In general I hope the US can urbanize, the older I get the more I realize it’s not really enjoyable living in this country. I don’t think I want hyper dense, but having more places to walk, bike, and explore that aren’t just cookie-cutter boilerplate-esque suburbs and freeways would be really nice. More places to meet people too, there’s so few third places. And not needing to drive would be a really big convenience.
(To be clear, I doubt most of the US will urbanize given the rural nature of a lot of it, but I hope at least bigger cities can move in that direction)
We're at a critical juncture here in the Twin Cities. The state DOT needs to re-build the interstate that cuts right through the entire metro area (I-94) for the first time since it was first built 50 years ago. There is a serious proposal to remove the interstate entirely and replace it with a street. This would be amazing, the area around I-94 is, as you'd expect, quite unpleasant to be in. It's noisy, dirty, and dangerous. The interstate is infamous for being one of those roads that was planned to run through and destroy working class and Black neighborhoods in the 50s and 60s[1], and removing it would go some way to regaining what had been room for people to live. I think it's a bit of a longshot, but dang, I would love to see the cities recover that space for the people who actually live here, not just those who are driving through it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I'm really hoping we don't blow it by just rebuilding the stupid thing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_94_in_Minnesota#His...
Very similar story - the highway divides Syracuse University from the poor Black neighborhoods. It's a scar through the middle of town.
I'm very excited to see how the city heals around it.
Here's a list of many twin cities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_cities
[1] https://www.archdaily.com/800155/6-cities-that-have-transfor...
I'm afraid that this would wind up like Vancouver, which lacks freeways through the city and has pretty bad traffic as a result. Better maybe to tunnel it under if possible? That works well for Seattle, although we still have I5 to contend with that divides the downtown from Capitol Hill (there is talk of lidding the entire freeway through downtown).
I was sitting in a coffee shop in a small town and I overheard a conversation next to me. Two elderly men were talking, and one of them made a comment to the effect of, "I like a rural town, so I try to vote to keep it that way." Two or three decades ago, this town really was a small farming town, but the population is growing and the town is changing. It's not becoming a city, though, not by any means! As the city (somewhat) nearby is becoming more expensive, the suburban sprawl is, well sprawling. The small rural town is transforming into a suburb of the city.
I would agree that this is a negative change for the small town, and I would argue that the solution is to urbanize the nearby city. There should be much more housing, and it should be much more affordable to live in the city. As it stands, many people want to live in that city, but find the housing prices unaffordable. So these people make a compromise between how much they are willing to pay on housing vs how long they are willing to travel (almost always by car) into the city. I count myself in this group.
Urban areas and rural areas complement one another, and there's pros and cons to living in either kind of place. However, post-WWII styled suburbs are, in my opinion, a net negative.
It really is. Some subruban and rual places are starting to get this as well. A common theme among the ones that get it is to provide density bonuses (i.e. if you allocate large blocks of conservation space, you can build more densely). The result is that you get the same overall density in an area but the people are living much closer together and not sprawling out and building over the natural environment.
I personally think most of them are too conservative with their approaches (often setting upper limits on density even with the bonuses) but the general approach of "build dense to limit the impact on rural spaces" is progress.
And because it's a highrise parking spots are expensive. Like $50k+ each. And that goes directly to the price of housing in rents.
Meanwhile, even at the busiest our garage is more than half empty. What a waste.
D magazine even used a picture of my garage in their article: https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2021/12/the-city-of-da...
Wait am I reading this right that a 3-bedroom family home would come with space for six cars? How many families have 6 cars that's insane O.O
Sounds like a regulation someone long ago thought would for sure prevent anyone from building anything. No way they actually wanted that much residential parking ...
Unfortunately, that sounds like the spaces are close to being properly priced in the market?
Getting more utilization would require the price come down, and the price decrease may not increase the overall revenue immediately.
You would need cheaper nearby parking in order to force the price down. If there is no cheaper parking nearby, then the market is at the clearing price.
I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey and Maryland, spent a little time in my 20s in the denser-than-suburbs suburbia of the Bay Area, and then the past 14 years in San Francisco proper. More recently I've been spending 1-1.5 months at a time living out in "rural" parts of Truckee, CA.
I just don't know anymore. In San Francisco I live within a few minutes' walk of two dozen or so useful businesses (corner store, grocery, bakery, butcher, restaurants, bars, etc.), and everything I need to live I can get by walking no more than a half hour. I hate driving and love this.
In Truckee, the closest convenience store is a 40-minute walk, and all the other necessities are at least a 10-minute drive. On the other hand, I'm a light sleeper, and the intense darkness (moonlight, at most, only!) and quiet in Truckee was wonderful for restfulness. In SF we live near a Muni bus depot, where they clean buses well past midnight every night. I can mostly -- but not entirely -- get darkness with blackout blinds, but it's really not the same.
I definitely don't want to go back to the suburbs, but that sort of thing -- with much better city planning than most (all?) US suburbs have -- has potential to give me quiet and darkness, but the ability to walk everywhere I need to go.
Ultimately, though, what drives where I want to live is where my friends are. As I get older, I find it harder and harder to make new, close friends. Moving to a new place where I don't know anyone sounds like torture to me.
There are advantage and disadvantages to living everywhere in the world. You soon learn to enjoy the things that are possible where you are and not get into the things difficult/impossible.
You experienced a bad compromise of having high density of a city and the high car ownership of suburbia. Like a "stroad," a road that is trying to be a street, it doesn't work.
Try to spend a week in a place with walkable density and no cars: Amsterdam, Oslo, or closer to US, Disney Land.
This is backwards, you’ve got no choices in a lot of US cities other than to drive.
So everyone is pigeonholed into something you want
For now, not to long ago the left seemed adamant about forcing everyone into sprawling concrete jungles. I give it a few more years at most before they’re back at it pushing to cancel cars and force people to move to high rises.
I think we can agree that the sane thing to do is charge for it and let the market set the price. If home owners or developers want to build their own on-site parking, they're welcome to. Personally, I'm sick of having four parking spots in my garage tacked to my rent despite being a one car household.
Or did I misunderstand, and you feel on-street free parking should be paid for by tax payers? I have to disagree. I pay for my own parking. And people like me generate more tax revenue for the city because it costs less to service density, so I'm also funding on-street parking. I don't think that's fair. We should not be subsidizing car dependency. If you want to drive, pay for it yourself.
* Increased housing costs
* Decreased housing supply
* Increased air pollution
* Increased traffic
* Increased noise pollution
* Increased water pollution, stormwater usage
* Decrease in community and neighborhood cohesion
If a person feels they need parking, they can pay for it. They don't need society to force parking to be made available to everyone, whether they want it or not.
I can confidently say, I don’t care about this problem at all. Parking further up the street from my house is a small, small, small price to pay for the benefits of being walking distance from interesting things.
Besides, even if you mandate parking, it's an absurdity to mandate free parking.
Near me, the city is talking about removing a big parking lot and strip mall and turning it into a mixed use space, but as far as I’ve read there has been no talk of transportation. The area sits at the intersection of two stroads. It’s technically walkable, but it’s not a pleasant walk. It’s technically can be biked, but not without competing with cars for space on the road. There might be buses, but they are very infrequent and slow. Everyone I know would want to drive, as the alternatives are significantly worse than driving. If people can’t park, they simply won’t go.
I’d love to get rid of my car, but that requires the city, and region, make significant investments in public transit infrastructure. The non-car option can’t just be available for those who are willing to put in a lot of effort to avoid using a car. The non-car options need to be better than the car option. Easier, cheaper, safer, and more pleasant.
Removing parking lots makes driving worse, but doesn’t make the alternatives better.
If mandatory parking requirements did go down, and zoning was increased, then the people who own it would willingly put forth the effort to make the space more useful. It would also help sort out what is considered "unused" - which right now is a nebulous concept.
What does hyper dense mean? And how is that detrimental? Tokyo meets all of your requirements, for example, but you would call that hyper dense for sure, right? The article is "about" Baltimore, MD. Does that city meet your threshold of hyper dense?
As with most things, a lot of this comes down to money. The more dense an area, the more use the things you want are used, and the more money they make, they more likely they are to thrive. The more dense an area, the bigger the tax base, the more money there is for nice things that maybe don't make money on their own.
If they did it like Spain, for example, where you can just walk out of your home, sit on the street at any restaurant, and drink wine with your friends, we'd have exactly what you're describing.
But then they wouldn't be able to rake in DUI profits.
Save the conspiracies for red light cameras or speed traps.
Let's say a developer builds a bigger, taller building than what was there previously and adds residents. If they're not required to include sufficient parking, the new cars will flood the surrounding neighborhood, and existing residents will now have no place to park. This depends on the type of neighborhood, of course, but it happened in mine in Chicago. Not being able to just come home and go inside, but rather have to drive around and around in ever-larger circles (in the winter) to look for a parking spot because some alderman got paid off by a developer to screw his constituents... that's the reality.
We're seeing this in L.A. too, where local politicians will sell out to developers and publicly excuse it by pretending that parking creates cars and cars = bad. L.A. is a giant county masquerading as a city, and it's never going to be Amsterdam (you hear this asinine comparison all the time). Pretending that people aren't going to bring cars to their residence is absurd and damaging.
But big vacant parking lots growing weeds? Hell yeah, we have those all over the place, around dying malls and boarded-up Macy's. But what did CA politicians do? Pass laws that allow developers to destroy one single-family home and build 10 units there, overriding any local zoning or review and without local ability to prevent it.
So now we're going to pave over even MORE ground and cut down MORE trees, while said malls are still sitting there. As if the place isn't hot, barren, drought-stricken, and depressing enough.
Anyway, that's what I think of when I hear "get rid of parking requirements:" corrupt sellouts.
"Part of this is a result of poor planning and ordinance-making that long ago overcompensated for the wide use of automobiles. Henry Grabar, a staff writer at Slate, mentions this in a book published last year, Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World. ”On a national level, certainly, there’s far more parking than we need,” Grabar said in an interview. “There are at least four parking spaces for every car, meaning that the parking stock is no more than 25 percent full at any given time. And some of those cars are moving at any given time, so parking may be a good deal emptier than that.”
Even in residential areas, the rise of AirBNB is causing an accordion effect in parking availability, at least in my neighborhood. I live downtown in a place that doesn't have much in the way of garage space or driveways so the streets are heavily used for parking and there is enough space generally speaking for everyone who lives here, but come weekends and event times now that so many condos have become temporary party houses people rent so they can trash, this floods the streets with cars from out of the area and suddenly the people who actually live here have nowhere to park.
What's the original source for that statistic?
I used to live in an English town that set up maximum number of parking spaces for new homes. On paper looks good, as they were trying to incentivize public transport as you mention.
However the outcome was that single family homes were virtual unaffected, as they usually have a double garage plus driveway, while people on apartment blocks had severe parking limitations. In other words, if you were well off enough to buy a house you were gold, and the less well off people had to bear most of the burden.
Also, at least over here, most shopping centers have underground parking.
The "historic city center" and all that crap... that I understand... noone goes there for weekly shopping, but instead people go there to hang out, drink coffee, eat, etc.... public transport works great for that. Malls, shopping centers or even larger stores? Nope.
Reality in a lot of european cities is fundamentally different to most of the US.
When there's a lot of housing there, people sure do do their weekly shopping downtown - but it's mostly the people who live in the area. I lived in central Philadelphia for 7 years or so and when I needed groceries, I walked to one of the grocery stores in the neighborhood. I mostly wasn't carrying a ton of stuff on the train, but that's because there were shops close enough to walk to instead anyway.
(Though also, you can fit a lot of stuff in a cargo bike.)
I’ve come to realize that urban forests double as homeless camps. My homeless camp has is rife with crime, drug over doses, violence and fire. Last month I’ve had a leaf blower stolen, my car window broken, and an explosion due to them throwing a propane tank into a camp fire.
Since they’re tucked into a forest - the city won’t take any action. The city does take action on homeless camps that are more visible. I don’t mean to conflate urban forests with homelessness. However that’s very much the case here in Austin, Tx.
"I’ve come to realize that urban forests double as homeless camps."
You typed both of these sentences in the same post. One of them needs to be removed, because they don't make sense together.
So, if I have a two car garage in my house, a parking spot at work, and a parking spot at the local shopping district, how else is this going to work? I can't bring my parking spot with me. The idea that we should look at per existing car utilization as any kind of indicator is ridiculous. Now, if any of those spots is never used, that may be a good indicator- but it might be because a building isn't fully leased at the moment as well.
The fact that your home garage and work parking lot are also empty most of the time is also a huge problem. It makes cities much larger than they need to be, and serving public transit across them impossible.
I don't think it's a huge problem. My garage is part of the overall footprint of my home. My garage is under my office. It wouldn't help to have them full all of the time. Should I also have someone living in my house while I work? Or ensuring that all offices have shift work? Sure, there is a possible efficiency there, but we make certain concessions for convenience. A ratio of 4 spots per car doesn't seem obviously bad.
I do think there are some places with too much parking, but there are also plenty of places where there is not enough.
More green spaces are good for cities.
Cities are best when they are allowed to gradually adapt, rather than trying to plan everything out 'just so' from the outset and being rigid about changes.
But parks are tougher to put in once the land has been used up.
A great many people are. Urbanist Xitter (Mastodon, Threads, whatever) is very much alive and well. The closest thing to a consensus about what to do with the reclaimed space is some trees, but primarily medium-density affordable housing, ideally with retail on the bottom. Sometimes the space can be used to make room for transit, too. By making these places denser and more livable, it prevents even more trees, meadows, etc. from being cleared for more exurbs.
I'd start with Suburban Nation, move on to StrongTowns and MissingMiddle, then take it from there.
I think it was George Carlin that said put affordable housing on golf courses?
More seriously, if you have a brownfield ex industrial site, will trees etc grow ok there? Does converting brownfield sites to meadows or forests pose any risks to nearby humans?
So those rolling green links might not be the cheapest places to establish new housing when you include the remediation.
Feels kind of appropriate if you could grow forest on a site for 50 to 100 years or more. Then harvest the wood with all the nasty stuff in it. Then bury all that contaminated wood somewhere deep. Then build houses on the newly clean earth.
Also any expectation of "the demise of malls and the decline of brick-and-mortar retail" is hasty. Globally, during the pandemic, 80%+ of retail was brick and mortar [1], and it actually increased in 2021, though it appears to be correcting. Research shows consumers don't trust stores with an online only presence [2]. I think banking on that will be too little too late. We need better solutions sooner.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ECOMPCTSA/
[2] https://www.kbbreview.com/6657/news/consumers-lack-trust-onl...
In cities outside of Baltimore, where there aren't 20,000 abandoned buildings (when last I lived there), where there's a public housing shortage and a rising cost of living, they need affordable homes, not trees. I love trees but they're better for cities that don't have housing shortages, yet have the money to pay for trees.
Baltimore (and Philly, similar in some respects) has large concrete and brick deserts. But they also have large and small parks with lots of trees. That's where you get mugged after dusk (and sometimes during the day). You don't walk through Patterson Park at night.
IMO it's a privileged thing to think of first. Certain websites that cater to this kind of post don't seem to discuss civic issues from the perspective of the people who need the most help. It's more a certain kind of person who's more interested in a closer walk to the Starbucks and Trader Joe's.
I have been to parking lots covered in mature Aleppo Pines (which smell great in the heat) and from far away you couldn't really tell there was a parking lot there.
We look at a large section of a land and decide that we will destroy all life on it, pave over it with asphalt (so that even the rain cannot drain into the soil), all so that large vehicles can sit there unused. It really is the lowest opinion one can have on a piece of Earth.
In 99%+ of east coast US environments, grassland will become forest naturally (over time), even with the deer population as it is.
There's far more forest in New England than there was 150 years or so ago.
The selfish human reason to want trees as a natural heat regulator is I think alone worth the benefit in areas with lots of asphalt where people will be near.
Parking lots are parking lots because they require low CapEx, almost no OpEx. You buy some abandoned land, raze it, asphalt it, charge $30 a day per space (at let's say 75 spaces), tow the rest (at the driver's expense). You're pulling in a little under $67k/month. Wait for a commercial developer to come buy and take it off your hands for 3x its value.
You know how much it costs to dig up the ground, install power lines, a box, then bury footings, bolt in legs, install panels, etc, 9+ feet high? For a whole parking lot? $300k-500k, minimum (that's how much it costs just to install a small fleet of EV chargers btw, that's not doing major construction over an area the size of half a football field).
How much you gonna make off these panels? A 200kW panel array generates about 480MWh/yr, which at 1MW/$40 comes out to about $19,200/year in SREC credits. PA energy price is $0.18/KWh, so 480MW is $24/hr. But you're making 80% efficiency and it's not sunny all day all year, so at even 50% usage, that's $24,960/year. Almost a third of what the parking lot makes a month. Before we talk paying back installation costs, assuming your net metering deal is perfect.
It would be cheaper to build a multi-story garage, where you'd make WAY more money.
Were I replacing parking lots, I'd prioritize any abandoned / under utilized lots. Just start mulching and planting.
Plant willows and maples to break up the surface. Or maybe mechanically break things up, if the best-available-science supports doing so, if you're impatient.
Bonus Points: Convert planters, meridians, etc into P-Patch style community gardens. People love to garden. In my city, the wait list to join a P-Patch is years long.
1. What to plant is important as not all places/soils are the same.
2. Are you also thinking about maintenance (watering and pruning included)?
3. Are you also thinking about environmental compatibility with existing fauna and flora?
Planting trees is not trivial!
Selecting native species needs to be done, but that's not that complicated (either by asking organizations, or by reading the recomended list by the state/country/whatever).
Maintenance is low. Sure, don't plant trees that need water every day, but that's it. Irrigate them every week the first year. Pruning ? But they're not fruit trees ?
It might not be trivial, but it absolutely can be done.
I think you are correct, though, that we want to avoid planting trees for the sake of it, and ending up with areas with inappropriate species devoid of much life.
In the UK, most land is either farmland, or built on, so urban green areas are much more important for wildlife. There is a drive in the UK to create more "green corridors" linking green areas together, but this is facing stiff competition with the drive to develop second cities.
Ripping up parking lots (car parks) and planting trees would be even more important in the UK.
Baltimore actually has a decent amount of forest and park per capita. The Roland park country club is becoming a public/private thing.
Getting around town without a car sucks though. There’s no growth to incentivize bigger transit projects. More busses would be nice.
I don’t think Baltimore and other hollowed out blue collar cities need trees as much as they need to enable entirely different industries. And I don’t know what those industries are! But there’s a lot of talented craftspeople here, and not enough capital to pay them.
Or we go anarcho-collectivism.
Donald Shoup is an economist with a seemingly infinite hatred for our massive waste of parking. Cool ideas for how to fix it (e.g. metered parking that goes up as parking goes down, money goes to the neighborhood that's being metered directly) and he helps drive home how insane the entire thing is.
He's got some old lectures and interviews on youtube that can be pretty damn interesting, for a video of an economist talking about parking lots...
Rewilding unnecessary farmland is also a good idea. As usual in these conversations, there's no reason we can't do both.
Tearing up a parking lot and later building a new one is not only expensive but it does significant environmental damage.
Most of the efforts to improve driveability make it impossible to walk anywhere.
I think it's good to have a diversity of types of development. Just as people who don't want to drive shouldn't expect access to car-dependent environments to be easy, people in cars shouldn't expect the very few pockets of hard-won walkable environments to be optimal for driving into.
That's a good thing. Cheap or free parking is just a subsidy on car usage.
Your complaint is usually implicitly about a lack of free parking. Folks who insist on bringing their cars to town for dinner can foot the storage bill at a lot/garage down the street IMHO.
The free market is telling you something.
You've probably seen that propaganda around here but in case you missed it, here is some documentation : https://www.strongtowns.org/
How so? If we waved a magic wand and all cars became EVs powered by renewable energy, what would be unsustainable?
It's always about the money. Who will sell the land, who will buy the land, who will build the houses, who will buy the houses (for how much), and so on.
If I am a developer I don't care to make a $100k house. I prefer that there is 'some' scarcity in the market so I can be selling $300k houses instead. This 'motivational' speech is socialist-like (I like socialism but the Scandinavian one - aka capitalism with enhanced social care).
If there is money to be made, then money will be made. I am sure that these places will go down in prices enough to become 'attractive', and not a day before.
Charge the people, a dollar and half just to see em.
hoppity heft property is theft
Keep this going at least for 10 years and see how much the people will enjoy it.
* emergency vehicles * other essential government vehicles like post office, garbage, etc. * commercial delivery vehicles (dozens per 1000) * taxi services (dozens per 1000) * personal vehicles for those with disabilities * personal vehicles for those who are willing to pay a lot of money+time for them (hopefully not many dozens per 1000).
You are thinking that the terminal goal is no cars. But the terminal goal is to live on Earth in a sustainable fashion so we don't destroy the only habitable ecosystem for humans. Fewer cars is a secondary goal in service of this very reasonable requirement.
