Building more housing helps, but building new housing will remain expensive for as long as land is expensive, so it’s vital that we avoid wasting land. Which means density.
Some people read “density” and think “ah, taller buildings!”, but that’s only half the picture - you can save tremendous amounts of space by improving horizontal density - look at how dense OP’s one storey housing is, by shrinking the houses, and by ditching the front yard and dedicated sidewalks.
Except, most of the space is still empty! Those streets are oversized (take a look at traditional cities, most streets are under 20ft wide (6m wide) wall-to-wall), and the houses all have gaps next to them which look big enough to fit (or almost fit) another house. So you could easily more-than-double the density without even going up, assuming the housing isn’t car-centric (I’m guessing those empty spots might be car parks, and the streets are overly wide because they’re for cars).
If this sounds nitpicky, it’s not: building one-storey houses is dirt cheap; imagine trying to make a portable two-storey tent. It even makes it realistically possible to remove developers from the equation, without too much going horribly wrong. It just needs to be efficient with the land it uses.
look at how dense OP’s one storey housing is, by shrinking the houses, and by ditching the front yard and dedicated sidewalks.
What the actual fuck are these suggestions. This sounds a lot like the conservative members of my area that argue homeless people don’t deserve anything. They want to cram the all into one building with no privacy, get rid of sidewalks and green spaces because people loiter, and generally make life as uncomfortable as possible for the destitute instead of treating them like normal human beings.
For reference, your standard wheelchair accessible hotel room will not be less than 20sqm.
I want cities to be more like Venice or Florence or basically any city built before the 1780s. They worked just fine. There are places like that in the city I live in, but they’re horrifically expensive because it’s literally illegal to build more of them.
And to be clear, I’m not saying “I want to put homeless people in these places”, I’m saying “I want to live in these places, and lots of others do to so stop making them fucking illegal to build more of.”
I don’t entirely disagree, but that article lost me when it said “this is as human scale as it gets” and shows a photo of stairs, which are a nightmare for people with mobility problems, and there aren’t any people in the photo. I did finish reading it, but it did little to address my concerns.
I will also forever have a chip on my shoulder about city planning and transit because I loved living in a walkable city while I was homeless. However, it being a nice place to live is why I couldn’t actually find affordable housing there. Thanks to the ass-backwards tax structure in the state, public transit is mostly funded via vehicle taxes, which sounds great until you’re being forced to buy a car because of lack of transit outside the city, then you realize it’s really just a tax on being too poor to live in the city.
The county is focusing all efforts into continued improvement on the city, but refuses to expand the county bus service. As if a bus packed with standing people going 50mph down a bumpy county highway isn’t dangerous. I talk to friends about it, and they go “well, it’s a rural red area and they don’t want it anyways, so fuckem”, completely ignoring that 1) It has more than doubled in population since Covid, 2) It’s blue enough to have drag queens at the bar, 3) We do want it.
When people in my situation read the article you linked, I assume it’s not going to be somewhere I will ever afford to live. Even the article doesn’t really address it. It’s got a spot for responding to criticism, and admits that cost is one of the criticisms, but it just says “it’s not expensive” and then tries to say gentrification is a good thing actually.
It concludes with this: “People spend their life savings just to spend a week in a place like that. What if you could create that in your city?”
The answer is no. I don’t want to build another city that’s so expensive it takes your life savings to visit for a week. Because that’s exactly how it would go in America.
approving more housing is like realizing that hey maybe i should stop actively hammering the splinter into my toe!
i mean yeah, you should do that, but if that’s the point we’re at maybe it’s time to start screaming about it rather than going “man this situation is suboptimal”
Simply approving more housing helps too https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/
Building more housing helps, but building new housing will remain expensive for as long as land is expensive, so it’s vital that we avoid wasting land. Which means density.
Some people read “density” and think “ah, taller buildings!”, but that’s only half the picture - you can save tremendous amounts of space by improving horizontal density - look at how dense OP’s one storey housing is, by shrinking the houses, and by ditching the front yard and dedicated sidewalks.
Except, most of the space is still empty! Those streets are oversized (take a look at traditional cities, most streets are under 20ft wide (6m wide) wall-to-wall), and the houses all have gaps next to them which look big enough to fit (or almost fit) another house. So you could easily more-than-double the density without even going up, assuming the housing isn’t car-centric (I’m guessing those empty spots might be car parks, and the streets are overly wide because they’re for cars).
If this sounds nitpicky, it’s not: building one-storey houses is dirt cheap; imagine trying to make a portable two-storey tent. It even makes it realistically possible to remove developers from the equation, without too much going horribly wrong. It just needs to be efficient with the land it uses.
240sqft = 22.3sqm
What the actual fuck are these suggestions. This sounds a lot like the conservative members of my area that argue homeless people don’t deserve anything. They want to cram the all into one building with no privacy, get rid of sidewalks and green spaces because people loiter, and generally make life as uncomfortable as possible for the destitute instead of treating them like normal human beings.
For reference, your standard wheelchair accessible hotel room will not be less than 20sqm.
I want cities to be more like Venice or Florence or basically any city built before the 1780s. They worked just fine. There are places like that in the city I live in, but they’re horrifically expensive because it’s literally illegal to build more of them.
And to be clear, I’m not saying “I want to put homeless people in these places”, I’m saying “I want to live in these places, and lots of others do to so stop making them fucking illegal to build more of.”
https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php
I don’t entirely disagree, but that article lost me when it said “this is as human scale as it gets” and shows a photo of stairs, which are a nightmare for people with mobility problems, and there aren’t any people in the photo. I did finish reading it, but it did little to address my concerns.
I will also forever have a chip on my shoulder about city planning and transit because I loved living in a walkable city while I was homeless. However, it being a nice place to live is why I couldn’t actually find affordable housing there. Thanks to the ass-backwards tax structure in the state, public transit is mostly funded via vehicle taxes, which sounds great until you’re being forced to buy a car because of lack of transit outside the city, then you realize it’s really just a tax on being too poor to live in the city.
The county is focusing all efforts into continued improvement on the city, but refuses to expand the county bus service. As if a bus packed with standing people going 50mph down a bumpy county highway isn’t dangerous. I talk to friends about it, and they go “well, it’s a rural red area and they don’t want it anyways, so fuckem”, completely ignoring that 1) It has more than doubled in population since Covid, 2) It’s blue enough to have drag queens at the bar, 3) We do want it.
When people in my situation read the article you linked, I assume it’s not going to be somewhere I will ever afford to live. Even the article doesn’t really address it. It’s got a spot for responding to criticism, and admits that cost is one of the criticisms, but it just says “it’s not expensive” and then tries to say gentrification is a good thing actually.
It concludes with this: “People spend their life savings just to spend a week in a place like that. What if you could create that in your city?”
The answer is no. I don’t want to build another city that’s so expensive it takes your life savings to visit for a week. Because that’s exactly how it would go in America.
approving more housing is like realizing that hey maybe i should stop actively hammering the splinter into my toe!
i mean yeah, you should do that, but if that’s the point we’re at maybe it’s time to start screaming about it rather than going “man this situation is suboptimal”