I see a space for cities/towns that were laid out before cars were common, and also for living out in the country.
Most current development (in the US) seems to go to high density car-dependent developments that aren't walkable to anything. (They could partially solve this by making 10% of the development commercial, but choose not to.)
I assume most of those new developments will be abandoned in my lifetime. There's no reason to choose such housing other than existing stock. They don't seem to be built to last, and don't provide basic amenities for young, middle aged or older people.
Sadly, the people building them can cash out well before the value of such housing drops to zero.
Places built for cars depend on cars so cars are in the future - news at 11.
> There are an estimated 8 parking spaces per car in the United States
Subsidized parking via zoning requirements = "built for cars"
> would you rather take an UberX or a Pool? Or a bus?
I would rather walk. However, most places in the US are not built for walking. Most places are also not built for buses. They are built for cars.
> Commutes are getting longer. ... Cars are freedom. They give people the opportunity to live where they want,
I don't know about you, but I don't think most people want a long commute. I certainly know people with 45 minute commute who want to live closer to work, but can't because they can't afford to live closer.
Since our infrastructure is built around cars, that means we've also built our business districts and suburbs and exurbs around cars. There's been less pressure to build dense because you can "always" drive another 10 minutes and be at the end of town where land is cheap.
> Road networks have proven to be a relatively easy and extremely effective investment
A.k.a "the Growth Ponzi Scheme". From https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ - "Most American cities find themselves caught in the Growth Ponzi Scheme. We experience a modest, short term illusion of wealth in exchange for enormous, long term liabilities. We deprive our communities of prosperity, overload our families with debt and become trapped in a spiral of decline."
> Public transit, even in the densest cities, is massively subsidized
Car transit is also massively subsidized. Those parking spots don't come for free. Those city roads don't come for free. Part 2 of the "Growth Ponzi Scheme" works out the numbers. Property taxes aren't usually enough to pay off those city streets.
Starting the article with the false equivalence of housing space to parking space is ridiculous.
Housing requires a massive amount of ancillary infrastructure such as power, heat, plumbing/sewer, telecom etc.
So do houses built further away. Do we want houses to be more close or not? What about corner shops?
Second, what happened in e.g. Moscow once cars were readily available and affordable? ... People who already had an advanced metro system, trains etc... still bought them! Why?
Right but the cities are already there. We don't have the luxury of redefining the American lifestyle and dependence on cars with a single unit of new housing. There's no benefit for the developer - leaving out parking (aside from the mandate to include it) makes the property less desirable.
Cities are increasingly unaffordable largely because of anti-urban, car-centric policies (zoning, infrastructure plans).
> If people want to live in cities and want to have a car-free lifestyle, then more power to you.
It's really not about what people want, it never has been. It is illegal to build walkable areas in almost all of the US. Laws need to be changed, immediately, for our well-being and the survival of our civilization. And then you can still go live in the country if you want to; it's awesome out there and you can be even further from the sprawl.
This is a romantic fantasy. One I sometimes share, but I recognize it as fantasy.
I understand the aim of what's being advocated here, and I really enjoy visiting cities like this (it saves on car rentals). But there's significant reasons people have spent a century or so trying like hell to escape these kinds of cities. Sprawl is a problem, but modeling cities after 15th century Italian towns is a mistake as well. I'd love to live in a place like this I suppose if we're all boutique shop owners and grocers this might work. But most people aren't these days. We actually have to get places that aren't necessarily right in our town.
One of the significant reasons we started moving away from this kind of development, even before cars became common, is that it traps people inside of them and prevents people from getting into and out of them. He uses Barcelona as an example, but he uses the Medieval part of Barcelona, not the 19th century bits.
So now we have to build extensive mass-transit. I'm thrilled as peaches to do that, but it's unbelievably expensive to finance. One of the reasons so many roads get built and expanded is that local governments can finance road development by forcing developers to build the roads or they won't get the zoning for their new mall or suburb (and the increased tax revenue is intended to cover long-term maintenance).
Brand new, above ground, subway/metro runs around $250 million per mile [1] in the United States (built on existing right-of-way). No developer can finance that. A brand new rural/suburban road runs $4-6 million per mile, and $8-10 million in urban areas [2].
I wish that humans had managed to develop a way of life and an advanced economy that made this possible. But we didn't. It sucks, but even if the car had never been invented, cities would no longer look like this.
> reinvent better uses of the existing urban layouts as people are stuck with them.
They are most certainly not.
Many car-dependent cities, large and small, are depopulating, quite rapidly. (Some at over 10% population loss per year!) This depopulation doesn't come from a city's urban core(s), usually; but rather specifically from the areas of these cities worst affected by car dependence — the sparse fringes of suburbia, and the exurban developments. (The people living in these places have the most car-centric, non-urban-infrastructure-reliant lifestyles to begin with; so when they get a better job offer somewhere else, they are unfettered from simply packing their things in their car and moving. This makes these suburban fringes and exurbs much more vulnerable to depopulation during low-employment periods, housing-affordability crises, etc.)
For many cities, these depopulated fringes and exurbs have nobody left in them at this point to care what happens to the area; and so, in response, these cities have often been literally shrinking, de-incorporating these exurbs from themselves, in order to avoid paying infrastructure costs indefinitely for roads and pipes and wires that nobody is using.
And after 10-or-so years of this state of de-incorporation and abandonment, there is nothing of value left in these places to directly move into and reuse. A perhaps-surprisingly constant amount of maintenance is required, both of buildings and of infrastructure, to keep both from falling apart.
• Suburban SFH homes in North America — usually stick-built, and usually in boreal-forest conditions — that have gone un-lived-in for more than five years or so (and not left in the hands of any bank’s or property developer’s maintenance company), are almost always a total write-off, not worth attempting to repair: they're inevitably mostly rotted, the rain having gotten in at one point and made a home for humidity and mold/fungus, destroying the structural integrity of the framing. (You might be able to save homes that have sat in desert climates like Arizona, but these have their own problems related to fast oxidation of metals, incl. electrical and plumbing. Maybe concrete+plaster Mission-style architecture can be saved; but after 10 years of disuse, you'd still need to gut the building to get it livable again.)
• An exurban "low-CapEx high-OpEx" asphalt road grid, that hasn't been driven on in 10 years, is no longer drivable: asphalt does not survive 10 years without maintenance, even if nobody is driving on it. It's likely been undermined over time with huge numbers of small sinkholes — sinkholes that will become innumerable potholes when the first person brave enough to drive down the weathered road runs over them. The roads would need, at least, to be mulched up and spat back out by a road re-paving machine (with a refill and resurface of the undermined subbase + subgrade layers in between) to make them safe.
If you're going to have to do both of those things to make conditions livable again in that area — raze all the buildings, and recycle all the asphalt — then you may as well do all the razing and asphalt-mulching all at once, first — and so end up with a fresh and empty terrain and a pile of materials, ready to be re-laid out in whatever (hopefully more compact!) fashion you choose.
That's well and good, but the sticking point is "the city was built before cars were a thing." The US is already heavy with sprawl and it's a reality that we have to live with. I'm not sure how to put that cat back in the bag.
Yes, but that's not an argument for anyone wanting car-dependent life. It's an argument for people being willing to tolerate car-dependent life (in order to have some benefits like affordability and more space), and that was never a disputed claim.
Incidentally, car-dependent affordable space is a farce. It's not actually more affordable, it only externalizes the costs. The huge infrastructure costs to support sprawl-style development are subsidized by denser parts of town. This is laid out bluntly in the articles on https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme and that's not to mention the externalized costs of the pollution of all the car traffic and many other things we could bring up.
In short, the car-dependent suburbs are artificially more affordable. And yes, tons of people will accept car-dependency in order to get the benefits and affordability of those places as we know them.
While I believe the logic in the article is sound, I think it missed the mark on what actually transforms cities in such a way.
It's not the cars - they're just tools. It's the insatiable appetite for living space.
There's a trend in the city I grew up in(Warsaw, Poland) that started over 20 years ago and continues to this day - people grew tired of living in crammed, Plattenbau apartments, so they moved to smaller towns(in part inspired by their notion of how Americans live) adjacent to big cities where all the jobs were. Additionally at that time interest rates were so high that this was an option for those who couldn't get a mortgage for an apartment.
Cars followed, but not everywhere. Places close to railways were an exception, but only up to a point, because over time commuters exhausted any spare capacity there was, so the remainder had to drive and bear the not insignificant costs of that. In the meantime a highway was built, but that didn't help for long.
Was Warsaw hollowed-out by this? Hardly. What happened instead is that it started cannibalizing smaller (but still relatively large) cities.
If you read a few more words I hope it becomes more clear:
> allow mixed use density and transit, and most cities do not allow that to be built anywhere.
It is illegal to build for car-free living in the vast majority of our land. So much is that in some of the places where it exists today, it would be illegal to build now because the building styles were made illegal over the last century.
Car dependency is built into our laws and our built infrastructure, and that codified life style does not fit the desires of future generations, not their environmental needs.
> ...and car-lifestyles are what North Americans have culturally designated as the marker of success.
This is no longer uniformly true. Some of the hottest, highest-priced residential real estate in the US is explicitly tied to more walkable environs. In the urban cores of cities like Portland, OR, Boulder, CO, and Austin, TX, there are definitely extraordinarily expensive ("marker of success") residences that are impractical (or at least very time inefficient) to live in unless one eschews a car-centric lifestyle. The developers have noticed, and there is a boom going on right now in those and similar cities by the developers to increase density; however, often neighborhood associations and land-use regulations tend to hold back the density of the proposed developments.
It's not about car-free life. It's about dense cities being terrible places to live unless you're at a level of wealth high enough to isolate yourself from the poverty, crime, noise, etc in a secure luxury apartment in an upmarket area.
IMHO, big cities are dying, they're a relic of the past. The Internet had already killed physical retail. The pandemic killed off more businesses while WFH workers fled the cities. Soft-on-crime policy trends seem to be hastening the decline.
And in a digitally connected world there's simply fewer reasons to physically pack ever more people into small spaces.
I don't think that is true. If you look at how larger residential areas looked in the States historically, you'll these placese were very livable, since there weee no cars.
The main issue in the US is that at some point the jobs of city and regional planners were hijacked by car industry lobbyists. The current state of affairs is what followed.
The headline/title seems like something of a stretch for two reasons.
The first is pedantic. The US was formed in the 1700s, roughly a century before the first car was invented. Most, if not all, neighborhoods prior to that were built from scratch.
The second is less-pedantic. It is hard to imagine that the various communes and utopias designed/built throughout the twentieth century in the US all required a car in order to live in them and be a part of the community.
Cities shouldn't be designed for cars. If anything, it should be the other way around.
Additionally, the idea of living directly in a city to be a luxury really destroys the justification of a "city" in the first place, in my opinion. The whole idea of suburbs throughout human history was the luxury of not being in a city, but thanks to that mentality + the Baby Boom, modern cities are now glorified business parks.
I see a space for cities/towns that were laid out before cars were common, and also for living out in the country.
Most current development (in the US) seems to go to high density car-dependent developments that aren't walkable to anything. (They could partially solve this by making 10% of the development commercial, but choose not to.)
I assume most of those new developments will be abandoned in my lifetime. There's no reason to choose such housing other than existing stock. They don't seem to be built to last, and don't provide basic amenities for young, middle aged or older people.
Sadly, the people building them can cash out well before the value of such housing drops to zero.
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