Did I miss something? I don't see anywhere where it "debunks" anything.
It has some talk about traffic accidents when you travel outside of a cul-de-sac, but doesn't talk about the increased safety inside (especially for say children who play in the area), doesn't talk about crime rates, or any of the reasons people move into suburban areas. It throws in some off the cuff comment about being more connected, but doesn't say why that would be true in a more densely populated grid layout (as opposed to knowing your neighbor more in the the suburbs).
The article seems really poor actually, rushed to meet a deadline.
The author, along with many strongtown arguments I've read, completely misses the point. A cul-de-sac is not optimized for cost, efficiency, or anything measurable by numbers. The value is in community building - kids playing in a safe area away from a trafficked road, neighborhood BBQs, a place to learn to ride a bike, etc.
Many suburbs don't have access to a park or even parking lot right outside their door, but a cul-de-sac provides a very convenient and safe space
To counter those thinking car traffic still exists since its a road - it does not. Neighbors in a cul-de-sac see kids playing in it all the time and when turning off the main road slow down to a crawl or stop.
EDIT: My comment kind of misses the point of the article - that cul-de-sacs should maybe be taxed higher since they're inefficient from a cost perspective. Most of the article reads very negatively against them though, and the bias of strongtowns bolsters that point for me.
While the article may have issues, I've not seen a compelling argument explaining lower suburban crime rates by their lower density instead of the huge unaddressed socioeconomic problems that in part drove suburbanization.
This article makes some pretty bold claims in the beginning and then totally fails to back them anywhere in the interview. It repeatedly decried the fall of the suburbs, and yet throughout the interview talked about how they're being revitalized. By the end it admits that the suburbs are seeing a huge resurgence due to covid and people fleeing the packed cities, but it even claims this was happening before, so what's with those false claims at the start?
I got exactly the same impression. The cul-de-sac per se isn't even addressed. Taking it as symbolic, the article's main argument for grid layouts seems to be little more than "everyone was doing it 100 years ago, and we found a handful of favorable correlations, so they must have been on to something".
The point of the article is that the return value of suburbs is being propped up by new investment and they are destined for collapse (Ponzi scheme). There isn't a single fact in the whole muddled essay that supports this premise.
It misses the core point of the people spouting "induced demand", which is that if you were to satisfy the demand for cars, there won't be a city to drive to or to park in at the end
They just take too much space
"More and better infrastructure lets us spread out and enjoy more space" only works to the point where you can still get to the centers of activity in your city within a reasonable time, and past a certain point you either have to bulldoze the center to make space for the vehicles of the suburbanites, or densify
It is insane to me that they decided to write an entire blog post about something like that if they didn't even address this
A lot of people simply dislike density beyond the density found in small towns and suburbs and are willing to pay a bit of a premium for that living condition. The author even "admits that the ideas of the Garden City and the Decentrists made sense on their own terms: a suburban town appealing to privacy-oriented, automobile-loving personalities should tout its green space and low-density housing. [Their] anti-orthodox frustration stems from the fact that their anti-urban biases somehow became an inextricable part of the mainstream academic and political consensus on how to design cities themselves[.]"
I noticed that the author mentions that a busier city street is safer from violent crime but doesn't acknowledge that very busy streets are also havens for pickpockets, whereas you generally get it both ways on mostly-vacant-except-cars streets in lower density areas with little to no violent crime.
Citation needed on what you have read as well. I too have read the same, but it conflicts with the reality that suburbs have existed for more than 100 years now, and those old ones have added and replaced infrastructure many times over their history.
That nothing i've read acknowledges that fact suggests they are cherry picking evidence instead of giving an unbiased analysis .
Misleading headline. The study is more accurately paraphrased as 'where you grow up.' The authors found little difference between those who moved when they were young from a low mobility area to a high mobility area.
I would love to see a deeper investigation into how mixed-income neighborhoods positively impact mobility. It's a relevant point when discussing housing subsidies and future infrastructure projects. Many of the low mobility families in the NYT article have no car or only one car. In modern cities which depend almost exclusively on private-car transportation, this is a serious obstacle to higher wages.
Is there someone who actually knows this issue and can tell me what the article is omitting
A few things:
- The zone was set with a few months notice, creating a huge problem for many that have been quickly dismissed. Usability of prohibition is terrible. I've heard there are loopholes like a dozen persons renting a single flat and selling their permits to rich people.
- The zone includes a variety on neighborhoods, from far-left still not gentrified ones, to offices mostly, main street and luxury homes.
- There's a lot of people living outside and working inside. Most use public transportation, but not everybody can do that: salesmen, suppliers... and there are a lot of private complementary schools (things like music schools) that are going bankrupt because parents can't get their children in or out.
- Some measurements indicate that pollution has in fact raised. There were no measures to replace the forbidden traffic.
- Reverting it is dead simple. Saying otherwise is plainly dishonest, but I'm reading it a lot.
I actually believe that a measure like that is necessary sooner or later, but it needs to be done right: transport alternatives, long enough notice, well chosen exceptions and specially doing the data based homework. As it is, it's propaganda.
That paper doesn't actually make that claim? In fact it references another showing there was no link between density and covid spread after accounting for poverty.
It's a simple survey of other literature essentially just noting that cities are predicted to change in some ways, but not making very many firm claims beyond that.
The New urbanism article was pretty bad.. The author made some OK points, but the only example he provides is the San Francisco which you can really only compare with a city like New York, London, Hong Kong.
I thought it was funny the idea that New Urbanists are this big powerful entity pushing all these regulations and codes in place, as if building developers and their investors don't have any sort of input.
Also he fails to provide any sort of evidence these new codes and regulations pushed by new urbanists are responsible for sprawl. Especially when most of the suburbs mentioned in the article are much older than new urbanist policies.
I think the article was about highways specifically (the arguments do not really hold up in an urban environment), but I don't think it said so specifically.
Stories like these are great to look for what the author is omitting and what propaganda is being pushed.
"Residents in suburbs, who tend to be over 30 with children, said they live
there because of the cost, size and type of their housing, to be close to
good schools,and because of the safety and security of the neighbourhood."
The city infrastructure, the very things it is supposed to do, is inadequate for its citizens needs: it cannot provide good schools, safety, or security.
I would like to note that this article is not the usual puff piece from Citylab and this documents with further evidence a common theme that we all know:
a. young: live the hipster lifestyle in the city
b. mid-age: live the family lifestyle in the suburbs
c. old-age: live the retirement lifestyle in the country.
The article seems to assume the reader knows about "strong towns". If they're trying to make an argument about overspending on roads it's very poorly worded and organized.
The article does expand on this in an interesting sentence.
> And I’m not aware of any maps that, for example, trace the safest sidewalks for neighborhoods in South L.A. or the northeast Valley—communities that have long lived with the kind of dangerous traffic that affluent neighborhoods, like the one where my family lives, now find unbearable.
While the author and I both agree that having safe neighbourhood traffic is good for local residents, it's an unfortunate property that only the rich have resources to do something about it.
The title asserts that density causes jobs, or somehow leads to better jobs, yet the article goes on to say, "One can’t create wealth just by crowding people together."
This article is all over the place, contradicts itself multiple times, and has no conclusion. It constantly appeals to authority by vague references like "... according to two decades’ worth of research from economists." Never mentioning which economists or what research.
Save yourself 10 minutes. This is all the article says: "Cities have more jobs due to many different factors, some of which are exclusive to cities."
This is fantastic, in that it does such an awful job its almost like a deliberate counter-argument. To the authors credit he's gone back and edited in notes where he was wrong/off, but the resulting article reads like a self-takedown.
Or at least the top half does. The bottom half reads like standard suburban reactionary boilerplate. "cities are gross I like to live in the country" nonsense by people who want their well-paved sprawl and quarter acre castle subsidized and protected by everyone else.
It has some talk about traffic accidents when you travel outside of a cul-de-sac, but doesn't talk about the increased safety inside (especially for say children who play in the area), doesn't talk about crime rates, or any of the reasons people move into suburban areas. It throws in some off the cuff comment about being more connected, but doesn't say why that would be true in a more densely populated grid layout (as opposed to knowing your neighbor more in the the suburbs).
The article seems really poor actually, rushed to meet a deadline.
reply