Live free or die
The past holds wisdom for today, and we can make our communities beautiful and equitable
There is a sea-change happening in developing new communities in the States, but like the overused Gibson quote states, it isn’t evenly distributed.
This is a long tail situation, with the help of projects like Seaside and Celebration, Florida pointing the direction toward car-lite walkable urbanism. Championed by New Urbanists, many of these communities look back to a time before we decided to orient our communities around the car, instead of people. Over half of all Americans car trips are within 3 miles (a 30 minute walk), and a full 30% of trips made are within a 10 minute walk. Because we decided to segregate homes from retail and stores, we’ve reduced our freedom to access our daily needs to only a car.
Which isn’t freedom at all.
Alternatives
I get excited about communities like the Wheeler District in Oklahoma. A brownfield redevelopment of a former airport, the Wheeler District purposefully combines a wide mix of home types from apartments to single-family homes to live-work to retail. It’s compact enough that you can walk from one end to the other, and also buy daily needs on-site.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more interested and appreciative of New Urbanism. Not because I’m full Trad are wish for the RETVRN, but because there’s hundreds of years of knowledge about communities which we ignored because the car was a shiny new thing. There of course can be Modernist communities, just like there’s possibilities to mine the vernacular.
A huge issue with New Urbanist developments is that they are often just sprawl-lite: they are greenfield developments far away from anything else requiring a car. I’m sensitive to this situation, and am ok with giving this situation a pass because we need to show developers and policymakers that this sort of development makes money, and people like it. Then we can use a policy ratchet to slowly make communities more walkable, and less car-dependent.
Policy proposals
So what might these policy proposals look like? Here are three first steps which would increase freedom, and allow us to build more.
NO PARKING MINIMUMS & PARKING MAXIMUMS
First of all we need to get rid of all off-street parking minimums. These minimums increase the cost of building units, locks in car-dependency, and makes the street wall and sidewalk dead. On the other end, we need parking maximums so we don’t lock in car dependency and builders don’t overbuild useless parking. There should be no off street parking allowed within a 10 minute walk of quality transit – bus, streetcar, or metro.
ABOLISH SINGLE FAMILY DETACHED REQUIREMENTS
If people still want to keep or build single family homes, great. But if you want duplexes, triplexes, and quads we should be able to build those throughout our neighborhoods. These missing middle typologies were prevalent throughout America until racist zoning came into play last century. It's OK to admit we made a mistake.
MIXED USE BY DEFAULT & DIVERSE HOME TYPES
All the famous streets in America - Bourbon, Broadway, Beacon - all have offices, restaurants, or stores on the ground floor with more up above or homes above. Mixed use should be the default city-wide. We need to allow a wider range of home types to match American's needs. We need: single room occupancies, co-housing, tiny homes, duplexes, fourplexes, and all the missing middle housing we used to build.
AS-OF-RIGHT ZONING
A big problem in many cities is that there isn’t an as of right permitting process, it’s all conditional. As-of-right is when a building can be built as long as the building use and the size, shape, and location of the building conforms to the zoning.
This is how it is in New York City, but not places such as San Francisco. Shifting to this process streamlines the process, everyone knows what is allowed on a given site, it remove an unnecessary veto point, and it removes a potential point of graft: supervisors or council members can’t extort donations for approvals.
For more policy proposals, check out If I was king of Zoning from Issue 2: Scorching.
If you are a policymaker, here’s a few places to start, AARP’s Re-Legalizing Middle Housing handbook:
Re-Legalizing Middle Housing: A Model Act and Guide to Statewide Legislation provides options for state and local governments to create and enact effective, customized, Middle Housing legislation that works.
AARP is the real deal, and isn’t just for older folks. We all (hopefully) get old. We all have complex family structures and needs. It is wild and frankly insane that our zoning and land use is centered around an out-dated idea of what family is, and reduces our individual freedom.
We can do better.