How Zoning Laws Are Holding Back America's Cities
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- Опубліковано 11 вер 2018
- Early city planners dreamt up elaborate ideas for America’s cities. But in their dreaming, they had forgotten the people their plans were drawn for.
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Professor Sandy Ikeda explains how city plans of the past have wreaked havoc on American streets, and how journalist Jane Jacobs stood up to city planners to give us a modest, people-centric approach to city design.
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There's a direct correlation between zoning law, property price, property tax, homelessness, opioid crisis and housing crisis.
You also forgot racial segregation, Climate crisis, and large retail monopolies
@@loljewlol explain
@@saltymonke3682 Single family housing is more expensive than the average house price and more easiler to discriminate towards Poc (there're article that more detials). With single housing being more far away from the finical district and downtown, and suburbs being less density than the average urban population, more people need to use personal cars to get to work. And the average distance are either 30-90 kilometers. So you have 10 of thousands of people, in every US cities, driving to work, polluting the area with large volumn of CO2. The US is the third highest pollutor on the planet but they're the highest per capita. Large retail monopolies like Target, Walmart, and supermarkets are usually located around suburbs neighborhoods and will have large parking lots. Your average mom-and-dad gourcy market required a mixed-use development (which are illegal in large part of the US) and walkable street, which isn't feasible in suburbs.
@@loljewlol your POC discrimination part doesn't make sense.
and no, they don't monopolize.
@@saltymonke3682 are you fucking deleting all the sources i posted?
"The more people walk on a street the more interesting a street becomes"
living in SF and I never knew the single-family zoning was so widespread here...
sure, most houses are single family, but purposely zoned this way? Wow
ua-cam.com/video/qY43Rwo7DnA/v-deo.html
It's every U.S city and Canadian city (Canada at a lower scale but still a lot)
Being from Massachusetts San Francisco has always kinda fascinated me. They have the same style of triple decker housing we have in mass but your triple deckers are fancy looking and well kept while ours are rundown and pretty much make up the entire bottom end of our real estate market. I already kinda figured they were single family’s in sf (full house lol) while a New England triple decker could have anywhere from 3 to 12 families (sometimes even more on the rare occasion) but now I can at least take some solace in the fact that our uglier version of triple deckers are actually much more functional toward providing a livable city
I think in the past 20-30 years, in-law suites have been legalized (if built to standard), so there is a fair bit of single homes having multiple seperate families in them.
@@tofuyam7361 That's actually been legalized only in the last 3-5 years around the Bay Area and then in all of California more recently. Ironically, I think only a few dozens new in-law units (ADUs) have actually been built (80+) in all of SF since they have become legal. Practically all the in-law units you see are very very old, and predate the the in-law unit ban and single family-only zoning.
Yeah, our zoning is crazy. Something needs to be done.
Such a myth that America is the land of the free! It’s one of the most tightly regulated places in the world, and these awful zoning rules (together with ridiculous government subsidized highways carving through cities, which put streetcars out of business) is a great example.
We cant put a shed house in our side backyard. On land that we "own". Ridiculous
@@eduardo42897 Blame The HOA (Home Owners Associatio) they are the cancers of home ownership.
@@eduardo42897 and you can’t own livestock while at the same time you can possess exotic animals inside your home.
I mean, land of the free refers to political and religious freedoms: if you want to complain about zoning, sure, but america is pretty good on those fronts.
that's not how the phrase "land of the free" is widely used@@elideaver ;
also, with enough single-family houses comes the significant loss of farmland, do you want to rely on a foreign country to provide food?
Auto and oil companies greatly benefit from single family zoning where people must have cars.
I'd actually argue that they *think* they benefit from it, but that the reality is that the economy would just work so much more smoothly otherwise.
I think this is collective belief in a singular ideal manifesting itself.
@@hellomate639 Collective = Comrade.
@@michaelcap9550 Heh and in this case... the collectivists are the conservatives and conservative liberals, oddly enough.
"We know how society is supposed to function." Arrogance. My point of view is "take the libertarian position unless there's good justification or significant public good to be gained by not doing so."
@@hellomate639 conservatism is not collectvist or individualist, but *communitarian*
Don’t forget supermarkets too! These zoning laws prevent you from owning livestock in your residential property!
This is also why we're all stuck in traffic. I agree with another commenter, we should look to Japan. In Japan they also have small commercial spots throughout residential areas. Oftentimes they might have a dentist office on the bottom floor and the dentist lives above it on the second and third floor.
You are free to live in Japan ....or NYC....for that experience. Not everyone shares your view or wants to live jammed into a pack and stack environment.
brett b you can live in the suburbs or the country then sir but the problem is that CITIES, the places that are supposed to be “jam packed” mixed use environments aren’t truly like that at all anywhere in the us besides nyc. Cities (and most people) function better when they aren’t designed solely for the purpose of making car use mandatory.
@@brettb8825 Don't then. No-one is forcing you to. If you deregulate the market, and people want to live in conditions that you suggest, the market will provide that for them. People who don't want to live like that currently don't have that choice: regulations FORCE them to live in single use areas. You talk about freedom but it is you who is advocating against that.
brett b that’s why your cities are shitholes
@@brettb8825 I want to buy toilet paper, ah drive 30 minute to the nearest shop
You can thank Robert Moses for Nyc’s zoning issues.
Him AND Jane Jacobs. Robert Moses was great in implementing the big projects that were needed. Jacobs was great in filling the cracks left by the big development.
He is the reason long Island is car dependent suburb,.
@@archknight7278 Not to mention help contribute to the decline of NYC's subway network.
I feel like this is one of the major sources of most of our modern problems. When you forced people to drive to buy their goods, it became profitable to make massive warehouse box stores like Walmart. More roads had to be built. Roads had to be widened. The work experience for workers was greatly reduced by massive cooperations who neither knew their workers nor cared for their welfare.
Pollution increased. Depression increased. As the woman in this video said, Americans became isolated in their nuclear style families that were imposed upon them by zoning. Elderly were shipped off to nursing homes to die. Downtown died and with it, a great deal of economic and job security. Obesity rose sharply until heart attacks became the #1 cause of death...
In most ways life is better than it has ever been - but at the same time, we have an awful lot of problems because a comparatively small group of people in the government presumed to manipulate the population for the “greater good”.
Sad thing is, it is a choise they made and the whole premise of the American dream: a house in a suburb. I live in the Netherlands and ofcourse I complain also about things going wrong here. Luckily there is always someone to point out the good things ua-cam.com/video/ul_xzyCDT98/v-deo.html
Perhaps that's also partly why american supermarkets have higher portion sizes in products (except for the fact that there are many obese people, probably also due to having to drive everywhere), because if you have to drive every time you go grocery shopping, it's more convinient to buy in bulk, so you don't need to go so often. Or what do you think?
There needs to be a movement to counter the actions of the past 70-90 years of urban planning. The infrastructure from suburbs costs way too much and city's will bankrupt themselves trying to maintain it. Detroit will not be the only city that suffers from municiple bankruptcy.
It's bad for the environment removing natural habitats decreasing biodiversity, and removing wetlands that are able to handle flooding better. They make everyone poor as car costs continue to go up. Furthermore, company's like Walmart, Walgreens and Home Depot can cover the whole country because of the disconnect we have with our local businesses and their inability to maintain huge bigbox stores. Also, the amount of land we have from parking lots is equal to 1/3 the size of Delaware.
The happiest people in this country are cars. Cities have been built around them for decades. Now we need to build them around the passengers.
I'm all for it
A perfect case study in the inevitable failures of central planning regardless of good intentions
Perfect reason why suburbs should not get to decide zoning maps and should vote pro-development urbanist politicians.
It's depressing to see vast single story strip malls which require vast parking lots because there is no housing anywhere close. It's simply a waste of real estate, because of separate zoning of business and residential.
We don't have zoning laws here in the UK. Within a 2 minute walk of my front door there is 2 restaurants, 2 convenience stores, a dry cleaners, a petrol (gas) station and a car mechanics.
Pretty much the same for me in NYC, and my area still has detached houses and not really a city feel
I envy you.
Chicago also has a decent amount of mixed used neighborhoods throughout.
Older neighborhoods in the US were also built before these asinine zoning laws, and those areas are charming and walkable. I live in a neighborhood that was built in the 1890's, a few decades before the zoning laws became common practice, and I live within easy walking distance of an ice cream shop, a tea parlor, a pet groomer, an art shop, a fish and tackle store, several restaurants, 2 cafes, a salon, a candle shop, a Mexican grocery store, a convenience store, a dentist, a vet clinic, three parks, a couple churches, and a computer repair shop, and I can bike to a bigger grocery store in 5 minutes. Newer developments in the area are so spread out with nothing but houses, which isn't a great way to build communities.
Dear America, we here in Europe have done "mixed zoning" for decades. What I can tell you is that, it does work. Just look at big cities like Madrid or Paris.
Pretty sure NYC has it too. Idk why other cities wouldn't want there to be businesses that people could walk to. It's not like it'll ruin the neighborhood feel if it's only a story high.
I don't think I would not want to live in paris
Asia has it too, to varying degrees.
They could even look to older communities in the US.
I am from Europe, and I never understood why so much single family housing is present so close to the city in US. Sure, it is good to have some, to limit long commutes, but definitively you need more central mixed use zoning, with retail and small businesses at the street level and few floors above for resitdential, and sometimes some offices. It works very well in so many European cities. For example I live in Zurich, Switzerland, and the space is kind of scarce, but most (90%) of the building here are from 1920s, and they are about 4-6 stories high, with first floor being retail (small shops, bike shop, coffee shop, book store, florist, mini art gallery, restaurant, fast food, cake store, tourist points, pharmacies, clothing stores, etc, etc). It works so well. You have everything you need close by, don't need to use car, or public transport much to get what you want. This lowers the traffic and street noise quite a bit too, and generally doesn't crate traffic hotspots. It is not perfect, I still think there is not enough small parks for example in the city, and trees on small streets, so you are surrounded with a lot of concrete. Here is a Zoning map for my city: www.stadt-zuerich.ch/content/dam/stzh/hbd/Deutsch/Staedtebau_und_Planung/Weitere%20Dokumente/Planung/BZO2016/Zonenplaene/190125_BZO_Zonenplan_12500_final.pdf (50 MB) , and check out all the zones marked K, Z, Q, which is really a big portion. I still think it is not enough, and prices are of course pretty high due to a lot of density housing and lack of space, but at least the traffic is not a problem.
The SF zoning is absolutely atrocious.
I don't think it would make sense to plant multi story mixed used buildings in everu suburbs, but suburbs dense enough could use a few single story small business buildings that mesh with the area
@@Kevin-it4fh the compromise we have in south east Asia is when the density isn't quite there, is one block in a Suburb is zoned mixed use and the rest is single family homes or semi detached. Rather than not allowing any commercial spaces to operate within the walkable borders of the suburb. This compromise doesn't eliminate sprawl but it does slow it down. Still kinda hell if the place doesn't have adequate public transport like my medium sized city in Malaysia.
Yes, I'm sure a small apartment in switzerland costs way less than a single family home in florida or texas, like they said in the video! Not to mention parking space for your car and independence from public services (government control)!
I also live in Zurich. Agree, when it comes to car independency in Zurich but also neighboring areas. But... costs of buying a properly are out of a reach as I guess in many places. Fortunately it's possible to buy apartment in other canton and commute by SBB.
Swiss and US urban plans are plans from different planets: one for people another for cars.
capitalis baby
Legit, I looked up streets of other cities and of course I got pictures of those places
I decided to look up the streets of one of America’s biggest cities. I looked up “houston streets” and I get a bunch of pictures of either houston street in manhattan or dallas, or a street or two in downtown houston.
Houston has 2 Million people within city limits, and is an actual city of almost 5 million.
_I went through tens of photos before I found a regular picture (there some flooding pics, those don’t count) of a regular street that wasn’t within the square mile or two that’s downtown. And this picture had a barely visible strip mall with a street light_
Why? Because there’s nothing happening on Houston’s streets. There’s nothing _to_ take pictures _of_
In fact, in *most* major American cities, there is nothing happening. Our cities are dead zones. A network of commuters to a small downtown patch with a tiny ring of urban space around them and that’s it. The rest are tasteless tract homes with inhospitable streets.
Thank socialism for that.
izdatsumcp are you serious? Suburbia is the epitome of individualism. In fact, 1950s planning was rife with grand, pet projects made by star planners, with little to no emphasis on people’s everyday experience. Ffs, there are suburbs where the sidewalks are taken out so that poor people can’t rest there. Freeways-an individualist mode of transportation, and lobbied for by auto manufacturers-were built through minority communities so that commuters could go straight to work with the promise of not facing street or pedestrians traffic and then be able to go back home to their single family houses every night, without having to interact with anyone.
This style of planning was also almost entirely unique to the US, save for South Africa and some of the commonwealth countries. Do you not have eyes, man?
It wasn’t the fucking USSR or China. Socialist planning called for the creation of micro-districts, each with their own hi-rise apartment blocks, and built in sections with schools, parks and shops connected with mass transit all ready to go by the time people moved in (not saying this is correct, but that it’s a contradiction to what you’re saying). Fuck, sometimes there isn’t even a transition between the hi-rises of the city and countryside, with densities uniform everywhere.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
Does everyone like to say stupid shit nowadays?
chairmanofrussia
It is individualist in principle, but in practice there are subsidies for the single-family home all over the place. For instance, the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction. Largely benefits the upper-middle class and the upper class. Also, the public money used to build and maintain freeways - it didn’t all come from gasoline taxes. Even at the start of the Federal Aid Highways Act of 1956, only 70% of maintenance costs of the Interstate Highway System were paid through gasoline and diesel taxes. That was largely because the Interstates that were already there at the time were brand-new or less than 10 years old, and proper early-life cycle maintenance of the pavement and associated materials on the Interstates was not conducted. Now less than 50% of maintenance costs of the Interstate System (of the maintenance that actually is conducted) is covered by gasoline and diesel taxes. Income taxes are being used to fill the gap - meaning that everyone, including those too poor to afford a car, are paying taxes to keep the Interstate Highway System maintained (if you can even call them maintained).
So no, suburbia benefits from socialism, just not the kind of socialism that comes to the minds of most Americans when they hear the word. Socialism in practice helps the principle of individualism - what government policy could be more ironic than that?
@@chairmanofrussia Not true, suburbs are the epitome of redistribution. It costs more to provide infrastructure and public services to people who are spread out more.
izdatsumcp is that socialism? Just having the requirement to build public transit to counteract sprawl isn’t socialism, it’s a symptom of not having _enough_ of it. You’ve just admitted that we need more public transit. And there is no “redistribution” because most suburbs _don’t have_ public transit. They’re built for cars, the most individualistic form of transportation on earth. That’s the worst example you could have ever given. “They need trains now so it’s socialist.” Wtf??
I am on the verge of outrage that this has a mere 16,000 views. Very much sense was made
The vast majority of the social problems in the United States can be traced to two primary issues: 1) Bad car-centric zoning laws and city planning, and 2) an unsound monetary system based on debt. Easy fiat currency and easy credit is the primary enabler that fuels unsustainable suburban spawl.
Debt would finance good infrastructure ... if it was legal
You lose credibility with your 2nd point. Debt is a tool, not the source of the problems. 1st point is valid, although, there are other sources of the problem too, but zoning laws by far is the worst.
@@baxakk7374 Go read the book "Strong Towns" by Charles Marhohn. He discusses the role that malinvestment wth debt plays in enabling suburban spawl.
It's almost like our problems would be solved if the USA was *actually* free market.
How to best get back to urban environments where we can live, work and play? One element that helps enormously is moving to a land-value only property tax. When owners of land are rewarded for investment in capital improvements while charged an annual fee equal to the potential annual rental value of whatever locations are held, the result is development of land to its highest, best legal use. If zoning encouraged mixed-used development, this is what the market would then generate.
Cool video, didn't know that cities in the US are that much regulated.
Yes, sir, the home of the brave, and the land of the free, is ironically regulated.
Yeah, that's why our cities look terrible, we have so much urban sprawl, traffic is terrible, and our public transit sucks.
@Zesty Meatballs the traffic congestion should be alleviated if the infrastructure takes a more pedestrian friendly approach.
“I’d rather have a longer commute”
👍 great go right ahead, just don’t try to block these projects where they ARE wanted. You can’t force others to do what you want to do.
I’ve got to tell you: obesity, respiratory illnesses, financial burden, and social isolation are NOT my bag of tea! But to each his own.
“Far more pedestrian density”
That’s the whole idea, what’s wrong with that? You want no pedestrians so you can commute faster? That’s really selfish thinking, you want to live in a far away neighborhood and commute to work, but not only that!, you also want people who live in your destination neighborhood to sacrifice their quality of living for the sake of YOU? a commuter who doesn’t even live or pay taxes in their neighborhood??? 👎 NOpe
@Zesty Meatballs that's a blatant lie. You won't have as much traffic with denser populations if you had more walkable cities and better transit. But you can sit in your car for hours and never be able to enjoy your free time.
Also, everything in America is regulated and rules, laws, and regulations vary from state to state.
Jane Jacobs was a great thinker and ahead of her time on the idea of the walkable city. I’m glad to see these ideas making a resurgence among urban planners and city zoning regulators.
I live in Elmhurst Queens right now. It's just a nice neighborhood being so close to Grand Avenue Station. QCM and QPM within walking distance. I also bike to Rego Center to buy groceries at Costco. What I do in the Elmhurst area is impossible in most American cities that they call "downtowns" where it lacks any activities and life.
Too bad NYC is really expensive. I wish other cities and suburbs also implemented mixed use districts. Idk why anyone wouldn't want to have a small businesses that you could walk to in your neighborhood.
This was extremely well done, this video deserves 10 times the views it has now.
Holy shit an actually informative and objective video on urban design that namedrops modernism for the scourge that it is? Impressive
Never thought zoning laws would be fascinating… great video and content
As a conservative, I’m puzzled why my fellow conservatives are against excessive government regulation - EXCEPT when it comes to zoning laws
Property values. As long as it rakes in money for themselves, they don't care.
I can't even imagine how it feels to grow up in a car-centric neighbourhood.
It's probably so depressing to be eleven and completely unable to go anywhere without your parents, because public transport is not an option and walking won't get you anywhere.
Yeah this is how I grew up. We rode bikes in the neighborhood but for everything outside it we had to get driven by our parents. We still had places to play basketball or football but yeah we never went to the cinema or anything until we could drive
What's ironic is that a lack of zoning indirectly creates incentives for transit companies(primarily streetcars) to make great transit.
What would happen during the late 19th century and early 20th century is that Streetcar companies would but dirt cheap land outside of the cities that is undeveloped.
They would then either promise to build a streetcar line or just go ahead and build one and then divide and sell the land to the highest bidder, who would then divide it and do the same. Until they would finally sell (or lease in Hong Kong's case) to developers that would build businesses and apartments (Typically in the same building).
This created a positive feedback loop where Streetcar companies sold the land at a massive profit and the newly developed land provided them MASSIVE amounts of riders who would then take the Streetcar of the rest of the city.
Because there were so many riders, and the company had so much land money, they could charge fares for dirt cheap and still make fare profit.
This is actually still happening in Hong Kong where fares are so cheap, they are the equivalent of about 50 US Cents and trips are so frequent, they don't need timetables.
Great insights on the zoning laws and their impacts on American Cities.
Single family homes are a good choice for a lot of people, but forcing it huge sections of cities with soaring housing prices is a bad idea.
@Vitaliy Markov False. Most families prefer to have a house, a backyard and a garage rather than be forced into a tiny apartment
@@Jamcad01 It is also false to assume that the only options are large single family homes and tiny apartments. Many multi-family units are larger than 1,000 square feet, even larger for townhomes. Many single family homes are also smaller than 1,000 sq. ft. and house four people. It is also false to assume that every family wants to live in a single family home. They do because that is largely the only option that is available because of these zoning laws. Places with townhomes, large multi-family units, etc. sell just as well. What you are saying is completely incorrect.
@@Caswell19 I'm not saying that other types of homes aren't popular or available, but there is clearly a preference for a detached home with a backyard over other types. Not just the US either. Same phenomenon in Australia and even Europe is trending towards suburbs being more popular.
@@Jamcad01 is it what they prefer or are single family homes what make up the majority of the housing stock in places with good public schools?
@@Bhq870 the schools are built after the houses typically.
Houston: what's a zoning law?
Which may actually prove to be one of Houston's greatest strengths in the near future. Although it exemplifies sprawl and many of the other critical problems of American cities, this lack of superimposed order may result in thriving neighborhoods that will grow in response to the demand for quality urban space on a canvass as robust as America's fourth-largest city.
That's why I love Houston.. What many people don't realize is that strict zoning laws don't benefit the people, they benefit large corporations and HOAs .. Many naive people think that zoning laws help to protect them or their home investments .. that couldn't be further from the truth .. Zoning laws are hurting everyone .. Even middle class and wealthy people are becoming more irritated by strict zoning laws .. and this has resulted in many cities getting large population loses as people move to areas where there is more freedom ..
Houston has seen so much growth and prosperity in recent years because of their relaxed zoning laws ..
More and more cities are realizing that if they want to keep people and continue to grow their cities, the recent zoning laws need to be changed ..
@@davehart7943 Strict zoning laws benifit people who already own homes by increasing the value of their assets. This even incentivizes them to fight zoning reform.
Funny enough I grew up in Houston and it’s not very walker friendly. Takes like a half hour or more to walk to the store. Getting anywhere seems to take forever! And going downtown took about an hour, and tons of traffic. I’m currently in London at the moment and the difference is staggering. People on the streets everywhere, reliable public transportation, not an absurd amount of traffic, stores and restaurants are always a 5 minute walk away... it’s just amazing!
Houston not having zoning didn’t lead to the denser neighborhoods Jane Jacobs talked about. So I’m not sure zoning alone or not having zoning will by itself create more livable cities. I’ve been watching for decades now affordable 6 story buildings being demolished for new and expensive high rises. I’d love to see how these tall buildings without stoops contribute to street life because I don’t think they do. I think having affordable housing for all types of people will keep a city alive and the only way of achieving this is by preserving as many prewar tenement buildings as possible.
What the guy said is true. If cities just had the courage to make the minimum house size 1,360,000 sq ft we'd all live like kings. Why don't they do it??
Nah but seriously, tiny homes and van life have shown that minimum sizes are BS. If someone wants to live in a smaller home for price or location reasons why don't they have the right to do so?
4:25
I had begun to suspect this in my childhood as i started to play games with any kind of building or construction..
@J C "Most families prefer to have a house, a backyard and a garage" Agreed.
But ALL people violently and justifiably hate being FORCED to NOT HAVE A CHOICE.
Also, of that majority (including myself, who has happily lived in suburbs for 58 years)
a large majority cannot afford it. So, if you FORCE single-family houses as the only choice,
then you had better be FORCED to GIVE AWAY all those single family homes with wide open spaces, backyards, garages to the poor for free,
Excellent Presentation. I am a Real Estate Paralegal and found this video informative!!!!
Such an underrated amazing video!
Maybe encourage spontaneous city designs by the people living in it making the changes they want to live in?
No city planners dictating on high. Instead city planners adapting to people used and accommodating through appropriate dispersion of police, and fire services, and allowing for the unexpected.
That is exactly what Vienna is doing with its newer public housing developments.
This video is super under rated
There’s a home mortgage interest deduction (HMID) for taxes at the federal level, and it was designed to encourage homeownership. With the changing housing needs of today’s populace, it is outdated. It also, as statistics show, largely benefits the upper-middle class and the upper class. Time to remove the HMID from federal law. Call/email your 2 senators and your representative in the House and tell them it’s time to repeal the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction. Doing so will remove an unnecessary subsidy to single-family housing. It will also likely force more competition price-wise for the mortgages that *are* issued to homeowners, driving down the interest rate for mortgages a little.
P.S. If the HMID is the only reason you can afford to live in the house you have, then you don’t deserve to have the house - you clearly didn’t make the smartest financial decision.
I wish american cities had the chaos and dynamism that asian cities had. At the very least, we could use more Vancouvers and Montreals.
Most American cities are weak-sauce. These planners were insane. The answer was so obvious.
The only American cities that aren’t vast swaths of suburbs with 2 sq. Miles of actual density (CBDs) are the east coast cities like NYC, DC, Philly, Boston & Baltimore, possibly Miami (I’ve yet to visit), and then SF, LA and Chicago.
The reason I add LA in here is too long to explain, all I can say it that its weighted density is actually higher than chicago’s, and the massive core running 15 Miles from downtown to santa monica has a density that matches the AVERAGE population density of Tokyo-Yokohama. The suburbs are a whopping half of that. It’s not a suburb looking for a city, it’s that it’s all city so it feels like such.
Point is: How is it I can reside a city of 16,000,000 people and only have one friend I actually hang out with?
@Schreibmaschine Yet I can find plenty of cities in places like Europe where geography isn’t as constraining-say Spain for example. Madrid is compact and dense with plenty of room outside the city. Boston isn’t that constrained by geography. There’s still a lot of space left for the city, but it’s still super compact. There’s really no excuse for the wastelands we call “cities” in America.
@Schreibmaschine okay fair enough but come on. Latin American cities like Buenos Aires aren’t that constrained yet are extremely dense. While there’s a lot of jungle and mountains in those places, it’s not so bad that the cities still don’t sprawl. Yet they manage to achieve actual urban environments. You can’t tell me that parking lots and strip malls are the only thing possible in a country with a lot of space.
@Schreibmaschine Yes, and places like Chicago too. A combination of culture, civic and national policy, zoning laws and yes, geography conspired to create the suburban wastelands we call cities here in the US. It’s a real issue and it really gets on my nerves.
@Schreibmaschine Spain is vastly underpopulated thought? Madrid does have mountains, but thats only on one side of the city. Madrid can expand for hundreds of more miles because there are no physical barriers.
@Schreibmaschine I was specifically talking about Madrid though, I know that most of Spain is mountains.
Thanks for using my hometown/current residence of Columbus, OH as an example. It was one of a few cities to take full advantage of the interstate freeway system in conjunction with an annexation policy, which I think is still in place since its inception in the 1950's. Of course, single family homes became a priority in newly acquired land while a few neighborhoods in established areas were afflicted by gentrification- especially after the 1980's. But now, after a sharp increase in both home values and average monthly rents, the city leaders have begun to see the light. In 2024, there are proposals for changes in zoning to allow for mixed use developments, though mostly in established areas. Those will include no parking requirements, which will likely benefit the local public transit system. And height restrictions on new buildings will be relaxed, per the designated section.
I work in a book wearhouse and often pack and send out the "life and death of american cities". After this im deffinetly finaly gona read it
Apparently some companies are having employees go back into offices is because they cant get rid of the building because no one is buying more offices, you could easily turn offices into apartments if zoning wasnt an issue, this would increase the number of housing making it cheaper and then the employees could work from home, saving money because they dont have to go to and from work everyday so that extra money can be used elseware.
Hence why some offices are being turned into apartments nowadays, and newer developments are mostly mixed-use.
Thank you for your video series Here's a bus stop design failure and an incomplete design on sidewalks, which presents the question: Do pedestrians deserve shade in summer? @lvpI
Was the ending quote something you have created or are you quoting that? Love it, would like to use it but, wanted to credit it.
The music is very nice.
fantastic video
This is good and all but it doesn’t mention where planning laws come from: elected boards, public hearings, and voters. Planners are administrators and don’t have the agency to make laws. More people have to be involved in civics if they want to see this stuff changed. Planners hate this stuff too.
Let's compare Melbourne and Los Angeles.
Both have urban sprawl and suburbs.
Melbourne has gridded suburban streets with wide sidewalks. Melbourne has easily accessible businesses and stores that line the main roads next to the suburban homes with wide sidewalks. Melbourne has a wide clean train network that reaches far into the many sprawled suburbs and connects them with the main city. Melbourne has a wide bus network that connects the suburbs to the train stations. Melbourne is actually walkable.
Los Angeles has confusing culdesac suburbs with narrow sidewalks, leading people to walk in the street, which is also divided and trapped in by terrifying big roads with narrow sidewalks. Los Angeles has strip malls located randomly in the middle of the isolated suburbs that can either be reached comfortably by car or uncomfortably by walking the terrifying and ugly streets with narrow or no sidewalks. Los Angeles has a decent but tiny train network that reaches only connects to a few neighborhoods, downtown, and the airport. Los Angeles has a bus network that is subject to traffic and used as transportation on its own rather than a connector to train stations. Los Angeles is not actually walkable.
Growing up in a Sydney suburb where one could reach downtown Sydney via. bus and train and moving to Los Angeles at age 7, even I was shocked by how dead American suburbs looked. Australia might have its differences, such as having unexplainably narrow streets and a densely packed population, but America did not have to go this way. Had America chosen the grid pattern, follow mixed-use zoning like the rest of the world (Japan, Europe, Australia all say hi), build wide and protected sidewalks, establish either subway or regional rail networks connecting these sprawled suburbs to the city, and establishing bus lines to connect the suburbs to regional town centers and train stations, American suburbs and cities would definitely be comparable to Australian, or even European and Japanese cities. In fact, the weird culdesacs could've stayed as long as these suburbs had gridded sidewalks. Just imagine how many people of all classes and incomes would be able to find and access jobs and education if American cities were actually designed to favor the person and NOT the car? And imagine how much emissions would be reduced if Americans didn't have to drive to work every day?
Of course, we can't demolish culdesac neighborhoods or tear down homes to build new businesses, but you can always invest in some sort of public transportation or at least the widening of sidewalks.
Sorry, that was long, but you get my point. American cities could've sprawled without being so car-dependent.
If you think Los Angeles is bad, there are many cities in the sunbelt that take it to new extremes like DFW, Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, and many many more. The Los Angeles metro isn’t even that big and doesn’t even rank in the top 10 by land area.
Melbourne and Sydney form a very interesting midpoint between walkable city design and US car centric design. I don't think they're well designed cities in the slightest, their suburban sprawl alone is far too extreme for any well designed city and they take the housing affordability issue and put it on steroids, but they're still interesting to look at.
I do think you're overestimating the density of Australian cities here though. It's only fractionally higher than LA. The population centre of Melbourne is Glen Iris, meaning there's actually more people living in the sprawling eastern suburbs than the urban core. There's a whole lot of single family zoning in Melbourne which causes similar issues to US cities as well. Yes, Melbourne has mixed use zoning, it's underused though.
Melbourne and Sydney are also far more car dependant than you give them credit for. Take Melbourne as an example again, because I actually live here and know the issues. If you want to move around the suburbs our transport net fails and your only reasonable option is to drive. I used to study at Monash and the only way for me to get there was on a slow as fuck bus. This is the direct cost of sprawl, well, this and $1mil houses 1hr out from the city. Additionally Melbourne's outer suburbs are so far away from the city at this point that commutes are actually starting to get unreasonable.
The biggest advantage that Australian cities have over US in terms of walkability is just sidewalk reliability though. Which is a sad as hell sentence. It's very rare for roads in most Australian cities (other than the Gold Coast, which is a dumpsterfire) to not have at least one sidewalk. This is something that the US needs to learn from. Sidewalks should be the default, built on every road unless there's an exceptional reason why they cannot be, not an optional addon. I spent 10 minutes dropping into random suburbs around Melbourne on maps and every road I saw had a sidewalk. The first road I dropped onto in LA didn't have one. That's the single largest issue.
Also, at one point in the 1920s, both Melbourne and Los Angeles were known for their massive streetcar networks that were the envy of the world.
Guess which city still has a large functioning streetcar network.
There have been many casualties to the death of the humanities in the social eye. Fear of SJWs and intersectionality have lead to a general distrust of disciplines like Sociology, Philosophy, Anthropology, etc which all have a wide and nuanced literature on the effects of city planning, gentrification, and the concept of spaces. I fear it isn't that we don't have the answers to these problems, but that it has become socially unacceptable to implement them in America(among others). The irony of those that have rigged, status quo, stances on this topic is that they also tend to be the types of people that are vehemently against top-down government planning. The hypocrisy of traditional western city planning as something other than top-down government intervention seems to elude them.
People who fear "SJWs" and "intersectionality" are not the type of people who would actually study or be interested in Sociology, Philosophy or Anthropology.
Just checking in to tell you that you are completely right. The new boogeyman is apparently critical race theory, simply because it sounds scary. In European academics, knowing how to apply critical theory (history is a series of consequences) is an absolute must in any humanities discipline. I can not for the life of me dream up a non-racist reason to be against teaching the consequences of slavery, segregation and discrimination.
@@TheNinetySecond Because determinism is contrary to their need to believe that everyone is capable of pull up their bootstraps, or that historic bias can mean that people don't even have boots to pull on in modern society. If they admit that their construction of race ensures growing inequality among groups, they would have concede that society requires radical change, not conservation.
Jane is my hero
What happens with the make-up of the streets? Will there be a separate lane for just buses? or Emergency Lanes? Even if these zonings are implemented for walkability, why are there still so many cars?
generally people need cars when they have to do a lot of driving. cars are used much less by people who live in cities. and often, people sell their cars and instead use public transportation, bikes, or walk to where they need to go, since things are much closer to where they live.
Those are some interesting cars they were driving at the Vanity Ballroom in 1973.
We need to more so connect the reasons for affordable housing if zoning laws are antiquated. For example, if any corporations or developers receive governmental subsidys or abatements, they should be required to build affordable housing or contribute to a housing/ urban improvement FUND within the City Centers. The increased prosperity of a City is directly correlated to the demand of reasonably priced housing. So, who is on the hook for the costs?
We need an equation that says, for every X persons hired within a city, Y number of reasonably priced housing is neededs. Why? It’s a market crash safety measure. Any City that becomes severely unaffordable will experience a market correction or recession. You advance the costs prior to a recessions since it is more costly socially and economically to recover
Excellent.
Excellent video
Nice video!
Those zoning laws seem to have become rather outdated
Doesn’t this ignore the fact that the roads, sewers, ect need to be built to match the use? It’s much harder to retrofit a city with infrastructure after the fact and can cause severe disruption for an extended period of time
America is doing really well at maintaining their infrastructure /s
repoilify not
Its insainingly expensive to do all of that for suburbs because you need so much more sewer lines, roads ect per capita.
ua-cam.com/video/7IsMeKl-Sv0/v-deo.html
The way american cities are planned make them giant ponzi schemes. Remaking the infrastructure so the city is sustainible without infinite growth and federal money will be cheaper in the long run.
This is very important check out Not Just Bikes series "Strong Towns" it adds needed depth to this situation.
Great video i share it
apply chaos theory to urban planning
it was worked for thousands of years, it will work for hundreds more.
I bet the Duomo was designed by this sort of vibrant modern thinking! Dove Duomo! I can’t wait for the frescoes, the food, the joy!! The MUSIC and love!
So cities should be Big and Grey and Glorious!
No. Blocks and parks, not house in forest.
@@thebronywiking I was refferencing Arstoztka
Okay. Irony is hard to detect online.
Future city designers should take some notes from Disney. They've made walking in their parks fun and interesting, things to look at and things to do. Cities today aren't walking friendly(or bike friendly), it's boring and uninteresting.
Nah, NYC also has pretty good mixed use districts and walkability. Idk why other places don't follow
@@Kevin-it4fh NYC is an exception
@@GamesWorld03 It's an exception within the US. If you go outside of the US it's really not, in fact, it's not even fantastic on the global scale.
Cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Seoul, New Delhi, Beirut and Kyoto maintain highly walkable streets. The US's design is actually more the exception on the global scale. This is really what makes this so much more frustrating, walkability isn't hard, it's the default. You have to actually design against walkability actively to end up with what the US has.
@@Lankpants I just don’t get it how a country that was on top of the world after ww2 did such a terrible job at planning cities apart from a few exceptions
Jane Jacobs is a fucking inspiration
Always rise your eye when you hear minimums
Interesting
Suburban sprawl is the root cause of loneliness, secluded , anti social activities. Because no one knows whats happening in their neighborhood
Answer is people centric approach!
Me at 1 am watching this trying to brainwash myself into being a YIMBY so that I’m more comfortable at my job in development
check out Not Just Bikes series "Strong Towns" if you want to actually learn about it
You have to listen to the environment. You can't just go in and bulldoze everything, then put your plan on top. You have to look at the terrain, the trees and put in transportation. A hub will grow around that naturally and you can shape it but it has to grow on its own over time as well. A single person sitting in a room looking at a plan will never be as dense and intricate as a neighborhood built by the people living in it.
Jane Jacobs has entered the chat
Hmmm...I wonder if these zoning laws will be re-thought after this COVID-19 disease.
they will out of pure need. I predict people will start businesses out of their homes and create a black market before politicians realize its inevitable
They need to. This model is not sustainable, because the infrastructure cost for the vast areas of suburbs and commercial zones cannot be balanced out by the taxes from the low density buisnesses. The cities simply don't generate enough taxes from 100 sq metres of parkinglots and 20 sq metres of buisness to pay for it.
As a result, cities rely on never ending growth and federal cash, and the costs are pushed downwards to the people who buy the homes in the shitty suburbs.
Western countries have extremely high density city planning. In our part of the world, cities have traffic divided by curbs into separate roads, one serving each direction. Lots of sidewalk space and parking space.
"Western countries"? You meant the US right? Here in Europe I can walk to the downtown of my 600k population city in about half an hour, tram takes 20 min.
I also live on a square with a diversity of shops lagre enough that I would in theory be able to live my entire modern life within 500 m of my apartment.
@@thebronywiking sounds cool
That photo of the vanity ballroom was not taken in 1973. You can clearly see 1920s cars parked around it. 😑
true
Literally we've let Authoritarians force their vision on OUR communities.
Almost all "cities" in America aren't cities. They're just suburbs of New York.
Just read this headline and thought about sharing it here:
"Gov. Polis’ housing proposal would allow duplexes, townhomes, ADUs across many cities in Colorado"
"The Polis administration has laid out a sweeping plan that would explicitly allow more dense housing across Colorado’s increasingly expensive metropolitan areas and resort communities, even if residents and local elected officials object to it."
They better start with all the land around RTD railway stations. Lots of empty land, great to build apartments and shops around stations. Better get the Japanese to plan them for you.
Does this remind anyone else of Vox?
ua-cam.com/video/qY43Rwo7DnA/v-deo.html
Perfect, Kuwait.
A friend pointed out a flaw in the video: "They didn't promote high rises specifically, but they promoted "building up to create affordability." That's the same argument made by high rise proponents (overlooking the very high cost of those buildings). Maybe these filmmakers didn't have time to clarify that point -- but I fear a lot of people will miss it!"
I think there is such a backlog of demand in most major western cities, that when any building permits ARE granted they are inevitably going to be luxury apartments. But I think that would sort of be like telling Apple they weren't allowed to build the first iPhone since only relatively well off people could afford it. But that's how all markets work, it always starts with luxury products which finance the continued development of much more affordable products. I think we are stuck in a negative feedback loop where people want affordable housing but every time new building permits are granted there is a public backlash about the fact that luxury apartments are built, so zoning laws are never relaxed to the extent necessary and the cycle continues.
@ahri Nailed it. Democrats make building costs much more expensive.
Supply and demand rule the day. Luxury is not luxury anymore if there is a lot of it. Have you been to an auto show recently? You can see it in the cars. A Toyota in 2019 will likely have features that, if they were put into a car in the year 2010, would raise the price considerably. A Honda Civic barely beat out a 1980s BMW in a race. It’s not democrats making thing more expensive as much as it has to do with a lack of hi rise housing and low supply. While one could argue that the luxury features in cars of 2010 became standard features in 2019, it still took 10 years for it to happen. When it comes to housing, it’s ridiculous to believe that people should wait that long (and it’s often 20 years) for housing to become affordable. Cheap housing lining main streets as 10, 20 and 30 story buildings need to be built en masse-so long as they’re integrated into the communities, not as projects-for the problem to go away.
Instead of building high rises and suburbs one should build 3 to 7 story apament/office blocks with outward facing business on the bottom floor.
thomas sowell explained the housing crisis in another video
He has been explaining these problems for decades yet is still looked over lol. Im a huge Sowell fan. He always hits the nail on the head.
Pain Exotic leave the USA it’s dead
Yeah .... no one cares
City planners are egomaniacs that want to play God. Great video IHS!
You can say that of central planners of all kinds. The human ego is the problem, everyone wants to play god and act as a grand savior. Fear is the other half of that problem, for people allow their fears to trick them into empowering these would-be saviors through whatever political state structure is popular at the time... democracy being the latest fad.
Those from 1940 to 2000, definitely. Those from 2000 onward? Not really.
Houston has an answer ...
meanhile in pretymuch the rest of the world
Social engineering in city planning.
sovie microdistrik vs usa urban spraw
The map at 6:18 is Columbus, OH, not Boston. Recognized at first sight.
They never said it was Boston.
But yet people believe in government
Zoning isn't the problem, the way we price buildings is.
Both are connected to each other.
There not streets, their ' Stroads '.
Laughs in houston
This guy gets it
Can't walk in Houston either
Ngl I only clicked because my dyslexic ass read "Zombie laws"
I feel vox vibes
What sucks about these mixed-use zoning areas is that there are a growing trend of crimes, thefts and vandalisms that happen in these areas...
Is this true per capita? In my city the small mixed use section is the nicest part with no crime unlike deteriorating suburbs but this may not be true everywhere
Stop defunding the Police. This problem can be solved.
Here from r/neoliberal
I'm surprised people can't connect the dots. Minimum wage works in the exact same way as zoning for single-family homes. People get priced out of the market when the wage has an artificial price floor.
Thats not entirely true because in labor markets theres monopsony power, which is why moderate minimum wages can actually increase employment. Similar to how anti-trust is needed to prevent market failures and get to equilibriums.
That's not exactly true. Having a minimum wage that doesn't go above 50% of the median wage does lead to improvements in welfare
@@GPCImpulse Wage floor effects still happen just not to that extent since labor supply is rather inelastic. General rule still applies
@@markwalshopoulos a general hueristic than an actual rule. Reality of monopsony power vary from city to city
@@GPCImpulse Monopsony power? What, dude? Are there not multiple different shops, pubs, restaurants, warehouses, whatever?
I literally live 5 min away from Empire State plaza