Comment by cosmic_cheese
18 days ago
The thing that gets me is how many people are seemingly in favor of preserving zoning that keeps out mom and pop corner grocers and cute coffee shops and the like.
It’s just like… why?! I can’t wrap my head around it. There’s no downside to being able to top off on milk and eggs by taking a leisurely stroll on a sunny Saturday morning. That sounds downright idyllic.
People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away.
It is confusing, especially because the few places in the US that have walkable neighborhoods like you're describing are also extremely expensive, so clearly they are desirable. It is rational to buy a cheaper house in an area that doesn't have this stuff, because that's what you can afford or you want to save your money for other things you care about, but then why fight against it once you live there? Wouldn't it make your neighborhood a better place to live while also raising your property value?
It’s just hyper-local nimby vs regular nimby.
Everyone where I live wants a corner store or corner bar 2 or 3 blocks away from them. Close enough to walk to conveniently but far enough they never have to know it exists unless they are personally interacting with the establishment in the moment.
No one wants such a thing a few houses down. So the local neighbors get their friends who live close by to join the local neighborhood meetings and rail against the noise/traffic/crime/etc. And of course the ever-present “property values” boogeyman. Houses directly next to a corner shop I guess are worth a bit less than the same house a block away. There also might be traffic!
Sitting through local neighborhood association meetings is exhausting. Anyone who actually desires to get things done burns out pretty quick.
> Houses directly next to a corner shop I guess are worth a bit less than the same house a block away
This could be true but I would want to see some data. I have paid extra for an apartment before because it it had a grocery store on the first floor, so it's not obvious to me that being adjacent and having to walk past the shop every day would drive a home price down. I know apartments and detached homes are different, but still.
I just think the common explanation for NIMBYism, that everyone wants to protect their property value, doesn't actually make sense when it seems like the densest American cities are also the most expensive to live in. I have the same confusion about public transit. It's common for suburbs to fight very hard to keep public transit out of their town, but it's incredibly expensive to live within walking distance of a train station, so property values don't work as an explanation for this either. You also hear people say it's because the NIMBYs are afraid of the city folk invading their suburban paradise, but if you go to NYC or DC nobody is taking the train from the city to the suburbs to have fun, there's nothing to do there. These stops are almost exclusively used by upper middle class office workers going into the city for work. You don't have to worry about poor city people because as soon as the stop is built, they won't be able to afford a house anywhere near it.
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> few places in the US that have walkable neighborhoods
Lots of places in the US have walkable neighborhods. You just have to live in a place that was developed before WW2 and car ownership wasn't assumed.
I live in as suburban of an area as you can imagine with master planned communities and what not. I can still walk to 3 grocery stores, multiple bars, fast food restaurants, fast casual restaurants, coffee shops, medical offices, convenience stores, and loads of other services in under 15 minutes. The suburbs built in the 90s and 2000s are not the dystopia people make them out to be.
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Those are often the expensive places.
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This isn't true at all though. There's a small amount of areas that are able to be super expensive and you can walk to stuff. Then there's far more cheap areas where you can walk to stuff that aren't generally desirable. The slightly more expensive unwalkable areas are intentional because the only way to keep the area safe is to make it inhospitable for people who can't afford cars.
Allowing business also does the opposite to property values, it creates demand to sell because fewer people want to live adjacent to heavily trafficked areas.
There has to be a careful mix to have business and residential in the US and it not devolve into Vape Shops, lottery stores and other highly profitable but exploitative businesses.
It really only works if there's some other sort of barrier like general unaffordability.
Judging by what the moms in my neighborhood say—traffic and parking.
The average person does not think about such things at all. They live in Car World, where they sit in a giant metal box for 30-45m and then wind up at the place where they can actually buy their shit. Their brain shuts off during driving[1]. To them, it's just The Way Things Are. And then they go take a trip to Tokyo and wonder why it feels so much nicer[0].
The thing to note is that NIMBYs are loud and obnoxious, but they do not have broad democratic support. What the average person has is a deep aversion to change they were not consulted with. What gives NIMBYs power is the fact that the average zoning agency is not very good at explaining the rationale of their changes or collecting and incorporating public feedback. It's very easy for a NIMBY to take a few things out of context, bring out a parade of horribles, and scare the average guy into opposing something they otherwise might have liked.
Since NIMBYs are inherently minoritarian, the real base of their power isn't even democratic outrage. Their favored tool to stop projects they don't like is paper terrorism: i.e. finding as many legal complaints as possible that they can sue over to block the project. Even if they're bullshit, it'll take a year or two to get the lawsuit thrown out. Which means that, congratulations, you just increased the cost of the project by about 10% or so, and you're probably gonna have to explain to the feds why the grants you applied for aren't enough and your project is late.
[0] And, in the process, piss off a bunch of locals as they bumble their way through the city using their translator app
[1] In fact, a lot of the hype surrounding self-driving cars is just to make it possible to completely shut off one's brain while driving. I would argue that trains and buses already do that, but...
Recently moved to an area that has some very small local shopping centers every .4 mile or so and it's been amazing. I can walk to a local bodega, a hardware store, some coffee shops, restaurants and a local pharmacy within 15-20 minutes. Not sure how I ever lived without the options.
Curious where this might be - assuming NYC?
NYC, Seattle, Chicago, probably lots of places in CA, literally anywhere in Europe
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Most northeast American cities are older and denser - Boston, NYC, Philadelphia, Baltimore (at least parts of it), Washington DC (at least parts of it) ... smaller cities on that region too.
downtown Edmonton, Canada.
had a similar experience in RDU in NC. Or Anacortes, WA.
plenty of cities can and do run these locations. it's not just an NYC thing.
I've had something similar in the middle of nowhere Maine.
I miss it so much.
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Colorado
"People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away."
Not my preference but also not out of bounds as a democratic outcome.
If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.
How about if your neighborhood wanted to keep out people of a certain ethnicity instead? Is that a democratic outcome that we need to respect?
The definition of democracy is that we hold regular elections for political office. It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level. 51% of my neighbors cannot decide that they'd like expropriate my house or checking account. The point of YIMBYism is that these kinds of decisions have negative externalities and a larger group of voters- at the state or national level- are removing that decision-making power from a smaller group at the local level. This is a democratically legitimate outcome!
> How about if your neighborhood wanted to keep out people of a certain ethnicity instead? Is that a democratic outcome that we need to respect?
Come on, you know that's not analogous.
> It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level.
It also doesn't mean "any policy the voters want, as long as long as it's the one I want."
Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
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The question is, -- is it a deliberate democratic outcome, or is it an accidental consequence of local zoning codes and city planning?
If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.
> If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.
>> The question is, -- is it a deliberate democratic outcome, or is it an accidental consequence of local zoning codes and city planning?
>> If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.
In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences. It's not supposed to "push these processes...towards more globally optimal outcome," which when decoded means "what you or what some distant technocrat prefers."
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There's also been studies showing how changing infrastructure designs can often be most unpopular just before the change but then become very popular after once the effects of the change are actually felt.
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> If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.
The flaw in this argument here is that the opposition is trying to prevent these folks from even having a voice, which is fundamentally undemocratic. So this isn't a relevant statement here because this isn't a complaint about a democratic outcome. It's a complaint about people trying to eliminate voices who want to solve a problem. It's an attempt to silence discussion, which has the effect of preventing action.
It’s not democracy when you exclude people impacted by the decision making process from the decision. Preselecting the outcome before the vote destroys any legitimacy the outcome has.
Anybody who is eligible to vote can vote. How is this not democracy?
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Is it still a democratic outcome when NIMBYs are doing things like abusing environmental regulations to choke out developments that citizens had approved of with their votes?
The whole issue with NIMBYism are: contradictory democratic wishes and disproportional power of home owners. This points to issues with the democratic process, and not democracy itself.
Most people agree that more homes need to be built, but no home owner wants it in their backyard. So you end up with a deadlock where nothing is done.
NIMBYism is frequently driven by a small number of people who feel very strongly and use rules designed to protect minority rights to get their way. Is it democratic? I don't know... much of what's going on if put to a vote would be split 3 ways. A minority in favor, a large number who don't really care and another minority against (but they either don't get a vote or the default result is to go against their wishes).
What an odd viewpoint.
Effectively, we are all living in a shrinking prison of all decisions made before us. A "democratic" dystopia.
Respecting an outcome doesn't mean you have to (1) give up on differing views, or (2) stop working respectfully for another outcome.
I support upzoning. It is a bad idea to come after people’s comfy, expensive cars. People like cars.
I lived next to a mom and pop store, not grocery, selling crystals and such. The owner of the store allowed a homeless camp on the store's lot. City could not clean it out because it's on a private property. The closest tent was less than 50' from my bedroom. The homeless fought, burned stuff, blasted music and hopped over 8' fence into my backyard to help themselves with anything they found there. Store owner was not bothered perhaps because during the day the homeless wondered off, perhaps he just liked them. The police did not do anything, would not even come over noise complaints. Would you like to live like this?
Could you clarify why it is important to your point that the neglectful property owners next door, owned a store rather than a house or vacant lot?
It was not neglected, it was an functioning store. I doubt someone would do the same with their house, an empty lot is also a concern.
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The fact that the problem happened at a store, didn't make the store itself the problem.
Any more than the problem of loud neighbors, is a problem of having neighbors.
It's a problem of people owning non-residential property next to residential. I am against that, not just stores but the comment I responded to asked about stores specifically.
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It's unfortunate that you have had that terrible experience and that the legal system in your location failed you.
I'm not sure however that there's anything to indicate that mom and pop stores are especially susceptible to these kinds of outcomes. It sounds more like you got a case of shitty neighbour which is possible whether or not the neighbour is a commercial lot or a small home.
If your negative experience had been with a neighbour living in a private home instead of a neighbour who owned a small business would that change your view around the matter of zoning for small businesses in residential neighbourhoods?
I don’t think it’s a common pattern for mom and pop stores to have a homeless camp on their lot.
Neither do I, yet it's a much higher probability with a commercial property vs residential.
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This seems like a wildly specifically bad outcome.. I’m a bit confused why your city allows this? You can call the cops on owners for noise violations, unsafe conditions, etc, etc.
Having lived in a dense walkable place with plentiful stores mingled with residential housing, I can say I’ve never seen that particular problem before.
You are not from the US, are you? The government of big cities here is taken over by people who believe the society we have is to be dismantled.
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What you don't seem to see is that the problem is not the fact that the shop owner let the homeless people stay there.
The problem is the fact that those people were homeless to begin with.
So many people like you seem to just accept the idea that there will always be homeless people—you just don't want to have to see them. Ideally, they should just go die, and decrease the surplus population, right? At least that way they won't be bothering you.
If a few of them are breaking noise ordinances or stealing stuff and the police won't do anything, then complain to the city about that, not about the fact that the shop owner has the compassion to allow them a place to exist.
And if you actually want there to be fewer homeless people overall......then maybe, just maybe, you might have to accept fewer zoning regulations that raise the price of housing.
Why would you think that I don't see that the homeless are a problem? They are a huge problem and I don't really care what happens to them just as they don't care what happens to me but yes, they should not be allowed to camp on the streets in my city.
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The city should have gone after the property owner, they are responsible for any encampments on their property, and nuisance is definitely included in that, even here in liberal Seattle, and let’s not get into liability (your fire insurance has to cover them, so your insurance company gets involved and jacks your rates up really high). So in Seattle if they setup on private property, the property owner is in big trouble, so they mostly setup on public land.
You realize homes are also private property right? You can have a shitty neighbor like the one described that is also enabled by the fact that they're in their own home. That doesn't justify what they're doing, but your argument against stores as "private property" doesn't hold water.
I could, but most people, even the ones who advocate for "homeless rights" don't want to live in a homeless camp. They are fine with letting others though.
I would not like to live like this. I don't believe that relaxed zoning laws would make a situation like this more likely.
That sounds awful. Did you take them to civil court or explore doing so?
I did explore it, but there is not much to do without police reports. I had only reports for theft but those were not investigated, could not get noise reports as the cops would not come or come during daytime when the homeless went off the camp.
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Did you talk to the store owner about the problem?
For perspective I didn't even learn to drive till 30 so I know the pros and cons of walkability.
And since learning I shifted firmly into car dependent camp and regret that we bought a house with 60 walkscore and not say 20.
First of all convenience is overblown for everything except drinking and children (paradoxically - people go to the burbs for kids but it must be pretty bad for those who can't drive). Shopping for groceries on foot every other day is a waste of time. Local stores for hardware, clothes etc. are typically more expensive with worse quality and selection. Anything remotely specialized like a climbing gym or a bar that is a good place for dancing is unlikely to be walking distance unless you optimize for it, so you need a car or transit - slow and inconvenient. Restaurants in the US are expensive.. sure if I had a Tokyo style joint nearby maybe, otherwise going out is not a daily thing and if prefer variety, so the walking options quickly lose appeal. The only thing it's unquestionably better for is going to a local bar to drink a beer or eight. I lived blocks from Granville st in Vancouver when I was 25, that was great. Maybe a local park would be nice too, but suburbs do have those. Driving everywhere, as I found out, is just better for everything else.
The second, in the US it filters out the wrong kind of people to a large degree. Given non-existent law enforcement for property crime and disorder in many cities, this is why I suspect people protect their low density. Places where people have to drive, and places without services, will have many fewer people of the kind that cause crime and disorder. The economic lower middle gets caught in the crossfire - I have lived next to affordable housing and I believe 95% of the people there are probably great, but they didn't enforce the law on the other 5%, so if they tried to build anything affordable next to me i would fight it tooth and nail.
> It’s just like… why?! I can’t wrap my head around it. There’s no downside to being able to top off on milk and eggs by taking a leisurely stroll on a sunny Saturday morning. That sounds downright idyllic.
Traffic? Parking?
Yesterday I went to a neighborhood corner coffee shop that I'd never been to before. They had a little parking lot across the street that was full (and a disaster, I had to back out onto the street), so I had to park around the block in front of someone's house. All the street parking near the shop was full.
I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away
There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away." I can literally drive all the way across my metro area in about 45 minutes, passing dozens and dozens of grocery stores, coffee shops, and restaurants during the journey. A 45 min drive is a huge distance.
Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.
The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.
No one is going across town for the coffee in either case. I’m willing to bet time to coffee is about 5 minutes for the SUV driving say Denver suburbanite as it is for the walking Tokyo urban dweller. Same temporal convenience just different scale based on the predominant mode of transportation.
Also median commute times in car dominant cities are usually less than 30 mins. The narrative of people driving far distances to work represents a few (loud) supercommuters in most american cities. What people forget about with suburban sprawl is that jobs have sprawled as much as housing; oftentimes the old downtown is not even the major job center any longer for the region, a vestigial center whether the city realizes it or not (many a cases of new build american hub and spoke rail networks to long faded downtowns only because that’s how it used to be done not because that is reflective of most people’s travel patterns today. hence poor ridership capture of many of these newer networks).
Commute times in large transit oriented cities are often longer with metros averaging less than 20mph, an hour or more is not unheard of in places like nyc. It is really hard to beat the convenience offered by a car and a say flyover american city barely 25 miles wide with 60mph point to point travel pretty much everywhere at any time. That is why people drive almost exclusively in those places.
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> The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.
You did it again. There nowhere in the US where you need to "[cart] a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee." Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").
That kind of black-and-white thinking does no one any good. And it's probably a big part of the reason why, like you said above, you "can’t wrap [your] head around it". You're not going to understand things without empathizing (or at least reasonably hypothesizing) about the other group's feelings and experiences.
> Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.
So? No American city is going to be bulldozed to build a clone that works like Tokyo, even assuming the Americans want to make the same tradeoffs the people of Tokyo make. If you want to any progress towards walkability, you're going to have to make serious compromises away from that ideal.
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> Traffic?
The premise of these places is that it's on your way. That's not any more traffic, it's just the people already passing by stopping there momentarily.
> Parking?
That's this:
> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
You would also get things like part-time shops. You have someone with a work-from-home job and they put out a sign in front of their house saying you can get coffee and food there. They mainly get a few customers during the morning rush and a few more at lunchtime and do the work-from-home job the rest of the day.
Those would be everywhere if it was allowed, and they wouldn't even need parking lots because they wouldn't have enough simultaneous customers to fill one and there would generally be one within walking distance of any given place anyway.
> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
>> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
> This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
No, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. What I'm saying is a busy coffee shop has negative externalites on its surrounding neighborhood (traffic, people parking in front of your house all the time). That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.
So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
>> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
> Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
Like have you lived in a suburb? Shops aren't usually walkable, but they're not "concentrated downtown" either. The middle is totally an option, and that's probably the usual situation. I don't know why people are gravitating to this false dichotomy (walkable OR 45min away, NO in-between). Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
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Cars are the most sensitive form of transport to both traffic and parking, and even then the only other form of transport I can think of where parking is an issue is biking. If you could walk or take public transit, there would be no need to park, and traffic would be much lower because much less space is needed per commuter. Wider roads and more parking spaces are easy to point to as solutions but the real problem is subpar, uncomfortable, or even non-existent public transportation.
> but then they might not be economically viable
I want a source for this. I've never been to Tokyo or Amsterdam, but everyone I know who's been there describe the zoning working exactly this way and it seems economically viable.
>> A 45 min drive is a huge distance.
Not in Cambridge, Massachusetts traffic!
Somehow all our neighborhood corner stores, cafes, village centers, and such seem to get by without a huge amount of parking. Likely because there's bus service and lots of housing within walking distance and actual bike lanes and such to get around.
The street parking issue is solved by making people pay for it, but people insist on their right to be given free space on public streets.
It’d also help if people in single family houses and some townhouses used their garage for its intended purpose. In my neighborhood the number of cars parked on the street would drop by 80-90% if people sold or dumpstered the mountains of junk sitting in their garages and parked their cars in there.
You don't need to worry about traffic or parking when you take a leisurely stroll to the store.
In my experience I’ve come to realize there is a segment of the population who is against any kind of change at all, of any kind. Even if they have complaints, if action is taken to address that complaint, they will complain about the action.
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away
I live far enough out of DC where there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me. On the way to my parent’s house, there’s a bison farm. But I’m also a 5 minute drive to the closest strip mall (which has a CVS and several restaurants, both sit down and fast food). The ALDI is 10 minutes, and almost everything else, including the Apple Store, is within 15.
There are some suburbs where it’s 30 minutes to get to essentials, but most aren’t like that. Heck, the average one-way commute to work in Dallas Texas is under 30 minutes.
Even if we ignore freeways and such, a 15 minute drive at 30 mph is about 7 miles, which is a circle containing 176 square miles - or the entirety of the city of New Orleans or Denver.
A 15 minute walk is about a mile, so that's a 3.14159 sq mile circle - that's a small town or a neighborhood or two.
As much as I love going to bat for New Orleans, I will point out that people drive to Metairie all the time for things. The eastern part of New Orleans is also very spread out. (It's also not the 24/7 city it was before the pandemic.) A better comparison would be the towns on the Northshore.
It all boils down to perceived drop in home values. It is a vicious cycle that feeds on itself. Less supply, higher prices, bigger mortgages, more NIMBY to prevent drop in home values.
Any real estate agent will tell you what people actually want. Ask one who's been around for a while, in an unofficial setting over drinks. Ask what questions people ask. Ask what they follow up on. Really dig into it. You'll realize that while nobody likes commuting, a commute is the price one pays for those other things people want that you'll hear about over those drinks. It'll give you a lot to think about, i promise.
This is 1000% the truth - nobody passes up a house because there's a similar one further away.
You make it sound so charming, but as an example there’s a rural-ish neighborhood nearby that has a commercial lot which they’re going to put a 24 hour convenience store in. And all the neighbors are freaking out about it because of the clientele and noise they’re worried it will bring in.
I would also be a bit alarmed by a 24h convenience store, but that's quite a different thing than a normal-business-hours small grocer or similar.
why alarmed? do you live in Meth-town?
I'd love more 24/7 options around, even if it's just a 7/11
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People like that but no existing person tolerates the potential of having it next door. 4am deliveries. Plates clinking. People making noise. Commercial dumpster operations. Customers taking up all the parking including illegally in your private parking space. There are certain potential disruptions you get living there 24/7 that you don’t get stopping by for 20 mins once a week contributing to that disruption.
Not saying these people are right or wrong. Just that it isn’t so black and white an issue. It is one thing when a place is already “lively” and tacitly accepting of all that comes with that vs going into that especially when it is unknown and easy to just say ‘no’ before seeing it how it may play out.
Someone imagining they are able to hear plates clinking from several buildings away may have issues that extend beyond having chosen to live next to a restaurant.
Allowing cafes into neighborhoods doesn't mean mandating you turn your living room into one.
Eh, I think it’s a bullshit complaint too - but you can absolutely hear a commercial kitchen in operation a few buildings away if the doors or windows are open on a summer day.
I personally find it quite pleasant - and if not I can just shut my damn window - but many others apparently get super annoyed at even the tiniest of potential inconveniences.
You can argue that but someone might stand up at that zoning review meeting and say well what if they allow outdoor seating in the future. Or what if they throw out takeout trash in my yard. Or what if the customers fill up my trashcan and I can’t put any in myself. Or they are double parking my driveway making it hard for my mother to back out.
At the end of the day, it is going to cause friction something happening somewhere there wasn’t something going on previously. Not saying these people are right or wrong, just that they have grievances that are based on real issues, however big they may be in the grand scheme of things, that they may value more than the prospects of an $8 latte a few minutes sooner than the one already down the road at the strip mall in a sort of containment zone.
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Because when I buy a house in a quiet neighborhood I don't want a cafe or bar open right next to my bedroom window? Is this actually mystifying? Everyone wants the shops near, but not too near, but you can't zone for that; someone will be too near.
In Seattle I lived on the 20th floor above a bar and it still awoke me some nights.
Places full of single family houses with essentials being 30 minutes away don't tend to stay like that for long. They are great business opportunities for developers of supermarkets, malls and the like. You buy some cheap land, build some cheap commercial low-rises, and rake cash as the tenants come flooding in.
I wish people would give examples of these places so we could look at them!
Summerlin, NV
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Because absolutely no city wants to become Houston? The USA doesn’t have great examples, and we aren’t Japan. Houston not being walkable at all probably has a lot to do with the fear.
I live in a walkable neighborhood in Seattle and had to pay for it. Also lived in Lausanne and Beijing so I still know what I’m missing.
Well said. I wonder about this too in my city (Australia). Apparently many people think "living the dream" is having an excessively large copy-pasted house in a copy-pasted suburb in the middle of nowhere, with no amenities, no green/community space, and you have to drive for an hour to get anywhere. It sounds like a dystopian lifestyle to me.
Or, you could live in a somewhat smaller residence where you actually have access to the things that make life good. But god forbid there's a train nearby that increases the sound by 10dB every 10 minutes and brings in all those dodgy (i.e. working class) people! Grrr functional society makes me angry!!
> access to the things that make life good
Could it be possible that what makes life good is subjective and people have different enjoyments and hobbies?
Having space for a woodworking shop or a large garden or a backyard pool or any other such things bring joy to some people. Not everyone wants to live in an apartment in Manhattan.
> access to the things that make life good.
This is a strange opinion to me and I guess it's just "the divide". The things that make life good to me, of the things that change with home location, are peace/quiet, privacy, safety, meditative aspects, nature, space to host and play and have kids run around. Hearing that a city block contains "the things that make life good" is kind of baffling. Driving time is suboptimal but it's nowhere near an hour and it's worthwhile.
The suburbs I'm talking about do not really have nature or space to play. They are by no means rural, but endless seas of identical streets and houses. They are basically the worst of both worlds (no nature and no accessibility), with the advantage of a little extra space. And often they don't have shops either because again, they're so far from anything. Just sad places in my opinion.
Also, there is such thing as medium density, in between "city block" and "endless houses". No one seems to want to acknowledge this exists and may be a good option. I'm fortunate to live in a medium density area and I think it's very pleasant. It is absolutely not a city block but there's a train station 1 minute away and a local shopping/community precinct 10 minutes away (by walking). A decent amount of green space, and it seems to be popular with couples and small families. But suburbs like this seem to be rare and that's my point.
what is so important about being able to walk to a store? take 1 weekly trip to walmart or costco and you’re done shopping for the week
my soulless suburb has lots of parks, trails, and friends and neighbors houses for me to walk to, why do i need a commercial development in the middle of this?
Being able to make small grocery trips means less spoiled perishables (only buy what you plan to use right away) and more flexibility when cooking, since it’s no big deal to go grab whatever it is that you need in the moment. It also prevents the annoyance of realizing you forgot that one thing last week’s trip, which is just going to have to wait until next week’s trip.
This is how it is in the sleepy residential parts of Tokyo. An interesting knock-on effect is smaller, simpler, cheaper refrigerators since you don’t need to store a ton of refrigerated goods for long periods when groceries are within arm’s reach.
this isn’t really a compelling argument, i can still take a 10 minute trip to the store if i forget something
japan is always used as the example here, but america is not japan. i’ve spent a lot of time in japan. due to “cultural differences” the systems that work in japan don’t work in the united states
also, the car dependent areas of japan are still way nicer than tokyo anyway
Some people just don't want anything to change ever.
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away.
Please tell me where in the US, aside from very remote desert areas, can you possibly be 45m (min or mile? either way) away from essentials.
Eh, I live in a fairly typical midwest suburb and I don't have access to walkable groceries. But my local grocery store is about a 5 min drive.
Is that a "five mile" drive or is that literally five minutes from car start to car park?
Because I can get about 2 miles by car in that time, if I'm really honest about stop lights and such.
'Walkable' has been heavily influenced by the car culture we live in.
Too many, crossing an intersection with a traffic light makes that commute unwalkable. In my suburbia, going from one shop to another 5 doors down requires driving.
well yeah the point is that it would be so nice to have
Please give an example of somewhere that has groceries 30 minutes away and is denying some small business to move in near by. This makes it sound like you have never seen a suburb and are describing some extremely rural area.