[HN Gopher] 20-Minute Neighborhoods
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20-Minute Neighborhoods
Author : simonebrunozzi
Score : 144 points
Date : 2021-03-25 13:50 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| edu wrote:
| Living in the center of a big European city, this sounds like
| normal.
| awillen wrote:
| I think it is normal in big cities - the problem is people want
| this in suburbs as well, which often lack the density to
| support the idea.
| asdff wrote:
| They don't lack the density, they just shifted how these
| needs are met. In Europe, you can have a teensy town of 2000
| people and a cafe and bar and all your shops in walking
| distance still. In the U.S., this used to be the case until
| the 1950s or so, when automobiles made it possible to develop
| larger, regional stores that service a number of towns for
| all their needs and could dominate over the competition
| (Walmart today is what used to be a dozen separate services
| in one hulking brick and mortar).
| udev wrote:
| This is one of those things that the soviet cities did well.
|
| They called this microraion (microdistrict):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdistrict
|
| An interesting side-effect is that house/appartment-hunting
| become much easier and less stressful because no matter which
| district you will choose there will be services (groceries,
| pharmacies, clinics, child-care, schools, parks, etc) withing
| walkable/very-short-ride distance, which allows population
| distribute and grow more-or-less evenly, without segregationist
| tendencies like in the West: "I need to buy there because of the
| school", or "I need to buy in that area to avoid the
| immigrants/ethnic/black/brown people from the other area", etc.
| gowld wrote:
| > West: "I need to buy there because of the school", or "I need
| to buy in that area to avoid the immigrants/ethnic/black/brown
| people from the other area", etc.
|
| How to microdistricts prevent class or racial clustering?
| ngngngng wrote:
| I feel like class and racial diversity wasn't really
| something the USSR had to work with.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| That's all well and good if you work in the subset of
| industries that can exist in such cities. Is there a meat
| packing plant within 20 minutes? Is there a farm? Is there a
| harbor? Is there an airport? Is there a powerplant? Is there a
| military base? Not everyone is lucky enough to work in office-
| based industries. Some jobs need huge structures that cannot be
| integrated within a 20-minute walking distance. Such jobs are
| equally important. Any city planning must address everyone, not
| just office workers.
|
| I work on a military base. We make lots of noise. I like making
| that noise. I like getting paid to make noise. I don't want
| live beside it 24/7.
| asdff wrote:
| Ideally if you have some big geographic dependent job center,
| you would have transit to move workers from this city center
| to this job center. That transit could be anything from a sad
| bus that shows up once an hour, or a subway that shows up
| every 90 seconds, depending on local political climate most
| of all, depending on need. For example, the subways in NYC
| don't really help you out if you need to get across town.
| They are designed to funnel workers from where its cheap to
| live elsewhere in nyc, to where they can find jobs in midtown
| or lower manhattan, like a big toilet bowl. Los Angeles also
| built the green line to service people working for the
| defense industry around LAX. Planners recognize needs for
| movement and have this data, but I'd say the biggest barriers
| are locals not wanting to see a train and the working people
| it carries, and a lack of strong federal support in recent
| decades (in contrast to highway funding).
| piva00 wrote:
| For these jobs you have industrial areas outside of the city
| skirts and good public transportation to/from the city
| neighbourhoods, good as in: accessible, fast and ubiquitous.
|
| That's how The Netherlands do and I really like their cities.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> For these jobs you have industrial areas outside of the
| city skirts and good public transportation to/from the city
| neighbourhoods
|
| So... zoning. How is that any different than cities today?
| How then is the "20-minute city" any different than a city
| today + better public transport?
|
| My point is that people calling for integrated cities with
| services all within walking distances need also to
| accommodate the dirty/loud/dangerous jobs. Outsourcing such
| things to beyond the city limits is simply a repeat of
| current zoning policies using different names. The
| "20-minute city" concept boils down to just another call
| for better public transportation options. Ok. Cool. Do
| that. Just don't pretend you are doing anything
| revolutionary.
| Ap777 wrote:
| It isn't zoning when it happens naturslly
|
| >Town is built.
|
| >convenience store is willing to pay a premium for land
| that puts it in close proximity of potential customers.
|
| >meat plant is not because they aren't banking on Joe
| Schmoe strolling by going "huh yknow what I could use
| 35lbs of beef"
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Meat plants are not placed near customers. They are
| placed near employees. The goods are then shipped wide
| and far. "Natural" zoning did indeed see slaughterhouses
| inside major cities, right in the middle of residential
| areas. Zoning and health codes then pushed such
| industries outside cities. They are now placed wherever
| labor is cheap.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Stock_Yards
|
| "Two thousand men worked directly for the Union Stock
| Yard & Transit Co., and the rest worked for companies
| such as meatpackers, which had plants in the
| stockyards.[24] By 1900, the 475-acre (1.92 km2)
| stockyard contained 50 miles (80 km) of road, and had 130
| miles (210 km) of track along its perimeter.[20] At its
| largest area, The Yards covered nearly 1 square mile (3
| km2) of land, from Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue and
| from 39th (now Pershing Rd.) to 47th Streets."
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Yes zoning, but only for some things. You don't need to
| have all office spaces in downtown. You don't need only
| big supermarkets that are in just a few neighbourhoods.
|
| If less people have to move over long distances, it makes
| easier for the ones that need to.
| quantumwannabe wrote:
| So...a car dependent city then. They tend to have their
| office buildings distributed fairly evenly throughout the
| metro area and have a supermarket in pretty much every
| neighborhood. Every daily need and lots of non-daily
| needs are less than 20 minutes away.
|
| Just admit that you want public transit and high density
| and stop trying to weasel around saying so. All of the
| benefits professed about dense living already exist in
| most car dependent cities, with the only difference being
| the mode of transportation used. In a car dependent area,
| industrial areas are also part of the 20-minute
| neighborhood without the downsides of having to live a 20
| minutes walk from them.
|
| Outside of a handful of cities (mostly on the West Coast)
| that failed to expand their infrastructure when their
| populations grew, people in car dependent areas already
| live in 20 minute neighborhoods. You just disagree with
| their lifestyle and transportation choices. If someone
| comes along and builds lots of 100 story skyscrapers when
| the transit system can only support 10 story buildings,
| the same issue will befall your beloved dense public
| transit dependent city.
| asdff wrote:
| Walkability does not equal a safe or desirable apartment.
| Westlake in Los Angeles has a "walk score" of 91, very high
| meaning you can get all your needs met without a car. Doesn't
| make it a paradise, this area is high in crime and
| homelessness, and no one with a family moves there unless they
| don't have other options, which is why it is primarily
| populated by recent immigrants from Central America who have
| few other options.
|
| These services seem important, but people sacrifice them all
| the time, because they prefer space, safety, and school
| districts, to the novelty of walking to a convenient store. The
| most expensive houses in LA are up in the hills, where it takes
| you 10 minutes just to drive down windy roads with zero
| sidewalks before you even hit a shop of some sort at the
| bottom. Being able to walk to your errands is just not
| prioritized in American real estate over the three S's. People
| willingly take an hour commute for these things.
| udev wrote:
| "the novelty of walking to a convenient store" <- this sounds
| funny
|
| Not sure if sarcasm or figure of style of some sorts. If
| neither I recommend traveling to
| European/Asian/UK/Commonwealth cities where walking,
| convenience and safety are all combined seamlessly for large
| parts, if not whole, cities.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| i commented about this subject yesterday, i don't think it's a
| bad idea, but i personally can't imagine living without a car. It
| wasn't a popular opinion but i still stand by it. Maybe i'm just
| afraid of change, but i hate the thought of having to rely on
| public transport. tfl in my experience is a slow, noisy
| uncomfortable nightmare.
|
| Anecdotally, i remember seeing a prediction from the 1950's about
| mile high skyscrapers containing fully contained "cities". I'm
| not sure what happened to those..
| freeone3000 wrote:
| What happened to those is people want to have the flexibility
| to move around independently of their jobs. You can still see
| those in Montreal -- one tower my friend lives in has offices
| on the middle twenty floors, grocery and shopping on the bottom
| three, parking in the five basement floors, and the top twenty
| floors are for residential (with a restaurant on the top two,
| because imagine the view!). It's not a bad place to live and
| work, but, he just happens to not work there -- his workplace
| is a tower three blocks away.
| dublinben wrote:
| The promise of a 20-minute neighborhood is not trading 20
| minutes stuck in traffic in your car for 20 minutes stuck on a
| crowded train. The promise is that most everyday needs can be
| met within the radius of 20 minutes of "active transport" like
| walking, cycling, or scootering. Frequent public transport
| service just further extends that radius.
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| How such an arrangement would work in London, for example, is
| beyond my comprehension.
| techsupporter wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean? London is one of the places I
| can readily imagine this existing.
|
| Where I live in Seattle, an area that isn't even in the
| downtown or Capitol Hill core, I am a maximum of 15-minute
| walk from two parks, a library, three shopping areas, two
| grocery stores, health care offices, and a major transit
| center. At the transit center, two bus routes that go to
| different parts of the city (an important thing, since two
| bus routes going to roughly the same place are basically
| the same bus) arrive every 12-15 minutes virtually the
| entire calendar day.
|
| Does that not sound like something that many parts of
| London already have?
| marshmallow_12 wrote:
| Not that i'm aware. Many shops i need are in large,
| industrial areas, far away by foot. And 20 minute walks
| everywhere simply eats up my day. I hate using the buses,
| driving is far, far easier and faster.
| koyote wrote:
| Wait, what part of London are you from?
|
| I lived there for a decade and only knew a single person
| who had a car (because they had to commute out west
| towards Slough).
|
| Driving in London does not make any sense, it's expensive
| (congestion charge, parking), slow and impractical.
| Especially when London is made up of what is basically
| dozens of villages, all with their own high street.
|
| I lived in many different parts of London and never had
| to walk more than 15-20 minutes to get anything I ever
| needed. Rarely I'd have to hop on the tube to get
| something specialised (which would probably not even be
| available outside of a large city like London).
| bluGill wrote:
| You have to do it, not imagine it. I didn't imagine I'd sell my
| car when I moved to my current house. But seeing the bus every
| day while I drove for a few months convinced me I ought to at
| least try it - two months later I sold the car that I hadn't
| used in a month.
|
| Sadly I have to move.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| I don't think this is about 'no one should have cars', but that
| no one in the city should NEED a car to get to 95% of their
| long tail of errands. I pay a premium in my area right now to
| live walking distance to shops, restaurants and a grocery store
| even though I still have to drive to work every day. That
| proximity is valuable even if it doesn't mean I don't need a
| car at all.
|
| Honestly I think America's lack of walkability is a major
| contributor to our health crisis. Even if you still drive every
| day, walking to dinner or the grocery store would have a hugely
| positive impact on people's health in the long term.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I don't think it's possible to be both dense enough to
| sustain local stores that can be walking distance and at the
| same time have the infrastructure that allows everyone to
| have a car. My evidence is that no such place exists, and
| also, simply the amount of space that car related
| infrastructure takes such as roads and parking.
|
| Also, once people have access to a car, they're going to use
| it to shop at big box stores to save on price, starving the
| local smaller stores of business.
| rel2thr wrote:
| 20 minute walk is big difference than a 20 minute cycle. Almost
| every typical American neighborhood is 20 minute cycle-able. Very
| few do it though
| egypturnash wrote:
| You are neglecting the part where major roads in the suburbs
| are aggressively unsafe if you are on foot or on a bicycle.
| There are places that are theoretically ten minutes away from
| me that require biking along the edge of a four-lane street
| with no side parking, no bike lanes, and no sidewalks, and a
| constant stream of cars to fight with. Biking or walking
| through that shit is super dangerous; I stay in the parts of
| the city that have roads that have _some_ hope of the car-
| drivers acknowledging that the road belongs to cyclists, too.
| thepangolino wrote:
| Why don't like about this concept is how it forces a certain
| "gettoisation" of the neighborhoods.
| graeme wrote:
| It certainly doesn't in Montreal. We have tons of
| neighbourhoods like this.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I can't really see that - what are you thinking?
| carschno wrote:
| I wonder how this relates to the "15 minute city" concept
| discussed in (at least) many European cities like Paris:
| https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201214-how-15-minute-...
|
| The concepts seem _very_ close, yet there is no reference in the
| article. Shouldn't these agents align globally, or am I missing
| some significant differences?
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| They are generally the same thing, with flexibility for local
| conditions and preferences.
|
| In my opinion, the most compelling expression of the idea is
| found in the work of New Urbanist architect and planner Leon
| Krier.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Krier
|
| Merely scrolling through the Google image search results for
| Krier will provide an excellent introduction, as the concepts
| are so user-friendly. These are the neighborhoods I've always
| looked for, and there are some.
| nilsseipel wrote:
| We recently built a tool for this trend: Our tool analyses travel
| times in cities from different points of interest like super
| markets, parks, doctors etc.
|
| For now our tool is only available in German but you can take a
| look at our translated front-page and explore our tool in one
| german city:
|
| Front page [google translated]:
| https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
|
| Demo [don't use the translated front page for navigation]:
| https://15-minuten-stadt.de/cities/Frankfurt%20am%20Main/
|
| If you would like to get in contact, shoot us an e-mail at
| nils.seipel@flux-impulse.de
| carschno wrote:
| This is amazing, thanks! Not sure how exactly you calculate,
| but couldn't you extend this tool "automatically" (I know there
| are pitfalls) to all places in the world which are well covered
| by OpenStreetMap?
| habi wrote:
| Not exactly this, but here's a website which calculates
| isochrones (regions included in a certain travel time) based
| on OSM data: https://commutetimemap.com/
| djdeutschebahn wrote:
| great! there is also the python package osmnx[1] to
| calculate isochrones by yourself. Also check geoff boeing's
| blog[2]. if you are into geo spatial things.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/gboeing/osmnx [2]:
| https://geoffboeing.com
| djdeutschebahn wrote:
| See my reply below, we updated the site with 3 non-german
| citys. Would love your feedback on them. I try more some more
| cities in the next days.
| djdeutschebahn wrote:
| The calculation is very easy apply on any city you can find
| in OSM data artifacts. Will do this in the near future!
| Balgair wrote:
| Any plans on doing this for non German cities? I'd love to
| see this for Dakar or New York or Mumbai
| djdeutschebahn wrote:
| yes! we will definitely do this in the future for cities
| worldwide.
| djdeutschebahn wrote:
| Ok we have done this now for 3 non-german cities. The
| 20-km boundary of the box are our system limit atm. Would
| love your feedback on it!
|
| https://15-minuten-stadt.de/test/New%20York/
|
| https://15-minuten-stadt.de/test/San%20Francisco
|
| https://15-minuten-stadt.de/test/Tokyo/
| habi wrote:
| Not exactly this, but here's a website which calculates
| isochrones (regions included in a certain travel time)
| based on OSM data: https://commutetimemap.com/
| CalRobert wrote:
| This is great! Are you doing a pan-european version?
|
| There's soething similar for the US at
| https://www.mapnificent.net/ if anyone's curious
| paulcole wrote:
| People love the idea like they love the idea of getting in shape
| or learning a new skill. The vast majority who love the idea hate
| the slightest inconvenience and effort required. You'll get
| excuses by the bucketload why it just won't work for them.
|
| People say one thing and do the opposite. It's just the way of
| the world.
| bluGill wrote:
| I found that living where there is a non-car option increased
| my physical fitness. Instead of knowing I should exercise but
| making an excuse I just walked to the bus stop every day. This
| was just a couple blocks needed to get to the offices, but a
| lot more walking than I'd do before because it no longer was
| something special to do it.
|
| Too bad I've been transferred to a different office now, one
| with not transit and nothing in walking distances.
| paulcole wrote:
| From a very young age I made the decision to never drive. No
| clue why but I was just like "this seems dumb" and went with
| it.
|
| Now I'm nearly 40 and think the positives have outweighed the
| negatives. Honestly one of the best decisions I've ever made.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| It sounds like all this needs is faster transportation. I
| remember when I first got a motorcycle in SF I could get
| everywhere so much faster and I enjoyed the city so much more. My
| commute went from 45 minutes to 20 minutes. I know motorcycles
| are not for everyone, but I think low powered electric scooters
| could be a better solution over buses. Maybe I'm just bitter from
| the 38 in SF.
| BeniBoy wrote:
| I think faster is not the answer, as Ivan Illich theorised it,
| speed is part of the issue.
|
| "Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness
| which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and
| shrink them for only a few."
| bluGill wrote:
| Speed should be on an automated train of some sort. Humans
| are not capable of controlling a vehicle going faster than
| they can run. We fake it all the time, but if you are honest
| you will realize they are mostly get lucky and are not safe.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| Go to South East Asia. They are scooter masters. The roads
| there are so efficient at moving people. American roads are
| congested with unnecessarily large vehicles in cities.
| Personal scooters are a decentralized transportation
| solution that works very well in Asia.
| bluGill wrote:
| I've been there, (India), there are cars everywhere too,
| though scooters are common.
|
| Scooters are not safe. They are everywhere, just like
| cars are everywhere in the US. That doesn't make either
| safe. They allow for more crowding than we get in the US,
| but they are not great transit in general.
| clashmoore wrote:
| Buffalo is a 20 minute city, I believe if you include it in the
| list of major US cities it has the shortest commute.
|
| It's thought that all the infrastructure planning that happened
| back when the city was growing in population in the 1950's and
| 60's is helping keep commute times down now that the population
| is much lower. Basically infrastructure planned for many
| millions of people but has a population of 800k.
| opportune wrote:
| Love the idea but people will never support it in the Bay Area
| besides maybe parts of San Francisco and Oakland
| Dig1t wrote:
| This is awesome, I love the idea of a 20 minute max commute time
| for anything important.
|
| >This means ensuring minimum density levels of around 25-30
| dwellings per hectare
|
| But does this mean that its all apartment blocks? I want a yard
| and some space between me and my neighbors, I really don't want a
| shared wall or tiny spaces like in Europe or Asia.
| vanviegen wrote:
| 30 dwellings per hectare comes down to 3230 ft2 (333 m2) per
| dwelling. That's certainly enough for a free standing house
| with a yard. Your neighbors wouldn't be far though, but that's
| basically the point.
|
| Edit: I forgot to consider public spaces: sidewalks, roads,
| greens. So no, it probably can't be all free standing houses.
| bluGill wrote:
| It can be, because you don't have to limit yourself to one
| story. If you are willing to go to 5 floors you can get a lot
| of space, and it is only slightly more expressive than the
| same usable space all on one level (stairways don't count as
| usable space). Though if you can go up to 5 floors that
| allows a lot more space than most people have.
|
| I used 5 floors as the limit because I've been told above
| that you need more expensive construction to support the
| building - consult a real engineer to verify.
| [deleted]
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _But does this mean that its all apartment blocks?_
|
| No, it doesn't.
|
| It means you need _some_ apartments or similar in the mix, but
| it 's really not that high a density level.
|
| These links might help you get a better idea of what we are
| talking about:
|
| https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatibl...
|
| https://missingmiddlehousing.com/
| ttul wrote:
| I have always been mystified by the logic of disallowing a
| mixture of commercial and residential zoning through a city. What
| is the advantage of having tracts of single family homes that are
| miles away from a central shopping area, vs. mixing smaller
| stores throughout the residential area?
|
| It just makes no sense. Was this sensible in the 1940s?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The car made it sensible. Seemed like a good idea post-war.
| bluGill wrote:
| In the early days it was. Most people still lives in the old
| areas, and your house wasn't that far from all the advantages
| of mixed use. So it seemed like you got a quite street yet
| were close to everything. Then we made the exclusive zones
| more than a few blocks wide and it took a while to realize
| that isn't a good idea.
| xur17 wrote:
| I think the advantage some people see (which is a tradeoff) is
| that separate zoning means you can live on a quiet residential
| street that is away from the hussle and noise.
| dublinben wrote:
| The "advantage" and original purpose of euclidean zoning was
| segregation and the exclusion of racial minorities.[0][1]
| You'll still hear these benefits repeated in euphemisms in this
| very thread as "space, safety, and school districts."
|
| [0] https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/
|
| [1]
| https://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/2019-...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I'd say it's no longer specifically about race anymore, but
| about socioeconomic class overall. Especially with the ease
| of being able to search household income statistics for
| various zip codes and whatnot.
|
| A secondary reason is also due to the increasing issues of
| mentally ill and drug addicted homeless. For various reasons,
| the simplest way to minimize interacting with the
| aforementioned groups is to live in a far flung suburb, where
| everything is spaced out, separated by highways, and not
| conducive to homeless people.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| As a British person when I played Sim City growing up I used to
| think 'this isn't very realistic - huge squares of a single
| type of land-use and a grid of roads at right angles' - then I
| visited the US for the first time and actually yeah it is
| realistic for there!
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Well, if you go West it is. The East is much like any
| European city - a warren of too-narrow roads. Which makes
| sense, as they were founded (by Europeans) when that sort of
| thing was common all over the world.
|
| Here in Iowa, which became a State in 1846, we have a nominal
| 1-mile grid of secondary roads covering the entire state. To
| make easy access to land for agriculture. It was planned and
| executed by surveyors, business people and pragmatic
| colonists.
| secabeen wrote:
| It's common in the mid-west. In much of the far west, it
| stops because lots of land has insufficient water and can
| be too rugged to be developed with roads at the road-every-
| mile level.
| bostonvaulter2 wrote:
| I totally agree with that. I wish we used a type of zoning more
| like Japanese zoning, where instead of exclusive zones, you
| have maximum level of allowable nuisance in different zones.
| This is a good writeup that has been discussed on HN in the
| past: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-
| zoning.html
| rmason wrote:
| Detroit's mayor has embraced the idea of 20 minute neighborhoods.
| One of the advantages Detroit has is that so much must be built
| back why not do it intelligently? Since 2016 Detroit has created
| several twenty minute neighborhoods. Some of it has involved
| walkways that connected smaller neighborhoods into a single
| cohesive neighborhood.
|
| One of the biggest problems is finding people to open
| supermarkets. There's a single Whole Foods for all of Detroit. So
| they provided financial incentives, the big chains swooped in and
| built markets on eight mile which is at the city's edge. Those
| supermarkets serve the suburbs more than residents of Detroit.
| That doesn't help people in the majority of the city.
|
| https://detroit.curbed.com/2016/6/15/11946166/mayor-detroit-...
| rossdavidh wrote:
| So, I like this, and enjoy neighborhoods (usually in old inner
| cities) which approach this, but one thing I don't see often
| acknowledged, is the difficulties of homelessness for this
| concept. People often don't like to say it out loud, but one of
| the principal drivers of the urge to retreat inside your car, is
| the fact that it puts a barrier between you and the crazy guy
| shouting on the streetcorner. We have not yet found a system that
| effectively removes the angry shouting, or urinating, or
| otherwise crazy-acting person from the sidewalk, or bus, or urban
| train, that is not uncomfortably close to a police state.
|
| Not saying it cannot be done, I'm sure it can, but I haven't seen
| it. One of the principal obstacles to any pilot plan of this
| sort, is that it is a magnet to those people who don't get social
| interaction any other way (because few people wish to be around
| them), so it is at risk of being descended on. Plus, some people
| (the sort who otherwise are quite in favor of public transport in
| the abstract) don't want to be thick-skinned enough to deal with
| even one such person.
|
| Me, I'm kind of a jerk, so I don't mind; it's all part of the
| human experience. I have the ability to tell such a person that
| I'm not talking to them today (unless I am), without being
| wracked with guilt for the rest of the week. But a lot of people
| (who otherwise would be in favor of this idea) just cannot (or do
| not wish to) be thick-skinned enough to cope with this.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I was homeless for several years and I also have had a college
| class on _Homelessness and Public Policy_ long before that. I
| still write about homelessness.
|
| I got myself off the street by moving into a cheap, small
| rental in a walkable neighborhood where my life works without a
| car. The _need_ to own a car in the US is part of the burden
| that helps push some people out into the street. If we had more
| walkable neighborhoods where more people could make their life
| work without a car, that would help prevent homelessness for
| people who are currently at risk.
|
| In the US, we straight up just need more housing. We have
| underbuilt for a long time and that helps push costs up.
|
| We also need more small-ish scale housing in walkable
| neighborhoods. We have largely zoned those out of existence.
|
| One reason crazy homeless people gravitate to big cities is
| because that's where they can get services. If you generally
| help people make their lives work across the US, then you would
| likely see less of this pattern.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| It is definitely a downward spiral sort of situation. The
| gravitation of such people to the few remaining areas that
| are still "20-minute neighborhoods" or something close to it,
| increases the pressure on them such that people move out (to
| neighborhoods which are suburban or at any rate less
| central).
|
| It also causes businesses (especially small ones which cannot
| afford private security) to move away, which erodes one of
| the objectives of this approach, which is to have small
| businesses of many sorts in the neighborhood. People may, in
| the abstract, like the fact that the business is tolerant of
| the poor and mentally ill, but they don't want to walk past
| them to go to that business. Definitely it's a bad, self-
| reinforcing situation.
| [deleted]
| mjevans wrote:
| Better social safety nets are also required. I have heard
| that it isn't uncommon for someone who's on the street to
| have mental health issues which are untreated by society. In
| the US this seems to have been the result of replacing one
| hell for the unfortunate (abusive mental 'health' jails) with
| an even greater hell of apathy (nothing at all).
| abstractbarista wrote:
| There's a certain city in central NC that I generally avoid
| because of this aspect. Every time I've visited friends there,
| I was asked for money in a confrontational manner. Every time
| I've left my car, it seemed reasonable to expect vandalism or a
| break-in upon returning. (I'm not a flashy person. I drive a 12
| year old Civic. I keep nothing valuable in the cabin. I keep to
| myself.)
|
| After a few of these negative interactions, I decided to
| generally avoid visiting ever again. It's not that I have a
| problem dealing with it: It's very easy to say no, or to run if
| needed. _It 's that I simply shouldn't have to deal with this
| BS in the first place! Please, just leave me alone!_ I'm
| leaving you alone.
|
| In places like this, I lock the doors upon entering the car.
| Depending on location, I also keep the engine running, in case
| the car must be used in an evasive or defensive manner. (People
| have tried my door handles while stopped at lights, so the car
| is set to lock when driving too.) Be aware of your
| surroundings, and casually pay attention to how people are
| watching you.
|
| I am very glad to live in a different nearby city, in a more
| sprawling area, that has _much less_ of this activity. Due to
| the sprawl, it is not nearly as economically motivating for
| trolls to congregate.
| rory wrote:
| So specific to not just say the city haha. Let me guess,
| you're talking about Raleigh and you live in either Durham or
| Cary?
| leetcrew wrote:
| is raleigh really that bad? it seemed quite nice when I
| visited.
| rory wrote:
| I don't mean to imply that, it is a nice city. The parent
| is actually more likely referring to a city further west.
| fatnoah wrote:
| >People often don't like to say it out loud, but one of the
| principal drivers of the urge to retreat inside your car, is
| the fact that it puts a barrier between you and the crazy guy
| shouting on the streetcorner
|
| As a former, long-time resident of an older inner city, I can
| say that not a single person I've ever encountered has made
| vehicle trips to avoid homeless people. Convenience, time to
| destination, and other concerns "drive" these decisions. For
| anything within that 10 minute radius, everyone walks. It's
| simply more efficient than driving.
| anonfornoreason wrote:
| I literally just moved out of a west coast city due to the
| homelessness problem, and homeless camps changed my commute
| habits on bike and foot. While I am OK going by a homeless
| camp on bike/foot solo, I stopped taking my family through
| them after some sketchy encounters. I was lucky that I didn't
| need to change my bike commute with my kid due to camps, but
| that was because I could take some alternate routes to his
| school. If I wanted to completely avoid homeless camps on my
| bike commute, I would have had to increase my commute
| distance by about 30%. Not only that, but it's whack-a-mole.
| The smaller camps move around alot. Also as a bicyclist, you
| notice that the bike lanes are problematic near any campsites
| due to broken glass and needles. I am positive many people
| consider this when deciding whether to start or to continue
| being a bike commuter, at least in west coast cities with big
| homeless populations.
|
| I know many people that still live in the city, and people
| that moved away. Of my coworkers, all but one with kids moved
| out of the city when we went full remote, all cited
| homelessness and school quality as the top two issues.
| Homelessness is absolutely a big deal when making livable
| neighborhoods that people want to be in, whether or not you
| can find ways to "make it work" is beside the point.
| Daho0n wrote:
| Most western cities doesn't have these kind of areas as
| there simply aren't homeless people enough to live there.
| With a working social security net it wouldn't need to be
| accounted for in the planning at all.
| anonfornoreason wrote:
| No disagreement at all, but given the choice of sticking
| it out and doing needle sweeps of the playground before
| letting my kid play, or moving to a city that doesn't
| have that problem, guess which one was the easy decision?
|
| In other words, don't conflate my lack of desire to spend
| another year dealing with homeless people as a lack of
| desire to find real solutions to homelessness. It's a 20
| year problem, my kids will be grown up before it's not an
| issue anymore.
| munificent wrote:
| _> I can say that not a single person I 've ever encountered
| has made vehicle trips to avoid homeless people._
|
| I can think of many times where people I know have chosen to
| drive to avoid homelessness problems (or, more specifically
| homeless unstable drug addict problems).
| graeme wrote:
| I live in a neighbourhood that's super walkable with a ton of
| commercial street mixed with residences. The homeless only
| congregate at one small area. It isn't really an issue.
|
| There are tons of commercial streets and only so many homeless.
| But when you have fewer streets, you have more homeless per
| street.
|
| Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Things may be different in
| the US. In particular the bay area.
| mycologos wrote:
| > Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada.
|
| Very cold winters seem like an effective (and brutal)
| deterrent against long-term homelessness? Though, you say the
| homeless people in your area congregate in one place, do you
| have some idea why?
| graeme wrote:
| Higher foot traffic, some homeless services, maybe police
| action elsewhere?
|
| Specifically am referring to the plateau mont royal
| neighbourhood. There, the homeless congregate on mont royal
| avenue. It is long, has a metro station, plentiful bus
| routes, a monastery that provides homeless services and
| food, a library across from the metro. Lots of stores and
| foot traffic all throughout the day.
|
| I'm in Halifax now for a few months and the homeless people
| (who congregate on spring garden) seem more aggressive for
| whatever reason. In Montreal they were never a bother.
|
| There were definitely long term homeless as I saw many of
| the same faces over the years. Could be a lower number, but
| I think part of the issue is shelter.
|
| For instance SF has no more homeless per capita than NYC,
| but they have a massively higher number of unsheltered
| homeless, which causes a lot of problems both for the city
| and for the homeless.
|
| But NYC also has many more "homeless amenable" areas than a
| place like SF, which has a fairly small walkable area. My
| central point is if you built like Montreal and NYC then
| the _entire_ city is walkable and the problem is less
| concentrated and thus much less bothersome.
|
| (There are homeless elsewhere in Montreal. But in my
| specific neighbourhood only one street has them)
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I'm in Halifax now for a few months and the homeless
| people (who congregate on spring garden) seem more
| aggressive for whatever reason. In Montreal they were
| never a bother.
|
| It's a different society. Spent a little bit of time in
| Montreal. Used to think only the language was different
| but it goes much much deeper.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| That's where the services for the homeless are. Why bother
| walking all over the city when the drop-in shelter is right
| there with your social housing waitlist ticket?
| vecinu wrote:
| > Mind you I live in Montreal, Canada. Things may be
| different in the US. In particular the bay area.
|
| It's difficult to compare these places, when I lived in
| Toronto the homeless situation was nothing like what I saw in
| downtown SF, even around Bloor & Yonge at night.
|
| You'll find the situation is much more grim in the US in
| major cities and exactly like the OP describes. It affected
| me slowly over the years, I'm still recovering.
| lcc wrote:
| Toronto has gotten noticeably worse in the last few years,
| unfortunately. Still not as bad as SF but on its way.
| graeme wrote:
| True I remember visiting Pittsburgh and staying in this
| gentrifying neighbourhood across the street. It was an odd
| mix of upscale bars, luxury cars and run down shops and
| homeless people everywhere. I had to go into a hospital to
| have my eye looked at and was shocked at the appearance of
| those there. I'd never seen such bad teeth in Canada or
| disheveled people in the waiting room. Of all races I might
| add.
|
| And it was definitely unsettling, I had a man follow me
| from the bridge back towards my neighbourhood at night.
|
| But, I also note that Pittsburgh has relatively few such
| walkable neighbourhoods (though it is much better than the
| Us average!). If it was more like NYC or Montreal the
| homeless population would be more diffuse.
|
| I've been to NYC a bunch and it always feels much safer.
| Not only were there fewer homeless per street corner, but
| there are always large amounts of normal people walking
| around, so you feel safe with numbers.
|
| (To be clear, other than the one person following me, I
| felt safe in Pittsburgh. The ones in the neighbourhood I
| was in were not aggressive. But it was different than
| Canada or NYC in that they were much of the foot traffic)
| dcolkitt wrote:
| NYC has spent decades bribing its homeless residents to
| relocate to other states[1]. Not every city has a giant
| tax base of hedge fund managers and Goldman Sachs
| executives that gives them the luxury of simply paying to
| have their homeless problem sent away.
|
| [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-
| va/2019/12/03/new-york-...
| graeme wrote:
| Can't read due to paywall, but it says nyc is just
| shipping homeless to newark. That's still nyc metro.
|
| Also nyc doesn't have low per capita homeless numbers. It
| does however shelter them better than, say, SF.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > You'll find the situation is much more grim in the US in
| major cities
|
| No need to cross international borders. Vancouver BC is on
| par with downtown SF for this.
| rory wrote:
| This would probably be the case for the imagined suburban
| neighborhoods in the article. Select cities in the USA
| (notably NYC and LA, perhaps SF as well) have
| disproportionate homeless population because people travel
| there to live a homeless lifestyle. I personally know people
| who moved hundreds of miles away to one of these cities for
| easy access to drugs and opportunities for prostitution.
|
| Your average walkable suburban center would likely have a
| pretty limited homeless population, and locals would be
| familiar enough with them to recognize whether or not they
| are a potential threat.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| Along the same line, the issues get worse if you are a woman. A
| lot of my female friends have concerns of people trying to
| grope them on public transport, or men making catcalls or wolf-
| whistles or otherwise harassing them as they walk.
|
| One of the nice things about being in your own car, is you
| generally don't have to deal with kind of stuff.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| I agree that there are a lot more women who feel threatened
| than men, perhaps for good reason.
| barry27 wrote:
| rossdavidh you clearly ARE kind of a jerk. Your reaction to
| this piece is simply to whine about homeless people? You should
| definitely remain in the suburbs, shuttling back and forth in
| your cone of security.
| oetnxkdrlgcexu wrote:
| This problem has its roots in deinstitutionalization. Many
| centuries were spent building a social system of asylums to
| house people incapable of participating in society for one
| reason or another.
|
| However, the absolute power of the asylum operators over their
| charges inevitably lead to gross abuses which caused the entire
| centuries-old system to be abolished and replaced with nothing.
|
| I have no idea what could possibly be a solution here. There
| will probably always be some number of people incapable of
| reasonable self care. There is also no system honest enough to
| be trusted to have absolute power over the lives of dependent
| others. This problem seems intractable.
| Daho0n wrote:
| The Nordic countries also deinstitutionalized but they are
| light-years ahead of most other countries in tackling this
| problem (though still far off the goal). The biggest problem
| is that you simply cannot get something like it through the
| political system in the US: Humane prisons that are there to
| rehabilitate instead of parking or punishment, actual free
| healthcare all the way through the system, state-run centers
| that provide shelter, food, social helpers, etc. (that isn't
| just parking people with a roof over their head to hide the
| problem). I don't believe for a second any of this would have
| the interest of (enough) voters or a snowballs chance in hell
| of passing politicians as long as An Eye For An Eye and The
| American Dream are still there. They are IMO incompatible
| with such a humane system.
| jandrese wrote:
| It wasn't replaced with "nothing" because the problem is
| still there and needed to be handled. Since no better
| solution was given it was defaulted to the police. But the
| police are trained to handle criminals, so they end up
| treating homelessness like a crime.
|
| This is what people talk about when they say defund the
| police. They want to downsize police to the point where they
| only deal with crime and use the freed up funds to run mental
| health centers, halfway houses, drug treatment centers,
| etc...
| Chris2048 wrote:
| The police are "nothing" - they are the default handlers of
| antisocial behavior, but in no way are they mental heath
| specialists.
|
| wrt mental health centers: what happens when people don't
| want to go to those places? Either they'll be in exactly
| the same position of being handled by the police, or the
| police will be too busy in which case the public will
| suffer (which usually changes the electorate opinion on
| matters).
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Or, and this is a controversial view, maybe some homeless
| people could be helped through cheaper access to cars. As
| part of my job I have recently sat through many days of cases
| at a local courthouse. In our rural area, judges are loathed
| to revoke a driver's license because they know that doing so
| renders a person effectively unemployable locally. If someone
| doesn't have access to a car, and therefore cannot find work,
| perhaps there is a place for giving them better access to a
| car.
|
| (Anyone saying that the answer is better public transport,
| that isn't an option here. Rural area. Most work is in
| farms/oil fields/military. 24/7 bus service over thousands of
| square miles just isn't ever going to happen. No car or no
| cellphone = No work.)
| Drunk_Engineer wrote:
| Depends on what you mean by "access" to cars. Simply giving
| away free cars won't work because they are expensive to
| operate and maintain.
| dublinben wrote:
| Rural areas existed before the invention of the automobile.
| Rural communities can still be dense and support active
| transportation (walking, cycling, etc.) for many people's
| daily activities.
|
| Most people don't live in rural areas though, so the kinds
| of solutions (free cars!) that might work there are not
| appropriate for urban and suburban areas.
| munificent wrote:
| _> Rural areas existed before the invention of the
| automobile._
|
| Yes, and farming was ubiquitous and highly labor
| intensive then. In 1940, the US had about 13 million farm
| workers. Today it's about 3 million.
| bluGill wrote:
| I know a few amount of people who should never drive a car.
| That is they are so bad that drunks are better drivers.
| Some are just old and the body is failing, others never had
| the mental ability to do it.
|
| At least in cities there can be (but often isn't) useful
| public transit.
| [deleted]
| bshep wrote:
| this is a complex issues for sure, now the questionis what
| are these cases about?
|
| if its stuff like parking tickets, broken tail lights, low-
| grade speeding then i totally agree woth the judge
|
| if its drunk driving or driving while under the influence
| or things where you put others in danger then... why is the
| driver doing those things if their livelihoods depend on
| it?
|
| Just food for thought
| lsy wrote:
| Leaving aside the politics of whether we should care for the
| less-fortunate, I think this is only a problem of perspective
| and not of reality. In practice, there is safety in numbers, so
| cities with more people walking, out and about, tend to be
| safer (and feel safer for residents). When everyone retreats to
| a car, the street becomes a place that you shield yourself
| from, and disengage from, thus making the street feel less
| safe, and encouraging more people to use cars. Encouraging
| walkability and transit improves the sense of safety on
| streets, but it takes the willpower to do it in the face of
| what is essentially a panic response.
| munificent wrote:
| _> In practice, there is safety in numbers_
|
| That is only true when the perpetrator is a rational actor.
| No sane person would start a fight with a group of, say, ten
| people. But a lot of the people causing problems in public
| spaces today are _not_ in their right minds.
| asdff wrote:
| Safety in numbers doesn't apply today anymore. When someone
| goes batshit crazy on my train saying something racist or
| rapey, everyone else in the crowded car goes silent and tries
| not to make eye contact with the crazy person. We live in a
| world where anyone might be carrying a gun, drugs in their
| veins, or a bloodborne disease, so no one is intervening for
| anything unless it's their kin on the line. The street can be
| a scary place if you are one to be stalked by these sort of
| people. I've known several people who have been stalked to
| and from public transport and their house in this city. It's
| dangerous if you are a woman and walking alone, legitimately.
| lettergram wrote:
| Idk where you live, but often places where carrying a gun
| is normal is far less like that. Women often carry weapons
| when possible (you probably just don't know).
|
| You're far less concerned about being stalked when you have
| protection.
|
| Personally, I'm far more willing to intervene or suggest
| someone to stop something when I am carrying a weapon. You
| can protect yourself so you're willing to say "hey man,
| let's not scream on the bus"
| anonfornoreason wrote:
| I am the opposite. If I am carrying a weapon I am more
| likely to stay quiet - it's a huge responsibility that
| should not be taken lightly. Intervention has a way of
| escalating, so I avoid anything close to stirring the pot
| when I am armed.
|
| Obviously I would (not with a weapon) step up in certain
| situations, but someone yelling shit on the bus?
| Definitely not going to engage that person, it's best to
| ignore and let it go.
|
| You might enjoy this book:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/When-Violence-Answer-Learning-
| Takes/d...
|
| "Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is, it's the
| only answer". Kinda ups your bar about what you will let
| slide vs address.
|
| Finally, shooting/stabbing/etc someone even if 100%
| justified has a way of wrecking your life. Your employer
| or coworkers find out about it? Have fun at work. Your
| family finds out about it? Have fun at family gatherings.
| Etc etc.
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| ok, idk where you live either, but I think we've got the
| reverse correlation in the world: those places in the
| world where people are likely to be caring guns are far
| less likely to have successful public transport systems,
| and the few they do have tend to be disproportionately
| used by the poor and destitute.
|
| the other obvious problem would be, presumably, that if
| it's genuine 'crazyness' that you're concerned with, as
| opposed to anti-social behaviour or drugs that tend to
| accompany the lack of social capital and safety nets in
| the US, then a gun wouldn't actually be a disincentive.
|
| on the other hand, I'm surprised how people don't vote
| road rage or idiots behind the wheel as arguments against
| car driving.
|
| For a tragically relevant example of genuine crazy behind
| the wheel: see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_20
| 17_Melbourne_car_a...
|
| obviously then you've also got the downside of living in
| the area with guns.
|
| see gun death, murder, and car death/injury stats in US
| vs elsewhere, for example.
|
| disclaimer: I live in the green areas mentioned in
| article, don't own a car.
| wrs wrote:
| You're going to pull your concealed weapon on somebody
| while you're on a crowded bus? Now I have two things to
| worry about...
| graeme wrote:
| I live in Montreal. It's like this. The key is the zoning doesn't
| require a ton of setbacks, parking spaces, single use
| neighborhoods, etc
|
| My brother was visiting, and I showed him a broken book. He
| mentioned it would be nice to repair. I said I'd check if there
| was a bookbinder in walking distance. He was skeptical. Google
| maps showed three within a 20 minute walk, in different
| directions.
|
| Pick any service and it's like that. The area is dense, quiet,
| leafy, unpolluted, full of parks, small yards, three stories
| high, but full of commercial arteries such that anything you want
| is a quick walk away. Whole swaths of the city are like that.
|
| The areas are enormously popular and tourists love them. Yet such
| neighbourhoods are illegal to build in the whole rest of north
| america.
| burlesona wrote:
| You described the key issue: "such neighborhoods are illegal to
| build in the whole rest of North America."
|
| I don't think it's productive to think of the suburbs as "bad"
| or "wrong," because that just turns into an angry debate about
| whose lifestyle is better.
|
| What I think is productive is to recognize that we shouldn't be
| legislating that there can only be one way to live, and we
| especially shouldn't be prohibiting that the traditional
| neighborhood development patterns that have worked for
| thousands of years. If we _actually_ had a free market, there
| would be both a fair amount of auto-oriented suburban
| development, and massively more traditional, walkable
| neighborhood development.
| simlevesque wrote:
| I live in Montreal too and we'll have to work hard for it not
| to become just like everywhere else in North America.
|
| New construction projects are totally different from the places
| that were built a long time ago, like around Masson, Ontario,
| St-Laurent, etc...
|
| Griffintown makes me sad.
| udev wrote:
| I love Montreal, but it seems you are describing the
| Plateau/Mile-End rather than Montreal as a whole.
|
| But I agree, from the North American cities I visited, Montreal
| has the nicest, livable higher-density housing areas.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| High taxes, but surprisingly low cost of living.
|
| "hard to be a consumer but easier to be a human" was what
| I've heard about the city.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I'd take that tradeoff.
| graeme wrote:
| Fair though it's more than the plateau. Mile end, rosemont,
| little Italy, mcgill ghetto, outremont are all like this. And
| then while other areas don't have quite as many criss
| crossing streets, they are still very walkable and mixed.
| (Cote des neiges, st henri, ndg, westmount etc)
|
| I'm sure I'm forgetting some neighbourhoods too. Mostly
| describing those I personally walked around a lot. The
| mountain gets a way a bit for those in the second list,
| whereas the areas around the plateau are a square grid of
| similar neighbourhoods in all directions.
| dcchambers wrote:
| I think college campuses are great examples of 20-minute
| neighborhoods.
| swader999 wrote:
| The viking guy that 'stormed' the capital created quite a
| presentation on this very idea. https://rumble.com/vcc263-the-
| new-heaven-on-earth.html
| circumvent123 wrote:
| I think his idea is a little bit different
| swader999 wrote:
| Yes. He's a dreamer.
| BBC-vs-neolibs wrote:
| Sacred dimensional energies and Tesla coils.
| telesilla wrote:
| I'm presently in a 20 min neighborhood in Europe. You know how
| long people have been here? Since before the Romans. How long
| have cities* been in Australia? Couple of hundred years? Maybe
| that's really what this is all about. The train lines run into
| the cities on centuries-old routes, lifestyles have been built up
| for eons. The 'New world' has understandably got growing pains.
|
| * my first edit said 'people', not cool. Now I'm curious about
| what kind of cities the Aborigines had.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Over 50,000 years...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Australians
| telesilla wrote:
| Ah I can't believe I said that. Apologies, thanks for calling
| me out
| Causality1 wrote:
| The author and I must have wildly different definitions of "outer
| suburb" if thirty dwellings per hectare seems like a reasonable
| density. Most areas that I'd consider a suburb have a density
| about one tenth of that. They're still twenty minute cities, but
| that's because 95% of the adult residents own a car.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > They're still twenty minute cities, but that's because 95% of
| the adult residents own a car.
|
| The '20 minute city' was always about 20 minutes by walking,
| not car. The whole thing is exactly about not needing cars
| jocho12 wrote:
| Super interesting read. Think that a fair amount of inspiration
| can be taken from dense university and college campuses that
| essentially can be dubbed as sub-30 minute neighborhoods.
|
| Looking at UBC in Vancouver, B.C. is a solid example, it is
| outside of the heart of Vancouver on the Western shore, yet has
| created a neighborhood that could be considered a 15-minute
| neighborhood.
| can16358p wrote:
| Just reading the title, I thought of a new social app where
| people create neighborhood groups with random people/friends of
| friends with similar interests that expire after 20 minutes.
| Might be a cool idea.
| awillen wrote:
| The challenge is density - it's much easier to do this if you
| have more people in a relatively small area. More attractive for
| businesses, more people to share the costs of parks and other
| public facilities, etc.
|
| But then the type of people who want these sorts of neighborhoods
| often picture them as purely single-family homes. The two things
| are completely at odds.
| sparrc wrote:
| density is not really a challenge, it's just a question of city
| laws and zoning.
|
| if you allow 5-6 story apartment buildings and eliminate
| onerous process and requirements (like parking minimums,
| setbacks, design reviews, "environmental" reviews, etc etc.)
| then you will see these neighborhoods being built.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > The challenge is density - it's much easier to do this if you
| have more people in a relatively small area.
|
| I don't understand why people think this.
|
| I live in a town of 13k people in the UK, low density - 11
| people per hecate - mostly single-family homes with large
| gardens. We have a little town centre with good restaurants,
| bars, theatres, churches, shops, tea-shops, coffee-shops, book-
| shops, specialists like a delicatessen, a dedicated butcher,
| flower shops, sports equipment shops, and so on. Everything you
| need day-to-day or really week-to-week.
|
| It doesn't need density. I'm not entirely sure what it does
| need apart from just getting on and doing it... but I don't
| think it's density blocking it.
| asdff wrote:
| It's not density, it's walmart and places like it. Walmart is
| now the coffee shop, book shop, delicatessen, butcher, flower
| shop, sports equipment shop, optometrist, etc, in these
| similar sized American towns, which once had all of these
| things as well
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| I disagree with the cause-and-effect here.
|
| Large lot sizes and setbacks makes everything far apart.
| This increases how far people need to travel for basic
| necessities like a grocery store, a bank, or an
| optometrist.
|
| If you have to drive 25 minutes to get to anything, it
| makes sense for the Walmart to also have a bank and an
| optometrist and a Starbucks inside so you can do all of
| that on one trip.
| munificent wrote:
| Yeah, Wal-Mart and other super groceries like this are the
| seed of the problem. It goes like this:
|
| 1. You have a handful of nice small towns each with their
| own little commercial center with a small grocery store and
| a collection of other shops and restaurants.
|
| 2. Wal-Mart wants to move into the area. Their efficiency
| is driven by logistics and scale. They don't want to open a
| small Wal-Mart in each town that they have to drive trucks
| to. So they pick one of those towns and put a mega-Wal-Mart
| there.
|
| 3. People in the neighboring towns start going to that Wal-
| Mart occasionally because it has a few things the smaller
| local grocery store doesn't have.
|
| 4. Business dries up at the local grocery stores. They
| already operate on razor-thin margins so it doesn't take
| much to put them in the red. They close.
|
| 5. Now even the people who don't want to go to Wal-Mart
| have no choice.
|
| 6. People tend to visit the other shops and restaurants as
| an additional errand tacked on to their necessary grocery
| run. Without a local grocery store anchoring those trips,
| people no longer stop at the restaurants or other shops.
| Those satellite businesses close down.
|
| Ta-da, now you've got a bunch of dead towns with no
| functioning city center and one bigger town with a Wal-
| Mart. Traffic gets worse for everyone. Wal-Mart rakes in
| the cash because instead of them having to pay for last
| mile product shipping, customers do it for them by driving
| thirty minutes from their food desert dying town to the
| nearest Wal-Mart.
|
| Did I mention that all the people who used to work at these
| small stores and restaurants now have shitty jobs at Wal-
| Mart and awful commutes?
| asdff wrote:
| I think the worst part is while it is easy to see how
| this came to be, I don't know how you put it back. It's
| like saying how do you unburn down a forest. You can't
| put it back together. One shop opening in the otherwise
| empty commercial corridor on main street is going to look
| failing and close down with the rest of the block
| remaining vacant. Local planners then turn to razing
| historic commercial blocks to turn them into some cookie
| cutter chain since no one local has any capital anymore
| to start a business.
| lxdesk wrote:
| I think the probable reversal of the cycle is:
|
| 1. Towns revise their taxation and zoning laws so that
| more classes of business are permitted in residences.
| They also start issuing more forms of local credit(the
| technical means to do so are only getting better),
| excluding big-box participation and restarting the cycle
| of capital accumulation locally.
|
| 2. Costs are lower and incentives are now aligned for
| more small businesses to survive in marginal areas.
|
| 3. Big-box stores increasingly become commodified and
| unbundled, themselves; the shift from Main Street to Wal-
| Mart to Amazon is one of the warehouse turning into a
| store and then back into a warehouse. The services of
| shipping logistics and delivery become less of a
| centralized process. Now the local businesses are using
| the big-box to their benefit.
|
| The reason why Wal-Mart succeeds is ultimately premised
| on policies that let capital centralize itself according
| to a national and global framework. But that's only one
| way of "seeing" the economy, since following that policy,
| as we know, creates a mix of expensive star cities and
| dying no-hope towns. It's improbable that the future will
| simply be a restatement of the post-1970 trends, given
| what we know about history - something will change.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| I don't have an answer but I do my part by refusing to
| shop at WalMart or any big box store. I'm lucky to live
| in area where there are decent local businesses to
| support.
| Loughla wrote:
| Option B: instead of cookie-cutter chains, it's health
| care. Cancer centers, physical therapy, and other related
| things. But all owned by the local health conglomerate,
| so prices are all obscenely high.
| leetcrew wrote:
| 4.) and 5.) don't quite add up to me. if people
| moderately to strongly preferred the local grocery store
| over walmart, surely they would accept a modest price
| hike to keep the local store in business? these steps
| only make sense if the people didn't actually care that
| much about the local shop to begin with.
| bluGill wrote:
| We didn't. We went to the local grocery store because
| driving half an hour for groceries all the time wasn't a
| great option. WalMart when it came to my hometown as a
| kid was a great liberation - we finally could buy all the
| things we wanted to buy without a major day long trip to
| the nearest big city.
|
| Note that Sam Walton was still CEO of walmart at the time
| I remember. Since then the quality of thing you can get
| at WalMart has gone down (remember when they used to look
| for made in the USA products?). I wouldn't be as excited
| to see them in town now. Though they are still better
| than the high prices we had to pay locally.
| ssmiler wrote:
| 7. Wal-Mart increase its margins.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Their margins have been ~3% for the longest time. Don't
| know if it's possible to go lower and still have a
| business.
| sparrc wrote:
| Having lived in both countries, in my experience UK towns are
| a lot more dense than American suburbs.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| But the UK can do it for towns at the same low density
| figure (like mine) then why blame density?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Maybe your town is an exception? Maybe there isn't an
| ASDA or Tesco or Aldi close enough to put all those small
| business out of business due to them not being able to
| match economies of scale?
|
| Generally, if you give everyone cars, and you give
| everyone a Costco/Walmart/Target/etc, they're going to
| use their cars to drive to the big stores and get cheaper
| prices.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Maybe your town is an exception?
|
| Seems bog-standard to me. There's a big Tesco and a big
| Aldi. Still lots of small shops. Obviously Tesco and Aldi
| don't replace bars, restaurants, theatres.
|
| Frankly, I think Americans just don't believe it's an
| option. They don't really have any obstacles except their
| own imagination. I think if you showed them my town
| they'd all say 'ah right yeah I get it... not really a
| big deal... it's just some shops and restaurants and
| things in the centre of an area of housing that everyone
| can walk to... yeah we can do that but really sure why we
| haven't tried so far now I think about it...'
| wffurr wrote:
| "25-30 dwellings per hectare" (12/acre) is considered "medium
| density", and as you say, not compatible with an entire
| neighborhood of single-family homes, which are 10-12 dwellings
| per hectare (4-5/acre)
|
| https://www.theurbanist.org/2017/05/04/visualizing-compatibl...
|
| It doesn't require going fully urban, though. Lots of medium
| density examples that are below 3 stories. I particularly like
| the example in that article of "The Boulders at Green Lake
| development" which is 36/acre.
| awillen wrote:
| Sure, it's definitely doable without a ton of density. The
| problem is neighborhoods like the one I currently live in
| (suburbs of San Diego), where everyone has signs up in their
| yards declaring their total opposition to changing the zoning
| to allow 2-4 unit properties. That would destroy the
| "character" of the neighborhood, you see.
| olyjohn wrote:
| And when you don't change zoning, the existing houses still
| get demolished, and replaced with ultra modern McMansions
| built out to the setbacks, which totally ruin the character
| of the neighborhood anyways. Then you have this terrible
| mix of tiny little old houses with yards and great big 3
| story Borg cubes scattered throughout.
| choeger wrote:
| I would argue that mixing is a good idea. 300sqm per
| household is not a great upper limit for families nor
| affordable for people with smaller incomes. But houses with 4
| apartments of various sizes on 600sqm lots can be quite nice.
| Add to that single-family-homes with 2.5 stories on similarly
| sized lots in a 1:2 ratio and you got a nice quarter. If you
| make the roads broad enough, that is. Feeling cramped in can
| really destroy the appearance (and take away space for public
| trees).
| orthoxerox wrote:
| 25-30 dwellings per hectare is 3-4 ares per dwelling. That's
| easily big enough for single family dwellings. Hell, you can
| fit a 8x12m home on a 10x20m plot with a 6x10m backyard and a
| 2m wide front garden, and you will have 40 ares left for
| roads, sidewalks and curbside parking. Make the houses semi-
| detached and the place will even look good.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| There's a point at which it's pointless to build single family
| homes. This [0] for example.
|
| All the space between the houses is basically wasted. Much
| better to build townhouses and start putting the garages
| underground/on the side of the houses.
|
| https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TvqhU0a2H_Uta3-qXBVmgKOqask=...
| bluGill wrote:
| The problem with townhouses is there is always someone who
| won't let you do something you want to do.
| cletus wrote:
| This one is easy: people like the idea of this but still want a
| 4x3 300 square meter house on a quarter acre block. Or in the US
| is often an acre lot within a city, which is crazy to me.
|
| And this just doesn't scale. This is why communities are
| completely car dependent.
|
| Singapore is mentioned in this article but guess what? Living is
| much denser in Singapore. Obviously they're constrained by
| geography. But it get a lot of benefit from this.
|
| Where space isn't an issue people in the US and Australia at
| least have consistently chosen space and car dependence over
| convenience.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| It's hard to say what people actually prefer when the laws
| often constrain what may be built. For example, the building I
| live in could not be rebuilt without zoning variances today. It
| has no off-street parking, but if it were a new building, it
| would require a parking space for each apartment. The building
| is quite close to the edges of the property, and if it were a
| new building, it would need larger setbacks that are likely
| impossible to achieve. This is the norm in my dense, highly-
| desirable neighbourhood, where tiny flats are expensive. If
| someone wanted a large, detached house and yard, there is
| plenty of that available not far outside of the city at more
| reasonable prices. People pay the premium to live here
| precisely because they care about being close to things more
| than they care about having space.
|
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/11/4/the-myth-of-re...
| bluGill wrote:
| Be fair: people don't get a fair choice to anything else. Every
| try to rent in a dense neighborhood? Biggest you can get is a 3
| bedroom apartment, which is enough for the poor, but not for
| anyone with a bit more money. If you are never home anyway, and
| don't have kids it works, but once you want a family you will
| want more space if you can afford it. In Europe larger
| apartments are available (and at a reasonable cost).
|
| Every try to get around in the US? With higher speed roads
| everywhere, and strict zoning ensuring nothing is in walking
| distance you have to drive everywhere, so you need space for
| your car.
|
| Everybody wants it all: 100 acres, and walk to everything. That
| isn't possible for many people (a super rich person could
| perhaps pull it off, but only one per city as a second trying
| would make even the most dense downtown too sparse). When the
| above factors eliminate the city as a reasonable compromise,
| then it is no wonder people go the other way. If I have to
| drive everywhere I may as well drive a bit father and get more
| land.
|
| NYC is the only place in the US that can honestly claim any
| sort of exception to the above, and they are not doing much to
| expand the part of the city with this claim (at their costs to
| build transit it would be stupid of them). Other cities try and
| have some small areas, but overall the city doesn't really
| leave anyone a serious alternative for those who aren't trying
| to make a statement.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| While expensive, though cheaper than NYC, Seattle and
| Portland can claim walkability too. Portland has the better
| public transit in the city and from suburbs in, Seattle has
| much more going on though, between the two.
|
| But I also think, most people really just dont like living in
| a downtown. Yes, there are plenty that do. But not everyone.
| It's really weird to keep pushing this idea that if you dont
| want to live in a dense area, there's something wrong with
| you.
| asdff wrote:
| You make a lot of sacrifices living downtown, some you
| don't notice until living there for a while and it wears on
| you. It can range from annoying to legitimately toxic to
| live in certain apartment complexes. After a while you
| start wishing you had more separation from your neighbor
| blasting music, your other neighbor's screaming kids, the
| teenagers smoking weed and leaving trash in the stairwell,
| the people airbnbing and drinking all day in the pool
| between kids taking cannonballs, or the homeless encampment
| outside the door that makes noise, starts fires, and raids
| the gated garage regularly for bikes, despite the
| surveillance cameras. Maybe those apartment walls start
| feeling very tiny and claustrophobic when you have a
| partner or children in there with you, all working from
| home. Maybe you wish it didn't take you 15 minutes to walk
| from your door to the first patch of grass where your dog
| can piss. Or you wish the bus didn't have to run in city
| traffic and take an hour and show up late, or that you
| could park closer than a 10-30 minute walk to your door.
|
| As much as we say how beneficial urban living is, the built
| urban environment we've crafted is toxic. Apartments are
| built thinwalled, small and cheap to cater to 22 year olds
| with an offer from a salary job and no one else. Cars are
| given the priority over transit, and suburban commuters are
| given priority over local resident car owners who might
| have to spend 30+ minutes after work hunting for parking in
| their neighborhood. The only new parkland you see in the
| 21st century seem to be a handful of grossly expensive
| freeway caps, or pocket parks, which pale in comparison to
| park development in the 19th century. Cities with good
| parkland are riding on the coattails of their better
| thinking 19-20th century planners. Schools are underfunded
| and charters loot the public school purse. Homelessness,
| crime, and the mental health crisis on our streets are not
| being addressed at any level of government and there is no
| signal that these things will be addressed anytime soon,
| since there has been zero plan of any kind. And on top of
| it all, few get jobs in cities that make any of this city
| life actually affordable.
|
| Once you get past the age where living in cheap uber
| distance of the bars matters, cities can be a legitimate
| drag due to how they've been designed over the past 100
| years.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| Damn, you hit the nail on the head. I grew up in a rural
| area of florida. I competed in a business competition
| thing in high school that sent me and other classmates to
| Cincinnati. My first "big city" experience. We were all
| like, "Whoa!" The first few days. After day four or five,
| we were all complaining about missing trees. In my 20s,
| traveled, lived a few big cities, Seattle and Portland
| being the prominent ones. Yea, outside the cities it's
| nice. But the city itself, concrete, asphalt, homeless,
| random assholes just being assholes... it gets boring as
| you get older. Too much of the actual living experience
| is peacock posturing. Why live in the downtown to escape
| to nature through a shitty commute? I find it better to
| live on the cusp and visit a small city if I need to,
| escaping everyday into a tree infested woodland a small
| walk away.
|
| Sure, theres probably a better city planning philosophy
| that can address this, but the feasibility is probably
| remote. Not just economically, but by discipline. After 2
| or 3 decades, there's barely any of the old guard that
| gave a shit about the new great plan. They're going to do
| their own thing for their own prestige or benefits.
| Shitting on the original plan. That's reality. So we have
| the system we have. Some want dense urban environments,
| some dont. Those that do want it, paint and tidy up your
| own home your own way. I dont care. But dont come to my
| side and demand I adopt all your ideas because trees are
| scary and need to be chopped down for a starbucks with
| apartments.
| ghaff wrote:
| I like visiting cities but I almost certainly wouldn't
| want to live in one long-term.
|
| For example, I really like visiting NYC but when I lived
| in Manhattan one summer as an intern in grad school
| (admittedly as a poor student and in a considerably
| different 1980s NYC), I was pretty much non-stop
| pestering friends in Connecticut and New Jersey to come
| out and visit on the weekends because the city was
| totally getting to me.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| We also support that less dense living through subsidies and
| regulation. Without the subsidies and regulation, it may be
| that people would choose differently.
| Mvhsz wrote:
| If a drive down a highway cost as much as a train ticket, I
| think US cities would indeed be very different.
| https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/10/think-buses-
| an...
|
| I'm definitely a city person, and there have been some well-
| meaning comments from non-city people wondering why people
| like me are opposed to their lifestyle. I don't mind people
| choosing to live in the suburbs or rural areas, I just want
| them to pay for the giant ugly highway that lifestyle
| requires. I want my taxes to go to city parks and schools and
| streetcars.
|
| Side note - I am aware that state and federal DOT funds most
| highways, but the city has to pay for the induced demand for
| car infrastructure that those highways create downtown. On
| the flip side, the state and federal DOT contribute minimally
| to the cost of me taking the subway.
| oftenwrong wrote:
| Part of the problem is that some of those subsidies are
| invisible to the average person. It's not a line item on
| their bills; it's more subtle. For example, the
| infrastructure required to service low-density settlements:
|
| https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/a-thousand-h.
| ..
| jefurii wrote:
| This was the thing that I loved most about living in a semi-rural
| town in Japan. Everything I needed on a day-to-day basis was 20
| minutes away by bike or train. I could be in the center of a
| major city in an hour if I hit the trains right, but 30 minutes
| in the opposite direction took me to landscape that looked almost
| exactly My Neighbor Totoro. It was awesome.
| bmd3991 wrote:
| This is my favorite thing about Japan. The layout and
| transportation perfectly matches my ideal, I'd love to live
| there for some amount of time.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Japan is a paradise as far as I'm concerned. I generally hate
| US cities but would be happy to spend the rest of my life in
| any Japanese city I've visited, large or small.
|
| I don't think we will ever see that level of efficiency,
| cleanliness and safety in established US cities. The culture is
| different. More importantly, I think, is that US cities have a
| skeleton which is generally not conducive to the transportation
| network seen in Japan.
|
| I think that the current push in the US to add ADUs('granny
| flats') in suburban neighborhoods will show us the limitations
| of our current layouts. Cramming more density into an
| infrastructure limited area will likely result in lower quality
| of life. The solution, IMHO, is to undertake larger projects
| where entire neighborhoods are bought out at fair price(at huge
| public expense) and redeveloped according to modern urban
| design patterns. That will likely never happen due to the
| obsession with the past and unwillingness to allow change.
| bluGill wrote:
| ADUs help though because they are a step to more density in
| areas that don't have enough. Most suburbs have enough
| population to support good transit - but there is a big
| chicken-egg problem: without good transit nobody will ride,
| and without a lot of riders you can get enough money to
| support good transit.
|
| You can't prove this on small scale though, good transit is
| about the places you can get to: the jobs, stores, churches,
| restaurants, friends, and whatever else you might want to do
| in your city. A fast bus (not to be confused with the typical
| slow meandering buses most people are used to) every 5
| minutes that doesn't connect to any other buses is useless. A
| bus every 10 minutes that via affordable transfers to
| anywhere can get you anywhere can get good use. Plumbers and
| the like still need to drive, so private autos will still be
| 30% of all trips, but a good transit system can be useful in
| the suburbs if you can just get there.
|
| Did you note I stuck affordable in there? The ideal transit
| system should have the majority of the riders on a monthly
| unlimited rides family pass.
| burlesona wrote:
| Supposing you have enough population - an older and more
| developed suburban area - you actually don't need to buy out
| entire neighborhoods, in many cases you could get pretty far
| by just buying out a few homes or strip malls and connecting
| small scale streets through the gaps - even ped/bike only
| streets if you want.
|
| The main problem with that is that it's still not worth it in
| most cases. For most neighborhoods there's nothing to walk to
| because the population density is too low to support
| businesses or services. There's too much fragmented farmland
| separating out all the little pods of cookie cutter houses
| and strip malls, so the only configuration that works is to
| have a little pod of commercial at some highway intersection
| while all the residential to support that is sprinkled around
| a 10 mile radius of fragmented development.
| gamegoblin wrote:
| A big part of this has to do with zoning laws. In Japan,
| zoning is largely done by gauging the externalities produced
| (e.g. noise, pollution, foot traffic, building height, etc),
| whereas in the US, zoning is largely done by function
| (housing, commercial, industrial, etc).
|
| So in Japan, you have many neighborhoods that have a house
| beside a tea shop beside a tailor beside house. In the US, it
| is very rare to find such mixes.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| _We expect a much stronger focus at the neighbourhood level will
| deliver very high social, environmental and economic returns from
| small outlays. But, for this to be achieved, much greater urgency
| is needed._
|
| This strikes me as a "pushing a boulder uphill" approach and that
| tends to do poorly. A "water runs downhill, so let's try to be
| _downhill_ " approach is vastly better.
|
| Instead of arguing that "We need more bus service and it's a
| pittance compared to trains" make a stronger case. A budgetary
| argument of that sort is a pretty weak argument. It's not
| compelling. It's essentially manipulative and it tends to not
| work.
|
| Instead of decrying the urgency of the case, give people easy
| steps to take in the here and now. Tell individuals what they can
| do as individuals to participate in the growth of 20-minute
| neighborhoods. Tell businesses what they can do.
|
| The article indicates that the suburbs in question are already
| densifying and then follows up with a defeatist attitude along
| the lines of "...but we are still so very, very far away from
| what needs to happen, boo hoo hoo!" instead of saying "This is
| already happening to some degree and here are some easy steps to
| take to help reach the critical tipping point and make this
| happen!"
|
| The writing is not that compelling. The approach to the problem
| space is not that compelling. The arguments aren't that strong.
|
| A better approach would be to profile cities and neighborhoods
| that have achieved this, even if it was a long time ago. What
| were the ingredients? How can you add just a little something to
| existing infrastructure to make this pop?
|
| This isn't hard. You just need to give people the answers they
| already mostly want. You need a recipe for how to make this
| happen and then a lot of people will be all over it like gang
| busters.
|
| If people are failing to make it happen, it's because they don't
| have the information or mental models or solutions they need. If
| you give them that, a lot of people will run with this.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| You really can't add little things to existing infrastructure
| because you can't smoosh buildings closer. People want 3000 sq
| ft homes on an acre of land on a quiet street and to drive to
| their shopping and to drive to their walmart, and no bus
| service can service a neighborhood like this because either the
| stops are so far apart it's a 5 minute walk to each one, or it
| stops so frequently that it takes an hour to get across town,
| or a compromise of both, leading situations where driving is
| nicer than taking the bus. And even then, a bus service is not
| going to reach everywhere you want to go, because house-to-
| house travel is the absolute longest possible. Even on a decent
| feeder system, going from the suburbs to a normal part of the
| city takes forty-five minutes to get into the metro because of
| all the parking lots, for all the cars, that people own,
| because the bus service takes too long to get anywhere. The
| only way to start is to build a dense neighborhood where people
| can live and work within it, as a new neighborhood, with
| collective parking and minimal concessions to car traffic. It
| has to work as a system, or it doesn't work at all.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| Before life got in the way, I wanted to be an urban planner.
| There are always relatively small projects you can do to
| improve walkability, encourage use of bicycles, etc.
|
| The reality is "planned neighborhoods" of the sort you are
| talking about typically fail. That's not how good
| neighborhoods come into being.
|
| Good neighborhoods grow organically out of good policies that
| foster such neighborhoods and they evolve over time.
|
| Jane Jacobs said something about the big developments that
| get all built in one go along the lines of "It was always
| dead, but no one noticed until the body began to smell."
|
| Yes, it has to work as a system. No, it doesn't need to get
| "born" all at once, like a human child or something.
|
| The book "How buildings learn" brilliantly documents that
| _wonderful old buildings_ are typically _wonderful_ precisely
| because they are _old_ and that means they 've had time to
| adapt and evolve. They weren't usually brilliantly designed
| from the get go. They had a lot of wonderful touches added to
| them over time in most cases.
|
| This tends to also be true at the larger scale of
| neighborhoods and cities.
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