Isn’t it weird how half the paycheck goes to rent? It’s not like housing is a new invention, why’s it so expensive?
IMO, it’s some combination of ideologically-driven failures of town planning (the distance from buildings on one side of the street to the other is legally mandated to be ~20m wide, when it could be ), financial fuckery (investors drive housing prices through the roof by buying housing as speculative vehicles, and investors do so because investors are driving housing prices through the roof by buying housing as speculative vehicles - an ouroboros of shitfuckery) and lobbyist-driven partisanship on public transport (car companies hate trains, so they wage propaganda war against them and in support of overly-large roads with mandatory lanes for vehicle storage).
I agree with you in general, but 2m isn’t wide enough for fire truck access. Some regulations are based on the prevalence and nature of natural disasters in a given area.
I’m also not sure about your 20 meters figure because I can’t find that there is a federal minimum. 20 feet is the minimum for fire trucks though.
2m isn’t wide enough for fire truck access, sure. Why do you need to drive a giant fire truck down the alley? The standard response (besides “we need to carry water and I don’t know what a fire hydrant is”) is “we have a ladder on the top of the fire truck”, which might be relevant in some contexts but the picture is of 2-storey buildings which could be easily handled with man-portable ladders.
My main concern here is that people demand wide roads for fire access to the tall buildings (that can only be fire-fought with trucks), then demand tall buildings because “it’s the only way to build densely”, ignoring the fact that narrow roads with shorter buildings are just as dense, cheaper to build, and have lower firefighting requirements. It’s an idiotic catch-22 that people keep painting us into.
My 20 metres figure isn’t a hard number, it’s my eyeballing the 2 lanes + 2 parking vehicle storage lanes, plus a footpath plus a nature strip plus the required building setback/front yard.
There is so much wrong with the logic of that sentence. I’m going to start with basic economic/town planning theory:
The core function of a city is that everything is close to everywhere else - you live in a city because it’s close to your job/a hospital/a nice lasertag place/whatever, which are located there because 1) you and lots of other people are located in the area, and 2) because other businesses they rely on are located closely. The other businesses are located closely for the exact same reasons 1 and 2 (if the Obscure Thingy repair shop is 2 minutes away instead of 3 days away, then you reduce downtime and save money, etc). The more densely you build, the more these virtuous cycles are amplified. Incidentally, this is why cities are roughly circular (which maximizes the number of places close to other places), and not a 170KMx200mx500m line in empty desert.
“A midsized town” is vague as heck but the logic of the previous paragraph applies just as well to small towns - if you keep stuff compact then you make it easy to walk to places, instead of needing to constantly drive everywhere (and waste even more space on roads and redundant parking at every single destination). In fact, if you have a town of, say, 30 000 people, and you maintain a density of 30 000 people per sqkm, then guess what: literally everything is within a km, which means everything is within a 10minute walk (and statistically, 5mins or less, since 10mins is the distance from one edge of town to the opposite edge, and a naive-average trip would be half of that).
You’re technically correct that there’s plenty of room on the edge of town to build low-density housing. In practice though, people want to live close to the centre of the city, rather than on the outskirts with a 3-hour commute. The USA having “an abundance of space” on the outskirts means jack shit. Cheap rent on the outskirts just means high mechanic/fuel costs and lots of unpaid hours spent driving to/from work (or literally anywhere else in the city that you want to go - I hope you don’t have friends in the city centre that you want to see regularly).
I can’t remember the video about it all that well, but wasn’t ‘the line’ supposed to be using the concept of the 15 minute city? So, while, yes… there are very good reasons circles are city standards, if everything magically worked out and they built the thing it wouldn’t matter whether it was a line or a circle.
I hope you don’t have friends in the city centre that you want to see regularly).
So much fuck this. I have a friend who decided to go that exact route, because it put him ‘halfway’ between multiple family members and friends… and now he sees none of them because they’re all ~an hour away. Suburbs fucking suck, and the car brained society we have is so fucking foolish.
if you keep stuff compact then you make it easy to walk to places
Never going to happen in america :( I lived in a small city (2,500), and it was spread out enough that walking anywhere sucked, not even counting the horrible roads (it was a crossroads of two semi-important highways). I want to say it was 4km x 4km. The medium sized city (for the area, it’s medium sized, we’d consider 30,000 to be large [and in fact, the closest large city was ~30,000, and that’s where you had a real hospital, and all the services you would imagine a city having]) of ~9,000 was more like 10km x 10km.
Those are rural cities. Suburbs get so fucky so quickly… I think the town of 70,000 I lived in for a while was something like 9km x 18km, and that was a factory town. The not factory town suburb of 90,000 was around 15km x 20km. Just mind bogglingly spread out. The developers of an area are trying to maximize profit, and the car culture allows them to buy the cheapest land that’s far away, sell the idiot housebuyers the idea of driving down a (currently, lol, not once everyone moves in) idyllic little road with no traffic to the center of the city and have everything they could want in a 15 minute drive.
Isn’t it weird how half the paycheck goes to rent? It’s not like housing is a new invention, why’s it so expensive?
IMO, it’s some combination of ideologically-driven failures of town planning (the distance from buildings on one side of the street to the other is legally mandated to be ~20m wide, when it could be
), financial fuckery (investors drive housing prices through the roof by buying housing as speculative vehicles, and investors do so because investors are driving housing prices through the roof by buying housing as speculative vehicles - an ouroboros of shitfuckery) and lobbyist-driven partisanship on public transport (car companies hate trains, so they wage propaganda war against them and in support of overly-large roads with mandatory lanes for vehicle storage).
I agree with you in general, but 2m isn’t wide enough for fire truck access. Some regulations are based on the prevalence and nature of natural disasters in a given area.
I’m also not sure about your 20 meters figure because I can’t find that there is a federal minimum. 20 feet is the minimum for fire trucks though.
2m isn’t wide enough for fire truck access, sure. Why do you need to drive a giant fire truck down the alley? The standard response (besides “we need to carry water and I don’t know what a fire hydrant is”) is “we have a ladder on the top of the fire truck”, which might be relevant in some contexts but the picture is of 2-storey buildings which could be easily handled with man-portable ladders.
My main concern here is that people demand wide roads for fire access to the tall buildings (that can only be fire-fought with trucks), then demand tall buildings because “it’s the only way to build densely”, ignoring the fact that narrow roads with shorter buildings are just as dense, cheaper to build, and have lower firefighting requirements. It’s an idiotic catch-22 that people keep painting us into.
My 20 metres figure isn’t a hard number, it’s my eyeballing the 2 lanes + 2
parkingvehicle storage lanes, plus a footpath plus a nature strip plus the required building setback/front yard.US-Americans have an abundance of space. There is no need to build very densely. Atleast not in a midsized town that Anon describes.
There is so much wrong with the logic of that sentence. I’m going to start with basic economic/town planning theory:
The core function of a city is that everything is close to everywhere else - you live in a city because it’s close to your job/a hospital/a nice lasertag place/whatever, which are located there because 1) you and lots of other people are located in the area, and 2) because other businesses they rely on are located closely. The other businesses are located closely for the exact same reasons 1 and 2 (if the Obscure Thingy repair shop is 2 minutes away instead of 3 days away, then you reduce downtime and save money, etc). The more densely you build, the more these virtuous cycles are amplified. Incidentally, this is why cities are roughly circular (which maximizes the number of places close to other places), and not a 170KMx200mx500m line in empty desert.
“A midsized town” is vague as heck but the logic of the previous paragraph applies just as well to small towns - if you keep stuff compact then you make it easy to walk to places, instead of needing to constantly drive everywhere (and waste even more space on roads and redundant parking at every single destination). In fact, if you have a town of, say, 30 000 people, and you maintain a density of 30 000 people per sqkm, then guess what: literally everything is within a km, which means everything is within a 10minute walk (and statistically, 5mins or less, since 10mins is the distance from one edge of town to the opposite edge, and a naive-average trip would be half of that).
You’re technically correct that there’s plenty of room on the edge of town to build low-density housing. In practice though, people want to live close to the centre of the city, rather than on the outskirts with a 3-hour commute. The USA having “an abundance of space” on the outskirts means jack shit. Cheap rent on the outskirts just means high mechanic/fuel costs and lots of unpaid hours spent driving to/from work (or literally anywhere else in the city that you want to go - I hope you don’t have friends in the city centre that you want to see regularly).
I can’t remember the video about it all that well, but wasn’t ‘the line’ supposed to be using the concept of the 15 minute city? So, while, yes… there are very good reasons circles are city standards, if everything magically worked out and they built the thing it wouldn’t matter whether it was a line or a circle.
So much fuck this. I have a friend who decided to go that exact route, because it put him ‘halfway’ between multiple family members and friends… and now he sees none of them because they’re all ~an hour away. Suburbs fucking suck, and the car brained society we have is so fucking foolish.
Never going to happen in america :( I lived in a small city (2,500), and it was spread out enough that walking anywhere sucked, not even counting the horrible roads (it was a crossroads of two semi-important highways). I want to say it was 4km x 4km. The medium sized city (for the area, it’s medium sized, we’d consider 30,000 to be large [and in fact, the closest large city was ~30,000, and that’s where you had a real hospital, and all the services you would imagine a city having]) of ~9,000 was more like 10km x 10km.
Those are rural cities. Suburbs get so fucky so quickly… I think the town of 70,000 I lived in for a while was something like 9km x 18km, and that was a factory town. The not factory town suburb of 90,000 was around 15km x 20km. Just mind bogglingly spread out. The developers of an area are trying to maximize profit, and the car culture allows them to buy the cheapest land that’s far away, sell the idiot housebuyers the idea of driving down a (currently, lol, not once everyone moves in) idyllic little road with no traffic to the center of the city and have everything they could want in a 15 minute drive.