Without careful management, you stand a chance of creating a "Hotel Carter"-esque situation where it is too easy for residents to adversely effect the lives of other residents. Some minimal amount of separation (even if it is only a few feet between each unit) and keeping things out in the air to aid in policing should be well-worth it.
The issue of land wouldn't be so bad if we had decent transportation around our cities. It shouldn't be necessary to own a car if you don't live downtown somewhere, although unfortunately it typically is.
Property itself is a monopoly enforced by government, and many people don't have and can't afford it in urban areas, so it's not clear how much of an impact that might make. Of course, if you're looking to live in a rural area you'll already find a pretty lax permitting process, but there may not be enough commercial activity around to support you. In an urban area things are more inter-dependent, and having a dense area of small homes on small lots, built however the owner feels like it and disconnected from sewage, could be a recipe for disaster.
That said, allowing people to build accessory dwelling units in their yard can be a good way to slowly and evenly density an area (as opposed to plonking down a few bit apartment complexes). Many cities already do this, with some kind of expedited permit process.
I think what is helpful is to define values. I think most people would value a park nearby - but how much park. A 500 acre park per apartment is obviously too much - you couldn't have a city, and I'm not sure if there is enough land in the world. You wouldn't want 1 square cm per apartment either - the few parks you would keep wouldn't hold all the people who want to use them. Someplace in the middle is a compromise - but I'm not sure what.
For the most part I don't think that the law should limit what buildings can be put up - factories/stores/housing can all share a neighborhood. However even if chemical factories don't release anything, there is still enough fire danger that they should be separated from anything else. Worse some chemicals are safe on their own but if they leak to a neighbor the combination is dangerous so such things need to be kept apart.
I don't really feel like trying to come up with a proposal of what the rules should be, but what we have isn't right.
Good for you, for proposing a compromise, but even that seems open to abuse. After all the government could just sell the land. If it's too sensitively located to sell, any lease, even an initially expensive one like that you propose, should come with strict requirements for land use.
So, in case of an emergency where everyone wants to evacuate the city/populated area, your plan is to hook up a trailer? Wouldn't it make traffic worse if people did that and make it harder to maneuver?
Why not just buy a small amount of rural land and just leave stuff there, like a polite prepper?
This is being painted as somewhat of a negative thing but in many places this is part of good urban planning. It's private property (generally with large buildings) where as part of the agreement to build a giant building one also needs to build and maintain some public space. Yes it's technically still private property. Would people rather these landowners just put up a fence and a keep out sign?
We have not done that. There's still plenty of developable land close to cities, and plenty of inefficient uses of space that can be better utilized. The problem is who owns it.
It doesn't always require a big legal battle. If you can convince someone on the Preservation Board to require N more parking spaces (resulting in X fewer rental units at an even higher cost than originally planned), then you can shift the economics enough to render the project unviable.
It might just prevent you from living in it, for instance if it happens to be in between a discotheque and a pig farm.
What makes me nervous would be not knowing if my long term investment in a living space could be erased by some arbitrary use of the neighboring land. And individual homeowners would have no power against corporate owners of the land.
Not a bad idea. There are many instances where government policy has had the exact opposite of the stated intended effect. One example: trying to preserve the real character of an area by setting a large minimum lot size. The result: places like Apple Valley, with giant houses set in the middle of huge yards. It becomes an enclave of the rich and famous. In fact, Apple Valley is reasonably popular with well heeled actors and movie biz people because it is about 2 hours from LA/Hollywood.
If these folks can deliver on actual solutions for this problem space, more power to them.
I'm anti-land use planning without compensation, so no.
If you want to inexpensively "fully engage" in society, go head and live in an apartment downtown or on a bus/train line. But don't restrict my ability to raise my kids in a home with a yard.
Nationalizing inner city land would likely have many unintended consequences. I could see it resulting in migration of people and businesses away from the nationalized area only to regroup at a new center that wasn't restricted by direct governmental control. Reasons for that that spring to mind are that planning permissions would certainly be a nightmare, difficult to obtain and extremely slow. If there was a hard quota of apartments vs commercial space it could create a bad situation for businesses and drive them away. The types of residential units may not meet the demand which could drive segments of the population to seek housing elsewhere even if the costs were higher. Poor design decisions for the units constructed could produce areas conducive to crime or just make it unattractive or inconvenient.
There's a long history of national building projects in many countries that have created problems like these.
That is more green space than in most suburbs. No one would ever build apartments with those restrictions, they would build single family homes. No one would walk through the parks because it would take too long to get anywhere and would drive instead.
One tenth of that might be workable. One hundreth is probably fine. Gives the apartment building a house-sized lot for garden. And gives neighborhood a block sized park. And gives the city a large, nature park.
Shutting down a nuisance is doing the entire neighborhood a favor, and that land can be repurposed to provide more housing in an area that sorely needs it.
The airports and race tracks were almost certainly built in the middle of nowhere originally. They can relocate some place that's currently a middle of nowhere. Airports and race tracks should exist in areas where land is cheap and abundant, not in places where lots of people want to live.
The land owners make a huge profit from selling the land to developers, current residence see their property values go up, and more people have the opportunity to live closer to work.
The issue of land wouldn't be so bad if we had decent transportation around our cities. It shouldn't be necessary to own a car if you don't live downtown somewhere, although unfortunately it typically is.
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