The topic is explored thouroughly on the 'Not Just Bikes' youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes which uses information from urban planning group 'Strong Towns' https://www.strongtowns.org/.
The sweet spot seems to be about 1920-1940.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Orle...
> consider college campuses and their central quads, which typically do not have automobiles even today. The ones people admire are the older ones, not the newer campuses, which tend to be functional but aesthetically mediocre
Neither source just simplistically says "it's the fault of cars", both are deeply thought-out perspectives on what is really going on. It's not just cars, it's certain engineering and bureaucratic decisions that were made around cars. It's also the scale of development, i.e. governments that are set up to work with large-scale developers and are too hard for small-scale developers to deal with, and the general trend toward all-at-once top-down development, and I could go on and on. StrongTowns has successfully diagnosed the entire systemic pattern. It's not just blame-the-cars.
Check out the actual resources, don't just assume they are only the simple thing the poster had to say to make any point at all.
Admiring the old brick styles of the ivy leagues is simple confirmation bias due to their academic prestige. There are plenty of beautiful Modernist buildings, it comes down to if the college is willingly to pay for it.
So that’s in a city, not even the maligned suburbs!
Because if so they're also responsible for housing prices being insane in the area
I do understand however what it is trying to say. My opinion is that housing development is vastly commoditized and builders wants tried and trusted designs at lowest prices and fastest speed. There is not much room for creativity and experimentation. I went to see houses build by Toll Brothers which are premium expensive builders and even their designs were regular with few bells and whistles only to show off. Lower end market basically just follows the template. This is extremely disappointing because house construction is something that lasts for so long.
I chatted with Chuck Marohn (founder and face of Strong Towns) once at an event a couple years ago, and they're quite aware that they get a lot of traffic from HN.
As others point out, Americans like and want to transport themselves by car. Let's accept this, work with it, and build around it instead of lusting after a minority defined Utopia.
I tried to find the tweet, but it was succinctly put ~"it's said people in Los Angeles love their cars, but people in LA have no choice but to own a car, it's not love, it is necessity".
In every city that has made a concerted effort to accommodate all modes of transport, driving as a percentage has gone down. "build it and they will come" is better suited to transport than it ever was to SaaS.
It is easy to conclude that people don't "want" to drive.
Apparently a whole lot of Americans _don't_ want to transport themselves by car.
It's almost a tautology to say that if you want to have a particular kind of nice neighborhood you'll have to include those uses in your planning.
I think that most people want to be able to get from A to B in comfort, and are not necessarily married to one particular mode of transport.
If the only way to get anywhere is by car, then of course people want to transport themselves by car. If you offer other competitive options, people will sometimes take those options instead.
I think the minority are questioning the strangeness of this supposition. Least of all because the government has a hand in it.
Neighbourhoods are where people live, yet built for and around cars?
It may be single variable but I think a reasonable person might want to question that at least on some way.
https://theconversation.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-cycl...
The group that talks about systemic racism is perpetuating it.
A good example of a car centric city that is very attractive is Seattle from ten years ago. The city had a strong sense of community because it was composed of intimate neighborhoods mostly with single family zoning rather than mid rise boxy apartment blocks everywhere, ample green space for its population, and roads with little traffic. It is because Seattle was so attractive that people and businesses flocked to it. Now those aspects are going away as density, anti car policies, and other issues are making the overall quality of life worse.
If you design cities to not have alternatives to cars then of course there's no substitute. All my day-to-day trips are currently faster using a bike+train, significantly less stressful, cheaper and also much healthier. People don't generally prefer specific modes of transportation, they just want to travel quickly and conveniently. That can be achieved with any mode of transportation, yet cars are the most expensive, most polluting, loudest, lowest density and most stressful.
I just took a look at a picture of Seattle from 2011 and it looks like half the area is dedicated to car parking with huge stroads everywhere. Having to take a car to go to the shops 300m away sounds like a total nightmare. And it's not even the suburbs! If those roads had little traffic on them then that was clearly just due to the population not having caught up. Once it did of course those roads weren't going to be enough. At that point you can either bulldoze more of the city for the car and still get awful traffic or provide better alternatives...
For reference this is the photo I found: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Downtown...
Very few American cities actually offers FAST point to point transit via automobiles. 50 years ago, it was probably realistic, but now automobile traffic in most American cities makes quick transportation anywhere unrealistic.
I for one simply don't want to pay the to own and maintain a car, preferring instead to rent one or purchase a ride (via taxi or rideshare etc) as needed.
I've never been to Seattle, but it looks like a medium-density city on the map.
Yes.
Now go look at Peter Cooper Village in NYC.[1]
"The complex is designed as two large "superblocks", independent of the grid system that characterizes the majority of Manhattan below 155th Street.It consists of two large parks, one for each part of the complex, juxtaposed with modern red brick apartment towers."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_Town%E2%80%93Peter_...
But I suspect a huge part of it is visiting Europe or Asia as a tourist and enjoying being without a car.
But they didn’t actually live there.
I grew up in LA suburbs. We had to drive to do anything: shop, go to the movies, visit friends. When I finally moved out of the home I grew up in, I moved to Hollywood, the neighborhood, which is very walkable and has lots of good public transit. Later I moved to San Francisco, and at this juncture I'm in a neighborhood in Oakland built up mostly in the 1910s-1930s. Not nearly as walk friendly as my old SF and LA neighborhoods, but there are still good groceries, restaurants, and bars within a 5-15 minute walk. And it's an aesthetically beautiful mix of victorian, craftsman, and spanish-style architecture for the most part, in gently rolling hills surrounding a beautiful tidal estuary which reflects the downtown high-rises.
When I visit my family in the suburbs, it feels really weird and isolating.
Adult hood in America is coming to terms with the fact that I'll never live to see this cleaned up version of the USA everyone is dreaming about so instead I'm scooping my single family home and getting the hell out of dodge.
Do not get me wrong here, I do think the many police boxes and the fact that you can greet and recognise the face of your local officers on your way home after work at night helps to form a sense of community. But my suspicion is that the truth lies more in the fact that Japan has a culture where people “police” themselves to an almost ridiculous degree in terms of all forms of behaviour. There are of course massive downsides to this kind of social pressure (especially on the level of individuals), but that would be a subject deserving an article in its own right.
Technically, according to what I've read, they did do something. They recorded it.
Are you sure? I’ve never had that impression across years of transit, bus and rail, in Pittsburgh and Boston.
I think the biggest barrier is a chicken and egg problem: it’s hard to motivate transit expansion without dense housing and it’s hard to motivate denser housing except along existing transit corridors
It's not the cost, it's the availability. I'm currently in the process of a home renovation. If you want a master craftsman to build you say, kitchen cabinets, you may have to wait years for them to be available.
Or you can go to the store and buy custom built cabinets from a factory and have them in a few weeks.
It's the same with the outside of the house. You can build a generic outside with supplies from Home Depot, or if you're really fancy the contractor's supply depot, or wait years for a master to do a custom job for you.
The standard of living has gone up IMHO bc of increased efficiency in the face of dwindling resources. We don’t all live in stone mansions with servants, but a nice apartment built to code as cheaply as possible with electricity, AC and a roomba is by some measures a better life than anyone on the planet had 100 years ago. As a builder, you make more money too.
Also, there is still a price ceiling. If they charge too much, people will choose the cheaper alternatives even if they aren't as good.
100 * £10 > 50 * £19
It plays into the other really: you have to multiply your fee by more than the reduction in volume to make more money; if you break even on the trade, in a way that's great, less work same money, but now you're not practicing.
So there's a trade-off there, and for it to be obviously worth it, there really has to be a significantly outsized boost to fee compared to reduction in number of people prepared to pay it, that just isn't going to happen unless you had it really wrong to begin with.
(Maybe if you're already on the very high designer end you can suddenly go 10x or more as a result of being 'discovered' or going 'viral'? But not lower on the ladder, like the difference between DIY shop 'it works' vs. bespoke; carpenter vs. joiner; as discussed above.)
Crown molding and things went out WAY before any of these supply chain issues you've brought up from the last 1-2 years.
The cost of trim wood is exponentially more than it was 50 years ago, and on top of that you cant find anyone who knows how to make custom ornamented trim.
Plus
I don’t buy this at all. There are many tracts of suburban (USA) houses where every house looks consistent and similar, with subtle differences in coloration being the main changes. And they do NOT look aesthetically pleasing.
I have a different theory. Go look at an old building and note the intricate details on trim, along windowsills, above doors, under roofs. Look at old bridges, lampposts, street signs or skyscrapers.
Humans used to build things with passion, and the builder’s pride shows in the result. Even low cost buildings like brownstones in the cities have these details; they give the buildings personality.
My theory is modern construction, since it is often prefab or cookie cutter parts, lacks these human touches, and we subconsciously sense it when we think they don’t look “nice”.
I think at the end of the day these folks just detest suburbs and can find a flaw about them no matter what aspect they look at.
I really like your observation about craftsmanship. I think modern minimalism is a nice cop-out for cheapening out on details and mass producing the same things.
I mean, I understand the need to have smaller lots. But, if you're going to have a small 3K sq ft lot then you need to limit the width of the house to allow at least 20' on each side and raise the height of the house to two stories, if it's more than 800 sq ft.
Another big reason for ugliness is the extremely shallow and underdefined rooflines typical of ranch house style. You need to have steep well defined rooflines that give the house shape. And add a small stone tower off to the side to make it look even better.
Another big problem is the 2 or 3 car garages which always have to be immediately infront of the house which makes it look like you'r coming home to a parking garage and not a home. Put the garage in the back, where it belongs and have a 6' wide small driveway with nicely paved bricks.
Another even bigger problem is the propensity of people to put down pavement EVERYWHERE. the driveways are insanely big. the streets are waaay to wide. and then if that's not enough, they fill up the backyard with pavement too. If you take an arial shot, you'll notice almost half the lot is filled up with pavement: talk about ugly.
And, there's no trees. Why? it doesn't cost much to put down some trees. it makes the neighborhood so much more beautiful and even decreases the temperatures in the summer. you could even make them fruit trees so people can get free food.
These are clearly conservative preferences, not objective truths.
Like social conservatism, there are valuable learnings embodied (steep roofs shed water -- more important in some climates than others), but there is also a lot of fearful aversion to the unfamiliar (i.e. anything not traditional western European).
> And add a small stone tower off to the side to make it look even better.
I would never want to live in a structure that pretends to be a castle. Or, more generously, one that is a vague echo of a style that once served a purpose.
Traditional Chinese housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siheyuan#/media/File:Siheyuan_...
Traditional Japanese housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukiya-zukuri#/media/File:Shoi...
A style of traditional African housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Africa#/media/... (and many more are like it)
Slanted roofs are super common throughout the world and history.
That's a valid aesthetic choice, but I personally enjoy such callbacks to the past. Based on aesthetics alone, I'd love to live in a place like this: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/6a/9f/3e/6a9f3e7d4304c5f463ddf8c2b... (but only if they were rare, it wouldn't be nearly as fun if everyone had houses like that)
Anyway - there is growing evidence of “objective truths” in architecture and design. Namely work tracking things like heart rate, eye movement, etc. Findings are indicating that asymmetrical houses or imposing skyscrapers are actually stressful to humans. The fist being stressful because you naturally look for symmetry (notice how you see faces in certain things?) and most “modern” architecture was created by people who lived through World War 1 and 2 and created houses that were asymmetrical and in some cases even shaped like bunkers if you are inclined to spot it. Skyscrapers create a disconnect not just from their imposing presence (will this fall on me??) but they’re also bad because they remove the human presence from the street and create sterile environments.
Anywhere you look the most desirable neighborhoods and the places where everybody takes pictures of and travel to feature “conservative” housing styles that were almost universally adapted from local building materials and for local weather patterns (white building in the Mediterranean or a-frame cabins) and naturally attract people.
When you search for a city like Amsterdam you get pictures of the beautiful homes on the canals. Nobody travels there for the ghastly glass modern architecture which certainly has never been described as quaint.
We already know how to build homes and walkable towns and neighborhoods. Unfortunately that doesn’t stroke the ego of useless academic architects who are trying to create more and more self-serving, disfigured structures so we get houses that just look ridiculous. Does a car live here or a person? I can’t tell.
And if you’re still confused go look at the Soviet style bunker apartments that look like crap or Boston City Hall building which surprisingly doesn’t cause people to commit suicide on the spot on account of its absolutely hellish design.
- Detached no matter the cost - so close they may as well be terraced, but they'll be detached 'gah-damnit'!
- Garage in front. I.. ok. Practical I suppose. Bloody ugly.
- Fake shutters!! I'm mentioning it last but it bugs me the most. At least have them wide enough that they look like they might be usable. But no, inch-wide 'shutters' on a six-foot window, why not.
The difference between "so close" and "terraced" is hearing your neighbors fucking at night. No thanks.
Agree with you about the shutters, though...
I find it rather curious waste of space, especially in ~50/60m2 apartments. Why do you need more than toilet and shower? I suppose that parallelized pooping and/or showering can be useful in rare occasions, but usually doing it serially works well enough and overall seems like an exceedingly poor trade-off. But the Brits seem to love 'em shrug.
Crossing borders can also be fun; with some crossings you can see an immediate and marked difference in building style; the Dutch/Belgian border is like that for example.
New Zealand houses are just horrible, full stop. Don't know how they managed to get so far behind on the rest of the Western world with that.
Not sure what I'm trying to say with this comment; don't really have a specific point as such. I just find it interesting that different countries have such different approaches to building and arranging houses, even though they're relatively similar in culture, climate, etc.
On the other hand, you can go overboard with rooflines and end up with McMansion monstrosities: [1].
1: https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149948821221/mcmansions-101-r...
A 3,000 sq ft lot is 54' on a side, if square. Your suggested 20' wide perimeter would leave a 14'×14' postage stamp, or 196 sq ft. That was about the size of my freshman dorm.
> and raise the height of the house to two stories, if it's more than 800 sq ft.
There's no second story — you've got no room for the stairwell!
It would cost even less to leave some on the site, but it seems that builders prefer to scrape all the topsoil off.
1. People (in the US at least) overall consistently choose more land over living somewhere walkable. In a lot of places, the marginal cost of more land is near zero; and
2. The dirty secret of car dependency is that most people (in the US) like being car dependent. In all but the densest largest cities, private vehicles are so much more convenient. Even in Manhattan there are a nontrivial number of people who cling to their cars.
When a lot of people say they want to live somewhere walkable what they really mean is they want their same 4000 square foot house on half to one acre of land next to somewhere walkable.
Walkability is predicated on high land costs so obviously that doesn't scale.
We recently moved from city center to a blue-collar suburb and it is notable to me how much of a car aficionado culture there is here! A lot of my neighbors are into repairing and working on old (and new!) cars. They LOVE their cars and go to car meetups.
It amuses me sometimes on here when people talk about how every car on the road is going to be self-driving soon and I think of my neighbors... they will ride around in a self-driving car when hell freezes over. One of my more redneck neighbors actually told me he enjoys brake-checking and cutting off the self-driving test vehicles he sees on the road. Which... I was kind of horrified but maybe that's good for the car's AI to learn. :-/
But no one, no one loves the unavoidable traffic jams. So the thing about clinging to their cars is sort-of two faced.
Yeah this pretty much. In some other countries, it's really expensive to own a large piece of land somewhere remote, so only the Uber-rich can live in those sorts of settings.
Also, in the US it's very difficult to build a house out of solid wood like my house from 40s. New materials might not look as nice but are less wasteful, more energie efficient and faster to build with.
Finally, people do come to new neighborhoods, e.g. in Portland the newish neighborhoods like Pearl District are successful in the sense that they are new, high density and mixed shopping/dining/living. Not for low income though.
From the pov where people actually exist, it's got 13' ceilings, plantation shutters, induction cooktop, tesla power wall, gigabit symmetric connection to the goddammit internet, dedicated home office with bookshelves and brick facade, and a monstrous 5 ton air conditioner to keep it all comfy. Oh and the sprinkler system is on an automatic timer so you don't have to even think about how shitty a typical American lawn is. You pay guys to do that for you.
Living in American suburbia is an unmitigated paradise if you can get over the principled outrage of how bland it all is in aggregate. The uniform nature of the developments is the reason why we can have nice things like fiber to homes. It makes economics of infrastructure way more acceptable and predictable.
You think if the outside would actually offer something instead of depressing scenery: stores and cafes within walking distance, parks and playgrounds, would people prefer to exist outside a lot more?
I could not exist at all in those suburbs. A cafe, various stores, and a supermarket within a 5 minute walking distance is as integral to my lifestyle as owning a fridge. Also having some forest around to go for walks is nice. The only thing walking for 10 minutes in an American suburb will get you is probably more suburb. If you're lucky a McDonalds and 20 acres of concrete parking lot will provide a change of scenery.
We are in the middle of a remodel and involving an interior designer as early in the process as the architect resulted in a much different layout and floor plan than if we only worked with an architect.
The architect helped us make sure the house was structurally sound and the interior designer helped us make sure suited our needs.
For a fee, of course (which speaks to your overall point).
I recently told a builder I wanted simple white cabinets. That would be "an upgrade to a level 3 cabinet" (whatever that means) because white is popular right now. So if I want faux wood it's included. If I want that wood painted white, we have to change the entire kitchen and add $10K. I politely left the meeting at that point.
It's my opinion that the increased availability of such robust interior living has lessened the demand for many local services or public goods, leading to inevitable underinvestment (don't fund libraries! no one* uses them anyway) or otherwise lacking places (why add grills in the park if everyone* has their own patio with a grill anyway), creating further incentive to retreat into the perfect home with everything one can need, rinse and repeat.
I assure you, they are not. Some materials left to the buyer's choice may be upgraded to something actually deluxe, but anything and everything else will be kept to the cheapest "builder-grade" materials that are the bare minimum fit for purpose, assembled in the quickest and cheapest way possible.
That doesn't sound like a good objective measure of what is a "nice" neighborhood -- I visit a lot of places as a tourist that I wouldn't want to live in. We have the neighborhoods we have because people are choosing to live in them.
Some things, like a central car free housing core with cars relegated to the outside edges of the neighborhood sounds attractive on paper (and for some people in real life too), but when you picture yourself schlepping groceries 2 blocks to your house, or walking the baby out in the rain to the car to take her to the doctor, it's less attractive for living, at least to those accustomed to living in the American car culture.
But really, it comes down to the bottom line -- people prefer to pay less than to pay more. If houses in a cookie cutter boring neighborhood cost 10% less than the ones in a planned neighborhood that's objectively nicer, it's going to be a lot harder to sell those expensive homes. So the developer's not going to build them in the first place.
Minor point, planned neighborhoods are at best a local maxima but I’ve never seen one that wasn’t sterile and bland. Irvine ca is a soulless sterile place with gobs of early 2000’s office park style landscaping all over the residential areas, and that’s even true for the just built areas. The new dev areas are all continued to be “master planned” and they are just sad. But hey, it’s family friendly!
> It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.
> Architects themselves admit more and more freely that they really like living in old buildings more than new ones. The non-art-loving public at large, instead of being grateful to architects for what they do, regards the onset of modern buildings and modern cities everywhere as an inevitable, rather sad piece of the larger fact that the world is going to the dogs.
A lot of it is also about uniqueness. The author is rightly awed by pre-war architecture in Europe when he travels, but tourists worldwide are similarly fascinated by glass skyscrapers in New York.
Talking at the neighborhood level, houses constructed today are meant to be more transient vs those from the last century. Builders (whether a property developer or individual resident) will consider sale and resale value first and foremost before anything else. A "unique" house will have far less buyer interest.
There are two pieces of information that I struggle to integrate into this model and would be interested in how others reconcile:
1) US census data suggests (surprisingly!) that the % of residents moving each year has declined significantly since 1990, and before that was about the same back to the first data collected in the mid 40s (though with some collection gaps) [1]
2) Anecdata: most of the new builds I see around me (Boston MSA) are luxury apartment buildings or way out in the suburbs. The former aren't quaint, but are decidedly custom architecture. The latter, I stereotype as "folks settling down in the suburbs". Maybe McMansions, but I wouldn't expect transient. This one might just be a sampling error on my part.
[1]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-189...
Our "main" street is half a kilometre away and has shopping, bookstores, restaurants. All small businesses.
Several transit routes run by the edges of the neighbourhood.
Everybody walks. Everybody used to walk to work. Streets are almost all one way.
It's cars. It's always cars that make neighbourhoods terrible.
The presence of cars does not mean it was built for cars. The most important difference between pre-war and post-war neighborhoods is that one was built FOR cars
> One common explanation for the decline of urban and neighborhood beauty is the rise of the automobile, which makes it harder to develop such places. Surely cars and traffic can ruin many an attractive scene. Still, this is not even close to a full answer. For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars.
The problem with cars isn't how they look, it's how they lead to communities where people don't share space, can't walk from place to place, encapsulate once open spaces, and separate everyone. Plus they pollute and kill people. In cities built before cars, like Paris, people share space and interact. You can walk to the produce vendor, tailor, etc without parking in giant lots around box stores.
Airplanes repeat the pattern on a national scale.
What do you mean? The person ahead of me on airplanes shares my lap space on the regular.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10109987/Fiston-Ngo...
I’m the CEO of Culdesac. Our vision is to build the first car-free city in the US, starting with the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US. That’s Culdesac Tempe, a 1000-resident neighborhood that is under construction now. Residents move in next year.
Join our waitlist at culdesac.com. If you want to visit in the meantime, drop me a note. We have something exciting happening on site next month that is open to the public.
Hiring-wise, we're hiring in Tempe or remote. Dm me on socials if you can’t find something. https://www.culdesac.com/jobs
Here's our insta, which has lots of construction updates https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac
Here's our tik tok https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac
Here's our twitter https://www.twitter.com/culdesac
Here's my twitter where I also talk a lot about ebikes https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson
Here's our intro article https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219...
Here's a longer piece on us https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/busi...
I'd much rather read a substantive comment about how your neighborhood is going to solve the challenges of being car-free, how it's going to interface with the rest of Tempe, etc. Directly on here, not just a link to your website and definitely not via a Medium or AMP link. A couple of links for further reading would be plenty.
What if I like my car, and the ability to easily travel outside the city limits that comes along with it?
I used to love walking around the area in Palo Alto around University Ave, on the residential side of Middlefield. Many of those buildings are new.
When I could buy, and then build, a house in Massachusetts, I chose recently-built, upscale neighborhoods. The difference, compared to most neighborhoods, is that the houses are more expensive, and built to a higher quality. (I also favored neighborhoods with restaurants in walking distance. This is possible, even in suburbia.)
I suspect that the older neighborhoods the article favors are just the upscale ones. The cheaper neighborhoods built centuries ago didn't last.
Agree about the Palo Alto observation, when I visit my in-laws down there I enjoy just walking around the old PA neighborhoods. It's like a free luxury house and garden tour. Total outlier nationally and probably globally, though, to be honest.
And while there are many aspects of modern interior design that I appreciate, floorplans tend to be universally terrible for anything designed since then as well. I have yet to walk into a (non-custom) home that was built since the year 2000 that I would ever want to live in.
Or, you can buy a new 2500 sqft home that has the same, plus a walk in closet in the master.
Heck I've seen plenty of 3000sqft 3 bedroom homes!
It is insane. Sure these new floor plans have 2 dining rooms, a breakfast nook, a living room, and a family room, but that is also monumentally stupid.
I've talked to new home builders and they have said that due to the demand of immigrant buyers for more bedrooms, they are now starting to make some 4+ bedroom houses at 3500sqft and above. Like... what? If you want a 5 bedroom house from the 70s you'll be out less than 2500 sqft, and that will be a very generous and spacious house.
I just don't get it. Modern floor plans are asinine. Builders will reply "Well it is what buyers want", sure, but your pool of surveyed buyers is limited to people who can afford a 1.5 million dollar 4 bedroom house[1]!
I do sort of get it, because land is such a huge portion of the overall house price, builders are basically stuck making high end "luxury" housing (never mind that the quality is very far from luxury) at high prices. If a plot of land costs $500k+, no way is anything resembling reasonable housing going to be built.
Oh this also contributes to why people are having less kids. If an extra bedroom costs $200k or so, of course no one is going to have more than 1 baby.
Disclaimer: Above rant is only applicable to large coastal cities.
[1] I've talked to people in this pool, a majority of them are also wondering why the hell they are forced to purchase a house with 2 dining rooms.
We also have a decent yard that the kids actually use, and the exteriors aren't ugly.
I'll be doing a major remodel to address this among other issues. But yea if we had a game room or a loft or something similar it would be a lot better.
The appraisal came in with the lot being 600k and the home itself is only 350k.
Half an acre though.
In my country, the typical old house or flat has several tiny bedrooms stacked next to each other, offering little privacy. Oversized common areas are to be expected. Tiny bathrooms where baths were replaced with small showers, and claustrophobic kitchens that double down as dining rooms are common.
However, my biggest pet peeve is orientation. Apparently, suburban architects didn't know how to use a compass until a few years ago. As a result, rooms often face south, which makes working from home in the summer nearly unbearable.
> I can visit many European cities and find lovely parts of town to walk through
1. Cars. They have ruined walkable neighborhoods, and in the US there are artificial walkable shopping centers, but you have to drive ther anyway. Everything being spaced out affects the architecture/landscape.
2. Building technology and ethos. It seems to me modern buildings are not built to last, and this is on purpose. Of course this is a huge factor! Old villages around the world always had many buildings that were made to last. This automatically means you will think deeply on its aesthetics, its symbolism, etc. Nowadays it's just about getting it done, and having an indoor space, with the outside looking as plain as possible for buidling costs and speed. I really wish building tech would also explore extremely durable constructions at smaller scales for towns and such. This would force people to think seriously about outside look and feel.
The city isn't walkable at all—and it's on average 1 hour from my office in Santa Monica—but the open spaces between houses, the lack of terraforming abominations you see in other hilly developments in LA, and the white ranch motif make the neighborhood "nice" to me.
Much of what I personally find "not nice" about modern neighborhoods is the clumsy imposition of our collective human needs—architectural, infrastructural—on the land itself.
Residents and communities then, can then choose something that work for their family and for their communities. Architecture comes alive, and lives and grows with the residents.
Edit: I just mean the physical environment, not political / social / economic
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> About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin's next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn't stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.
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> "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people," Yeltsin wrote. "That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it."
https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/amp/When-Bor...
How does a policymaker argue to spend $X more on a prettier building? That would just come off sounding too subjective to justify today. Now we will no doubt see psychological studies telling us obvious truths about humanity - that living in nice places feels good actually. The paper will say things like "pretty buildings improve quality of life by 23% and productivity by 6%". But unlike subjective opinion, a scientific paper is a defensible piece of evidence so we need the study to justify building a pretty neighborhood in a modern context.
This clinical economic view of the world is pervasive today so nothing can be justified outside of a utilitarian lens.
>For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars.
The boulevards and avenues of Paris were built by the government as infrastructure improvements and became known for their use as long parks, effectively; yes, they were built to be scenic, and the fact that they're wide enough for car traffic is a nice side effect. Modern automotive architecture, though, goes further; you need parking lots or garages, and large signage visible from the road. Developers don't really care that a roadside commercial development looks pretty; people are going to drive to Target all the same. And, of course, let's not forget that Paris wants to limit automobile traffic as much as possible.
> Diamond Head may also contain a partial answer to the larger mystery. Perhaps what modern neighborhoods are lacking is coordination...
If we're using Diamond Head as our benchmark, it looks like what most modern neighborhoods are lacking is millionaires, not coordination. Your average suburban development is going to be quite tightly coordinated: built by a single builder out of a book of facades, floorplans, and materials.
> These days, most homeowners decide to “go it alone.”
Who is "most," here? I don't think most homeowners are building custom homes; heck, a quick source I found shows that only 13% of home buyers in 2020 bought new construction[0].
The only thing I agree with here is that homes are designed around the interior first. Look at any suburban sprawl house, and you'll see a hideous mishmash of materials, window shapes and sizes, and rooflines--especially when you go past the front of the house and start looking at the parts you can't see from the street.
[0] https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/home-buying-statistics
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/6/3/cognitive-comfo...
https://www.villagehomesdavis.org/home
Widely viewed as an improvement over plain tract suburbia but not copied anywhere that I'm aware of although cohousing does the same sort of thing on steroids. Reason might be that buyers have selfish insular motives initially and don't see the benefits of community.
All those old nice neighborhoods were also built by and for the wealthy. The lower classes lived in squalid tenements and slums that are now mostly gone.
Regulation is not preventing beautiful homes. There are three things probably most detracting from neighborhood beauty in America are: a lack of regulations, capitalism and materialism.
All the places he lists as beautiful, especially in Europe have some of the most regulations regarding what you can build. A community design review, where a council literally has input upon the visual design of your building is almost unheard of in America but is common in European countries. The closest you get in America is some CCNRs saying you can't have a metal roof or the like. Parts of Switzerland literally require you to build a frame which represents the shape of the house you want to build so community members can walk by for some weeks and see how it affects the neighborhood skyline.
Capitalism has probably had the biggest impact. The reason older neighborhoods are beautiful because they were built at a time when practicing a craft was hugely important to a profession. You built those houses with all the mil-work and trim because that's just how it was done. Yes, builders were seeking to turn a profit but in many professions, a kind of cultural ethic prevented raw profiteering. That changed after the war. Post-war programs and an economic boom meant that you could start a business around moving shear volumes of houses. These builders hired people who weren't trained to think a porch without corbels was a sin. It's not just they didn't have the know-how. It's that they didn't think it was important or essential the way an old-school builder might. Modern American neighborhoods are what you get when profit is maximized and community input is minimized.
What people wanted in a house changed as well. The desire for material comforts like multiple bathrooms with indoor plumbing, loads of electrical equipment, forced air systems and more caused a good deal of the cost of the house to shift into equipment rather than aesthetic. The standards of home construction have gone way up too. From structural elements like the foundation to the quality of insulation to weather tightness.
Edit: BTW, I'm not saying one way or the other is the better way to do it. But if you want beauty, that requires a couple things: community review to increase coordination and enforced aesthetic quality. (These used to come from cultural sensibilities and now usually only are the product of regulation, HOA, CCNRs, ordinance, etc.) Both of these things requires the market to sell something people don't necessarily want to pay for.
I can’t tell you what’s more revolting to me—the idea of a bunch of neighborhood busybodies having that amount of power, or the fact the busybodies themselves are shameless enough to participate in this nonsense.
You know what neighborhood I want to live in? A neighborhood as far away as possible from those types of busybodies. Maybe somewhere across a vast ocean on the other side of the world, where people have come up with handy expressions like “it’s a free country” and “mind your own business” that you can use if some obnoxious busybody shows up to complain that they don’t like the architecture of your house.
> BTW, I'm not saying one way or the other is the better way to do it.
Just saying, some people do these things for different reasons.
When you are very wealthy you can have both but for those without that much money I don't blame anyone for choosing functionality over the aesthetics of a neighborhood. It seems rather insane to me to insist that your neighbor must increase their budget 20 or 40 percent (perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars) just so your house can be a couple percentage points more desirable.
This is going to be controversial, but in the west, the ultimate cause of the decline in objective beauty is a rejection of Christianity, which, for millenia in the west, has insisted that there is such a thing as objective beauty.
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/ugly-as-sin
I'd also recommend "The Abolition of Man" by CS Lewis (not explicitly christian, but Lewis was obviously extremely devout and a major apologist)
It remains to be seen if the west will develop a sense of objective beauty without a shared moral system.
Just to play Devil's advocate, if that theory held up you'd expect there to be a correlation between how religious people in a given area are and how much they value architecture.
Yet, for example, the Deep South in the USA is not known for it's architecture, whereas parts of continental Europe are (even today).
If we look at more catholic countries in the Americas, the middle class neighborhoods do look nicer in my opinion.
Edit: I should specify I don't believe this is specific to catholicism. Other religions also embrace beauty, like Islam and Hinduism. Protestantism by and large rejects the idea that material goods can embrace God, in their rejection of icons for examplr
Oh, dear Dog.
That's a cliched reframing of decades of social change. Which is the deeper rejection of the Almighty? Strip malls or McMansions? Skyscrapers or Tiny Homes?
If you start with a narrative, and squint hard enough, anything can be about Relativism. It usually isn't though.
Further, many people have had and have objective theories of aesthetics, while not being religious.
Finally, many beautiful buildings from the Renaissance era were inspired by classic Rome and Greece. The ultimate cause of that gain in objective beauty was a rejection of Christianity and an embrace of pagan learning and ideals - that's a trollish way of putting it, but at any rate the delineation between religious and secular aesthetics is not so clear as a partisan might hope.
Many of the most intellectually interesting people I know have revived their interest in religion, especially Christianity. There is no excuse for approaching the matter simplistically.
They only seem that way to you because their morality isn't identical to yours (though they are genealogically related)
