks, also you also get to know other neighbors around your street. - It´s very productive, you can get most stuff done in 15 min tops.
But to do it from scratch there are certain parts that you mention that must be taken in to account.
- You need green parks than old medieval cities, they must be a central part of the planning. They give air, and the much needed green surroundings we need. They also help giving more luminosity to the city. Old cities were that tight because they needed to be inside walls for protection, that´s not the case any more, and density it´s not such a priority anymore. - You MUST limit the size of the city. Above 200k and 300k residents, it starts growing too much and expanding to levels where you need mayor infrastructure to handle the volume of people getting to popular locations. The effect of a small city is lost (or at least you start loosing it). It would be better to build a group or constellation, of small cities connected by train, and surrounded by parks and industrial zones. - Parking is a mayor problem, you can deal with it, if you plan for big parkings outside the city and good public transport, and mandatory parking below the buildings (if you are starting from scratch, in Barcelona is impossible). Also if it´s well planed a lot of people don´t need to own a car. -Sunlight is a problem for row housing, but if they are well designed and oriented ( for example if you have a narrow street at the front, you get a big patio), with interior patios and attics, you can get a very nice urban landscape (with terrace gardens included) for the upper floors, and the patio to the lower ones. Patios are a central part of some urban Mediterranean cities, most live was lived facing to them. -Bikes are better channeled to more central and wide streets, and only allowed to go to the narrow ones to get to the destination (going slow at that parts). This is something that small cities like Ferrara (Italy) have pretty much nailed, but others like Palma de Mallorca are slowly iterating to solve.
Living in a small city makes you change the way you live, it´s a different mentality, sometimes people from Madrid or Barcelona get shocked by the change and can't handle it. Their usual complains are:
-I can't get all the options I got on my big city (theaters, museums, events, parties, etc..). Well this is true, but the fact is that when asked this people usually don´t go out of their neighborhoods, and rarely go to the theater or museums. You can have the same rate of Museum visits, going as a tourist once a year. -People is more nosy and opinionated about your live. Well this is true, and can be difficult to adapt for city or suburb people. But I´ve noticed that most internet social apps are designed to replicate this nosy live. We are social beings, and when you live isolated in a suburb home, you still need to be in contact with people.
At the end it´s very very pleasant to go to buy bread and start talking with one neighbor or a friend for 10 min (if you want of course, you can always go your way saying hello). Even now a day it´s much individualistic than it used to be. My grandmother used to tell me how they all knew each other, not only in their street, but in their neighborhood. This happened when everybody had problems to get food or money, and people had to help and get help in a daily basis.
We need people around and small cities give a nice compromise between the small tribe that we evolved in and the big community where everything it´s possible. Every time I read comments at HN about social Apps(to get new contacts) or being a loner, or an introvert, I see that those are problems that are seem to be much smaller here in southern Europe. Here hardcore introverts still exist, but they seem to be more scarce, and people use social apps a lot, but they still see each other in a weekly or daily basis (that is, when living in the same city). Dating apps are used, but you still can go out, and meet people you know that will introduce you to new people.
Worth comparing the Old and New towns of Edinburgh - the latter has lovely shared private gardens as well as public parks - shared private gardens are ideal as far as I am concerned as I like gardens but hate gardening!
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/728
We have access to lovely large gardens 10 minutes from the center of the city:
Under a new town you might be able to do it much more cheaply (which isn't to say cheaply in an absolute sense), but of course the economic incentive isn't there at that point.
That said, with services like Uber, and much more so, driverless vehicles, hopefully the desire to bring a car along wherever we go will begin to ebb in the near future, making the narrow street vision described here much less of a compromise. I imagine those times when you need a car to get somewhere, spending some of the time weaving around through carts and pedestrians would be much less frustrating if you can kick back and read a book while it's happening. Even more though, there would be less concern of servicing parking for these sorts of regions, so you could still have a few arterial roads to get in and out, far less wasted parking space, and no need to build underground mazes to accomplish it.
small mom&pop shops in the city you can reach by foot? sounds nice in theory, but this also means running to 10 different shops, lugging your purchases around for the whole trip. honestly - driving to a strip mall where you can buy everything and store the shopping in your trunk is just a lot more convenient. i mean, as soon as you have to get in the car to do the shopping, the strip mall always wins. i live in a big city and do the grocery shopping per pedes almost every day - but i don't need much (don't have to shop for a 3-4 hungry mouths).
it might work as an alternative - for people that are fed up with the car centrist society and actively seek out a place where the community takes its place. i'm just not sure that small, village friendly businesses would be competitive when strip malls are around.
Say what you want about Walt Disney - epcot as originally envisioned would have been amazing.
My guess is some combination of:
- Money
- Initial pre-committed residents
- Habitable land
- Management
And then the main thing left, is, I believe, approval?
Which leads to my questions:
- What is the legality? Where is it legal? Where is it illegal? Or if legal, what are the chances/what is needed for approval?
Establish a development committee and some staff to bringing commercial businesses and people looking for office space (so the people living there have some place to work). Local county/city transport authorities to build transit links into the development. Ensure they can get into and out of the area cleanly, it won't work if it's an island. Most of your population will be commuting into and out of it no matter what you do.
Build it in phases and sell it as you go. You'll need to build the residential sections first (businesses can't survive without customers).
Hire an advertising team to draw people in and blanket the region with adverts. Work with local real-estate brokers to hi-light this as a destination they should show all clients during a house hunt -- even people not looking for a place like this.
There must be a way to finance the planning and construction of a neighborhood along these lines, or finance the political effort it would take to designate a zone "traditional".
In an immediate sense, we can encourage trad neighborhoods by asking city councils to slightly change laws that allow smallness and interestingness to take hold. Let vendors set up stands. Open up alleyways. Close off a few streets to traffic.
Another way is to go big and get mega developers to build post-shopping shopping malls that are actually traditional cities. But the big approach has not worked so well in the past!
Like this:
Road/Parking___Housing/Shops___Greenway/Park___Housing/Shops___Road/Parking
It costs a bit of land, but the area would be much nicer.
There are some amazing resorts constructed this way and no reason a whole town cannot be as well.
Blaming cars for people being lazy and fat is itself incredibly lazy.
While having a network of isolated silos with 45 hour commutes in autonomous vehicles is an interesting idea, it is in direct conflict with the vision espoused here. It'll be hard to reconcile the two.
Or maybe question why you have the long commute at all...
Also, there is plenty of evidence that sitting and driving, instead of walking, affects obesity rates:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/more-time-driving-incr...
You guys in the US are so lucky! Large areas of land all for the taking.
In my country, most of the land is built full. Cities and towns do not end, they just touch other towns and the residences continue. What land remains is either designated forest land, or for agriculture. You are not allowed to build residences on those.
There is no way to get that off the ground. It is like if nitcoin started at $1000
I suggest using a CDN for the images. It took me ~10 min to load them. E.g. fastly or CloudFront.
But what you really need to kill automobile dependence is a way to transport goods throughout your city without a human to shepherd it along. You need to have train cars that can automatically load and unload palletized goods, and a package routing network for smaller items. Your pizza delivery will consist of the restaurant putting your food into a standardized container and pushing the "send" button. When you shop, you send your purchases directly home from the store instead of carrying them with you for the rest of the evening.
Cars aren't just for getting to distant places fast. They are also for moving stuff around too heavy for you to carry around everywhere you go. I once bought an air conditioner window unit in downtown Chicago and took it home on the El. That was such a hassle that I became much less reticent about giving up my parking spot afterward. It wasn't long after that when I stopped walking the six blocks to Jewel to buy as much food as I could carry home in my arms and started driving across the state border to buy as much as I could store in my home without spoilage.
City simulators that track the movement of people are fine, but they are incomplete if you can't also track the non-people items that also move around and transform within residences and businesses. Food, water, power, clothing, necessities, luxuries, raw materials, sewage, and trash all move around semi-independently, and in most cities, a lot of that moves around in a human-piloted vehicle.
Power moves through conductive cables. Drinking water does through pipes. Data goes through glass fibers or conductive wires. Fuel gas moves through pipes. Sewage moves through pipes. But then we have garbage trucks, delivery trucks, and cars moving everything else. Where are the pipes for that stuff?
Intermodal containerized shipping changed the world. But you can't exactly manage your household deliveries with a metal box 20m long. But thanks to them, most everything that makes it to your house once fit on a pallet or inside a shopping cart. Construct a container standard around those sizes and make your transportation infrastructure handle the containers, and your city no longer needs postal workers, delivery drivers, solid waste collectors, or anyone else whose entire job is to take things and move them to other places.
But something like that is going to be more expensive, and it has to be 99.99999% reliable. You'll need to be a lot more dense than suburban housing to afford that, especially when you have to invent and bootstrap all the tech yourself.
Edit: I bet you could probably get bootstrap funding from the logistics command of a national army and trial the system on a military base. What you would likely end up with is a rugged plastic cube-shaped crate with 4-way entry for forklifts and handtrucks, and attachment points for parachutes, chains, ropes, or tie-down straps. That would be your large container. Your small container would probably be a little less than 1/8 the size.