I live in Montreal. It’s like this. The key is the zoning doesn’t require a ton of setbacks, parking spaces, single use neighborhoods, etc
My brother was visiting, and I showed him a broken book. He mentioned it would be nice to repair. I said I’d check if there was a bookbinder in walking distance. He was skeptical. Google maps showed three within a 20 minute walk, in different directions.
Pick any service and it’s like that. The area is dense, quiet, leafy, unpolluted, full of parks, small yards, three stories high, but full of commercial arteries such that anything you want is a quick walk away. Whole swaths of the city are like that.
The areas are enormously popular and tourists love them. Yet such neighbourhoods are illegal to build in the whole rest of north america.
You described the key issue: "such neighborhoods are illegal to build in the whole rest of North America."
I don't think it's productive to think of the suburbs as "bad" or "wrong," because that just turns into an angry debate about whose lifestyle is better.
What I think is productive is to recognize that we shouldn't be legislating that there can only be one way to live, and we especially shouldn't be prohibiting that the traditional neighborhood development patterns that have worked for thousands of years. If we actually had a free market, there would be both a fair amount of auto-oriented suburban development, and massively more traditional, walkable neighborhood development.
Would your "free market" also mean that the people living in the suburbs pay the true cost of living in suburbs? Including higher taxes to offset the higher infrastructure costs and the higher impact on the environment?
Yes! I remember when they started building around the ÉTS (Griffintown?) There was no life there, just a sea of condos with no services. Verdun was a much more lively place.
Fair though it’s more than the plateau. Mile end, rosemont, little Italy, mcgill ghetto, outremont are all like this. And then while other areas don’t have quite as many criss crossing streets, they are still very walkable and mixed. (Cote des neiges, st henri, ndg, westmount etc)
I’m sure I’m forgetting some neighbourhoods too. Mostly describing those I personally walked around a lot. The mountain gets a way a bit for those in the second list, whereas the areas around the plateau are a square grid of similar neighbourhoods in all directions.
That’s the reason I truly adore and love Montreal. It’s the best city in Canada in my mind. If it wasn’t for the brutal winter, I think it’d be the best city in Canada by everyone’s view too.
So, I like this, and enjoy neighborhoods (usually in old inner cities) which approach this, but one thing I don't see often acknowledged, is the difficulties of homelessness for this concept. People often don't like to say it out loud, but one of the principal drivers of the urge to retreat inside your car, is the fact that it puts a barrier between you and the crazy guy shouting on the streetcorner. We have not yet found a system that effectively removes the angry shouting, or urinating, or otherwise crazy-acting person from the sidewalk, or bus, or urban train, that is not uncomfortably close to a police state.
Not saying it cannot be done, I'm sure it can, but I haven't seen it. One of the principal obstacles to any pilot plan of this sort, is that it is a magnet to those people who don't get social interaction any other way (because few people wish to be around them), so it is at risk of being descended on. Plus, some people (the sort who otherwise are quite in favor of public transport in the abstract) don't want to be thick-skinned enough to deal with even one such person.
Me, I'm kind of a jerk, so I don't mind; it's all part of the human experience. I have the ability to tell such a person that I'm not talking to them today (unless I am), without being wracked with guilt for the rest of the week. But a lot of people (who otherwise would be in favor of this idea) just cannot (or do not wish to) be thick-skinned enough to cope with this.
I was homeless for several years and I also have had a college class on Homelessness and Public Policy long before that. I still write about homelessness.
I got myself off the street by moving into a cheap, small rental in a walkable neighborhood where my life works without a car. The need to own a car in the US is part of the burden that helps push some people out into the street. If we had more walkable neighborhoods where more people could make their life work without a car, that would help prevent homelessness for people who are currently at risk.
In the US, we straight up just need more housing. We have underbuilt for a long time and that helps push costs up.
We also need more small-ish scale housing in walkable neighborhoods. We have largely zoned those out of existence.
One reason crazy homeless people gravitate to big cities is because that's where they can get services. If you generally help people make their lives work across the US, then you would likely see less of this pattern.
Better social safety nets are also required. I have heard that it isn't uncommon for someone who's on the street to have mental health issues which are untreated by society. In the US this seems to have been the result of replacing one hell for the unfortunate (abusive mental 'health' jails) with an even greater hell of apathy (nothing at all).
It is definitely a downward spiral sort of situation. The gravitation of such people to the few remaining areas that are still "20-minute neighborhoods" or something close to it, increases the pressure on them such that people move out (to neighborhoods which are suburban or at any rate less central).
It also causes businesses (especially small ones which cannot afford private security) to move away, which erodes one of the objectives of this approach, which is to have small businesses of many sorts in the neighborhood. People may, in the abstract, like the fact that the business is tolerant of the poor and mentally ill, but they don't want to walk past them to go to that business. Definitely it's a bad, self-reinforcing situation.
It's not necessarily a need for more housing, but more affordable housing and possibly rural communities built around portable housing units.
In my area there is a lot of housing available, but the housing market rate has gone up so much that people with available housing don't want to rent it out to people with poor credit that have been adversely affected with financial issues, and if they are renting it out they aren't going to go below market rate. They'd rather it sit on the market for a year or more, all the while they can claim tax breaks and funding.
There is a lot of rural land as well. If you're homeless or struggling, unfortunately there is almost no place you can go in America with the exception of a few places like Slab City where you can basically inhabit some land and setup a basic shelter. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of landowners somewhere that maybe owns 1000 acres of land that they use for their leisure or the government, and they definitely don't want you on their property even if you're a nice individual just looking for a place. In America, you're expected to work and buy your freedom of the necessities of a basic shelter.
>People often don't like to say it out loud, but one of the principal drivers of the urge to retreat inside your car, is the fact that it puts a barrier between you and the crazy guy shouting on the streetcorner
As a former, long-time resident of an older inner city, I can say that not a single person I've ever encountered has made vehicle trips to avoid homeless people. Convenience, time to destination, and other concerns "drive" these decisions. For anything within that 10 minute radius, everyone walks. It's simply more efficient than driving.
I literally just moved out of a west coast city due to the homelessness problem, and homeless camps changed my commute habits on bike and foot. While I am OK going by a homeless camp on bike/foot solo, I stopped taking my family through them after some sketchy encounters. I was lucky that I didn't need to change my bike commute with my kid due to camps, but that was because I could take some alternate routes to his school. If I wanted to completely avoid homeless camps on my bike commute, I would have had to increase my commute distance by about 30%. Not only that, but it's whack-a-mole. The smaller camps move around alot. Also as a bicyclist, you notice that the bike lanes are problematic near any campsites due to broken glass and needles. I am positive many people consider this when deciding whether to start or to continue being a bike commuter, at least in west coast cities with big homeless populations.
I know many people that still live in the city, and people that moved away. Of my coworkers, all but one with kids moved out of the city when we went full remote, all cited homelessness and school quality as the top two issues. Homelessness is absolutely a big deal when making livable neighborhoods that people want to be in, whether or not you can find ways to "make it work" is beside the point.
> I can say that not a single person I've ever encountered has made vehicle trips to avoid homeless people.
I can think of many times where people I know have chosen to drive to avoid homelessness problems (or, more specifically homeless unstable drug addict problems).
I lived in the inner city and in some of the neighborhoods I lived in you simply wouldn't walk around. Not at night, not during the day, not anywhere other than from the front door to the car.
You must have lived in a different kind of inner city than I did.
It was convenient and efficient not to be assaulted.
This problem has its roots in deinstitutionalization. Many centuries were spent building a social system of asylums to house people incapable of participating in society for one reason or another.
However, the absolute power of the asylum operators over their charges inevitably lead to gross abuses which caused the entire centuries-old system to be abolished and replaced with nothing.
I have no idea what could possibly be a solution here. There will probably always be some number of people incapable of reasonable self care. There is also no system honest enough to be trusted to have absolute power over the lives of dependent others. This problem seems intractable.
The Nordic countries also deinstitutionalized but they are light-years ahead of most other countries in tackling this problem (though still far off the goal). The biggest problem is that you simply cannot get something like it through the political system in the US: Humane prisons that are there to rehabilitate instead of parking or punishment, actual free healthcare all the way through the system, state-run centers that provide shelter, food, social helpers, etc. (that isn't just parking people with a roof over their head to hide the problem). I don't believe for a second any of this would have the interest of (enough) voters or a snowballs chance in hell of passing politicians as long as An Eye For An Eye and The American Dream are still there. They are IMO incompatible with such a humane system.
It wasn't replaced with "nothing" because the problem is still there and needed to be handled. Since no better solution was given it was defaulted to the police. But the police are trained to handle criminals, so they end up treating homelessness like a crime.
This is what people talk about when they say defund the police. They want to downsize police to the point where they only deal with crime and use the freed up funds to run mental health centers, halfway houses, drug treatment centers, etc...
Or, and this is a controversial view, maybe some homeless people could be helped through cheaper access to cars. As part of my job I have recently sat through many days of cases at a local courthouse. In our rural area, judges are loathed to revoke a driver's license because they know that doing so renders a person effectively unemployable locally. If someone doesn't have access to a car, and therefore cannot find work, perhaps there is a place for giving them better access to a car.
(Anyone saying that the answer is better public transport, that isn't an option here. Rural area. Most work is in farms/oil fields/military. 24/7 bus service over thousands of square miles just isn't ever going to happen. No car or no cellphone = No work.)
Leaving aside the politics of whether we should care for the less-fortunate, I think this is only a problem of perspective and not of reality. In practice, there is safety in numbers, so cities with more people walking, out and about, tend to be safer (and feel safer for residents). When everyone retreats to a car, the street becomes a place that you shield yourself from, and disengage from, thus making the street feel less safe, and encouraging more people to use cars. Encouraging walkability and transit improves the sense of safety on streets, but it takes the willpower to do it in the face of what is essentially a panic response.
Safety in numbers doesn't apply today anymore. When someone goes batshit crazy on my train saying something racist or rapey, everyone else in the crowded car goes silent and tries not to make eye contact with the crazy person. We live in a world where anyone might be carrying a gun, drugs in their veins, or a bloodborne disease, so no one is intervening for anything unless it's their kin on the line. The street can be a scary place if you are one to be stalked by these sort of people. I've known several people who have been stalked to and from public transport and their house in this city. It's dangerous if you are a woman and walking alone, legitimately.
That is only true when the perpetrator is a rational actor. No sane person would start a fight with a group of, say, ten people. But a lot of the people causing problems in public spaces today are not in their right minds.
There's a certain city in central NC that I generally avoid because of this aspect. Every time I've visited friends there, I was asked for money in a confrontational manner. Every time I've left my car, it seemed reasonable to expect vandalism or a break-in upon returning. (I'm not a flashy person. I drive a 12 year old Civic. I keep nothing valuable in the cabin. I keep to myself.)
After a few of these negative interactions, I decided to generally avoid visiting ever again. It's not that I have a problem dealing with it: It's very easy to say no, or to run if needed. It's that I simply shouldn't have to deal with this BS in the first place! Please, just leave me alone! I'm leaving you alone.
In places like this, I lock the doors upon entering the car. Depending on location, I also keep the engine running, in case the car must be used in an evasive or defensive manner. (People have tried my door handles while stopped at lights, so the car is set to lock when driving too.) Be aware of your surroundings, and casually pay attention to how people are watching you.
I am very glad to live in a different nearby city, in a more sprawling area, that has much less of this activity. Due to the sprawl, it is not nearly as economically motivating for trolls to congregate.
Theft is a problem. Car thefts are way up in Denver, stealing catalytic converters.
But is being asked for money really that horrible? A lot of people are suffering, even if dope sick that's torture and money would fix it.
I guess depends how 'confrontational' but I've noticed those who treat these humans as less than, that's where the most problems are.
An example, contractor who did my bathroom. The contractor stopped at a stop light with tents and he started taking pictures (in the posting to fb as a meme type of way). And he got accosted for it. I don't feel too bad for him - it's not a freaking zoo. Those are the type of people who attract bad confrontations in my experience.
most people won't even make eye contact or smile. That goes such a long way. I can't imagine being in that position, it'd be like some sick twilight zone, everyone looking away you.
For sure though there are a small % of just mentally unstable, tweakers, etc.
But easily over 95% of the unhoused people I've talked to or walk by are nice, real humans. I tend to nod, give any extra change or food. I've also had similar positive encounters in much bigger cities like London too.
A counter example, Paris has more pick pocketer types who are far too invasive/physically grabbing. But flat out crime is different than what I'm talking about.
I live in a neighbourhood that’s super walkable with a ton of commercial street mixed with residences. The homeless only congregate at one small area. It isn’t really an issue.
There are tons of commercial streets and only so many homeless. But when you have fewer streets, you have more homeless per street.
Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Things may be different in the US. In particular the bay area.
> Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Things may be different in the US. In particular the bay area.
It's difficult to compare these places, when I lived in Toronto the homeless situation was nothing like what I saw in downtown SF, even around Bloor & Yonge at night.
You'll find the situation is much more grim in the US in major cities and exactly like the OP describes. It affected me slowly over the years, I'm still recovering.
This would probably be the case for the imagined suburban neighborhoods in the article. Select cities in the USA (notably NYC and LA, perhaps SF as well) have disproportionate homeless population because people travel there to live a homeless lifestyle. I personally know people who moved hundreds of miles away to one of these cities for easy access to drugs and opportunities for prostitution.
Your average walkable suburban center would likely have a pretty limited homeless population, and locals would be familiar enough with them to recognize whether or not they are a potential threat.
Very cold winters seem like an effective (and brutal) deterrent against long-term homelessness? Though, you say the homeless people in your area congregate in one place, do you have some idea why?
Suburban areas are not free of homeless people merely because of zoning. The suburbs have a police state that harasses, tickets, fines and/or arrests people for homeless activities like illegal camping, being parked too long, public urination and panhandling. Big cities tend to be more permissive (or the police are focused on bigger crimes).
Along the same line, the issues get worse if you are a woman. A lot of my female friends have concerns of people trying to grope them on public transport, or men making catcalls or wolf-whistles or otherwise harassing them as they walk.
One of the nice things about being in your own car, is you generally don't have to deal with kind of stuff.
> We have not yet found a system that effectively removes the angry shouting, or urinating, or otherwise crazy-acting person from the sidewalk, or bus, or urban train, that is not uncomfortably close to a police state.
Huh. The whole damn Europe. You 'remove' then by having a safety net. Which is one of a few things I'm really glad to pay taxes for.
> "We have not yet found a system that effectively removes the angry shouting, or urinating, or otherwise crazy-acting person from the sidewalk, or bus, or urban train, that is not uncomfortably close to a police state."
you're advocating unnecessary force. it wouldn't just be uncomfortably close, it would be a police state, where force is used to gain compliance and instill arbitrary order. mincing words like this is an attempt to avoid cognitive dissonance (i'm a good person so i'd never advocate a police state!). it's the same coercive impulse that gives us poor policy decisions to all sorts of non-obvious situations, including this pandemic.
when faced with a "crazy" person, it'd be better to control your own fears and realize that that person is quite unlikely to be a threat to you. control yourself, not others, and default to compassion and humility under uncertainty. being fearful is nearly as bad as being belligerent, in that they both serve to distance and disconnect us from our humanity.
I don't think this was the intent of the comment you're replying to. Personally, I interpreted their position as exactly the opposite: they're very anti-unnecessary force, and frustrated that we can't implement a compassionate system to deal with the problems at hand.
> when faced with a "crazy" person, it'd be better to control your own fears and realize that that person is quite unlikely to be a threat to you. control yourself, not others, and default to compassion and humility under uncertainty.
As a woman, I appreciate the empathy here, but question the logic. I cannot "control" the fact that I have breasts. The multiple times I've been agressively groped by homeless men has been entirely out of my control. The threats of assault I've received when ignoring catcalls were also out of my control (and luckily the homeless man who charged at me and threatened to stab me was held back by a good samaritan, because I assure you, that situation was entirely out of my control.)
Homeless people are harmless 99% of the time. But when you pass 100 homeless people every day, that 1% genuinely does matter.
This was the thing that I loved most about living in a semi-rural town in Japan. Everything I needed on a day-to-day basis was 20 minutes away by bike or train. I could be in the center of a major city in an hour if I hit the trains right, but 30 minutes in the opposite direction took me to landscape that looked almost exactly My Neighbor Totoro. It was awesome.
Japan is a paradise as far as I'm concerned. I generally hate US cities but would be happy to spend the rest of my life in any Japanese city I've visited, large or small.
I don't think we will ever see that level of efficiency, cleanliness and safety in established US cities. The culture is different. More importantly, I think, is that US cities have a skeleton which is generally not conducive to the transportation network seen in Japan.
I think that the current push in the US to add ADUs('granny flats') in suburban neighborhoods will show us the limitations of our current layouts. Cramming more density into an infrastructure limited area will likely result in lower quality of life. The solution, IMHO, is to undertake larger projects where entire neighborhoods are bought out at fair price(at huge public expense) and redeveloped according to modern urban design patterns. That will likely never happen due to the obsession with the past and unwillingness to allow change.
A big part of this has to do with zoning laws. In Japan, zoning is largely done by gauging the externalities produced (e.g. noise, pollution, foot traffic, building height, etc), whereas in the US, zoning is largely done by function (housing, commercial, industrial, etc).
So in Japan, you have many neighborhoods that have a house beside a tea shop beside a tailor beside house. In the US, it is very rare to find such mixes.
ADUs help though because they are a step to more density in areas that don't have enough. Most suburbs have enough population to support good transit - but there is a big chicken-egg problem: without good transit nobody will ride, and without a lot of riders you can get enough money to support good transit.
You can't prove this on small scale though, good transit is about the places you can get to: the jobs, stores, churches, restaurants, friends, and whatever else you might want to do in your city. A fast bus (not to be confused with the typical slow meandering buses most people are used to) every 5 minutes that doesn't connect to any other buses is useless. A bus every 10 minutes that via affordable transfers to anywhere can get you anywhere can get good use. Plumbers and the like still need to drive, so private autos will still be 30% of all trips, but a good transit system can be useful in the suburbs if you can just get there.
Did you note I stuck affordable in there? The ideal transit system should have the majority of the riders on a monthly unlimited rides family pass.
Supposing you have enough population - an older and more developed suburban area - you actually don't need to buy out entire neighborhoods, in many cases you could get pretty far by just buying out a few homes or strip malls and connecting small scale streets through the gaps - even ped/bike only streets if you want.
The main problem with that is that it's still not worth it in most cases. For most neighborhoods there's nothing to walk to because the population density is too low to support businesses or services. There's too much fragmented farmland separating out all the little pods of cookie cutter houses and strip malls, so the only configuration that works is to have a little pod of commercial at some highway intersection while all the residential to support that is sprinkled around a 10 mile radius of fragmented development.
We recently built a tool for this trend:
Our tool analyses travel times in cities from different points of interest like super markets, parks, doctors etc.
For now our tool is only available in German but you can take a look at our translated front-page and explore our tool in one german city:
Nice work guys! I was just wondering whether this is the case for me. I live in Frankfurt and I think it is really the case. The travel times by public transport are a bit long though to other parts of the town. I.e. I live in Gallus and need roughly have an hour to Ostend or even almost an hour to Preungesheim, including walking to the station though. So for such a small city that is quite weird, but I guess the green map shows that I should be happy anyway.
This is amazing, thanks! Not sure how exactly you calculate, but couldn't you extend this tool "automatically" (I know there are pitfalls) to all places in the world which are well covered by OpenStreetMap?
Not exactly this, but here’s a website which calculates isochrones (regions included in a certain travel time) based on OSM data: https://commutetimemap.com/
An interesting side-effect is that house/appartment-hunting become much easier and less stressful because no matter which district you will choose there will be services (groceries, pharmacies, clinics, child-care, schools, parks, etc) withing walkable/very-short-ride distance, which allows population distribute and grow more-or-less evenly, without segregationist tendencies like in the West: "I need to buy there because of the school", or "I need to buy in that area to avoid the immigrants/ethnic/black/brown people from the other area", etc.
> West: "I need to buy there because of the school", or "I need to buy in that area to avoid the immigrants/ethnic/black/brown people from the other area", etc.
How to microdistricts prevent class or racial clustering?
That's all well and good if you work in the subset of industries that can exist in such cities. Is there a meat packing plant within 20 minutes? Is there a farm? Is there a harbor? Is there an airport? Is there a powerplant? Is there a military base? Not everyone is lucky enough to work in office-based industries. Some jobs need huge structures that cannot be integrated within a 20-minute walking distance. Such jobs are equally important. Any city planning must address everyone, not just office workers.
I work on a military base. We make lots of noise. I like making that noise. I like getting paid to make noise. I don't want live beside it 24/7.
Ideally if you have some big geographic dependent job center, you would have transit to move workers from this city center to this job center. That transit could be anything from a sad bus that shows up once an hour, or a subway that shows up every 90 seconds, depending on local political climate most of all, depending on need. For example, the subways in NYC don't really help you out if you need to get across town. They are designed to funnel workers from where its cheap to live elsewhere in nyc, to where they can find jobs in midtown or lower manhattan, like a big toilet bowl. Los Angeles also built the green line to service people working for the defense industry around LAX. Planners recognize needs for movement and have this data, but I'd say the biggest barriers are locals not wanting to see a train and the working people it carries, and a lack of strong federal support in recent decades (in contrast to highway funding).
For these jobs you have industrial areas outside of the city skirts and good public transportation to/from the city neighbourhoods, good as in: accessible, fast and ubiquitous.
That's how The Netherlands do and I really like their cities.
Is there a military base? No (or maybe, depending on definition)
My personal threshold is probably closer to 5 mins, otherwise I'll not go, or order what I need. We joke that we live in a 800m rectangle 99% of the time, save for trips to the airport.
Walkability does not equal a safe or desirable apartment. Westlake in Los Angeles has a "walk score" of 91, very high meaning you can get all your needs met without a car. Doesn't make it a paradise, this area is high in crime and homelessness, and no one with a family moves there unless they don't have other options, which is why it is primarily populated by recent immigrants from Central America who have few other options.
These services seem important, but people sacrifice them all the time, because they prefer space, safety, and school districts, to the novelty of walking to a convenient store. The most expensive houses in LA are up in the hills, where it takes you 10 minutes just to drive down windy roads with zero sidewalks before you even hit a shop of some sort at the bottom. Being able to walk to your errands is just not prioritized in American real estate over the three S's. People willingly take an hour commute for these things.
"the novelty of walking to a convenient store" <- this sounds funny
Not sure if sarcasm or figure of style of some sorts. If neither I recommend traveling to European/Asian/UK/Commonwealth cities where walking, convenience and safety are all combined seamlessly for large parts, if not whole, cities.
I have always been mystified by the logic of disallowing a mixture of commercial and residential zoning through a city. What is the advantage of having tracts of single family homes that are miles away from a central shopping area, vs. mixing smaller stores throughout the residential area?
It just makes no sense. Was this sensible in the 1940s?
As a British person when I played Sim City growing up I used to think 'this isn't very realistic - huge squares of a single type of land-use and a grid of roads at right angles' - then I visited the US for the first time and actually yeah it is realistic for there!
Well, if you go West it is. The East is much like any European city - a warren of too-narrow roads. Which makes sense, as they were founded (by Europeans) when that sort of thing was common all over the world.
Here in Iowa, which became a State in 1846, we have a nominal 1-mile grid of secondary roads covering the entire state. To make easy access to land for agriculture. It was planned and executed by surveyors, business people and pragmatic colonists.
The "advantage" and original purpose of euclidean zoning was segregation and the exclusion of racial minorities.[0][1] You'll still hear these benefits repeated in euphemisms in this very thread as "space, safety, and school districts."
I'd say it's no longer specifically about race anymore, but about socioeconomic class overall. Especially with the ease of being able to search household income statistics for various zip codes and whatnot.
A secondary reason is also due to the increasing issues of mentally ill and drug addicted homeless. For various reasons, the simplest way to minimize interacting with the aforementioned groups is to live in a far flung suburb, where everything is spaced out, separated by highways, and not conducive to homeless people.
I totally agree with that. I wish we used a type of zoning more like Japanese zoning, where instead of exclusive zones, you have maximum level of allowable nuisance in different zones. This is a good writeup that has been discussed on HN in the past: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html
I think the advantage some people see (which is a tradeoff) is that separate zoning means you can live on a quiet residential street that is away from the hussle and noise.
One of the key impacts that planners worry about, aside from the obvious noise and smell, is visitors.
Homeowners in residential zones expect that the streets are used rarely, and by people they personally know.
Businesses generate traffic. Worse, much of that traffic is outsiders.
Sometimes you will see mixed or light-commercial zones immediately adjoining residential zones, where the key criterion is that the business “does not normally receive visitors.”
In the early days it was. Most people still lives in the old areas, and your house wasn't that far from all the advantages of mixed use. So it seemed like you got a quite street yet were close to everything. Then we made the exclusive zones more than a few blocks wide and it took a while to realize that isn't a good idea.
The challenge is density - it's much easier to do this if you have more people in a relatively small area. More attractive for businesses, more people to share the costs of parks and other public facilities, etc.
But then the type of people who want these sorts of neighborhoods often picture them as purely single-family homes. The two things are completely at odds.
> The challenge is density - it's much easier to do this if you have more people in a relatively small area.
I don't understand why people think this.
I live in a town of 13k people in the UK, low density - 11 people per hecate - mostly single-family homes with large gardens. We have a little town centre with good restaurants, bars, theatres, churches, shops, tea-shops, coffee-shops, book-shops, specialists like a delicatessen, a dedicated butcher, flower shops, sports equipment shops, and so on. Everything you need day-to-day or really week-to-week.
It doesn't need density. I'm not entirely sure what it does need apart from just getting on and doing it... but I don't think it's density blocking it.
It's not density, it's walmart and places like it. Walmart is now the coffee shop, book shop, delicatessen, butcher, flower shop, sports equipment shop, optometrist, etc, in these similar sized American towns, which once had all of these things as well
We don't have to guess what this looks like. We can just look at pre-car neighborhoods in the U.S, which were a lot more dense than modern suburbs, but not necessarily extremely dense. The largest U.S. cities in 1920 included places like St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore [0], each of which have several neighborhoods with a gentle mix of single-family homes alongside two-, three-, and four-family flats and traditional corner stores.
If you let neighborhoods develop organically, then this is what you get.
"25-30 dwellings per hectare" (12/acre) is considered "medium density", and as you say, not compatible with an entire neighborhood of single-family homes, which are 10-12 dwellings per hectare (4-5/acre)
It doesn't require going fully urban, though. Lots of medium density examples that are below 3 stories. I particularly like the example in that article of "The Boulders at Green Lake development" which is 36/acre.
I would argue that mixing is a good idea. 300sqm per household is not a great upper limit for families nor affordable for people with smaller incomes. But houses with 4 apartments of various sizes on 600sqm lots can be quite nice. Add to that single-family-homes with 2.5 stories on similarly sized lots in a 1:2 ratio and you got a nice quarter. If you make the roads broad enough, that is. Feeling cramped in can really destroy the appearance (and take away space for public trees).
25-30 dwellings per hectare is 3-4 ares per dwelling. That's easily big enough for single family dwellings. Hell, you can fit a 8x12m home on a 10x20m plot with a 6x10m backyard and a 2m wide front garden, and you will have 40 ares left for roads, sidewalks and curbside parking. Make the houses semi-detached and the place will even look good.
Sure, it's definitely doable without a ton of density. The problem is neighborhoods like the one I currently live in (suburbs of San Diego), where everyone has signs up in their yards declaring their total opposition to changing the zoning to allow 2-4 unit properties. That would destroy the "character" of the neighborhood, you see.
There's a point at which it's pointless to build single family homes. This [0] for example.
All the space between the houses is basically wasted. Much better to build townhouses and start putting the garages underground/on the side of the houses.
density is not really a challenge, it's just a question of city laws and zoning.
if you allow 5-6 story apartment buildings and eliminate onerous process and requirements (like parking minimums, setbacks, design reviews, "environmental" reviews, etc etc.) then you will see these neighborhoods being built.
This one is easy: people like the idea of this but still want a 4x3 300 square meter house on a quarter acre block. Or in the US is often an acre lot within a city, which is crazy to me.
And this just doesn’t scale. This is why communities are completely car dependent.
Singapore is mentioned in this article but guess what? Living is much denser in Singapore. Obviously they’re constrained by geography. But it get a lot of benefit from this.
Where space isn’t an issue people in the US and Australia at least have consistently chosen space and car dependence over convenience.
It's hard to say what people actually prefer when the laws often constrain what may be built. For example, the building I live in could not be rebuilt without zoning variances today. It has no off-street parking, but if it were a new building, it would require a parking space for each apartment. The building is quite close to the edges of the property, and if it were a new building, it would need larger setbacks that are likely impossible to achieve. This is the norm in my dense, highly-desirable neighbourhood, where tiny flats are expensive. If someone wanted a large, detached house and yard, there is plenty of that available not far outside of the city at more reasonable prices. People pay the premium to live here precisely because they care about being close to things more than they care about having space.
Be fair: people don't get a fair choice to anything else. Every try to rent in a dense neighborhood? Biggest you can get is a 3 bedroom apartment, which is enough for the poor, but not for anyone with a bit more money. If you are never home anyway, and don't have kids it works, but once you want a family you will want more space if you can afford it. In Europe larger apartments are available (and at a reasonable cost).
Every try to get around in the US? With higher speed roads everywhere, and strict zoning ensuring nothing is in walking distance you have to drive everywhere, so you need space for your car.
Everybody wants it all: 100 acres, and walk to everything. That isn't possible for many people (a super rich person could perhaps pull it off, but only one per city as a second trying would make even the most dense downtown too sparse). When the above factors eliminate the city as a reasonable compromise, then it is no wonder people go the other way. If I have to drive everywhere I may as well drive a bit father and get more land.
NYC is the only place in the US that can honestly claim any sort of exception to the above, and they are not doing much to expand the part of the city with this claim (at their costs to build transit it would be stupid of them). Other cities try and have some small areas, but overall the city doesn't really leave anyone a serious alternative for those who aren't trying to make a statement.
While expensive, though cheaper than NYC, Seattle and Portland can claim walkability too. Portland has the better public transit in the city and from suburbs in, Seattle has much more going on though, between the two.
But I also think, most people really just dont like living in a downtown. Yes, there are plenty that do. But not everyone. It's really weird to keep pushing this idea that if you dont want to live in a dense area, there's something wrong with you.
Indeed. Singapore does a very good job with the limited land it has. But nobody but the ultra-wealthy live in "landed home". It's a 700 sq ft 2 bedroom apartment for a family of 5 in a housing block with 600 other units. That's the typical middle class housing. Not sure that would fly in most Western countries.
The funny part is having a big home on it's own land somewhere away from all the people is seen as luxury by quite a few. Basically suburbs.
We also support that less dense living through subsidies and regulation. Without the subsidies and regulation, it may be that people would choose differently.
I'm definitely a city person, and there have been some well-meaning comments from non-city people wondering why people like me are opposed to their lifestyle. I don't mind people choosing to live in the suburbs or rural areas, I just want them to pay for the giant ugly highway that lifestyle requires. I want my taxes to go to city parks and schools and streetcars.
Side note - I am aware that state and federal DOT funds most highways, but the city has to pay for the induced demand for car infrastructure that those highways create downtown. On the flip side, the state and federal DOT contribute minimally to the cost of me taking the subway.
Part of the problem is that some of those subsidies are invisible to the average person. It's not a line item on their bills; it's more subtle. For example, the infrastructure required to service low-density settlements:
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My brother was visiting, and I showed him a broken book. He mentioned it would be nice to repair. I said I’d check if there was a bookbinder in walking distance. He was skeptical. Google maps showed three within a 20 minute walk, in different directions.
Pick any service and it’s like that. The area is dense, quiet, leafy, unpolluted, full of parks, small yards, three stories high, but full of commercial arteries such that anything you want is a quick walk away. Whole swaths of the city are like that.
The areas are enormously popular and tourists love them. Yet such neighbourhoods are illegal to build in the whole rest of north america.
I don't think it's productive to think of the suburbs as "bad" or "wrong," because that just turns into an angry debate about whose lifestyle is better.
What I think is productive is to recognize that we shouldn't be legislating that there can only be one way to live, and we especially shouldn't be prohibiting that the traditional neighborhood development patterns that have worked for thousands of years. If we actually had a free market, there would be both a fair amount of auto-oriented suburban development, and massively more traditional, walkable neighborhood development.
New construction projects are totally different from the places that were built a long time ago, like around Masson, Ontario, St-Laurent, etc...
Griffintown makes me sad.
But I agree, from the North American cities I visited, Montreal has the nicest, livable higher-density housing areas.
"hard to be a consumer but easier to be a human" was what I've heard about the city.
I’m sure I’m forgetting some neighbourhoods too. Mostly describing those I personally walked around a lot. The mountain gets a way a bit for those in the second list, whereas the areas around the plateau are a square grid of similar neighbourhoods in all directions.
Not saying it cannot be done, I'm sure it can, but I haven't seen it. One of the principal obstacles to any pilot plan of this sort, is that it is a magnet to those people who don't get social interaction any other way (because few people wish to be around them), so it is at risk of being descended on. Plus, some people (the sort who otherwise are quite in favor of public transport in the abstract) don't want to be thick-skinned enough to deal with even one such person.
Me, I'm kind of a jerk, so I don't mind; it's all part of the human experience. I have the ability to tell such a person that I'm not talking to them today (unless I am), without being wracked with guilt for the rest of the week. But a lot of people (who otherwise would be in favor of this idea) just cannot (or do not wish to) be thick-skinned enough to cope with this.
I got myself off the street by moving into a cheap, small rental in a walkable neighborhood where my life works without a car. The need to own a car in the US is part of the burden that helps push some people out into the street. If we had more walkable neighborhoods where more people could make their life work without a car, that would help prevent homelessness for people who are currently at risk.
In the US, we straight up just need more housing. We have underbuilt for a long time and that helps push costs up.
We also need more small-ish scale housing in walkable neighborhoods. We have largely zoned those out of existence.
One reason crazy homeless people gravitate to big cities is because that's where they can get services. If you generally help people make their lives work across the US, then you would likely see less of this pattern.
It also causes businesses (especially small ones which cannot afford private security) to move away, which erodes one of the objectives of this approach, which is to have small businesses of many sorts in the neighborhood. People may, in the abstract, like the fact that the business is tolerant of the poor and mentally ill, but they don't want to walk past them to go to that business. Definitely it's a bad, self-reinforcing situation.
In my area there is a lot of housing available, but the housing market rate has gone up so much that people with available housing don't want to rent it out to people with poor credit that have been adversely affected with financial issues, and if they are renting it out they aren't going to go below market rate. They'd rather it sit on the market for a year or more, all the while they can claim tax breaks and funding.
There is a lot of rural land as well. If you're homeless or struggling, unfortunately there is almost no place you can go in America with the exception of a few places like Slab City where you can basically inhabit some land and setup a basic shelter. Otherwise, you're at the mercy of landowners somewhere that maybe owns 1000 acres of land that they use for their leisure or the government, and they definitely don't want you on their property even if you're a nice individual just looking for a place. In America, you're expected to work and buy your freedom of the necessities of a basic shelter.
As a former, long-time resident of an older inner city, I can say that not a single person I've ever encountered has made vehicle trips to avoid homeless people. Convenience, time to destination, and other concerns "drive" these decisions. For anything within that 10 minute radius, everyone walks. It's simply more efficient than driving.
I know many people that still live in the city, and people that moved away. Of my coworkers, all but one with kids moved out of the city when we went full remote, all cited homelessness and school quality as the top two issues. Homelessness is absolutely a big deal when making livable neighborhoods that people want to be in, whether or not you can find ways to "make it work" is beside the point.
I can think of many times where people I know have chosen to drive to avoid homelessness problems (or, more specifically homeless unstable drug addict problems).
You must have lived in a different kind of inner city than I did.
It was convenient and efficient not to be assaulted.
However, the absolute power of the asylum operators over their charges inevitably lead to gross abuses which caused the entire centuries-old system to be abolished and replaced with nothing.
I have no idea what could possibly be a solution here. There will probably always be some number of people incapable of reasonable self care. There is also no system honest enough to be trusted to have absolute power over the lives of dependent others. This problem seems intractable.
This is what people talk about when they say defund the police. They want to downsize police to the point where they only deal with crime and use the freed up funds to run mental health centers, halfway houses, drug treatment centers, etc...
(Anyone saying that the answer is better public transport, that isn't an option here. Rural area. Most work is in farms/oil fields/military. 24/7 bus service over thousands of square miles just isn't ever going to happen. No car or no cellphone = No work.)
That is only true when the perpetrator is a rational actor. No sane person would start a fight with a group of, say, ten people. But a lot of the people causing problems in public spaces today are not in their right minds.
After a few of these negative interactions, I decided to generally avoid visiting ever again. It's not that I have a problem dealing with it: It's very easy to say no, or to run if needed. It's that I simply shouldn't have to deal with this BS in the first place! Please, just leave me alone! I'm leaving you alone.
In places like this, I lock the doors upon entering the car. Depending on location, I also keep the engine running, in case the car must be used in an evasive or defensive manner. (People have tried my door handles while stopped at lights, so the car is set to lock when driving too.) Be aware of your surroundings, and casually pay attention to how people are watching you.
I am very glad to live in a different nearby city, in a more sprawling area, that has much less of this activity. Due to the sprawl, it is not nearly as economically motivating for trolls to congregate.
But is being asked for money really that horrible? A lot of people are suffering, even if dope sick that's torture and money would fix it.
I guess depends how 'confrontational' but I've noticed those who treat these humans as less than, that's where the most problems are.
An example, contractor who did my bathroom. The contractor stopped at a stop light with tents and he started taking pictures (in the posting to fb as a meme type of way). And he got accosted for it. I don't feel too bad for him - it's not a freaking zoo. Those are the type of people who attract bad confrontations in my experience.
most people won't even make eye contact or smile. That goes such a long way. I can't imagine being in that position, it'd be like some sick twilight zone, everyone looking away you.
For sure though there are a small % of just mentally unstable, tweakers, etc.
But easily over 95% of the unhoused people I've talked to or walk by are nice, real humans. I tend to nod, give any extra change or food. I've also had similar positive encounters in much bigger cities like London too.
A counter example, Paris has more pick pocketer types who are far too invasive/physically grabbing. But flat out crime is different than what I'm talking about.
There are tons of commercial streets and only so many homeless. But when you have fewer streets, you have more homeless per street.
Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Things may be different in the US. In particular the bay area.
It's difficult to compare these places, when I lived in Toronto the homeless situation was nothing like what I saw in downtown SF, even around Bloor & Yonge at night.
You'll find the situation is much more grim in the US in major cities and exactly like the OP describes. It affected me slowly over the years, I'm still recovering.
Your average walkable suburban center would likely have a pretty limited homeless population, and locals would be familiar enough with them to recognize whether or not they are a potential threat.
Very cold winters seem like an effective (and brutal) deterrent against long-term homelessness? Though, you say the homeless people in your area congregate in one place, do you have some idea why?
One of the nice things about being in your own car, is you generally don't have to deal with kind of stuff.
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Huh. The whole damn Europe. You 'remove' then by having a safety net. Which is one of a few things I'm really glad to pay taxes for.
you're advocating unnecessary force. it wouldn't just be uncomfortably close, it would be a police state, where force is used to gain compliance and instill arbitrary order. mincing words like this is an attempt to avoid cognitive dissonance (i'm a good person so i'd never advocate a police state!). it's the same coercive impulse that gives us poor policy decisions to all sorts of non-obvious situations, including this pandemic.
when faced with a "crazy" person, it'd be better to control your own fears and realize that that person is quite unlikely to be a threat to you. control yourself, not others, and default to compassion and humility under uncertainty. being fearful is nearly as bad as being belligerent, in that they both serve to distance and disconnect us from our humanity.
I don't think this was the intent of the comment you're replying to. Personally, I interpreted their position as exactly the opposite: they're very anti-unnecessary force, and frustrated that we can't implement a compassionate system to deal with the problems at hand.
> when faced with a "crazy" person, it'd be better to control your own fears and realize that that person is quite unlikely to be a threat to you. control yourself, not others, and default to compassion and humility under uncertainty.
As a woman, I appreciate the empathy here, but question the logic. I cannot "control" the fact that I have breasts. The multiple times I've been agressively groped by homeless men has been entirely out of my control. The threats of assault I've received when ignoring catcalls were also out of my control (and luckily the homeless man who charged at me and threatened to stab me was held back by a good samaritan, because I assure you, that situation was entirely out of my control.)
Homeless people are harmless 99% of the time. But when you pass 100 homeless people every day, that 1% genuinely does matter.
Dead Comment
I don't think we will ever see that level of efficiency, cleanliness and safety in established US cities. The culture is different. More importantly, I think, is that US cities have a skeleton which is generally not conducive to the transportation network seen in Japan.
I think that the current push in the US to add ADUs('granny flats') in suburban neighborhoods will show us the limitations of our current layouts. Cramming more density into an infrastructure limited area will likely result in lower quality of life. The solution, IMHO, is to undertake larger projects where entire neighborhoods are bought out at fair price(at huge public expense) and redeveloped according to modern urban design patterns. That will likely never happen due to the obsession with the past and unwillingness to allow change.
So in Japan, you have many neighborhoods that have a house beside a tea shop beside a tailor beside house. In the US, it is very rare to find such mixes.
You can't prove this on small scale though, good transit is about the places you can get to: the jobs, stores, churches, restaurants, friends, and whatever else you might want to do in your city. A fast bus (not to be confused with the typical slow meandering buses most people are used to) every 5 minutes that doesn't connect to any other buses is useless. A bus every 10 minutes that via affordable transfers to anywhere can get you anywhere can get good use. Plumbers and the like still need to drive, so private autos will still be 30% of all trips, but a good transit system can be useful in the suburbs if you can just get there.
Did you note I stuck affordable in there? The ideal transit system should have the majority of the riders on a monthly unlimited rides family pass.
The main problem with that is that it's still not worth it in most cases. For most neighborhoods there's nothing to walk to because the population density is too low to support businesses or services. There's too much fragmented farmland separating out all the little pods of cookie cutter houses and strip malls, so the only configuration that works is to have a little pod of commercial at some highway intersection while all the residential to support that is sprinkled around a 10 mile radius of fragmented development.
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There's soething similar for the US at https://www.mapnificent.net/ if anyone's curious
They called this microraion (microdistrict): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict
An interesting side-effect is that house/appartment-hunting become much easier and less stressful because no matter which district you will choose there will be services (groceries, pharmacies, clinics, child-care, schools, parks, etc) withing walkable/very-short-ride distance, which allows population distribute and grow more-or-less evenly, without segregationist tendencies like in the West: "I need to buy there because of the school", or "I need to buy in that area to avoid the immigrants/ethnic/black/brown people from the other area", etc.
How to microdistricts prevent class or racial clustering?
I work on a military base. We make lots of noise. I like making that noise. I like getting paid to make noise. I don't want live beside it 24/7.
That's how The Netherlands do and I really like their cities.
Is there a farm? Yes
Is there a harbor? Yes
Is there an airport? Yes
Is there a powerplant? Yes
Is there a military base? No (or maybe, depending on definition)
My personal threshold is probably closer to 5 mins, otherwise I'll not go, or order what I need. We joke that we live in a 800m rectangle 99% of the time, save for trips to the airport.
These services seem important, but people sacrifice them all the time, because they prefer space, safety, and school districts, to the novelty of walking to a convenient store. The most expensive houses in LA are up in the hills, where it takes you 10 minutes just to drive down windy roads with zero sidewalks before you even hit a shop of some sort at the bottom. Being able to walk to your errands is just not prioritized in American real estate over the three S's. People willingly take an hour commute for these things.
Not sure if sarcasm or figure of style of some sorts. If neither I recommend traveling to European/Asian/UK/Commonwealth cities where walking, convenience and safety are all combined seamlessly for large parts, if not whole, cities.
It just makes no sense. Was this sensible in the 1940s?
Here in Iowa, which became a State in 1846, we have a nominal 1-mile grid of secondary roads covering the entire state. To make easy access to land for agriculture. It was planned and executed by surveyors, business people and pragmatic colonists.
[0] https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/
[1] https://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/2019-...
A secondary reason is also due to the increasing issues of mentally ill and drug addicted homeless. For various reasons, the simplest way to minimize interacting with the aforementioned groups is to live in a far flung suburb, where everything is spaced out, separated by highways, and not conducive to homeless people.
Homeowners in residential zones expect that the streets are used rarely, and by people they personally know.
Businesses generate traffic. Worse, much of that traffic is outsiders.
Sometimes you will see mixed or light-commercial zones immediately adjoining residential zones, where the key criterion is that the business “does not normally receive visitors.”
But then the type of people who want these sorts of neighborhoods often picture them as purely single-family homes. The two things are completely at odds.
I don't understand why people think this.
I live in a town of 13k people in the UK, low density - 11 people per hecate - mostly single-family homes with large gardens. We have a little town centre with good restaurants, bars, theatres, churches, shops, tea-shops, coffee-shops, book-shops, specialists like a delicatessen, a dedicated butcher, flower shops, sports equipment shops, and so on. Everything you need day-to-day or really week-to-week.
It doesn't need density. I'm not entirely sure what it does need apart from just getting on and doing it... but I don't think it's density blocking it.
If you let neighborhoods develop organically, then this is what you get.
[0] https://www.biggestuscities.com/1920
https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatibl...
It doesn't require going fully urban, though. Lots of medium density examples that are below 3 stories. I particularly like the example in that article of "The Boulders at Green Lake development" which is 36/acre.
All the space between the houses is basically wasted. Much better to build townhouses and start putting the garages underground/on the side of the houses.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TvqhU0a2H_Uta3-qXBVmgKOqask=...
if you allow 5-6 story apartment buildings and eliminate onerous process and requirements (like parking minimums, setbacks, design reviews, "environmental" reviews, etc etc.) then you will see these neighborhoods being built.
And this just doesn’t scale. This is why communities are completely car dependent.
Singapore is mentioned in this article but guess what? Living is much denser in Singapore. Obviously they’re constrained by geography. But it get a lot of benefit from this.
Where space isn’t an issue people in the US and Australia at least have consistently chosen space and car dependence over convenience.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/11/4/the-myth-of-re...
Every try to get around in the US? With higher speed roads everywhere, and strict zoning ensuring nothing is in walking distance you have to drive everywhere, so you need space for your car.
Everybody wants it all: 100 acres, and walk to everything. That isn't possible for many people (a super rich person could perhaps pull it off, but only one per city as a second trying would make even the most dense downtown too sparse). When the above factors eliminate the city as a reasonable compromise, then it is no wonder people go the other way. If I have to drive everywhere I may as well drive a bit father and get more land.
NYC is the only place in the US that can honestly claim any sort of exception to the above, and they are not doing much to expand the part of the city with this claim (at their costs to build transit it would be stupid of them). Other cities try and have some small areas, but overall the city doesn't really leave anyone a serious alternative for those who aren't trying to make a statement.
But I also think, most people really just dont like living in a downtown. Yes, there are plenty that do. But not everyone. It's really weird to keep pushing this idea that if you dont want to live in a dense area, there's something wrong with you.
The funny part is having a big home on it's own land somewhere away from all the people is seen as luxury by quite a few. Basically suburbs.
I'm definitely a city person, and there have been some well-meaning comments from non-city people wondering why people like me are opposed to their lifestyle. I don't mind people choosing to live in the suburbs or rural areas, I just want them to pay for the giant ugly highway that lifestyle requires. I want my taxes to go to city parks and schools and streetcars.
Side note - I am aware that state and federal DOT funds most highways, but the city has to pay for the induced demand for car infrastructure that those highways create downtown. On the flip side, the state and federal DOT contribute minimally to the cost of me taking the subway.
https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-h...