easy solution would be to just jack up the prices to reduce demand
Lol that’s been happening for a while now. It hasn’t worked. Lots of $ has been skimmed out of the economy though.
you mean $5m a house isn’t high enough?
Maybe a quick train ride gets it done too. Agree weather can be a big factor. Most people aren’t riding their bike or walking in the snow or the searing heat.
Not if the yuppies keep coming in
I am! I’m a little less enthusiastic about walking through heavy wind and rain, though.
Maybe you could build gerbil tubes connecting all the high-rise, mixed-use buildings.
Yep. Minneapolis has a pretty extensive skywalk system.
IMO, it means that buildings are right up to the sidewalks, and you need public right of way through the buildings. That’s “very high density” to me.
“quick” and “train ride” don’t seem to go together to me. The time on the train may be short, waiting in both directions seems like an issue.
To be fair, look at Manhattan. It’s sweltering in the summer and when the wind is whipping through the skyscrapers in January the wind chill can be bitterly cold. Yet New Yorkers walk or take the subway to a much wider radius than a five minute walk.
That said, a lot of people prefer having single family homes with private back yards and no neighbors on the other side of the wall / floor / ceiling making noise at hours when they wish to be sleeping or otherwise quiet. It’s nice to be able to blast the sound on the movie you’re watching late at night, or go to bed at 7:30 when you’re under the weather. It’s nice to make more dense housing available, but it’s not for everyone.
It would be for a lot more people if you mandated better soundproofing into building codes though. The concrete walls / floors / ceilings in my former home were awesome in that regard.
My question was “how high would they need to build?”
You can picture Manhattan neighborhoods where nobody owns a car and people walk or use the subway for nearly all trips. Do you have a feeling for the height of the typical residential building? Or, for that matter, people per square mile.
If people there are willing to walk a lot longer than 5 minutes in the winter, any idea of what their limits are?
I’ll try that one. Think 5 stories. Ground level is commercial. Then 5 stories of residence. Known as “5 over 1”.
The International Building Code was recently revised to include these as wood framed as long as the ground floor is steel & concrete. Virtually all US building codes just copy the IBC, though it is modified city by city. Mostly no changes.
So the problem is zoning. CA just addressed the problem of SR1 zoning, I think. So expect more 5/1 to pop up.
If you do not mandate parking, as most city codes currently do, you can build these cheaply and at a profit for the developer. It’s the cars that cost all the money. While we my adore the cute front yards, the two car garages, and the extra wide streets needed to handle 2 way traffic and side parking…it all adds up to a net money loser for the city. Virtually no sales tax revenue and huge infrastructure costs on a per capital basis. Simply unsound.
Prolly worth a new thread.
From what i can tell, the north side of Chicago seems to have maximized population density in a way that still requires having access to a car. One way streets lined with cars and most houses are 2-3 units. You might have a convenience store within a 5 minute walk, and a grocery store 15 minutes away?
Hong kong is full of what, 30-40 story apartment buildings and everyone walks or takes the subway?
I feel like 5 stories is not enough to get everything within a 5 minute walk. Maybe more like 15?
I think it’s misguided to try to eliminate cars altogether. People will still want to go on road trips to the beach / mountains and visit out-of-town family & friends and more and I don’t think we should be trying to eliminate those desires.
Make it so that it’s feasible to be a one-car family and only use the car occasionally rather than every adult needing one for commuting a double-digit number of miles each way every day. That’ll take care of most of the traffic and a lot of the parking needs.
When I lived downtown we had onsite parking, and some of my neighbors went skiing almost every weekend. But they could walk, bike, or ride transit to work, restaurants, bars, museums, sports, concerts, theater, religious services, grocery stores, and more. Nearly everyone had cars, but our average weekly mileage, especially during rush hour, paled in comparison to our friends out in the suburbs.
In rough numbers we had approximately 150 units, 180 assigned parking spaces, 250 adults, 275 people.
I was thinking more than 5 stories. Do you have any idea how many units fit into one of those buildings, and the footprint? There are a couple going up in a small city close to me. But, they are definitely car friendly. I look at them and say “not enough density to be truly walkable”.
That’s useful. How about number of stories, footprint, and setback? Or, an address that I could put into Google maps.
25 stories, not sure about the rest. Units were about 1350 sq ft, 6 to a floor except the ground floor, plus hallway, 3 elevators, trash room (w/ garbage chute and recycling bins), and a storage closet on each floor that aren’t part of the 1350 sq ft.
So each floor of the building was maybe 9,000 sq ft??? Maybe a little more.
Underground parking garage beneath the building & grounds.
Exactly zero people are proposing this. :eyeroll:
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Well, you’ll certainly want mass transit, perhaps light rail. This allows people to live without an auto. People need an alternative.
Size varies a lot. Putting up 3 of these in my small town. Estimating 8 or 10 units per floor, so maybe 45 units per building. A fair amount of commercial on the ground floor. Groceries, a couple of restaurants, a bakery, a barber shop and some lawyerly stuff, since it’s adjacent to the county court house.
The key to making it walkable is the mass transit. No way you can get everything you’ll ever need within a 5 minute walk. Tram to hospitals, for instance. Another key is to reduce car traffic. Check out the progress made in Barcelona in this regard. They are closing streets to car traffic.Super blocks
Btw, I lived in Manhattan a long time. Never needed a car.I would rent on occasion I walked many miles each week. ( Twig, that’s the smart route to getting you to the Berkshires.) I didn’t get the five minute walk bit, though. If you are physically unable to walk 10 minutes, that’s not a good sign health wise. Also, In the end, the amount you can save by not owning a car has to be considered a benefit.
Ease the eminent domain laws so corporates can snatch up whole blocks of old residential/commercial to create population dense areas with fat rental income and you have the American dream. Put a PAC on the front end and we have American capitalism, PAC lobbies politicians, politicians change laws, corporations that funded PAC profits.