The valid point is that skyscrapers are often architectural grandstanding, and make so many other compromises at the ground level, that they rarely deliver much higher density.
What's strange is that most people seem to agree that the best cities are made up of mid rise 5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards. Basically how we did the best architecture from before the 1920s. Yet when it comes to it, barely anywhere is building enough of that kind of building.
Yeah I think some NIMBY resistance to new development would be diminished if new buildings weren't so consistently and intensely offensive to human senses. There's no real reason we can't build beautiful buildings like exist all over older parts of the US and Europe (and presumably many other parts of the world).
It doesn't help that architecture (and most other artistic fields) is currently dominated by the belief that beauty is almost completely subjective. Under that philosophy, why not just design the thing that's going to at least win some awards for being "innovative" or "striking?" (These are almost always euphemisms for "offensive" but for people who think offense is a purely subjective experience)
There's no real reason we can't build beautiful buildings
There is a real reason: lack of skilled trades. Those old, beautiful buildings are the work of skilled tradespeople such as masons (skilled in stonework), master carpenters (skilled in joinery), glaziers, plasterers, painters, sculptors, blacksmiths, ironworkers...
Modern buildings use so much metal and glass because these materials don't require skilled trades to mould and shape them on site, they are delivered whole and assembled according to plan. To build an old-style building today would cost a fortune because the few surviving practitioners of those traditional trades are considered highly specialized experts and historians of construction techniques.
Even simple brick masonry work seems like it's dying. My father was informally trained by old school Chicago bricklayers. I'll see brickwork done by him 20 years later still looking new, and lined up well, while a lot of newer stuff just looks terrible. Same thing here in Chicago, so much nicer old brickwork compared to newer construction.
Yeah. Construction is in a race to the bottom, cost-wise. In my city (university town) there are a bunch of off-campus high rise residence buildings. They put these things up so cheaply that a lot of them are falling apart not even 5 years on!
Their whole m.o. is to put up a new building, sign as many incoming students as they can to leases, then mysteriously fall behind schedule for the opening of the building. This leaves hundreds of students stranded without a place to stay at the start of school term. They then offer these students a “free” lease transfer to the old building, thereby renting out a bunch of crappy rooms no one wanted in the first place.
Back about 20 years ago, a development where I lived got new sidewalks poured. On looking the work over, I decided that in the modern market today's foreman is the apprentice of two years ago, at most.
The other portion of this is a lot of buildings are build by contracting firms, not architects. It's taking a lot of trends and squishing them together in a way that works, but is not designed. The end product is facades with windows not lining up properly, weird perspectives, and extra rooms that don't fill a purpose.
This is a component for sure, but you can absolutely get CNC’d millwork to add ornamentation if you cared to. We can develop technologies to make buildings both beautiful and easy-to-construct if we cared to.
Also we need to be training up skilled tradespeople in general, even for the basic basic stuff.
NIMBYs are always going to NIMBY. You can concede all kinds of things, but it seems to be 'change' that bothers many of them. It's never beautiful enough and if it is then, well, it's not "affordable", or it doesn't have enough parking, or or or...
Source: I show up at things like city council meetings to support housing as a YIMBY.
People have a lot of reasons for resisting development. One of them is that it will increase traffic in the area and there's a good chance traffic is already bad enough. Secondly no one wants to have a 3+ year large scale construction project going on in their neighborhood and all the headaches that come with that. People want peace and quiet and the only one benefiting from it is the developer so why not resist that. Additionally, people bought into a certain place because of its characteristics and often those are not respected by developers who just want to maximize their profit by building the most profitable thing they can get away with. Lastly, often "new development" means rentals in an area that is dominated by single family homes. Not to come off wrong but people want to live next to people of a similar class and standing as their own. Renters (and landlords) don't have the same skin in the game as home owners.
Saying that I agree that some people will just find any excuse possible to resist. But their opinions are just as valid as the next guys and this is why we need to find compromise. I support thoughtful development and in making the dense part of town more dense.
There is no right to buy a piece of property and expect the surrounding area to stay static. If you want the town to stay small and quaint, buy the entire town.
Towns that do not grow wilt away and die. There are absolutely towns that didn't grow across America. You can recognize them by their landmarks like the closed factory, the "fod lease" signs along Main Street, and so on.
>Not to come off wrong but people want to live next to people of a similar class and standing as their own. Renters (and landlords) don't have the same skin in the game as home owners.
This and your reference to "the dense part of town" tend to point to a different meaning of "don't have the same skin" than the initial read suggests. Even if that was not your intention, it's absolutely the practical effect of reinforcing old injustices by claiming the rich white areas should remain that way while the denser, inevitably more diverse areas have to absorb all change.
And YIMBYs are gonna YIMBY. I just wish they would change their acronym to the more accurate YIYBY -- for your backyard. Which is where they want all this glitzy new stuff (with dubious benefits most of the time; and aesthetic qualities of even less merit in almost every case) to be built.
Source: I show up at the same meetings. And for the record, am agnostic on the [NY]-imby scale. I just wish the Y contingent wouldn't be so self-satisfied in their pretension that anytime someone questions the wisdom of latest pork barrel / snake oil proposal put forth by the development industry -- why, it's because they're a selfist, narcissistic you-know-what who just hates progress and loves to whine.
That new housing is "snake development projects", but my house was probably built by pure of heart Disney-esque woodland creatures singing as they worked, right?
People need a place to live. It is driving so many problems in our society that they don't. Sprawl causes massive CO2 emissions. Homelessness. People forced to move away from where they grew up. Businesses that struggle to hire.
And "my" backyard is accurate: people being told by others what to do with their own property is a big part of the problem. If it is your backyard, no one is going to force you to build anything in it.
Clearly, not all new development is perfect and awesome all the time, but one thing we used to do is to allow it: and then, crucially, allow it to change and adapt over time into something better.
It's not snake oil because it's new. But because of the blatant lies (and occasionally more subtle distortions) in the developer's project proposal, staring everyone right in the face.
Nor is all new development bad, nor old development ipso facto good, by any stretch. We get the issues, and understand the tradeoffs.
And I, at least, don't demonize YIMBYists. I just wish they'd stop being so smug, and find a better way of supporting their position than simply responding to any expression of opposing viewpoint with facile generalizations and tired caricatures.
And you see the unsatisfiable concerns over and over and over again. It's pretty rare to see a "yes, this project looks ok, but could we add this thing to it or do this other thing a bit differently?", where the asks are within reach and not impossible.
Funny. When our neighbours sold their house they stopped by all the houses around to deliberately leave kids toys out front everywhere. They wanted the area to look extra kid friendly. It was a very family heavy, child friendly area, no one minded. People do look for communities that actually talk to each other.
Anything less than a confirmed Yes vote (perhaps with caveats, but ultimately: a Yes vote) to whatever the developer proposes is, in the YIMBYist book, equivalent to the objections of that lady in Oregon.
Not really. Here, our YIMBY group works, from time to time, with the local bicycle advocacy group to improve new projects. We've found developers to be quite receptive to polite dialogue about potentially problematic bits and pieces of their projects.
Most public comments are simply unrealistic or "no!", though.
No project is going to be perfect, ever, and we're desperately in need of more homes, so yeah, let's build more!
The tricycle lady wasn't just some random person, either, she used to be on the planning commission, and helped kill a number of badly needed apartments in the 'nice' bit of town.
Based entirely conversations with a few architects and interior designers, the incentives are almost always far more aligned with “cost-effective”/“inoffensive” than “innovative”/“striking”.
Architecture has always been strongly bifurcated with the (much larger) low end being dominated by cost/market considerations. But these architects do take design cues from the top of their field.
Low-end Italianate and Gothic Revival yielded the gorgeous Brooklyn brownstones. Low-end Corbusier yields the hideous, cultureless 5-over-1s perfectly prepared for a Chipotle logo.
Chicago has many pleasant old courtyard buildings (mostly 3-4 stories) and our NIMBYs would protest them for not providing parking if they were being built today.
> Yeah I think some NIMBY resistance to new development would be diminished if new buildings weren't so consistently and intensely offensive to human senses.
This. Being upset that your entire neighborhood has been boxed in by ticky-tack five overs is a pretty natural response IMO.
People like to hate on NIMBY's here but for many cases (not all) I think it's reasonable to care about your neighborhood and to want to prevent outside interests from fucking it up.
It's funny, brownstones originally had similar resistance for being bland and uninteresting yet we find them beautiful now. I think cost effective new housing just isn't going to be that visually interesting, but we need it anyway unless it's going to be expensive.
Yeah, no. This is simply not true. It is simply not true that NIMBYs would opposed only especially ugly building. The complain and actual reality is that they oppose pretty much everything.
If you oppose building in general you are not a NIMBY though.
I guess the slide has been big but isn't the term mostly about, like, prisons, pubs, waste collection centres etc. that they want, but just not near them?
"Sure, the Seattle area needs more housing, but not in our quaint little suburb, that's already gone downhill since whenever I moved in" is a standard NIMBY line.
Skyscrapers are the natural result of extremely high permitting costs, which don't scale well with building size. Your average real estate developer is just trying to get a return of investment, and a 7 story building is set up to be less profitable than the skyscraper or a subdivision.
A non-trivial part of the problem is the requirement of having access to two stairwells for each apartment. This is theoretically helping with fire safety, back in a world without sprinklers, but it also leads to far more space dedicated to hallways. Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US, and adding that second staircase, in a different fire-proof structure, would have cut the number of units by 25%. The two stairwells only start becoming cost effective when your building has a very large floor plan, at which point, you might as well have skyscraper.
Way too many things that people consider just the natural way of doing things just come down to regulatory regimes that don't quite ban alternatives, but make them uneconomical. Even when we assume every bit of regulation was added for good reasons, ultimately we shouldn't judge said regulation by what it intended to do, but by what it causes.
Make building the 8 story block less difficult and more profitable than the alternatives, and it'll get built without having to actually force anyone into building them.
> Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US
I'm curious if this bears out in how much property and casualty damage is there from multifamily dwelling fires between Spain and the US? In any case, it's a good example of why we should keep in mind that every safety regulation is necessarily a tradeoff against cost and efficiency.
>What's strange is that most people seem to agree that the best cities are made up of mid rise 5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards.
I used to believe that but I don't think it's actually true.
I can't speak for Europe but as far as the USA, the evidence seems to show the _silent_ majority actually prefer the suburbs instead of 5-story buildings.
The above claim will be hard for readers to accept if they are well-versed in the constant negative news articles in New York Times, etc and Youtube channels like NotJustBikes, StrongtownsOrg, CityBeautiful, ClimateTown ... all disparaging the "soulless" suburbs.
What happens is the proponents of "walkable cities" have inadvertently created a "filter bubble" and now mistakenly think most families don't want to live in suburbs.
But what about all those surveys where people preferred "walkable" cities to go to businesses like grocery stores, theaters, and museums without a car?!? That's true but the surveys' methodology and framing are flawed because they don't structure the questions as a set of tradeoffs so the respondents can see if they prioritize other things above walkability such as bigger house sq footage, yard and pool to play in, garage for hobbies, not sharing apartment/townhouse walls with noisy neighbors playing music too loud, etc.
So the _silent_ majority in America do like walkability... but they also prioritize other aspects of residential living that ends up sacrificing the walkability. It's the unstated tradeoffs that explains the paradox of people supposedly wanting "walkability" but yet we still all end up with car-centric suburban sprawl.
> I can't speak for Europe but as far as the USA, the evidence seems to show the _silent_ majority actually prefer the suburbs instead of 5-story buildings.
Where in the US is made of "5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards" that the op referenced? I don't know anywhere that that's an option on the table. People live in suburbs because it's what is available, full stop. If there were dense 5-10 storey areas sitting empty while the surrounding suburbs were full, then you'd have a point
I live in a city, not a suburb, but they seem to be grouped with suburb-talk as there is a larger city nearby, and I find it strange that ‘walk ability’ isn’t mentioned since that is best part of living in a neighborhood of single family homes. People are out walking all the time. There are parks to walk to as well, but those are getting removed as they are being replaced with 3 story apartment buildings. Not sure how it came to pass that high density housing and less parks are the ideal.
Not really directed at you, but more at the general topic which causes all the stereotypes to appear and I don’t see them in the real world. Everyone I’ve met in an apartment living space wishes for a home. I know I did.
Are you claiming that suburbs are more "walkable"? What destinations are you walking to? Or are you describing a kind of pastoral pleasantness that is present in suburbs but not in denser areas?
I think what confuses some people about this topic is that their mental image of "suburbs" is a quiet street surrounded by lawns & trees, with minimal traffic, while their mental image of cities is of noisy, stinky, dangerous streets with lots of traffic.
I would argue that the "pleasant" qualities that we associate with taking a walk are orthogonal to the density of the neighborhood itself, and that the negative qualities people see in cities are really a problem of their car-centric design in the US. For example, see a neighborhood like Sunnyside, NY, just a few subway stops from Manhattan:
Highly dense row-housing, but with ample green spaces and many pedestrian-only pathways. Has enough density to sustain many local businesses within walking distance, features a number of subway stops easily reachable on foot--it's very possible to live in this neighborhood without driving.
It would be impossible to build a low-density neighborhood that works as well without a car, because there won't be enough people to sustain the businesses required to serve them within a walkable distance. And once you start assuming that everyone will own a car and will use it for every errand, then you inevitably get sprawl + congestion + traffic.
Generally people use "walkable" to mean that errands can be done without a car. I presume the people in these suburbs are using a car to get their groceries.
> Not everything has to be centered around consumption/consumerism
If you're arguing for a completely non-consumptive lifestyle in which you grow/forage all of your own necessities, then I concede that my argument doesn't apply to you, but I think most suburb-dwellers are not at your level. Suburbs are typically much more resource-intensive to maintain than denser neighborhoods.
Suburban neighborhoods are clearly less resource intensive since they don’t have a high density population to maintain with equally high levels of consumption
This is more about the city than the house. To build a walkable city requires a certain density. Great public transportation requires density. Density is not possible with US style sprawl.
As evidence, look at what people are willing to pay for a tiny apartment in London.
But the canyon effect of cities built entirely of skyscrapers is also not nice.
Great cities also have trees and grass everywhere.
And mixed use is needed. Being able to walk a block to get eggs from the corner store or grab a pint at the pub is amazing. That also is not possible with US style single use zoning.
We have also tried “towers in the park” style developments. Those are too spread out to walk or bike.
There is probably a way to get density for public transport and walkability, a few taller buildings but not too many to cause canyons, and street level businesses, but the easy answer is to stay with what has worked all over the world and simply build mid-rise buildings.
Also, US style sprawl is expensive. The upkeep to pave the roads every 5-10 years, maintain sidewalks, and the longer utilities, is usually far more than what the homeowners pay in taxes. Cities either raise taxes, let older neighborhoods crumble (common), or subsidize suburban areas with tax revenue from the dense areas (common). US urban sprawl is not sustainable.
What suburbs do people prefer? The pre-war suburbs in the US are walkable. The people who prefer walkable neighborhoods but like suburbs want to live here. The prices are high in cities that have them. Affordable, walkable suburbs will never happen again.
Also, we don’t give people the choice between suburbs and dense neighborhoods. People need to be allowed to make tradeoffs. This is especially true for the lower middle who can’t afford expensive areas, We don’t know if they would choose long commute and backyard, or short commute and apartment.
The Skyscraper Museum has [1] an exhibit on the history of density in NYC: https://skyscraper.org/housing-density/history/. Density was maximized in the slum tenement era at ~1000 people/acre, achieved with merely 5 story buildings (and somehow packing 10 people per apartment which just... how). The closest you've come since that era in NYC is London Terraces, which is essentially a block of residental rowhome high-rises. If you look immediately around it, you can see that most high-rises instead opt for the towers-in-the-park model.
Density tends to come not so much from height but lot coverage, and for various reasons, people insist on really low lot coverage from tall and supertall buildings, which puts extra constraints on density you don't get in mid-rise buildings.
[1] Or rather had, as they apparently swapped the exhibit out a few years ago, though much of the material remains online.
There are a TON of midrise apartment buildings under construction in the US, look at the stats on multifamily construction or just drive around. They don’t look like Paris but they exist. The problem is more that people don’t want neighbors because people are assholes.
It's a monstrosity, a tribute to blandness. All cities look exactly the same.
It's possible it will look better when the trees grow (if they plant any), though who knows whether the buildings will still be around.
Atlanta is great about trees. Any that are removed have to have a replacement planted.
Not sure where you're referring to, but at least around here in the actual city the architecture and landscaping is varied enough to not be bland. And we're seeing genuine increases in density and walkability/bikability and "urbanism" in general. I put 10x more miles on my electric scooter than I do my car now.
> who knows whether the buildings will still be around.
I think it's starting to come back. A lot of the new more affordable houses in the Bay and in larger cities are blocks of town homes. I think we are going to see a lot more development there, as developers realize they can build them more efficiently and people realize that they are the right ratio of space (e.g. garage, space for a family, small backyard) and density.
This is an article about the comment section of an article. What's next, an article about this comment on an article about the comment section of that article? The only thing stupider than this article is this comment imo.
I chuckled when I read your comment but Dezeen sends out these newsletters summarizing reader reactions to articles over the course of the week. It's a way of drawing attention to pieces they write, but also emphasizes the article as part of an extended discussion on a topic, and not the endpoint.
I actually appreciate it because it highlights the positive role that comments can play, and a contrast from some places where comment sections have been removed. It's not too different from HN I think in that sometimes the comments here are as valuable as the posted articles.
Having said all that, I think it would have been more in the spirit of the Dezeen newsletters to link to the original article. In this case, though, the original article (https://www.dezeen.com/2023/07/05/carol-ross-barney-skyscrap...) might not have the same reception here as at Dezeen; my guess is the OP was meaning to link to something to initiate discussion on the topic of whether skyscrapers are good or bad design, or are good or bad design in the current metropolitan context of many areas, and the article with the comments as a set was seen as accomplishing that.
Economic growth lead to the suburbs. Everyone gets their big pickup truck to enjoy on the open, expensive roads, back to their small plot of land fed by expensive infrastructure.
All this uses a ton of energy and creates a lot of pollution. Pollution which has drastically increased in the last 20 years or so.
Economic growth leads to per-capita carbon emission growth. The US emmits the second most carbon into the atmosphere, only beat out by the place that makes all the things purchased in the US, in a way, an extension of the consumption of the US.
When economic growth makes consumption cheaper, there is a countering effect of waste, pollution, and over-extension. Dense cities use far less energy and resources than suburbs. Its a fact.
The constant quest for growth, economic or otherwise, has put us in a very precarious position. Summer 2024 is going to be one hellova ride.
Look at how 100 year old suburbs are structured compared to newer ones.
Typically a lot tighter, designed to walk to nearby destinations, mixed use so you can live near a store, not drive 10 miles to a parking lot the size of a small village.
You cannot deny that older, "streetcar" suburbs are very distinct from modern suburb design.
If they were basically the same, I wouldn't be complaining.
In the EU they have much higher construction standards including much thicker walls and floors that block sound between units better. I wish the US could duplicate that, though that would increase building costs which are already high here.
I'm in a new building that uses sound isolating tech in the US and it's fantastic. You get some noise coming in from the front door since it's metal but both neighbors around me have dogs and I've almost never heard them. Every once in a while I can hear the slight vibration of the dog upstairs dropping its ball on the ground, but that's about it.
I've been in sound-proofed condo's before, and it's dramatically better. But it doesn't solve all the problems stemming from having dozens of families down the hall.
Some issues include:
- garbage in the hallway
- AirBnB renting to some dodgy characters who then roam the hallways, vomit in the elevator, and worse
- People taking my parking spot
- Smell of cigarette smoke
All of the above in a fancy building in a nice area.
The density allows for some incredible things in the neighbourhood, which is a good tradeoff though. I like having a concierge to receive packages and having good restaurants and other things around.
I just like that there are all these different options. None of them are - or have to be - the Ultimate Housing Answer.
My building solves this by banning rentals shorter than 3 months and aggressively tracking and fining idiots who leave rubbish around or park in the wrong spot.
I can confirm that. I live in a new apartment building (in Austria) and basically never hear neighbors even though the building is full of children. Older buildings can be significantly worse in sound isolation.
But the apartment prices are very high in comparison to US, not sure how much is it because of the better construction standards. Houses are financially out of reach for many/most people.
A lot of EU dwelling construction is built to be as energy efficient as possible. They use CMUs VS timber, and plaster their bricks instead of hanging drywall in large part because they can make it more energy efficient but also because Europe lacks ample timber supplies in many areas compared to North America. But energy is far more expensive in the EU than in North America so it's more important to save money there. Saving that, insulation in American homes is really good today and I believe R15 is the minimum allowed in new construction.
The drawbacks are European construction tends to be very bland and basic and small compared to homes in America. They also don't have HVAC (I think they'll regret this if the planet continues to heat) or forced air and tend to use radiant heating which is great, but requires high levels of insulation to be effective.
Saying that, you can have your timber framed home have thicker walls or have rockwool, etc put into the internal walls which will deaden noise like old plaster/lath walls.
The EU is composed of 27 countries, with varying construction standards. In Romania, you can hear when your neighbors flush the toilet, especially in new constructions.
Okay fair enough, but you understand my point. Some EU countries have higher standards that avoid the issue of hearing your neighbor. I remember watching a tour of a construction site that an american construction manager was going on and the floors were radiant heat, which meant they were 9-12 inches thick of concrete and the walls were also 9 or so inches.
Yeah part of the problem is that US construction is low quality. You'd have to upskill developers and construction teams here because they currently can't make sound isolated buildings here.
Once the technology makes it here from elsewhere, we should be able to do this stuff.
Developers in EU are forced to build to some standard of sound and thermal isolation. If given the option believe me they'd make it as cheap as possible too, just that law disallows it.
I think the issue in the US today is that increasing density within cities has become so absurdly difficult that we are making the "one-size-fits-all solution" be suburban sprawl.
Getting whatever drugs someone is smoking wafting through at a friend's apartment was a wake up call too. If I could be relegated to a "boring people" section, I might be more interested in a denser living situation.
If you can envision a suburb in which people are allowed to have a grocery store, hardware store, pub, etc. intermingled with the housing, then the suburb gets a lot better. You can walk or ride a bike to get 90% of the things you need for your day to day life. What makes the burbs miserable is zoning which puts all the people on one side of the town, and all the amenities on the other. Then all the infrastructure to move people from point A to point B by car. Because the way it is built is impractical and unsafe for pedestrians or cyclists.
This, exactly. I think most people would be happy living in better suburbs not city centers. Instead we have NIMBYs trying to preserve suburbs in all their current awfulness, and a few "everyone move to the urban core NOW" activists who think it's trivial because (a) they've never had do make such a move themselves and (b) they've never thought through the financial, political, and ecological issues involved. Literally abandoning the suburbs (including the suburb-like parts within big-city limits) not only isn't going to happen but shouldn't happen because it would be a disaster ecologically and otherwise. Suburbs need to be improved in place with better zoning and tax structures for higher density, mixed use, mixed income, walkability, public transportation, etc. Places that are already like that are clearly desirable, and would be a lot more affordable if there weren't so damn few of them.
It's amazing how people think everything is a Levitown in the American burbs. There are a lot of these types of towns and in certain places (East Coast) they have commuter trains that run through them too. People can walk to shops and the train, etc.
This even exists out West. A lot of Silicon Valley is structured this way for example. But yeah, there are a lot of dead suburbs where you need a car to get anywhere too.
Suburb is a very broad term so it includes giant subdivisions of 1000s of houses that are miles away from any commercial location as well as mixed use development where you can walk 2 min to a cafe or store. So I imagine that’s why we see very different opinions from people.
Exactly this. Many of us live in mixed-use suburbs and love it. Wouldn't move to the urban core for anything, totally unwilling to give up this community and lifestyle. But on HN a lot of the anti-suburb folks seem to think it's all just miles of tract housing.
I think when people think of the ideal urban environment, they're thinking 3-6 story mixed use buildings close to the street with tree lined streets. People have an idea of miles of single use suburbs because that's the prevailing model. I'd say almost all urbanists don't want everything to be like downtown.
It is definitely a major problem that the US has so much strictly residential zoning in most suburbs. This zoning may allow schools, and possibly churches, but often nothing else.
Allowing for small amounts of light commercial (cafés, small grocery stores, etc) to be sprinkled in would actually immensely improve things. Having a store within a few suburban blocks (perhaps 5-10 minutes walk, less with a bike) would obviously be helpful. But in many suburbs that is pretty rare. You may get the occasional small cluster of commercial zoning near main access roads, but often not placed to be sensible reachable by anything but car for nearby residences.
This is even technically achievable with strictly single use zoning if planned as part of a development, specifically zoning small areas for such businesses, strategically placed so as to be easily reachable from the residences without needing cars. But we often just don't do that. Even when there are rules requiring new developments to include some percentage of commercial space, developers tend to clump that near the entrance roads, potentially quite far from many residences.
Admittedly it is understandable that people are wary of having commercial spaces in the middle of residential clusters, unless the roads are carefully laid out such that they won't cause significant traffic on the residential streets. This generally means they are along specialized through streets (which have limited access to the residential areas, to make routes that cut though residential streets unappealing to through traffic), but that very same limited access also means most residences cannot easily reach those areas without cars. This can be avoided with smart layout, pedestrian/bike only paths to these areas, etc., but I just don't see that nearly as often as it should happen.
This is exactly what I was referring to. The sad part is that once an area is zoned solely residential and built up, even if the zoning is changed, it is very hard to bring in the light commercial establishments because they just don't fit.
I agree. But we should be seeing a spectrum of density with the urban core having some skyscrapers and as you go out from the core, density drops exponentially like a bell curve. Vancover is a bit nuts b/c they have single family homes next to sky scrapers (nimby driven, no?). Janky density distributions are a sign of bad urban planning, endemic to North America.
Side note (slightly rambling): Florida is hitting a wall. Traffic flowed smoothly for a while until the last 10 years in places like South and Central Florida. Miami is full (inefficient urban planning meaning it is prematurely full). Orlando is next to fill up.
Suburbs have a fixed capacity to handle people. Jobs cluster geographically (see Hotelling law[1]), so getting people in low density suburbs to work becomes logistically challenging when the population hits a certain number (~2M?). Like an N to M network problem that expands in complexity exponentially O(n^2). The graph with x-axis in population and y-axis in traffic jams is flat till that limit is reached, then the chart spikes up like a wall.
My dream for old age is to live in a building where I can access all the services I need without needing to check the weather outside.
Basically a low-tech Cyberpunk Arcology. I'd live somewhere in the building and it'd have a small hospital, pharmacy, grocery store(s), cafes etc. either in the lower floors or accessible through tunnels in adjacent buildings.
Until cultural pressure of nonacceptance of ecologically irresponsible suburban car-dependent lifestyle begins to outweigh traps of familiar American lifestyle, the suburbs will be there.
So, never? Appreciation for community and antipathy towards high density anonymous living seems to grow with age, regardless of the generation. Young people are more tolerant of urban living.
This is very American way of thinking. My parents love living in their post-Soviet urban neighborhood, cause it is walkable, and every time they leave the apartment they meet their neighbors in the local park. It is total antitheis of "anonymous" living; in fact it is in suburbs you do not know anyone, except your direct cul-de-sac neighbors.
We still have to build and maintain roads for cars, which has its own emissions. EVs also weigh more and road damage cubes or ^4 with vehicle weight, so EVs also increase the cost and frequency of road repair. EVs are an improvement, but less cars and not needing to own a car is the better choice.
Because it urbanized so late, China had the option to choose the alternative you advocate, but did not to take it: China is full of cars.
In contrast, IIUC, landlines are basically not a thing in large parts of China because China adopted the telephone as a mass-market service so late that they had the option of making cellular-telephone network so reliable and so ubiquituous as to eliminate the need to run a wired telephone network to every residence, and IIUC China took that option.
The fact that China is full of cars is (because Chinese policy makers are sensible practical people) at least some evidence that the alternative you advocate is not as great as you think it is.
I'm not sure how another urbanizing country choosing cars is evidence against my belief that denser and more walkable cities are better to live in. Places like the Netherlands are choosing to build dense walkable neighborhoods and in my opinion they seem really pleasant.
If China had chosen the path that the Netherlands is taking, would you consider China's choice evidence for your belief? If so, then "the rules" dictate that you consider the fact that China chose the way it actually did as evidence against.
>So if you claim that “no sabotage” is evidence for the existence of a Japanese-American Fifth Column, you must conversely hold that seeing sabotage would argue against a Fifth Column. If you claim that “a good and proper life” is evidence that a woman is a witch, then an evil and improper life must be evidence that she is not a witch. If you argue that God, to test humanity’s faith, refuses to reveal His existence, then the miracles described in the Bible must argue against the existence of God.
Hasn’t the Netherlands always been like that? I haven’t been there in a while but it always seemed walkable and pleasant to me. Nice little coffee shops, pubs, etc. with lots of people walking around. It isn’t really for me but I get it.
There is no absolute need for a car in China, it a convenience not a necessity, like somewhere in Phoenix or Tampa. So even if China twice GDP per capita compared to US there is still would be less ownership.
You may have to define "need". It is likely possible in nearly every jurisdiction to live without a car - particularly large cities like Phoenix or Tampa. Still I wonder why "living without a car" is really that important of a goal. Making life as awesome as possible should be what we are really shooting for. Being a 5 minute walk from everything important would be great. I don't know about a 15 minute bike ride though - that is really quite far and most people would probably rather drive I think (especially if in a hurry).
Even an electric car has big embedded CO2, but CO2 isn't everything. Other environmental impacts - mining and fabrication of the batteries, steel, etc. Then, there's tire dust - one of the biggest sources of toxins and microplastics . Electric vehicles actually generate more tire dust, because they are much heavier than equivalent gas cars. Then, suburban development is an incredibly inefficient use of land. You're trading habitat, farmland, and aquifer recharging for ticky-tack houses on cul-de-sacs. All of those roads also reduce water quality from stormwater runoff, and cost a lot of CO2 (and dollars) to maintain.
I think some people just don't like cars. That is completely fine, I don't really care about cars much myself. However, the odd thing is they don't want anyone to have a car. First the problem was emissions - which will eventually be fixable with EVs. But now they are too heavy and create too much "tire dust".
> You're trading habitat, farmland, and aquifer recharging
Habitat, sure, but farmland and aquifer recharging? I'd wager most suburbs in the US are cut out of forests, not existing farmland, and I see no reason why rainfall in the suburbs (low-density, with grass lawns) won't reach the aquifer the same way as whatever undeveloped land was there previously. In fact, dense cities will do worse in this regard, since there's more underground infrastructure and stormwater has to run off more.
Is running wholly separate refrigeration, AC, ovens, and other electric power negligible? Average household size in cities tends to be smaller than the suburbs. The environmental argument always clings to cars, but emissions keep improving. Carbon footprint per person is really what we're talking about here.
> Carbon footprint per person is really what we're talking about here.
On the other hand, increasing energy consumption per person is exactly equal to civilization and rising standards of living, so let's not be too hasty in condemning carbon footprint. Of course, ideally the energy we spend would be generated and stored via other sources; and technology will likely lead us in that direction.
I love sprawl. It allows me to have my own little piece of Earth instead of being packed in an ant colony. Skycrapers are cool to see and all, but the suburban lifestyle allows me to live among trees, lakes and birds.
I love my apartment complex. We’ve got a pool and a balcony with great sun exposure. There’s a great community of neighbors, many children for my kids to play with, quick access to parks and I can get to work in 20 minutes. To each their own.
That sounds like me, except for the apartment bit. Big comfortable house with a nice sized yard (and a pool, even), really excellent neighborhood community, children everywhere, parks within easy walking distance, and I can get to the urban core in 20 minutes.
Best part is I share no walls with anyone, and if I want to be alone I can achieve that. I love my neighbors, but everyone is happier not to be scrunched into a single building.
In modern buildings, shared walls are no issue. There may as well be the void of space on the other side of those walls, I wouldn't notice the difference.
The attitude of some density advocates preclude building what people want, on the basis that what people want is evil (due to carbon emissions, environmental impact, and what have you).
Yes, many seem to forget that this is what many people actually want. “Life has to suck” seems to be a prevailing view.
How about trying to solve the problem? Instead of driving the big pickup truck to the acreage, drive an EV. If infrastructure is expensive to build, find ways to make it cheaper.
Everyone driving EVs still has very large infrastructure costs of building and maintaining roads, parking, garages, etc versus if people lived in walkable and bikeable areas. Less wear and tear on roads by orders of magnitude when not using a car reduces maintenance, less roads have to be built, less wasted space for parking. The idea of making things more walkable and dense is to reduce maintenance costs for society and reduce things that just aren't fun like driving between 2 destinations. "Life has to suck" would be living far from everything and having to maintain a house that's way too big.
Europe is full of charming little walkable towns that bleed people every single year, because the majority of economic opportunities are in a small number of big concrete jungle cities that may be walkable in part but are on the whole full of cars, pollution, and the assorted unpleasantries of big city life.
Different people enjoy different things. I'd say policy should try and make things cost more or less what they should cost, and let people express their preferences by paying for what they want.
This is a cultural issue. As someone who grew up in a Soviet megacity, and visited American suburbia on couple of occasion, I felt miserable in suburbs, like dying from boredom.
Your side lost for a reason though. It's a dehumanizing way to live and your people eventually figured that out and rebelled against it.
Agree some suburbs are deserts but we have a lot of towns that are walkable while also giving the very human experience of having living space and personal space and nature and access to a city and all the things that make life nice.
You went to a very particular kind of suburb. There are lots of good sized suburban cities in the US, especially in the west, which aren't boring in the slightest.
I grew up in some of the densest Asian megacities. Chicago isn't like that, sure, but if you think that makes Chicago a boring place to be, I'm afraid you have very peculiar tastes that won't translate for the majority of the population.
Ah yes. The wonderful suburbs. The home of miserable suburbanites, cheaply and poorly built houses, HoAs and neverending sound of lawn mowers, leaf blowers, etc. The suburbs brings the worst of the rural living without any of its benefits and the worst of city living without any of its benefits together. A match made in hell. It's the worst kind of environmentally damaging dystopian existence filled with the worst kind of people.
There should only be rural and city living. If you want the sun and 'living things', go find a small homestead in a nice rural area with actual living things. No place is more anti-'living things' than a suburb. In order to build sprawling suburbs, we had to wipe out 'living things'.
Some people have different preferences than you so therefore they must be miserable and the worse kind of people? Ok sure
My suburban location is great. It’s quiet and peaceful with no annoying neighbors keeping me up at 2am playing electric guitar (this happened in a previous apartment). And yet I can still walk to dozens of shops and restaurants, unlike a rural area.
the most hilarious kinds of arguments on HN occur when someone like you gets into a heated argument with someone who i.e. thinks that F150's shouldn't be allowed to exist and people should only be allowed to ride bicycles.
I suspect a lot of the urbanites are the millennials and gen y/z's.
Gen X and older were the last generation to see getting a driver's license as a milestone of gaining freedom from parents.
Urbanites were raised by helicopter parents that chauffeured them around and urbanites stayed indoors a lot more since they were raised on the internet and mobile devices.
Why would they like personal forms of transportation, when it was not part of their growing up?
> I suspect a lot of the urbanites are the millennials and gen y/z's.
While there has been a slight adjustment to housing preferences due to a couple housing price bubbles, millenials are largely following the exact footsteps of their parents and buying into suburban neighborhoods. It's always been true that urban living appeals more to young people, and they tend to want something different as they mature.
Suburban residents and their leaders generally have no problem with city denizens doing what they want: no one is imposing _less_ density on cities. They could care less if you want to pack people into 100 story microapartments with buses and trains running at all hours of the day.
It's the city folk, often overlapping with the seats of county and state governments, that won't leave the suburbs alone, and are constantly trying to force zoning changes on them, bus their kids far away by merging or redrawing school districts, run public transit into their small downtowns, etc.
I live in a university town. We absolutely have people regularly fighting in city council meetings to deny building permits for 3-4 story apartment complexes.
In my small town, we approve apartment complexes without doing anything to accommodate the additional traffic they inevitably generate (in a small town that already has significant traffic problems and very little public transportation). The fight to deny these permits is warranted, in my opinion, until they're handled more appropriately.
Unfortunately it's an exceedingly complicated problem since a number of the main roads through town are actually US/state highways and as such, modifications require coordination between local, county, and state agencies, and often involve almost unbelievable lead times.
Traffic is subject to induced demand. Roads fill until traffic is high enough to convince people not to drive (either taking fewer trips or going via not car). If you build more roads, more people will drive until traffic is bad enough to get them not to, etc. etc.
We have nearly a century of data on this. It was observed when Robert Moses tried to build more parkways in New York, it was true in Texas and LA, it was true everywhere.
"Traffic is already bad" is a common NIMBY line in my area, but traffic will always be bad with sufficient population. Building more roads will not change that.
Why doesn't this apply to public transport too? Is there no point running more buses or trains because they'd just fill up again? And shouldn't this mean all roads should be packed all the time, rather than having many which are always fairly quiet, even in rush hour?
The capacity and throughout of public transit is dramatically higher and scales far better, so it's harder to hit limits and cheaper to scale them up.
Yes, it's technically affected - both in the "if you build it they will come" sense and that if transit becomes sufficiently congested people will change their transportation behavior - but cars have more liquidity and hit traffic limits much easier.
You can believe that the fight is warranted if you want. I post to point out that this isn't just city people trying to impose preferences on the suburbs.
The university that dominates my college town does not give a fuck about housing or infrastructure support. They are growing enrollment regardless. The kids who have to drive to campus rather than take the bus because there isn't enough housing within bus route distance are a pretty big problem for congestion.
One of the main issues in cities like Seattle is 76% of the city land area is zoned for single family only. People in Seattle aren't overly worried about what suburban towns are doing, but the city limits itself still has a ton of land area that could be upzoned to drastically increase density. Zoning laws are very much imposing less density on cities.
That paper doesn't actually make that claim? In fact it references another showing there was no link between density and covid spread after accounting for poverty.
It's a simple survey of other literature essentially just noting that cities are predicted to change in some ways, but not making very many firm claims beyond that.
What's strange is that most people seem to agree that the best cities are made up of mid rise 5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards. Basically how we did the best architecture from before the 1920s. Yet when it comes to it, barely anywhere is building enough of that kind of building.