Peaceful quietness is so overrated by US and northern Europe. It feels creepy and dead to me, a liminal space.
Besides, modern insulation does wonders for blocking noise if that bothers you, not to mention the savings on your energy bill.
I want my streets to feel alive!
I get that it is low density, but not that low, and there is some money to spend in such areas. They would do good business.
I know it sounds insane, but no, in many places, this is not possible.
My city, Austin, eliminated mandatory minimum parking in 2023, and was at the time the largest US city to do so https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/02/austin-minimum-parki...
I know of at least one business in my neighborhood that died due to these rules. They needed to expand to make the business work, but doing so would require that they buy even more land, in a fairly dense neighborhood, and turn it into parking.
In theory this ensures that any one business doesn't put undue strain on the local supply of parking spaces, but in reality I think it creates a sort of feedback loop that hollows out walkable downtowns/village centers, in favor of sprawl, where a car is required for 100% of trips (which in turn further increases demand for parking).
New developments = You buy your land plot, you don't inherit it
Restaurant or small shop = Very small profits
Restaurant or small shop outside city centre = Even smaller profits
Very small profits = Not a good investment of time or money to build restaurant or small shop in suburbia
Compared to:
Inherit restaurant in European town = No rent or interest to pay
Inherit restaurant in European town = No cost to build restaurant
Inherit restaurant in European town = Mortgage the building to borrow money for reforms and investments.
> They would do good business.
Then why aren't you opening restaurants and small shops?
The landlords who own the urban real estate correctly deduce that allowing more to be built would lower rents. They then convince suburban homeowners to go in with them on preventing that from happening, even though it's not really in the homeowners' interest, because rezoning would reduce the value of housing (i.e. price per square foot) but increase the value of land because you could build more housing on it. The urban landlords are the only losers there, because they have a high ratio of housing to land, so they want the housing to be expensive rather than the land. The ordinary suburban homeowners, by contrast, have a high ratio of land to housing, so they benefit from making the land worth more, i.e. allowing more to be built on it, but are bamboozled into wanting the price of housing to be high and therefore oppose urbanization.
You also get a lot of rubbish arguments about "induced demand" which try to imply that building housing would raise prices, when what it actually does is raise prices in the area immediately surrounding the new development (because people like new developments) while making it more affordable in all of the places they're moving from. Which is then used as an excuse not to do it, even though it improves affordability on net while creating more of the areas people actually want.
Something similar happens with commercial space. The landlords want it to be scarce. The argument used in that case will be something like "businesses will buy up houses to build Starbucks" or "it will make traffic worse" as if they wouldn't happily give you a Starbucks and a dozen new housing units on that piece of land if you'd let them, and as if traffic gets worse instead of better when people are closer to things and therefore drive fewer miles. But again it's really the landlords with the limited land that is zoned for those things trying to keep anyone else from getting any, and the other arguments are just the kayfabe because "we want rents to be high" is unsympathetic.
I don't get it either.
A developer buys 10 hectares of land and wants to max out the returns, so they pack it full of houses. Another developer buys the adjacent 20 hectares and follows the same strategy. Rinse and repeat. Purely market driven housing development orients towards developer profit, not long term quality of life of the neighborhoods being constructed.
It sounds more like “this is the way you do it” momentum.
Shops do better when clustered together. People combine trips and so if they need to go one place for any reason that will often enough "drop in" to a different one.
All this is to say, in most cases a shop is worth less than a house on those developments even though a shop would get higher rent when it is rented!
Most american suburbanites completely disagree with this take. They want their street to be quite and devoid of people. I think this is largely because there is no recourse for anti social activity in the US. People who have spent a lot of time in cities start to notice that anti social activity doesnt really get stopped and many decide it would be better to just not be around outsiders who could annoy them so they enact exclusive zoning to minimize interaction with people they dont know.
Even in low income areas, seeing actual antisocial behavior is very rare. People simply have better things to do than to be problematic, especially those struggling to make ends meet. And they are smart enough not to shit where they eat, and generally band together to prevent bad apples from getting out of hand. They have families too.
Fine yes there are areas actually infested with gangs, addicts and the homeless, who do not have better things to do and are anti-social. But those are rare in the grand scheme.
I have been in most of the so-called dodgy areas in the Bay Area and SF. I was quite confused, it was rather nice! Just lower-middle class.
A lot of it is built up in people’s heads, and reinforced by media.
