Seems like parking is a side effect for people's preference for larger houses and yards. Convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls with their neighbors, and the parking situation would change dramatically.
It's possible to have complete, walkable communities where most people live in single family homes - streetcar suburbs. It's also possible to have totally unwalkable multifamily housing - very common in some postwar sprawls to build a subdivision off an arterial and fill it with townhouses or condos. These can even look like good urbanism in carefully framed photos. It's only when you zoom out that you realize it's just the townhouses surrounded by "open space" and fast roads.
The issue with suburbia is the framework, much more than the housing types. The battle over housing types is more about within existing city grid systems, doing some piecemeal replacements of single-family houses to duplexes, triplexes, and apartment buildings. Suburbia produces multifamily housing easily enough - not that much objection to new condo/townhouse subdivisions. We just don't celebrate that much, because they are still ultimately subdivisions.
The GP said "convince people to live in smaller houses and share walls", you retort back "completely unnecessary". Your first two examples are...smaller houses and shared walls.
Define "smaller houses". Smaller than what? I can find tiny(er) houses compared to what I posted in recent developments/sub-divisions in the suburbs of Toronto (Mississauga, Oakville, Brampton, Pickering, Oshawa, etc).
All the streets in question have big(er) and small(er) houses, with both semi- and fully-detached houses. Some areas have more of some kind than another.
Next time I'll re-arrange the order of the links so that the big(er) stuff is first:
There are two subways stations (Keele, Dundas West) with-in 2km of that location. You can have sizeable fully-detached houses at densities that support walking distances of various amenities and mass transit.
The idea that urban living necessitates "smaller houses and share walls" is a red herring as demonstrated by a whole bunch of housing stock built pre-WW2.
I'm not sure what the average square footage of that Geoffrey location is, I'm not great at eyeballing that. But the average US SFH is what, almost 2,500sqft these days? I imagine these are less than that figure?
EDIT: I just did some quick Google Maps measuring on that 159 Geoffrey St, I estimated about 60x20 floor plate, maybe less. Lose some space from the stairs, two mostly full floors and maybe a finished attic, probably close to that 2,500ish sqft.
Notice the 'high' prices: this is because this neighbourhood is in high demand because urban living seems to be cool again
'with the kids'. But back in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s the prices were much, much lower because all the 'cool kids' (WASPs) were flocking to the then-new suburbs and leaving the dirty city for the immigrants (Poles in the case of Roncesvalles; Little Portugal is the next area over, and Little Italy next to that). Since the late-1990s urban living started becoming cool again. Of course such urban/walkable neighbourhoods aren't built any more, so a finite resource gets its price bidded up.
So I guess your point is you can buy just as much square footage in the city, provided an unlimited budget.
Nice to live in a world where a $2M house is a normal home price. I definitely don't live anywhere near that. So for me to live in that kind of an area, I'd probably need...a much smaller house and probably a shared wall.
You may be surprised to find out but the house we're talking about isn't in the US.
Also, just curious, what does a 2,700sqft single family house in London go for? Or Copenhagen? Or other very walkable European cities? Super cheap because they're not the US I presume?
> This might be one of those cases where random links were copy pasted without consideration for the actual claims.
Or it could be because the same silly tropes about urban living are trotted out regularly (which is why Oh the Urbanity made their video) and some of us counter them with the same silly replies we've posted numerous times before.
There are a number of examples in the posted links that are not "smaller houses and share walls", and I could find more if I didn't value my time. I could also find a whole bunch of "smaller houses and share walls" in suburbans developments in my area to show that "smaller houses and share walls" is not exclusive to (so-called) urban living; see for example "Why American Yards Are Shrinking":
The links clearly contain a significant portion of examples that undermine your own claims. Whether it also contains a portion of examples that support them is not something I addressed in the prior comment.
You're describing urban environments. A lot of people live in those places already. But a lot of people prefer to live elsewhere. Differences in preference is fine.
What doesn't make sense though is driving in urban environments, especially single-occupant vehicles that make up the vast majority of motor traffic in major cities. Keep the suburbs. But I think it'd be good to make cities painful to drive in for all but the folks who need it (e.g., people with mobility issues, or families with small children). If you're able-bodied in an urban environment, you should be the last person to be driving around regularly.
This is the wrong approach. Don't intentionally make driving worse for anyone, anywhere, ever. If you want people to use transit instead, then improve it until it's a better option than driving is today.
Nope. This is why pedestrians die. Force cars to go slower in cities.
They recently added a pedestrian island in the road near where I live. It is not unnoticeable. With paint lines, high reflective markings, and literally a concrete wall.
Literally on day 1, a car made an illegal left turn and hit the clearly marked island at 20mph faster than the speed limit. It jumped the 3 foot high barrier, but the pedestrian on that island was saved.
Make life in cities miserable, is more accurate. The reason is that transit is worse than cars always. If you make travel in cars worse, then all you did is make life worse for everyone.
And in reality it simply means that fewer people go there, because going there is miserable. The city starts converting to low income because anyone with income goes elsewhere.
> The reason is that transit is worse than cars always
As long as 'always' is restricted to a certain lifestyle and worldview, and doesn't take into account the excellent transit systems that exist around the world.
> And in reality it simply means that fewer people go there, because going there is miserable. The city starts converting to low income because anyone with income goes elsewhere.
That's incredibly naive, and I think a lot of European cities are direct counter examples to this. It often makes things a lot less miserable for the people who actually live in the denser urban areas that were previously overrun with cars.
How are they for a grandparents pushing a stroller?
Would you say they encourage a vibrant street culture of cafes and shops?
The ones I've seen, especially in Berlin and İzmir, are loud and a hassle to cross. That's because walkways and bikeways over multi-lane roads are car infrastructure. They are there to prioritize high-speed automobile traffic with few interruptions. I'm happy for the one going up at my gym, but I know it's there to ensure bike/ped political forces can't endanger the trunk road underneath. True pedestrian infrastructure there would involve a major speed and size downgrade to the road, which is unacceptable, thus the political defensive move to pay out the nose for something car advocates would never normally fund.
Elevated/buried pedestrian walkways make walking harder for a lot of people. A wheelchair-accessible ramp that goes up 12 feet is going to add at least 100 feet more distance up and down - and still be painful for a lot of people with otherwise manageable foot/joint issues.
Pushing a stroller for the last few years, plus spraining my ankle a few weeks ago has given me a little taste of what trying to use sidewalks is like for people with even tighter mobility constraints, and this in an area that is relatively accessible without a car.
By walking back down the ramp from it to the regular sidewalk. I just meant I want to add elevated walkways to cross streets with, not for them to replace sidewalks entirely.
I assume you mean for crossing busy roads and highways, not city streets? Certainly there are places for that, like Chicago's Lake Shore Drive. They're expensive and take a lot of space themselves, though, especially to meet accessibility requirements, and they can add considerable distance to the pedestrian's route.
Road space in cities is a zero-sum game. Currently cars command the vast majority of it, with obvious consequences.
Highly efficient uses of space, like dedicated bus lanes, directly transfer road space from cars to improve transit. This necessarily makes driving "worse" in the short term, until enough marginal drivers shift to the now-improved busses, leaving the car lanes quicker and less congested.
In most cities, cars are physically obstructing better transit, which makes traffic worse for everyone involved.
No, it is the correct approach. It is somewhat a zero-sum game at least in urban centers. Driving is cheap because free and cheap parking is widely available, and car speed is prioritized over other factors including pedestrian safety. Some of the huge volume of parking has to be given over to other transit modes, which will increase demand and eventually price for what remains. Urban speed limits need to be lower, pedestrians need to have more and safer ways to cross, which will also lower average speeds.
All of this will make driving less pleasant and convenient, the cost of making walking safer and easier. As it is driving is "artificially" easy, the consequence of decades of it being prioritized very highly. It needs to come down somewhat.
And even when cities invest in non-car transit, cars will still steal those resources. It's not uncommon in my city to see cars idling on bus lanes, or gig delivery workers parking in protected bike lines inside the bollards.
Yeah where I am there is little and half-assed bike infrastructure. Cyclists facetiously and bitterly call the bike lanes "uber lanes." They are simply painted and unbuffered, unenforced. Extra parking in residential areas and loading, ride share, and delivery space everywhere else. Cyclists ride in the lane or not at all, and then are blamed for being there when we're injured or killed in traffic.
I used to knock on these people's windshields to ask them to move on busy roads. I had to stop doing that after one person tried to run me over a few blocks later (they missed and hit the sidewalk). Others were content to simply scream, or back up onto me.
> It is somewhat a zero-sum game at least in urban centers. Driving is cheap because free and cheap parking is widely available, and car speed is prioritized over other factors including pedestrian safety.
I've never seen an urban center where "free and cheap parking is widely available", or one with a speed limit above 25.
Chicago for example has both. Phoenix, las vegas. As do a number of medium-large cities in the southeast like raleigh, tampa, charleston SC. Maybe not cities that come to mind first when talking about urban centers but they are million+ population agglomerations with plentiful parking and serious pedestrian death problems. Tens of millions of americans live in these "small" cities of around a million, so trends across them end up affecting a huge population.
Another factor is that urban speed limits vary widely in how much they are actually limits. Research is clear on the fact that road design has at least as strong an influence on driver behavior as posted limits do. Without rigorous enforcement & given the wide streets common in these places, driver behavior tends towards interpreting the limit as the minimum speed they are entitled to, rather than the maximum to be attained only when safe.
And finally neither I nor anyone else here know what you've seen so that's a very silly limit to place on the conversation.
I've been to NYC where free and cheap parking is on nearly every major and minor street. I would consider it widely available. Yes, trying to find a parking spot is a nightmare but that doesn't mean it isn't widely available generally.
Well yes, because there are a lot of people. That doesn't mean NYC doesn't have ample parking; parking is literally everywhere all the time. Many streets park on both sides, so over 50% of the street real estate is parking! Consider maybe that parking demand is high, not that supply is low.
Parking is most certainly not widely available. If spots exist but all of them are always taken, that means zero availability.
If you go to a restaurant with 100 tables, all of them full and a 2 hour waiting list, would you tell a friend on the phone "Yes they have lots of tables available"?
Improving transit is often achieved by making driving less attractive. For instance, by creating bus-only lanes that cars may not use, or by taxing/tolling car use to fund transit improvements.
Driving in urban environments is already terrible. This is the de-facto effect of density, regardless of what intended policy is. It seems to me that there’s just no way to have a large number of cars be comfortable in a dense urban environment. Might as well just try to minimize them.
Researchers like Giulio Mattioli have shown pretty well what should be clear from watching politics: getting people out of their cars requires sticks as well as carrots.
>Improvement to public transport is the only win-win policy measure in the diagram. As a matter of fact, all policies that reduce the need for an automobile to access jobs and services by improving the effectiveness of other modes are generally seen as contributing to alleviating social exclusion, insofar as they improve the situation of households without a car (Shaw and Farrington, 2003, p.109). They should have a positive impact on environmental sustainability as well, insofar as they encourage a modal shift from the private car to less polluting means of transport. However, transport researchers generally agree that “pull” measures that encourage voluntary reductions of car use – or “carrots” – are unlikely to effectively bring about change at an adequate scale and speed (Huby and Burkitt, 2000, p.390); therefore it is generally pointed out that there is a need for complementary “push” measures, which aim to reduce car use in a more direct and coercive manner (“sticks”).
> getting people out of their cars requires sticks as well as carrots
Or...it requires that governments stop prioritising car-based travel over all others, i.e. they should provide carrots for all forms of transport in equal measure, according to the long-term costs of providing it.
I live in a area with far better cycling/walking/PT infrastructure than probably most suburbs in my country, yet I'm still regularly struck by the degree to which infrastructure dedicated to moving people around in private automobiles takes up far more space and taxpayer budget than all the others combined.
I honestly don't know why anyone would ever want to do that. To me, it's only done out of necessity, and is a driving force in motivating people to get the hell out of that situation asap.
But the cool thing is, some people can choose that, if that's what they desire, even though I can't understand why.
I chose to buy my first house in a townhome complex with 100 units.
Why?
Maintenance was outsourced, and at a lower price than I could pay for myself (100 households at once get a good group buy price!)
Everything on the exterior of my house was taken care of.
The complex has 2 shared green spaces, one for dogs, one for people. The large green space for people is bigger than the yard in my current single family home. All year round weatherproof commercial yard furniture was already on the property.
Every year my windows got cleaned, the deck power washed. Landscaping was professionally handled, trees trimmed, pests removed, all w/o me having to worry about any of it.
I'd buy another unit in complex with that design again w/o issue or hesitation.
With proper construction techniques (which sadly that complex didn't have), sound is not an issue. Sound dampening is a solved problem, and I've lived in other complexes that had the same sound leakage from connected neighbors and I have from my neighbors right now in the house on the lots around me.
This is all fine while the management is fine. As soon as the company or people change, it goes to shit.
The next thing you know you've been trying to get the broken communal door/gate/sewer/extractor fan/lights/electric/gas/whatever fixed for months if not years and no one at the management company is even returning calls, and you sure as hell can't fix it yourself since you are not legally allowed to do it (and you can guarantee that if you were to do something yourself the dormant management company would suddenly spring to life and sue you to hell and back). Then next summer they hike the management and maintenance prices 500% and there is fuck all you can do apart from suck it up because now you can't sell because no one wants to pay the high fee, and you can't not pay it as you'll be taken to court for non-payment of contract within days (and P.S. their contract says they can hike the prices as they please because wow look at that cool yard for dogs! I totally forgot to read the entire contract.whatevs.)
TL;Dr it is great while it is all working fine. IME after a few years once the initial glean and glow has worn off and things start to naturally wear out and break, it will go to shit. It will start small with broken lawn furniture that doesn't get replaced, then before you know it the roof is leaking and there is nothing you can do apart from hope the people you pay to look after the place but are not responding to emails or calls actually do something.
> This is all fine while the management is fine. As soon as the company or people change, it goes to shit.
HOAs are member voted, it is a thankless job and improving things is as simple as running for the board, every time someone has wanted to take over they have been welcomed on. The HOA there has been going strong for almost 25 years, doing a great job managing the place.
The HOA did indeed fire their previous management company for incompetence, since the complex is in a large metro area, there is no shortage of competition in that field.
Edit: Oh and it isn't like people I hire myself are super reliable! I've had vendors working on my house ghost me, sometimes in the middle of a job. And there is also the cost of my time in learning about different fields (e.g. yard irrigation), collecting multiple quotes, and trying to do background checks to ensure the people giving the quotes do good work.
The problem is that the US doesn't know how to build proper walls. It's a wall. I don't have X-ray vision, I don't know what's happening on the other side of it. You don't either. So why is it a problem to share a wall? Noise. But if you use building materials that aren't paper, then sharing a wall becomes not a problem. If one neighbor wants to blast their music at 3am, and another neighbor has to wake up at 4am to go to work, and the building they're in lets them, what, then, is the problem?
Unless it's just the knowledge that there's people on the other side of the wall bothers you, but that seems silly.
I'd go one further and say it's wrong to assume the most inefficient, expensive, and socially isolating form of infrastructure shouldn't be expected to be the default. I get land capex is cheaper and distributed population is great for defensive posture against nuclear attacks and pandemics, but that doesn't mean that denser suburbs, small towns with strong centers, or indeed cities are less desirable than suburbia or rural areas by any means.
Life naturally fills the ecosystem it finds itself in to carrying capacity. The sustainable limitations here are financial, ecological, and regulatory. I think we're hitting up against those constraints right now. Unless they want to pay us more money, we're going to have to sacrifice the environment or car centric regulations to continue growing. If we decide to just stop growing, then we either need changes in regulations to further disincentivize growth or allow a ton of suffering to happen.
So does having to drive to work, sit in traffic, pay for and maintain the car (or more likely in the US, cars.)
I live in a city, share walls, and am less than a 10 minute walk from my office. My coworkers come in early and leave work late to avoid traffic. I'm home before they can get their car out of the parking garage and I can easily go home for lunch. I think my standard of living is therefore higher than someone who must drive to work.
That's often true. I've also read about a lot of situations in rural areas where the nearest neighbor might be 1/2 mile away, but they are absolutely crazy about property lines.
How would you propose convincing people to live four inches from their neighbor? This seems like somewhat of a challenging sale. I cannot speak for everyone, but I have lived this way and it is not good.
Don't build with shitty materials. There are ways to sound proof apartments to the degree that it's a non issue. Adding a facility in the vicinity for parties solves the issue of neighbours wanting to blast loud music (unless they are really obnoxious neighbours but in that case building management can take care of that).
Loud bass carries through pretty much any material. You’re going to need a cultural change where people in dense environments don’t play loud music, and watch their behavior after 8pm.
> Loud bass carries through pretty much any material. You’re going to need a cultural change where people in dense environments don’t play loud music, and watch their behavior after 8pm.
Not at all. New construction in NYC has excellent soundproofing. Even that is actually more a side-effect of changes to fire codes than a specific demand for soundproofing - buildings constructed with soundproofing as a specific goal can be even more insulated.
If you're in one of those buildings, it's actually quite difficult to hear your neighbors during any normal activity.
It's physically impossible for practically any kind of 4 inches of soundproof to prevent a 50hz frequency from vibrating through the walls.
Maybe if it was 4 inches of solid lead and even then particularly sensitive people might still feel a normal sized subwoofer placed against the wall on the opposite side.
I don’t build a lot of apartment buildings but I absolutely support this. On the other hand, imagine if I used these techniques in my single family home a quarter mile from my nearest neighbor. Paradise. Dead silence.
I might be missing something, but it sure seems like having all the good jobs in one place where it is absolutely helping to reside is the cause of all the traffic and parking congestion.
If all the jobs were distributed widely across a place that was pleasant to live, I’m not sure we would be talking too much about all this.
I do agree, though, that money will make a person do crazy things.
I imagine parking space.as replacing yard space though? People want parking, or at least, regulation has decided that people want parking more than they do yards
This is nice when everyone you live near is quiet, respectful, safe, and clean. What happens when the neighborhood turns and your wife can’t safely walk her dog outside the house, and you can’t get sleep anymore due to the loud pumping bass and drunk people fighting outside your window?
I kind of like the idea of a city community with nice little shops close by, but every city I’ve been in has had too much crime, congestion, and noise to make it livable for someone who likes quiet and solitude.
Density and diversity are opposing forces. Since diversity is now the absolute highest value in western culture, density can never be anything other than dysfunctional or a lament.
The problem with living in a car-free urban area, especially one that hasn't been extremely gentrified, is that someone is likely to liberate your bike.
