Comments by "" (@josephfisher426) on "City Beautiful" channel.

  1.  @234fddesa  Can you provide an example of that? I think it's much more typical for public infrastructure to stop at the equivalent of "R5", or possibly half-acre zoning where septic doesn't work but wells do.
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  2.  @golf1052  The substance of aesthetic design review varies greatly from place to place. It exists for good reason: when the property is no longer new, the planners want it to attract consistently paying customers. I would think it usually takes a backseat to substantial things though (like code).
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  3. Most zoning codes were written closer to 50 years ago than 100, and the older they are the more reflective they probably are of an organic community. Most US cities that age had mixed use, but have evolved away from that. Suburban zoning is usually much more restrictive. But it also is more in demand that way, so changing that is tricky.
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  4.  @ianhomerpura8937  In the past 2-3 decades a lot of places have created "town" zoning that is very permissive about uses. But that doesn't make developers want to change. Tell them they CAN make mixed use and they will make all townhouses. Allow them to make apartments contingent on mixed use, and they'll roll most of the cost of the commercial space, which will most likely be underoccupied, into the rent on the apartments. I am working on a permit right now for expanding a daycare into serially vacant commercial space in a 13-year-old mixed use TOD project. It's rather dire other than one headline restaurant... a third empty and a lot of the occupied space is beauty parlor. There just isn't enough demand for small commercial footprints isolated from large commercial anchors... and the commercial anchors want to be located with other commercial anchors. Home Depot next to WalMart, that sort of thing.
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  5. Maybe people like the "good" HOAs. Whichever ones those are that don't take themselves seriously enough to ban clotheslines and require a certain amount of lawn and similar nonsense. I know it does happen. A lot of jurisdictions require HOAs to be created with any subdivision that includes commonly owned space---thus there are tons of HOAs with minimal rules that exist for purely technical reasons. Evil HOAs were best represented in that X Files episode with the beast that had to be fed.
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  6.  @coolioso808  The old sort of alley for cars is probably the most effective way of getting walking paths (other than along streets) because individual paths are going to be hard to match up and maintain. It may not be a big deal to keep a path open when a development is new, but over time there will be fences and vegetation.
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  7.  @coolioso808  Garage townhouse and "two-over-two" developments are using alleys rather often. The examples of walking paths I can think of are where cross streets ended and continued on as paths. Two of them are to school properties and were probably created or kept open for that reason. I walked home from school more often than not, along one of two main roads (one of them with a guardrail between the psychos and the sidewalk, the other with a wide parking lane). But the only "paths" were the short cuts into the park that we weren't really supposed to take. Can't say that it was quicker for me to walk, but it only has to be half as fast as driving for it to be the correct choice, otherwise the parent is wasting time.
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  8.  @coolioso808  Even more important than the bike lanes is somewhere to safely park the bike at every business. I would find it pretty rough to bike for groceries for more than one person, but I could get to the nearest grocery pretty easily (even though a closer-in store has closed) by back streets. And I would do the same thing for work, if there were a job in that range... there are plenty of back routes. But there's a hassle on the other end.
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  9. Europe benefits in comparisons like this from having been originally laid out for completely human-scaled transportation. Is it compact, no, but in a space much smaller than the US.
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  10. Isn't almost any development in a city "infill?" And it is enabling them to save themselves? Most cities have gotten too big to keep expanding.
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  11.  @laurencefraser  If the price of electricity is ALSO essentially determined by the price of natural gas, the heat pump gets smacked too.
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  12.  @briankelly1240  Most of those sorts of streets are going to be set up for car parking anyway and/or be already be too narrow for "good" traffic flow. A setback makes the front yard usable in the sense that there is some privacy, and space to do something. The convention of 25 feet was developed early on in US urban planning, 1910s or 20s... cars played into it, but they weren't yet a dominating force (hence the streets were often only 30 feet wide).
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  13. Part of the reason for the "line" scheme is that it simplifies some of the engineering problems that arise as buildings get more sprawly. Ventilation. Waste collection. The massive weight bearing on the ground.
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  14.  @jackh3242  Speed tables are a good compromise for emergency vehicles. There is a lot of variability in bumps; some of them basically force you to stop, if you don't want to mess up your suspension.
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  15. A variation on this, in jurisdictions where parking is perceived to be an issue, is that a "non-conversion agreement" is required for the garage. To guarantee that it won't be made into a room, at least not with permits... Typical modern construction often isn't terribly repurposable to begin with. Two-story foyers and wide open kitchens with no stacks going through the ceiling don't lend themselves to making an upstairs apartment...
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  16.  @plankton50  At bottom it's all about the fire trucks. Pretty stupid when they're requiring sprinklers on everything anyway. My parents' house is on a 16 foot wide one-way street with parking on one side, and somehow that has worked for almost 100 years... and I am on a two-way street that isn't more than 28 feet wide and has parking on both sides. People will work it out. But it is apparently hard for planners to believe that. Your idea would work... but so would regulating garages so that people didn't get unrealistic expectations of being able to park a car in the first place. Regulating unit sizes would also work. Street parking on townhouses without garages comes fairly close to being sufficient all by itself... it's when there are multiple units per house and normalized 3-car households that you run out of space.
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  17.  @Coffeepanda294  The comment to which I was responding was about Soviet apartment blocks. The US tried similar things. Except for luxury ones, they failed, and most of the public ones have now been torn down. Generally they didn't make anything resembling the large parks between buildings, and that very much affects the demand for them... but in a place with pre-existing private land ownership, how could they? Everyone is going to demand to build as much as they can on the smallest parcel of land possible. Restrictions on apartments are the common-law response to that poor use of the commons.
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  18.  @harenterberge2632  Residential and commercial analyses shouldn't be mixed. Small commercial is better, but commercial zoning restrictions are frequently inadequate to preserve something good. I don't think anyone has real numbers to show that suburbs are being subsidized, not without playing around to make commuters a city cost.
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  19.  @harenterberge2632  From my perspective in a wealthy state in the USA, those documentaries are misleading... at least for parts of recently developed countries. The cities probably ONCE subsidized the suburbs, especially via employment. But the situation is now reversed, and it isn't even close. The cities contain too tax base, both in people earning income and in the value of property.
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  20.  @harenterberge2632  Roads are a legitimate cost on the ledger side of suburbs. The rest of infrastructure is not, because the cost of labor catches up and passes the cost of materials. Maintenance in a suburban layout is usually not complicated. You can almost hire trained seals to do it. In the close quarters of urban work, you're still going to be hiring trained seals, but you need twice as many of them and the work gets done no better than half as fast.
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  21. A layout can approximate a circle. But a rectangular grid is the most obvious organic basis for urban design because it allows structures to be easily built abutting one another.
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  22. Problem is that the business model for most staples has evolved away from smaller units that a lot of people can get to without a car. The city I live in has lost a quarter of its population over three decades... but at least half its grocery stores. The nearest grocery or pharmacy/convenience store to my house in a middle-class area is a mile and a half. And it's not for lack of business zoning: the pharmacy closed recently because it was not the corporation's desired footprint, and an independent grocer used to be about a half mile away. The business zoning just isn't wanted by business.
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  23.  @tthomas184  It's an issue for turns across the bike lane, which is where most legitimate accidents will happen (as opposed to acts of negligence by people who don't stay in their lanes). At present it doesn't really matter because the bike lanes in question are not much used, but if they were crowded comparably to the car lanes the problem would become noticeable.
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  24.  @VillainousHanacha  In my city they also "invest" in tons of flexi-posts along with the painted lines, and where there are bus stops, they put in temporary ramps for the bike lane. I wonder how the cost of all that would compare to making a curb out of wheel stops...
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  25.  @SaveMoneySavethePlanet  It may not truly be less expensive to build an exurb---but the profit is more reliable than rebuilding an urban area. Subdivided land has to be reassembled, and urban land is most likely to be available when it has the opposite of demand on its side. IMO design guidelines are more of an intimidation (and maybe an excuse?) than a thing that kills projects. At least in my area. That is not to say that the people who craft the guidelines are realistic. There are usually a lot of things that sound nice and that worked in an asymmetrical environment that is not similar to urban renewal.
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  26. If the greenbelt is a 90 minute transit ride away, not sure how much good it does for urban folks. Open space needs to be reserved everywhere, and that is not something that cities did until about 1900, and even then it was spotty.
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  27. For paths to be useful beyond a specific community, there has to be a lot more coordination between developments than usually occurs. One example is that where there are forest conservation requirements, the inside sides of a parcel are often put in easement, leaving the only available connectivity on the main road side. The jurisdiction could prioritize the path if they wanted. But it's usually not close to the top of the list.
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  28.  @4473021  Doesn't really work. Just concentrates the heat on the non-shady sides of each building.
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  29.  @anthonydpearson  The cold can be managed. Rain, less so. I think the bigger issue is that all infrastructure problems are iterative. The conventional package box works with a smaller dedicated box per user (to put the key in). That's a lot of space. The lock could instead be linked to something like a recipient's phone, so that the whole installation can only be package boxes; but that becomes a much more sophisticated standard box.
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  30.  @nacoran  Now I'm envisioning someone on a long bike trying to turn around in a tunnel...
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  31. Was it an orphanage or a whole prison complex?! An orphanage would be one building...
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  32. It's mostly because inertia is real.
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  33.  @highway2heaven91  Park-and-rides are a necessary feature of an expanding population that is bound to include some people who want more space than an urban area gets them. Either they have a way to get downtown, or they don't maintain a job in the city and employers will move away to attract them.
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  34. The advantage of a private taxi service in this arena is the management flexibility. The inflexibility might not be the unavoidable destiny of a government-run service, but it's definitely their tendency! My state provides (at least in the local area) a similar service for disabled persons. It's the right size vehicle, especially to be a short loop to a spine, and there should be a place for this. Do I expect the people running the system to find the right place? No...
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  35. It looks okay... but it's assuming that everyone is comfortable with living in an apartment, and you're not going to have the people who go thumbs down on that---it's not really an entire ecosystem.
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  36. It does help a lot to make it bikeable to have a small country and/or one whose settlement patterns are confined by geography.
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  37.  @bbukkegayo  Using logarithms to exaggerate small differences between large numbers is tough to do, but I guess statistics can meet any challenge!
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  38. It will only drive down your value if it instantly becomes a slum in which further investment is clearly unproductive. As long as there is demand to build more units on your property, your value should actually go up. But how long will this last is the question. Clearly a city will lose some low-maintenance residents this way, the sort of people who LIKE to maintain their property, and most sales for denser redevelopment are an exchange of a resident landowner with a direct stake in maintaining the unmeasurables of social order for an absentee landlord that sees only the dollar signs. You have to run it right, and California is leading the world in demonstrating that it won't do that. From a planning perspective, I would be concerned about the demographics. You can have dense housing only in certain places, and people who don't want to live in that type of area can preferentially locate themselves outside those areas at a much greater velocity than redevelopment can achieve. Does this hurt the affordable single-family areas?
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  39.  @tristerojade8543  That's what I would think too. But in that situation you're probably not selling the house for what it is worth to you or another homeowner like you, but what it is worth to a builder.
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  40.  @tylerbrown4483  Deed restrictions probably won't hold up if the rest of the laws or zoning change. But there's still the problem of it not being possible to force the suburban property owners (most of whom are also residents!) to sell to make something different.
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  41.  @Phalaenopsisify  If there's a concealed place to put the package, it's most likely OK. Many people with townhouses have notes on the door asking for packages to be placed in the back yard. One does hear of thefts and see videos of them on door cameras. But I live in a bad US city and it's not common in my neighborhood. One major US package shipper delivers packages requiring signature to a major convenience store. I recently had to pick up an e-reader sent there. But it would quickly overwhelm the system to make that a routine operation; the major companies are reducing locations, not adding them...
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  42.  @SaveMoneySavethePlanet  One ought to ask why any of (managed) pasture, corn, and alfalfa are located in CA, because none of them belong there! It's REALLY important to do transit at the same time. With CA development patterns (as well as new ones in general) I am skeptical of just how many ADUs can be made, though...
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  43. That's also very common in older US cities, particularly the parts that used to be suburban (though many of those lots have driveways; mine doesn't).
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  44. Well, it's a very unnatural accumulation of resources...
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  45.  @Freshbott2  The amount of elapsed evolutionary time, or the lack thereof, is a significant factor in how the US came to rely on zoning. In cities that existed before the car, zoning was uncommon. As those cities and their associated footprints expanded (quickly!) with the car, zoning was retroactively imposed based on what was already there. It has affected housing supply in suburbs much more than cities, which were mostly already as dense as demand would support. Similarly zoning affects what could theoretically happen much more than what is realistically on the table. If single-family properties become available in a large enough mass that a larger, denser development becomes possible, chances are there are some other issues going on that constitute a bigger problem than sub-optimal density. Like Detroit type issues. It's hard to get mixed-use development to be successful. A big reason for that is that the value of commercial land without EZ car access drops precipitately unless it's REALLY good.
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  46.  @Freshbott2 Detroit is an example of how bad it has to get before there is even the possibility of redeveloping an area previously subdivided in a single-family pattern. And no one is beating down the door to get into that part of Detroit. Or the similarly failed but denser part of Baltimore. Those are the kinds of places that are available for redevelopment today or anytime soon. And in those instances where those kinds of places are redeveloped, mixed use is near the bottom of the list that a developer wants. They want to build office parks or strip malls or townhouses (rarely apartments), in single compartmentalized uses, because that's the most economically efficient thing for them. They can sell those things. I agree that the ideal is that each business builds and owns the space that each business needs, but that isn't how capital is used anymore. Zoning is also not merely about the use, but the allocation of public resources. There is a lot of commentary about US suburban acre or half-acre zoning, but those are typically areas that don't have public water and sewer. They can't be more dense because they don't have the infrastructure.
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  47. It's common, but depends on the utility of those measures for the jurisdiction. Baltimore has at least 10 different residential zoning classifications, many of which include only fine distinctions, e.g. there are two zonings that are each identical to others for density, but one permits semidetached and one doesn't.
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  48.  @mohammedsarker5756  Yes, that should help with stuff that is straight up vacant. Commercial zoning usually has a pretty high assessment, though... a while ago I looked up an end-of-life-cycle strip mall with a fourth-rate grocery chain in a city neighborhood that is just barely not terrible enough to have a lot of vacants... it was still assessed for eight figures!
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  49.  @compdude100  Oh, I agree... but in fully urban areas especially, a large apartment needs a bus line to be attractive. And that means some degree of major road.
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  50.  @TheAmericanCatholic  Yes, the subway access is great. I would not have ever expected anyone to say something nice about New Haven, although it looks like a good deal of the rough area has been knocked down...
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