Strong Towns

Might not be the best resource for this, but the youtube channel "Not just bikes" has a few very interesting video on suburbs that could be a decent start. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A To go further, there are plenty of article around the subject on https://www.strongtowns.org/

For what it's worth I find that college towns are usually quite pleasant, though I'm not sure they match the small size the poster is thinking of here. New England has some charming towns (example: Bath, Maine). But one of the elements of "charm" is narrow, walkable streets, and _those_ are rare in the US outside of New England. Where they once existed they've often been bulldozed. https://www.strongtowns.org/ talks a lot about what makes towns great and as it turns out those characteristics also tend to make them charming.

> Cars are not some revelations-esque phenomenon and parking lots do not "eat" anything. This website provides a good counter argument: https://www.strongtowns.org/ > In America, driving is far and away the best UX. You go where you want when you want with up to four passengers even in a very small starter car Not for children/young people. In the Netherlands it's common for young people to develop independence using bicycles and public transport. I think that is far more mentally healthy than the US's car centric infrastructure, which excludes young people, making them overdependent on their parents, or dependent on being online in order to socialise.

It's apparently not in the interest of traffic engineers in the U.S. to care for pedestrian (or cyclist) safety. It's been this way since the post-war area where everything was built for cars, and this seems to have manifested in peoples' minds like the concrete they built. Hard to remove this. People seem to fight over minor improvements (like adding a protected bike lane or making safer crosswalks) while a drastic change would be necessary (like building completely different roads or changing underlying laws). I'd recommend checking out the "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel for some interesting observations on the differences between the U.S. and Europe when it comes to traffic safety. Also, Strong Towns is a resource you might want to check out: https://www.strongtowns.org/

Often times even with these enormous property taxes dont even cover the costs of infrastructure (lifecycle maintenance and replacement) in suburbia and the needed money is taken out as federal debt, creating a negative cost spiral that tend to bankrupt cities [0]. All of this only because in the 50'someone wanted to segregate themselfs and make business for the car industry. Time to reflect on the moltitude of market distortions interest groups enables. Strong towns [1] is a great no profit that study cities planning. [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUT… [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/

Lol, have you been to the Midwest? In small and medium sized cites there downtowns are often dead, including the small city I grew up in. All of them easily accessible by car. Dead city centres in North America more have to do with the post war experiment of subsidizing inefficient sprawling car dependent suburbs. If you want to actually understand this read more from the advocacy group Strong Towns[0] they also have a great YouTube channel. Now compare small Midwest cities to small cities in the Netherlands like Leiden or Haarlem and you’ll see limiting traffic from downtowns has little to do with how well they do economically. [0] https://www.strongtowns.org/

Any discussion of this ought to involve some of the concepts from Strong Towns https://www.strongtowns.org/ Their book is a good, quick overview of what they're about. It's not perfect, but it has some ideas worth considering.

You must live in America. Here in Portland, the bike are winning out and things like a city-wide 20mph speed limit are taking hold. It's faster to get across town on an ebike than in a car, because all the drivers are stuck in traffic that the bikes rarely see because they use different streets. It's far from perfect but pockets of success like this prove the investment is worth it. If you are interested in a ROI based perspective on town planning, https://www.strongtowns.org/ makes a compelling case that sprawl is not economically sustainable.

It's not about real rural areas, it's sprawl largely. It's been the dominant and TOP-DOWN planned development pattern for a whole generation, and it's totally tragic. Not only from energy perspective but nearly all other variables. There's almost nothing arguably redeemable about sprawl. https://www.strongtowns.org/ is about the best org discussing these issues and isn't coming from a left- or right-wing perspective but a sane, critical-thinking, research-based perspective.

It's worth pointing out that, in some of those points, even "urban" and "suburban" communities are net-negative in their infrastructure planning. Let's not lay into rural areas but not insolvent municipalities. More details about these issues at https://www.strongtowns.org/.

Highly recommend http://www.strongtowns.org/ if you are interested in articles like this; still trying to explain to city councils over a hundred years after Ebenezer wrote "To-Morrow" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement) why he was horrifically wrong. If you want to dive deeper into this, Jane Jacobs's "Death and Life of the Great American Cities" is an incredible and very approachable book on urban planning: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X

Charles Marohn of Strong Towns (http://www.strongtowns.org/), who is quoted in the article, did a great podcast interview a while back on "how the post-World War II approach to town and city planning has led to debt problems and wasteful infrastructure investments": http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/05/charles_marohn.html

I find it amusing that many folks here are ready to clap back at this comment about how "but people want single family homes" as if that weren't why we are in a housing crisis. Yes... people want single family homes, it's just not feasible to put 3M people into single family homes in a metro area without absorbing an unsustainable amount of costs. Here we are talking literally the cost of construction, but there is also the cost of infrastructure, and the cost of transport. The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable. If everyone were to live in a single family home, then after the transportation infrastructure reaches capacity, there is a cascade of issues that leads a region becoming totally unaffordable and ultimately unsustainable. I would recommend the Strong Towns organization for anyone more interested in the interaction between long-term affordability issues and surburban infrastructure problems: https://www.strongtowns.org

> the economy diversifies, and services improve Pure wishful thinking. Is there any empirical reason to believe this would be more true with everyone living in a couple of dozen large cities (as if that can even happen - see later) instead of in a greater number of more self-sufficient smaller cities and towns within a region? It's not like every company even in your own metropolitan area wants to be in "Seattle proper" is it? I used to work at a large one that basically moved out and they're not the only one. Investors didn't seem to mind one bit. > Why do any more suburbs need to be built at all I never said that they should. They need to be rebuilt, not built anew. More precisely, they need to be reconfigured to avoid the waste and ecological damage of tearing down one place and then building somewhere else. > Fix the cities and there will be plenty of space. Fix the suburbs and you'll have plenty of space too. Consolidation can happen as easily in each town as in the central city, and without some of the downsides - increased prices and decreasing affordability (already a major problem in Seattle), power distribution, waste disposal, what traffic still (and necessarily) remains, etc. I've been to Seattle. Consolidating most of the region's population into Seattle city limits would not be a utopia; it would be a nightmare even from a new-urbanist perspective. Ditto for the many other cities I've been to. A certain level of geographic expansion is inevitable, but not…

I'm very interested to see how this goes, especially since I was not aware of Ireland's particular housing shortage. I'm a big fan of infill/increased urban density in general, as long as it is ~equally beautiful to the surroundings. (Ex. live-work units can be much more beautiful than single-family homes, but 5-over-1s are usually not) Some other topical sites I've been reading recently that I'd recommend: https://missingmiddlehousing.com/ https://www.strongtowns.org/ (North America specific) One quote I'm unsure about: > [Popular housing reform] means having strict rules on parking and driving, ensuring congestion doesn’t increase. I'm unsure whether to read this as strict rules to increase car infrastructure as housing is increased to make way for more people's vehicles, or to make sure new housing development holds steady car flow / implements alternative transportation so as not to increase the number of cars. The first interpretation would make me concerned about induced demand.

I _highly_ recommend consuming more of the content put out by Strong Towns [1]. If I were to summarize their message, it's that in the past 100 years, we've engaged in a large-scale experiment to design our places around cars. This is bad for safety, bad for the economy, and (most importantly!) bad for us people that live in these places! Content and education-wise, they are my favorite non-profit :) If you're looking for audio: their podcast [2] is great (this article came out yesterday as a podcast, and I listened to it while I was biking... and then got angry at all the cars driving around me, lol). If you're looking for something longer-form, I'd recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer [3]. It's literally fantastic, and changed the entire way I think about the suburbs and cities. I grew up in a suburb and recently moved to the city, and had this deep, under-thought feeling that the walking/biking (and the livability that came from it) was why I loved cities so much. This book helped me understand why I felt that way, what specifically is wrong with how we build place currently - and also practical things I could do about it! Not to be dramatic, but that book took me from pretty much _never_ thinking about place to: volunteering for a local bike advocacy group, biking twice as much, and literally being a more friendly neighbor. Effects not guaranteed, but I can't recommend this book highly enough if you're interested in this sort of thing. P.S. I am…

There is this position in politics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_Party_(United_States) which has a mismatch in supply and demand much like Libertarianism. The New York Times would like to be Whiggish (e.g. "how am I going to afford to send my kids to college if cancel culture stops me from getting paid $50,000 to give a college commencement address?") and so would the people in California. For various reasons the "left" in America can't quite throw the poor, blacks, and brown people under the bus, but the political establishment would love to do so if it could: but a bird with two right wings can't really fly. History treats the whigs so badly because the whigs tried to "split the difference" between the north and the south in the civil war so you wind up with characters like Daniel Webster, the US secretary of state from New Hampshire, who was imploring activists to stop resisting efforts to repatriate escaped slaves from New York to the the south. Today "split the difference" comes in the form of symbolic activities like the ones mentioned here in the context of California where saying that a certain population is "15% white" could well mean that it is "70% asian", not "70% black". (e.g. even in the American South today it seems that white people are taking their kids out of the public schools to get them away from asians, not to get them away from blacks) Asians break the "race theory" enshrined in American law by being both successful (higher than…

Not sure complex systems researchers have gone that far into the practical issues yet, but Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West are the current leaders in urban growth/sustainability as far as I can tell as an interested outsider. Strong Towns [1] takes an antifragility approach in line with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and touches on complex systems thinking (without taking a theory/purely scientific stance). NNT occasionally posts thoughts on localism, though again usually quite abstract relative to the practical modeling question you pose. The most practical related work I've seen has been on growth of major international cities and large villages/slums in third world countries. I can't recall any authors in particular. Some of my commercial work approaches what you're asking about but I build products more than perform research and have never worked with zoning data. If anyone has a better answer I would love to hear it; this is my jam. [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/

Do anything recommended by http://www.strongtowns.org

> If anyone has a suggestion on how to deal with that problem, I'd love to hear about it... My knee-jerk reaction is to call you an anti-development NIMBY, but that's not actually solving any problem. So let's set that aside. Your neighbourhoods have benefited from the existence of this vacant land. The city, meanwhile, has costs to maintain that land, police it, etc and have even more costs to maintain the infrastructure of low-density housing in such neighbourhoods. Cities need to increase density, and they need to be able to afford to maintain themselves[0]. Selling vacant land removes a cost and creates desperately needed income in times where all a politician is allowed to do is lower taxes (or else their opponent next election will say that they will lower taxes and get elected). If you want to have low-density residential areas with lots of green space, you need to petition your government to raise your taxes so that you can pay for it. Campaign for politicians willing to invest rather than lower taxes. Have them convert the land into a local park, using your increased taxes to maintain it. [0] See everything on https://www.strongtowns.org/

Should share this with the Strong Towns folks. https://www.strongtowns.org/

Gobsmackingly poor deals made by city and town politicians are par for the course, and why https://www.strongtowns.org/ should be prerequisite reading for any council member, mayor, or board member approving deals that impact their community. It's easy to look at a glossy project 2-pager and only see the immediate tax revenue. It's much harder to glean a nuanced understanding of future financial burdens from a given project. No company will have any incentive to be forthright with that information.

> and I will refrain from flippant attacks like "do you pay my mortgage" Well to start with, have you heard of the Mortgage Interest Tax Deduction? I quite arguably do contribute to your mortgage! The actual answer is far more complex. https://www.strongtowns.org/ has some info, though some of their stuff is debatable.

"There’s status in a neatly tended space that conveys a message of respectable conformity and leisure. There’s also a strong cultural rejection of useful productive things because they’re useful and productive. "My favorite example of this concept is the humble clothes line. Is it legal to dry your laundry in the sun where you live? In many parts of the country this is expressly forbidden by law and/or private binding agreement. This sort of activity is associated with rural peasants, impoverished slum dwellers, dirty hippies, white trash (or worse), and is at odds with the look and feel of a prosperous community. It might be a scorching day in August but everyone is compelled to operate a mechanical dryer in the house and crank up the air conditioning because anything else is shameful and verboten." https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/6/the-other-pitchforks

In the United States we do treat one form of transport as the most privileged, the automobile. We force places of business to build parking, forcing lower density, and higher cost to business. We build many neighborhoods without sidewalks at all, and with no bike access, forcing pedestrians and cyclists out of dedicated lanes and into traffic where they need to contend with multi ton SUVs. We do not penalize against designing vehicles with extremely poor visibility and excessive height, which directly translates to fatalities of those not in an armored shell on the roadway. I would strongly encourage you to read more about building our cities and towns not directly around the automobile. We need to build around people, and bikes, and not strictly around the car. https://www.strongtowns.org/

Counter-intuitively, yes, in fact. See the great article from Strong Towns, which does a lot of advocacy around building healthy towns: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/8/6/the-key-to-slowing-traffi…

Qui bono? It’s great for banks and financial institutions and their investors to keep housing prices going up. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/7/15/federal-and-state-progra…

While it would have been great to convert these offices into housing units, it is not so easy in practice and the challenges are well documented by now. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/5/12/5-reasons-why-office-to-… https://www.naiop.org/research-and-publications/magazine/2022/winter-2… https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/vacant-offices-housing-conversi…

https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.youtube.com/@strongtowns/videos

Related site that has a lot of useful information about what good urban planning looks like. https://www.strongtowns.org