Alternative ways to build US cities and suburbs for the future

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Obadno

If your metric for a place being urban is most people using mass transit you are looking at the wrong continent.

A bus = public transit. Almost 90% of people commute into Manhattan on public transit.

Originally Posted by Obadno

NYC is by far an extreme outlier and still from hat I can find over 30% of the commuters into NYC come on a Bus or a Car.

Again we cannot un-invent the car.

Shitty design/planning isn't the fault of the car, lol. I've never said that.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Obadno

Im sorry do you not understand the point of this discussion?

its how to make Suburban areas more urban. suburbia for the future.

That will involve people commuting by car, I dont see why its any worse for people to drive to an urban center, park and spend the day than it is to drive to a "Fake" urban area and spend the day.

Nobody said it was worse. I said it's not much different than what we've had for 70 years. You're putting words into my mouth.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by jd3189

• Video Link

that video hits home!

Toronto's Riverdale reminds me of my own Lincoln Square in so many of the same ways that make these kinds of "in between" neighborhoods so freaking awesome, especially if you're raising children. as i watched the video i just kept saying "yep" and "absolutely" to myself.

we shoulda just kept on building more of them, oh well......



we fucked up.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Nobody said it was worse. I said it's not much different than what we've had for 70 years. You're putting words into my mouth.

Because its designed better than a mall or a strip mall.

A bus = public transit. Almost 90% of people commute into Manhattan on public transit.

Not really relevant, nearly 16% of people commute by car into Manhattan. and that is by far lower than any other Urban area in the USA. You were stating that the example I showed of better suburbia wasnt actually better because you still needed a car but I think that's a reductive way to look at it.

By that standard strip malls would be fine so long as most people arrived at said strip mall by bus.

How you arrive at a place isnt really the problem, its how that place is designed. We can make better neighborhoods within the suburban framework that are better to live and work without having to start from scratch.

Most American cities have not and were never built to work well with mass transit, even when we install rail and street cars after the fact it isn't nearly as effective because the very bones of the place are built around cars. I dont see how else you would propose we make suburbia better. But I have a feeling you will just say somehting equally shallow like "Just ban cars" or "everyone should just move to a pre-war part of the city" Which is nonsensical

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

that video hits home!

we fucked up.

Like many problems it took 60 years to get here and will take 60 years to get out. This idea has been around for 20 years or more and Its probably the most reasonable course of action to remake suburbia with what we have.

https://www.dpz.com/ten-years-on-why...e-of-covid-19/







There are plenty of examples in car oriented cities in the sunbelt where these concepts work well enough, so much so that new developments generally are better.

this one is a little pie in the sky but given enough time could happen.






For Example this is an exurban community in terms of distance from the city but built much better than a 1990's suburb ill show next

https://goo.gl/maps/4qdUMm3isE9gsPR9A

https://goo.gl/maps/ULJYovNA84V2KRA87

https://goo.gl/maps/oN3Ua6WevKGx5FwGA

Vs what was standard from 1950-2010 or so (and still way too common)

https://goo.gl/maps/88Gv1iP3xgNCYdLg9

https://goo.gl/maps/w72cnYwVTa53YJWi7

https://goo.gl/maps/zWE4sgra7cegYNSN9


These two areas are similar in price an amenities, both are very suburban but one is much better designed.

[jd3189]

I wouldn't advocate for getting rid of the car. We will always need streets, roads, and interstate infrastructure. But I believe we are extremely dependent on cars for the most part.

Outside of a few dense major cities, you can't function in a safe and healthy fashion in this country without having a car. What if you can't afford one? Most people who have cars, especially newer ones, have to rely on monthly payments and leasing, which is a large amount to pay on top of other costs like rent.

And what I have realized in the several years I have been living in Southern California is that traffic is a total bitch. So many people out on the highways all at the same time. Arterial and back roads being clogged up. It's a very shitty situation that doesn't have to be that extreme.

There's a lot of talk about how we can never get back to those days when America was more urban, but is that true?

I think we have to change zoning in this country so that single family homes aren't the only things you can build in the suburbs. We should also expand transportation infrastructure to accommodate cars, bikes, pedestrians, and public transportation.

If more of the newer suburbs and existing ones could be rezoned to include small scale mixed use buildings, duplexes, triplexes, small apartments, and maybe a few affordable housing "commieblocks" near train/bus stations with limited to no parking, it would lead to some nice living environments. Property values may actually go up because these suburbs are relatively nice for everyone. People would still have cars, but they wouldn't need them.

In terms of transportation, we should try to overlay more Amtrak or intercity commuter routes along interstate routes. That alone, along with good scheduling of course, would along more people to choose between driving or riding a train to a destination that they don't need to fly to.

I have the idea that many Americans, especially those who have not held on to the carcentric idea as dogma, wouldn't mind these measures. Gas is getting more expensive and traffic is getting worse. There's a lot we have to rethink.

[mhays]

Misc points:

I was referring to the towers in the park across the street, not the lowrises. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.6268.../data=!3m1!1e3

The mall is more urban in some ways. But just very incrementally.

The retail depends on a universe of tens of thousands of people, and likely six figures (a catchment area). Even another 1,000 onsite wouldn't shift the needle much at peak times. However those people will have a larger effect at the slowest times, disproportionately help certain types of business (like coffee shops), and give the place a mixed-use air. They'll help ease the worst times of the week for restaurants. The more the better, though the owners would prioritize retail.

Those new versions in post 25 are further in the positive column but you're aiming way too low. Suburban nodes don't have to be that car-dominated.

Few US cities allow easy car-lessness over broad areas. But most allow it in select areas. And many people live without them regardless of the inconvenience, due to poverty, stubborness, lifestyle, or age (too young, too old).

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by mhays

Misc points:



Those new versions in post 25 are further in the positive column but you're aiming way too low. Suburban nodes don't have to be that car-dominated.

Its not really aiming for, this is the primary starting condition and ideas on how to improve it or replace it.

We will need to accept a new hierarchy where arterials officially become semi-highways, and large suburban blocks get retrofitted. into smaller blocks (private roads or public roads, doesn't really matter) we can improve a lot of suburban areas in this way.

Now 20th century style suburban culd-e-sac SFH neighborhoods. I dont know what we can do about that, my gut says not much.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

A bus = public transit. Almost 90% of people commute into Manhattan on public transit.



Shitty design/planning isn't the fault of the car, lol. I've never said that.

Just to show how much of an outlier NYC is (its that blue one up in the top corner, the green one is London.)

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by Obadno

We will need to accept a new hierarchy where arterials officially become semi-highways,

and that's where the plan loses me. we can probably rebuild individual retail nodes in the burbs to be less shitty, but i'm a context guy.

the bigger picture of interconnectivity matters a great deal to me. it probably doesn't to joe six pack suburbanite who would perhaps like to drive to a shopping center that is less soul-crushingly strip-mallish.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by iheartthed

Shitty design/planning isn't the fault of the car, lol. I've never said that.

Urban renewal of the 50's through the early 70's has left a long foul stench even decades after it was abandoned like a lingering fart in the break room.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

and that's where the plan loses me. we can probably rebuild individual retail nodes in the burbs to be less shitty, but i'm a context guy.

the bigger picture of interconnectivity matters a great deal to me. it probably doesn't to joe six pack suburbanite who would perhaps like to drive to a shopping center that is less soul-crushingly strip-mallish.

The reason I say that is shrinking arterials is very hard to do and doesnt really turn out that great unless you turn that into new land to develop up to the street. I just dont see how we can undo that street design without hitting endless landmines and vastly over using eminent domain.

What I mean by new hierarchy:

Highway---- Arterial --- Local

to

Highway--Arterial-- Internal /semi block street--- Local-- Sub Category Private "public" streets

I just have a hard time seeing any situation where more than a handful of arterial streets will be shrunk and no just a wider sidewalk/bike lanes/Median does not cut it I men truly shrinking the street to bring buildings closer together. Its just not feasible in most cases.

[SFBruin]

I think that cars are important, but perhaps can be reduced in their usage in order to reduce congestion / improve the environment.

I think that this could happen either by charging for VMT or by using a licensing program (basically cap the number of car licenses available in a specific area, and have a bidding process to exchange licenses).

The car is not going to go away, but it can be discouraged in favor of more environmentally-friendly options.

[SIGSEGV]

With the advent of electric cars, we need to start taxing all vehicles per mile (or mile-ton, or mile-ton^2).

[llamaorama]

I like the aesthetic and idea behind current ideas of modern urbanism. But I wonder how realistic it is. The economy and society has changed so much, the car isn't the only variable that has effected the shape of cities. Also it might be the hardest to grab by the horns. And also from a sustainability perspective, tailpipe CO2 is an increasingly solved problem with the EV trend.

Personally, I think the truly biggest shaper is the development industry and the trend where the only new housing that gets built are luxury HOA based subdivisions that have privatized roads and privatized parks and luxury apartments. Then we expect these things to trickle down and become affordable as they age. But what's missed in this argument is that the formula for this development is to make it pod-like and not eschew walkability let alone efficient street patterns. Also this development is actively against the public commons - when developments are planned and luxury and they have private spaces and private playgrounds and private fake main street plazas, etc, then no public places of these sorts develop. Finally all these amenities and features are expensive and suck up capital from being turned into additional housing units. And then these amenities falter or rot and get torn out when the property or community transititions to being affordable. So there's no trickle down there.

Really, suburbs that emerged after freeways and the car but before the HOA craze and disappearance of the starter home, are not actually that offensive from a density or sustainability standpoint. Think about Anaheim or Long Island or the older parts of Houston and Dallas. These places can and do grow upwards with infill and evolve with time. But ask yourself, is Surprise, AZ or Sugar Land, TX ever going to adapt or change? No.

I think we need to deconstruct everything to come up with a radically new model rather than being stuck with the false dilemma of the status quo versus a strictly 1990s style New Urbanist variant that's like an outdoor mall developer from Arizona read Death and Life of American Cities and suddenly knows all. We need to list out the pros and cons of urban density , why do people want to live in suburbs or the city, why they want single-family homes or apartments, how the development industry works, how the bigger economy works for the 99%, and what policies can be realistically impacted at the local or state level. Also there's things that currently aren't talked about like the change from the conventional suburban growth led by municipalities building streets, to the master-planned amenitized HOA development and luxury apartment community style of growth. We also have new problems like housing affordability and the traditional middle and working class getting left behind.

Some thoughts:

Forces that favor density:

1. Land is not free. More value on less land = rational economic interest.
2. A building with more floors still just has one one roof and one foundation.
3. Any given length of roadway with water and sewer lines can support between 1 and many dwellings. Denser would be more efficient use of resources to a point.
4. Walkability for practical reasons or recreation or wellbeing.
5. All vehicles travel less distance and put on less mileage which carries a cost.
6. A very dense city could have district utility infrastructure.
7. If a building more than a couple floors tall needs to have an elevator and water pumps and be made of concrete, you might as well just maximize the potential investment and build a tower.

Forces that disfavor density:

1. Past a certain number of floors a building is going to need an elevator and other special mechanical stuff, whether required by law or not.
2. Past a certain number of floors, a building has to be made of steel or concrete. These materials are intrinsically less sustainable.
3. Structured parking is expensive.
4. Urban utilities underground become expensive and complicated at some point.

Reasons why people like homeownership beyond just wanting a yard or living in the suburbs:

1. Condos by their nature are going to have costly shared recurring expenses. Low density development has this too that comes through taxes, etc, but Condo associations being smaller can be more capricious.
2. The basic condos that are attainable by the working and middle class get taken over by investors and turn to trash. Basically turn into rental complexes over time and individual owner-occupants get screwed over in many different ways. Eventually when a rich douchenozzle from West Palm Beach buys the whole place to tear it down and Grandma gets the $15,000 her unit is worth and gets to struggle in a rental instead of having a house to pass down to the grandkids or reverse mortgage it to pay for the assisted living facility.
3. Owning the house and the land under it confers a sense of security.
4. Multifamily housing complexes have a lot of rules. They aren't child-friendly. Children aren't allowed to play outside or socialize and residents can be intolerant "karen" types.
5. Long-term family wealth building and having something to pass on. Or fall back on.
6. The proliferation of apartments is a sign of inequality.

Thoughts on transit:

1. People want to travel to and from places besides just work, at times that aren't the traditional AM/PM rush. To really be fulfilled in life and also rely on transit, you'd want to live somewhere where non-auto modes of transportation can take you everywhere from a dentist on a sunday to a beach or a state park. This is sort of viable in the Northeast and maybe parts of California and nowhere else.

2. A lot of people work jobs where they are not commuting to an office or factory in a central location. They are working in either the service industry in a dispersed location at dispersed hours of the day, or they go to work sites like a construction worker or cleaner or technician. With the growing trend of work-from-home in occupations that were traditionally the ones most likely to centralize in an office, the proportion of workers who couldn't rely on transit or even something like a minibus or taxi system is going to grow even larger.

3. Tailpipe emissions are a solved problem with EV's. Of course the resource use of manufacturing and maintaining vehicles and their parts like tires or batteries and the runoff from highways is still a sustainability issue so vehicle mileage is still not free either in an economic or green sense. So transit has a purpose still if we could combine trips - like a self-driving taxi for the last mile and then during peak times push people who aren't hyper sensitive to the effort of transferring modes onto buses or trains.

4. Automated delivery will replace travel to retail and commercial districts but still represents a transportation cost - a source of traffic, a source of resource use, etc. We don't want to push warehouses and shipping facilities to the exurban fringe and then have all these people bringing downtown apartment dwellers burritos and pho in from a commercial kitchen 30 miles away staffed by people who also had to drive a long ways, that would be ironic.

5. Automated delivery services will be faster and fresher and cheaper in denser areas so proximity to or being in the city will still mean better access to goods and services than far-out areas.

Thoughts on neighborhoods:

1. The Jane Jacobs Boston North End community of storefront shopkeepers living upstairs is just completely alien to the way society works now. We don't have small businesses like that. We don't have culturally homogenous people who don't have access to News at 9 stranger danger or Facebook. We don't have the mafia which actually artificially insulated that community from change and suppressed street crime.

2. Brick and mortar retail is in decline. There's not going to be endless demand for ground floor retail or commercial spaces in new developments. The "its basically a mall but its outside and has apartments" model of new urban town center development will falter.

3. The US is going stop growing demographically eventually. Right now we need a lot of housing so the time is right to build build build. But someday it could reverse and you might not be able to fix a neighborhood with infill if there's no demand to live there anymore.

4. On that topic, places will have to learn to shrink gracefully. How do we do that?

[llamaorama]

So here's a possible vision for a community of the future, based on current trends and economic realism but also with a dash of progressive idealism:

It's 2071

1. There's been disruptions in the development and lending industries. Now, its possible to customize your dream affordable starter house online and it will be delivered in pieces by robots and put together like the Sears homes of old. Lenders now rely mostly on AI and algorithms and you can get approved for a loan and get that home built on any lot rather than herded into a master planned community. Which aren't build anymore outside a few areas because of slow demand.

2. Old retail centers are long gone. Now, commercial areas are a mix of warehouses for automated delivery and on-site mini manufacturing that is almost all automated. Instead of being shuffled away like industry and warehouses of the past, these places are at the center of the community. A big broad sided building loading robot vans on one side will have storefronts on the other for small eating establishments, showrooms, niche office space for jobs that still need it, etc.

3. Health care facilities, and places that provide care for an aging population, are still hives of centralized not-automated not-virtual employment. These become the new downtowns.

4. Most American cities stopped growing more than the low single digits and many suburbs are now exceeding or nearing 100 years old. A lot of the original houses and apartments and retail buildings were torn down and replaced, and their replacements have been torn down and replaced. The income levels and demographics of these areas have changed and changed again.

Now that so much time has past, change has come. Streets are being opened up or downsized to adapt to new mostly automated travel patterns. This creates opportunities for walkability and connectivity.

[mhays]

There's a lot to bite off in all of that, some of which I agree with and some I don't. Some of the disagreement:

1. If Grandma owns a condo, no investor can buy "the building" without making a deal with most or even all of the condo owners. I believe this varies by state. An example in my area was a hospital that wanted to expand onto a condo site...they had to offer 3x market value before they got everyone on board.

2. EVs don't solve much of anything. You still have to generate the power. If the area is based on coal, it's still a major disaster.

3. Transit doesn't have to solve every trip. If you don't have a car and don't bike you can use Uber, rent a car occasionally, whatever. If it's just the occasional jaunt it's dirt cheap compared to your own car.

[Obadno]

Originally Posted by SFBruin

I think that cars are important, but perhaps can be reduced in their usage in order to reduce congestion / improve the environment.

I think that this could happen either by charging for VMT or by using a licensing program (basically cap the number of car licenses available in a specific area, and have a bidding process to exchange licenses).

The car is not going to go away, but it can be discouraged in favor of more environmentally-friendly options.

I mean that completely cripples cities that dont have pre war urban design.

[SFBruin]

^ You're right. I was thinking about this from the perspective of Seattle, but in other places, this might not work.

[SFBruin]

Originally Posted by mhays

2. EVs don't solve much of anything. You still have to generate the power. If the area is based on coal, it's still a major disaster.

I've read that internal combustion engines are incredibly inefficient, and that electricity generation at power plants can be more efficient. So, it could, at least in theory help reduce carbon emissions.

So, they have potential to solve some problems.