Why did we stop building through-streets?

[TheRatmeister]

Architectural details aside, Nordhavn, in particular, looks a lot like Assembly Square or the proposals for Suffolk Downs and Dot Bay City. I actually think we need to try for more than 350 units on 500,000 square feet, though.

I think you could aim for maybe 400-500, more than that would be pushing it in terms of livability I think.

 

[FK4]

I’m enjoying all of these examples people are putting forth to refute the notion that we just need to carpet everything in the metropolitan area with more housing. It’s making me think of “towers in the park“, which, although perhaps the specifics of Corbusier’s proposal were wrong, really has elements that are not unreasonable approaches. From a quality of life perspective, I think you’d get much greater benefits having clusters of density amidst clusters of green. Corbusier’s error is he wanted the towers too spaced apart and the green overly landscaped, but the examples upthread all show it need not be like that.

 

[TheRatmeister]

Corbusier’s error is he wanted the towers too spaced apart and the green overly landscaped, but the examples upthread all show it need not be like that.

You have to be careful with any design like this because it tends to create a lack of ownership towards the green space. It then becomes the responsibility of someone who doesn't care all that much, a government or landlord usually, and so it's a lawn because that's easy and boring. Creating a sense of public and private ownership of green space is crucial to ensuring that it remains vibrant and well used. This is actually a good use case for an HOA, an organization that can organize and maintain such a space supported by individual homeowners.

 

[FK4]

You have to be careful with any design like this because it tends to create a lack of ownership towards the green space. It then becomes the responsibility of someone who doesn't care all that much, a government or landlord usually, and so it's a lawn because that's easy and boring. Creating a sense of public and private ownership of green space is crucial to ensuring that it remains vibrant and well used. This is actually a good use case for an HOA, an organization that can organize and maintain such a space supported by individual homeowners.

Agree. That’s why we have all these privately owned, shitty parks. In many instances it would be better to have larger spaces, or spaces allowed to be more wild and less sanitized, and/or agricultural zones (for the latter, at the fringes of the city)

 

[Blackbird]

Well we're talking about Weston so it comes with the card.

Does it have to be? Far as I can tell from a quick Google search, the Weston of today started taking shape around the turn of the 20th century, but didn’t really reach it’s “final form” until the 1950s-1980s.

I imagine before Weston was Weston, Brookline might have been like Weston. But things change.

And 10 duplexes on the same or slightly larger lots will house even more.

Sure! My thesis here has always been “houses on streets over apartments off highways”. Duplexes and SFHs can co-exist side by side and do so in many of the areas older towns.

Yeah and it's a miserable, soulless hellscape of vast suburbia. No thanks. You can have homes without that, look basically anywhere else in the world.

Also sure! My point is that Phoenix is doing far better than Boston on housing affordability and is closer in size to Boston than LA. We can learn from them without having to replicate everything about them.

 

[Blackbird]

@Blackbird I think you're fundamentally proposing two different things here and it's complicating the debate. Are we replacing forests in 495 with dense small-lot street grids, or with more suburban-oriented huge lots on dead-end roads?

I could be sold on the merit of the former: these new urban-boned communities can eventually develop into something walkable and awesome. But the latter is just insane step backwards.... once that public land is divvied into huge parcels for mcmansions on cul-de-sacs, it's stuck that way for a verrry long time.

Dense, small-lot street grids (though it doesn’t even have to be grids)! But not necessarily apartment buildings!

The second point that I’ve tried to make is that there are types of developments besides McMansions on cul-de-sacs that are just as backwards and hard to get rid of or build around. A gated-community full of townhouses and a retirement home is just as much a gated community as one with McMansions and cul-de-sacs.

The matter of contention in the debate from my perspective is the question of whether or not it’s okay to build anywhere where there are not currently buildings. I personally think that “up not out” is an unreasonable and impractical way of approaching the housing crisis.

And yet “up not out” has been the approach by Beacon Hill with the MBTA Communities act and touting ADUs as a big housing win. Both take an angle of “how can we pack people in better”. It’s a flaw in the design imo that they aren’t also asking “how can we spread people out better?”

 

[Blackbird]

Most famously? London. It basically goes from Urban environment to Farm Field at the Metropolitan Green Belt - obviously there are still regional highways and railroads that penetrate that, but they're fairly common in the UK. Also see Montreal & Quebec City; Canadian provincial agricultural land protection schemes serve a similar purpose and effect, and there's a similar restriction in the Portland OR area.

Touché. I actually did have Montreal in mind as a counter example when writing that, but didn’t know about London or others.

Does Montreal have its own issue with housing affordability? I think London does, but like LA I don’t think that’s too surprising given the fact that it’s London.

If MTL is relatively affordable, then it’s a good proof-of-concept that building up a limited space can match supply without sprawl. The referenced Dutch cities could be too, though again I don’t know how affordable they are.

Building on this, then, we should define how big the urban part of the Boston metro needs to be to meet demand. I think that 128 is too small a cut-off if we’re trying for this type of thing.

 

[TheRatmeister]

The referenced Dutch cities could be too, though again I don’t know how affordable they are.

Housing affordability in NL is Fucked with a capital F because of the government's insistence on extremely strong rent control. There are some parts I think are good, like capping yearly rent increases and making it very difficult to evict tenants, but so much of the housing stock has rent hard capped that it creates huge disincentives for developers to build much of anything.

 

[Blackbird]

And of course, basically any SFH can be replaced with a duplex or triple decker. There's so many homes that can be built on the space we have now, freeing up large numbers of the existing stock of suburban SFHs for those who really, really want them.

Isn’t this justification for trying to build more SFH in Topsfield rather than strong-arming them into building multi-family now? It can always be up-zoned later.

My consistent takeaway is that our approach is only possible because we can afford to do it so poorly.

It’ll catch up to us someday.

 

[KCasiglio]

America Needs More Sprawl to Fix Its Housing Crisis

The word has become an epithet for garish, reckless growth — but to fix the housing crisis, the country needs more of it.

www.nytimes.com

Sharing this here as it is making an argument very similar to what @Blackbird was saying up thread - that the way out of the housing crunch is filling in the gaps in the suburbs. He makes the point that the Los Angeles metro area is actually much denser than the NYC metro area, and that while building up is good it is not sufficient to meet the scale of the crisis.

I don't have time right now to go through it bit by bit and share my thoughts on the individual points, but I intend to come back to it.

 

[stick n move]

America Needs More Sprawl to Fix Its Housing Crisis

The word has become an epithet for garish, reckless growth — but to fix the housing crisis, the country needs more of it.

www.nytimes.com

Sharing this here as it is making an argument very similar to what @Blackbird was saying up thread - that the way out of the housing crunch is filling in the gaps in the suburbs. He makes the point that the Los Angeles metro area is actually much denser than the NYC metro area, and that while building up is good it is not sufficient to meet the scale of the crisis.

I don't have time right now to go through it bit by bit and share my thoughts on the individual points, but I intend to come back to it.

I actually dont think theres anything wrong with the premise of building cities outward as they grow. As mentioned in the article cities have expanded outward since the beginning of time. Tokyo is the largest city in the world and it is absolutely massive. I think the real problem, which is fitting because of the thread this is in, is the way we are designing the road networks in this sprawl. The author was correct to point out that los angeles doesnt have the same high end density as nyc, but it has much more density for much further out from the core than nyc does. The thing they didnt pick up on is that what makes los angeles sprawl not that bad and much easier to fix, or a city like chicago, is that theyre both built on a street grid that continues out in every direction.

What makes chicago’s suburbs good and dallas’ suburbs complete shit is not the single family homes. Those can easily be torn down and something else built in its place as time goes on. The difference is the continuous street grid of chicago, los angeles…etc compared to dallas, houston, austin… with their disconnected, lots of wasted space, dead end roads, winding sprawl. As mentioned before once roads go down its extremely hard to change them so this is the most important part and the part these cities are getting the most wrong.

Ive been looking around on google earth lately at the outskirts of lots of cities to see how they are growing outward and what it looks like and some cities are doing it much better than others. In the us places like salt lake city and portland oregon are doing a pretty decent job of building on new street grids and having large mixes of types of housing like condos, townhouses, apartments, with single family homes all mixed together. Places doing a bad job in the us would be the outer suburbs of washington dc, the 4 horsemen of shitty sprawl which are dallas, houston, austin and atlanta, plus charlotte, and many more. Obviously each city has its good parts and bad parts and it seems like nowhere is building streets anywhere close to places like metro chicago built pre ww2, but there definitely are places doing better than others. Some examples.


Beautiful brand new neighborhood created in metro portland

These are all brand new

Where theres new single family homes its still dense

Another part of metro portland where the new streets are being built as a street grid.

Brand new suburban neighborhood in metro salt lake next to the light rail, on a street grid, with lots of different building types.

Good mix of housing types together in some new parts of the salt lake suburbs

Compared to trash sprawl of metro austin where the streets dont connect to eachother and theres tons of wasted space.

More trash sprawl in northern virginia

Even the ok stuff above of portland and salt lake have nothing on suburban chicago. The true power of the street grid.

So I dont think that all “sprawl” is automatically bad and I think the author doesnt fully understand what people are really talking about when they call something sprawl in a derogitory way. It really comes down to how connected the road network is to not cause unnecessarily long commutes by car, bike, walking, or bus, how dense the neighborhoods are, and if they have a good mix of uses.