Lived in Berkeley for 4 years. Definitely only thought of Emeryville as a series of big box stores and the Pixar offices. My roommate and I called it "The Merchant Republic of Emeryville" and joked that no one lives in Emeryville
No, we get it, money should only be spent on car-centric infrastructure. Had they spent the same amount of money on a bridge for cars (except we know that in that case it would've been a lot more), no one would've batted an eyebrow, but the instant money is spent on people, there's the knee-jerk hysteria and pearl-clutching.
@@safe-keeper1042 yo, you can hate cars all you want, it doesn’t change the fact that $21 million for that tiny ugly bridge thingy is shady af, I guess people from California are used to being ripped off and that’s on them, I don’t live in that shiathole therefore that’s none of my concern 🤣
Your "normal" person VS urbanist person comments hit home. I've been becoming more and more radically urbanist over the last few years and now I can't help but look around and see all the problems in policy and apathy. My wife just LOVES when I turn every conversation into something about urbanism, walkability, public transit, etc.
Yep. After getting into urbanism I feel like I see problems everywhere I go, whereas before I was living in blissful suburban ignorance. Now my girlfriend is starting to see it too because I talk about it so much lol.
Omg it’s the same with me. Ever since I had the chance live outside the U.S. and got to experience the walkable, bikeable, good public transit lifestyle in Japan (I have since moved back), I have become so passionate about urban planning that I will somehow very often turn every conversation I have with my husband into those topics.
@@whereaboutsunknown3822 yeah I had a similar experience. Japan doesn’t really even use big plans to get walkable neighborhoods. They have light zoning laws that allow small apartments and small shops in even the lightest L1 residential zone and they have heavier use zones up to L12 heavy industry and lighter uses are always allowed in a heavier zone creating mixed use neighborhoods you can walk in. By contrast zoning in the land of the free and the brave is strictly single use only afraid of adapting to new market demands like needing more homes and less office space now.
Finally a California city I can use as an example of how things can be better, instead of saying look at Amsterdam, Seattle, or Minneapolis. Because to most of the people I talk to in my home town, can't fathom the value of something so far away. For any European example, they'll be like "that's just how things are in Europe, and they wouldn't work here." For the others, they'll have some sort of built in NIMBY response about crime or traffic. . .
As someone from the East Bay, it's nice to hear good things about Emeryville. It's constantly ranked as a shithole, with sky-high crime rates, and that IS true, but it's gotten so much better in the last 5 years or so and is continuing to get so much better that I'd probably direct anyone looking to move to the Bay to Emeryville. Especially for people who don't have... cars. Can't steal 'em if you don't have 'em!
I definitely consider most of emeryville a shithole. Despite living hear 19 year’s I’ve never really checked it out more than the freeway off ramps. That was enough to turn me away, perhaps I judged it too harshly
i've always known it from being the home of Pixar, as someon who always viewed the whole credits. What's odd is that Pixar is smack dab in the middle of town, yet it's also a huge suburban campus.
A big issue with Emeryville's crime stats is that they are often reported on a per-capita basis, but a lot of the crime is committed by people who do not live in Emeryville. So in raw numbers the crime may not be as bad as it seems, or could be comparable to other areas in the East Bay, but the per-capita reporting makes it seem astronomical. At least that was my understanding the last time I read up on it.
@@Pierrelourens1 for sure. It's so small, I always thought of it as just another Oakland neighborhood. It's not like you cross the line over from west oakland and it immediately gets so much worse. emeryville is just a niehgborhood in the flats that doesn't have the hills making its crime stats look better
The first time I took the train from Seattle to San Francisco, my ticket had a transfer in Emeryville. I'd never heard of Emeryville so I didn't know where it was or if my ticket was wrong. Then I got there and found out it's next to Oakland. Years later I went into Emeryville once, to the Esperanto-USA store. I used the Emery Go-Round from MacArthur BART station, and it worked well and I didn't have to wait long.
Great video. As someone who lives pretty close to Emeryville, I can certainly say this process has started a long time ago. The Ikea and Theater area were the first to really start this trend of newer, easily walkable areas with shops below and housing above, and the city continued to build off of that. There is a good mix of old buildings and newer construction in areas that were very downtrodden and bleak looking. Great video highlighting a small community doing it right in a march larger suburban area.
Yes, but I wouldn't call that area the "Ikea area." That's Bay Street! That Ikea big box store nearby is actually a symptom of the previous suburbanization period if Emeryville's history. It was built at the tail end of it, but still. We have to recognize that Ikea, while trying to pretend like they're more climate friendly, is actually a disastrous business both for the climate and for sustainability in general. They might as well have been founded in Bentonville, Arkansas.
San Francisco is denser than most other places and people do walk there more than most places. What really needs to happen is we need to make more places like San Francisco’s layout to build enough housing to stabilize or even lower prices.
San Francisco has the 2nd highest density in the USA after New York City, and all in only 49 sq. miles. Also, Golden Gate Park (bigger than NY’s Central Park).
I love urbanization & reducing both carbon emissions & reliance on automobiles, but not everyone want to live in a gridlock dense city like SF. There is still a very small minority of the 300+ millions of Americans that want to live in “places like San Francisco’s layout “.
@@mattrancho rebuild small rural towns to how they were back in the Wild West and every else. Train station 🚉 in middle of the town , a Main Street densely packed with businesses on the first floor and apartments of second , third etc , and off the buildings off the main street are still walkable and dense. Small towns are dying due to the expensive car infrastructure and new small towns sprawling to ridiculous levels where parking lot filled lots with one business spaces hundreds of feet away from each other making walking around the business like hiking. This is what is killing small towns. Look up Alan fishers small towns don’t have to suck video
@@mattrancho San Francisco and Manhattan are the most expensive places in America showing there is more demand to live in dense walkable cities than there is supply so we should relax zoning to allow more to be built. Right now strict single use zoning only allows car driving suburbia to be built and about half of roads are paid through income taxes so suburbia appears cheaper than it is. If walkable places were allowed to be built, which could be less dense than SF, and got cheaper with the supply we’d see more people opt for urbanism and reducing carbon so they can save money driving less and might find out they like it.
@@karld1791 first off, I completely agree with the zoning laws. But SF & NY are 2 every unique cities that are in their own category (or should be). Yes there’s demand to live in those cities, but its also the popularity, image, rep, brand, attraction, lifestyle, etc that keep that demand high. These 2 cities are 2 renown international cities. Not a good example. Look at LA, one of the most expensive cities in America. Yes they are improving their public transit & are developing into more of a dense urban city, but over 90% of the city scape are low rise low density urban sprawl. After spending billions on light rail & bus rapid transit, the ridership were not as high as they projected. My point is its mainly about the “big city life, big city lights”. Some of the fastest growing cities are Seattle, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix. All these cities are majority suburban sprawl. Seattle being probably the city that really is developing an urban dense city with improving public transit (all cities listed are as well). But its mainly focused on downtown Seattle & downtown Bellevue. Seattle metro, stretching from Tacoma up to Everett to the east in Redmon are still suburban sprawl, which is over 90% of the metro. With that being said, yea there is a demand to live in urban cities, but urbanist want people to believe majority of Americans are dying to live in urban dense neighborhoods like SF or NY. “majority” of American still prefer driving their own cars living in single family homes. Americans are just used to that suburbia car driven culture & lifestyle.
SF native priced out over ten years ago. Moved to Santa Cruz Mnts, then priced out again. Currently in LA and hating it but haven’t been able to find a way back to the bay. Sigh. Enjoy your content. Keep it up 👍🏼
Just recently found this channel, reminds me a lot of Not Just Bikes, you guys are really hitting the nail on the head and I wish more people talked about this stuff to get the conversation going. I think a lot of people don't even know that cities can be less car dependent, so this content is so important. I hope to see that you and like-minded people bring about big changes in city planning domestically and globally. Thanks for the great videos.
@@noob.168 never traveled or lived abroad but i would love to. i've lived in a city my whole life but after seeing the suburban wastelands surrounding my city i would love to travel to europe
My eyes literally bugged out in disbelief at how great many aspects of Emeryville are. I never heard of it before. Great video. I live in LA, and this makes me really want to visit Emeryville!
It's not in any even long-range plans of which I'm aware, but Emeryville does have an Amtrak station with regular if not frequent service south to San Jose and north to Sacramento. I could imagine that being ramped up considerably in the forseeable future.
@@lasurflifeI arrived on an Amtrak train on a weekday and couldn't find a way out other than to take an Amtrak bus I didn't pay for into a place in San Francisco that was also a transit desert. I just wanted to get home to the South Bay!
I’m always so exited for a new Thomas the Trainer Video. This is a good spotlight on a place that doesn’t get that much spotlight. It highlights the things Emeryville is doing right compared to the rest of the Bay Area.
It's not a bad candidate if the scope is restricted to North America, but yeah. Better and equally obscure candidates exist aplenty in other countries. Zoetermeer, for instance. Never knew about it until today, and it looks pretty urbanist-friendly to me.
I lived in the phoenix area my entire life, and am 100% down to talk to you more about places around this city.....BOY DO I HAVE A LOT TO FUGGIN SAY. Feel free to reach out to me!
Emeryville isn’t really a fair comparison to an actual city. Emeryville is a tiny dot on a map, smaller in area to downtown San Francisco. It’s just an area that was once industrial lots; obviously this would be an area easier to zone for high density than SF’s swaths of single family homes. Also, Emeryville was a bunch of industrial lots in one of the highest crime areas in CA; you’re not going to be seeing any NIMBYs come protect that area. I’m not saying we don’t need urban planning reform. SF definitely needs to make it cheaper for developers. I’m just saying it’s unrealistic to point to a tiny blip on a map like Emeryville and say “why can’t SF be like this?”
I agree with pretty much everything, but I wouldn't be too harsh on San Francisco, as the city proper is really only a tiny part of the metropolitan area: it's more like the Manhattan of the bay area. I personally view Emeryville as part of San Francisco, not really a separate "city".
Being in high school its nice to see people in our age range finally realize the problems literally in front of our eyes.. the city for the car will be looked at in shame in the future
Sorry to burst your "people in our age" generalization but there are people out there older than Thomas and you that have done tons of research into the negative effects of car centric development. Check out The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
Let's see the Arizona video! This video doesn't have enough cursing. Thomas holds the monopoly on cursing and urban planning content, haha. It would also be cool to see people shed more light on California cities that are making progress. If it can be done anywhere, I'd assume California would be the first state to implement these changes
Its amazing how Emeryville has reinvented itself. But before it was all housing, shopping, and bike lanes, Emeryville was the Industrial Armpit of the Bay Area since the 1920s. A landmark animated neon sign of 60 years ago was Sherwin-Williams Paint "Cover The Earth". No one lived there. Just rail lines, tanneries, and industrial factories. But with tighter environmental regulations, by the 1980s, industrial plants were shutting down and moving.
The Scottsdale video would be interesting. I wonder if the city council will ever be accepting of light rail or BRT, though I think it’s been 6 years since Valley Metro first tried to do that.
I would not be surprised if they have some BRT or light rail at some point. But that is no panacea. The problems are so entrenched in a place like Scottsdale that they are very difficult to solve. You either have to grow yourself out of it (from a population standpoint) or take back land (shrink your physical size). More or less L. A. and Detroit (and Detroit remains a work in progress). Oh, and growing yourself out of it is really problematic given it is in Arizona (with its water issues).
i grew up in south berkeley, nearly adjacent to emeryville. over the decades, emeryville has dramatically changed into one of the best cities in the bay in my opinion. i've always noticed how much better the overall designed experiences of the city is once I leave bekeley's city limits. berkeley is now BARELY beginning to get its fucking shit together now that the nimby boomer are beginning to die off/loose power. but, it's not even close to the level of intention that i see in emeryville's urban design. currently I live in san francisco, and yes the rents are sweaty and the prospect of ever owning a home (for anyone here) is becoming outright impossible. i've always kept emeryville in the back pocket of my mind, but never realized why until watching this video. the only thing holding me back that lack of a bart station and access to nightlife culture.
Places in the city which oppose housing, should have their funds withdrawn. Low density sprawl does not cover it's own costs anyway, unless rates are extremely high. Higher density housing means much more rate payers in a smaller area, and less traffic roads means much less expensive maintenance costs (compared to walking, biking & public transport).
What about safety? Walkable sounds nice, but I think I know lots of people who would rather drive in a car through a bad neighborhood than walk through one.
The more regular people walk, the safer it is. Car-dependant areas result in only the truly desperate walking, which means you're more likely to run into sketchy people. In San Francisco, possible the most walkable city in the US, there are all classes of life walking about, which makes it much safer.
Have you been there? It's certainly encouraging what they're trying to do, but man, Emeryville is essentially a glorified freeway offramp with a bunch of disconnected shopping centers and condo's randomly spread about. It does have an Amtrak station, but even that looks out onto the back parking lots of random strip malls. There's a tiny neighborhood that actually has the form of a traditional streetcar suburb similar to most of the neighborhoods in the rest of the East Bay, but it's unremarkable in that sense. If urbanism can essentially be measured by the number of people outside of cars in public spaces (and I think it can be) as a proportion of the total population, Emeryville is way below average even for California. It may be headed in the right direction, but it has a long, long, long ways to go. And I'm a fan of the place, mostly because of its Amtrak station.
This is a great channel, and you produce great quality content, my friend, keep up the good work, I didn't know about this little town until today, so thank you. Also in mind about San Francisco, they are purposing some bills to combat the housing in some areas which is great news, so hopefully, more will be done, and San Francisco is amazing, I recently went there myself and it was quite the inspiring city, I would live there if the housing wasn't so high, but I'm glad the mayor is doing something, although its hard cause of politics in the way and like you said NIMBYS.
Used to live on the Emeryville/Oakland border and when I went out for my walks or bikes I always headed in the Emeryville direction! Lovely protected bike bath there. It’s still a bit weird in places, especially in the shopping areas and busy roads, but it is improving and a pleasant place!
I enjoyed your video and will look more into Emeryville! An unrequested technical tip though: Get a pop filter for your mic or place it at a location where the plosives (pop sounds produced when you say letters like P or T) are not so distracting. Good content though!
The bus to BART Station is a good idea. The next thing they should do is install some cycle parking next to the station, with direct acess to the platforms. In the Netherlands there is a parking at all stations. Moderate stations usually have 3000 spaces, as well as a shit tonne of shared OV-fiets bicycles. 50% of people ride the first-mile to train stations in NL.
When I lived in Oakland I used to bike through Emeryville all the time just for fun. It's really pleasant in some areas and in others it's just traffic and parking lots like the rest of the country. Either way, it was too expensive for me at the time and now I live far away from there, but I really do think the east bay has some of the best cycling in the country.
A comic book artist I follow named Art Thibert moved from the San Diego area to The Woodlands, and he calls it "paradise". I haven't looked much into it, but if it's a good example of urbanism, I give it my blessing.
This must satire. The Woodlands is Suburban almost exurban in nature. It's entirely car dependent, transit isn't even a viable option there. The small pockets of "urbanism" are pseudo - Urban mixed used developments with large swaths of parking and/or garages that are very much disconnected from each other. Its got a walk score of 18.
@@TivoKenevil hmm didn't say it was perfect. There's plenty of nature. Plenty of areas to walk, bike and it's clean. Yes it's not transit focused but it is a good place to live and visit. Reality, Not satire.
when i first moved to the bay area, Emeryville was kind of just a place for big box stores that had some apartments (I feel like people mostly referred to it as where the IKEA is). even in the short time i've been here (~decade, which is short in terms of infrastructure), Emeryville has made *gigantic* progress. I bike to and around Emeryvillle now, especially along a bunch of new dedicated low-stress bike paths and protected bike lanes. That was unimaginable back in 2012! There's so much new housing going up, basically new neighborhoods emerging from scratch. So excited to see what Emeryville will be like after the *next* ten years. Just full of jealousy from my own east bay city.
The thing about Yimby bros is that they always prioritize letting developers do whatever they want over prioritizing social and affordable housing and that’s where I disagree with them. We can and should build and design livable amazing cities but we must must must have government funded social and affordable housing in the mix from the get go. We can’t just let market rate housing projects gobble up the available land and wait for the magical trickle down theory to take place 5 years later making things a tiny bit less expensive than before but not really livable for workers like teachers janitors etc. emeryville is still one of the most expensive cities in America.
The problem is currency/economy itself. Get rid of that and we will have a superior world. We DON'T need more houses, we NEED more density, and absolutely NO cars.
Thank you for making these videos, Im trying to get my small city and county to realize the incredible benefits walkability and good city design could have for our area, and your videos keep inspiring me! To know that Emeryville can do it gives me confidence that we can do it!
It reminds what architect Jaime Lerner did as mayor of Curitiba and governor of the of Paraná, Brazil. For his time, it’s impressive how he implemented a innovative public transport system and banned car from main streets in the city’s centre. Although the city may not be all that for today’s standards, it’s far better than the average Brazilian city (basically worsened car-centric American cities + economic stagnation and informality here and there)
Small cities are great places to actually start building a full-fledge walkable city. The area is fairly small and can run a smooth operation if urbanist minded politicians are in office, as Emeryville has clearly done. I live in a small college town about twice as big as Emeryville with good bones to become a more walk/bike friendly city, but we have no real urge to change things here. The talk is always about more downtown parking.
Lots of info in this video, obvi considerable research on the topic has been done. Your pace and inflection are nice too. You might want to invest in a pop filter for the mic, or just sit 6 inches away from it and don't choke the mic 🤣 Also, yeah the mattress on the floor is all anyone can focus on once they see it. Throwing serious murder vibes. Gotta love UA-cams for it's diversity!
Great video, yes, good to focus on the good and give us the majors and the people responsible information so we can follow them in social media, thank you so much I'm actually moving so SF metro area soon so this came in perfectly, New subscriber! I am not sure if this would work but if you focus on main metro areas and do series of videos of them that could be beneficial, if you do top 25 of them there's a lot to talk about and it would give the channel some consistency and direction, but that's if you're the expert, great vid anyesy, cheers!
The mayor wants to ban cars? I won't be living there. That position basically sums up my opposition to most urban planners. Most want to top down force everyone into their vision when that's the reason we're in the mess in the first place. All the regulations, zoning regulations, deed restrictions, car centric subsidies, and tax payer funded building projects got us to today. It's naive to think this time around these top down mandates will produce the right results and even if they did at what cost?
I'm more about including public transportation along with cars than banning them completely, you're removing an entire preference of transportation simply for the sake of looks rather than accommodating for different types of people. 'Nimby's' is a straight euphemism used to manipulate people away from their mindset - it's fairly simple, if you want to replace a family's personal space and lifestyle with public transportation and housing then you better be willing to move all of their stuff for them and that accounts for paying for a new home and setting them up for a few months. Not everyone wants to live in a giant building of box clones and even as someone who does want to live in a skyscraper you have to understand that you're forcing actual human beings out of their homes.
Yeah, Emeryville is doing a great job of urbanizing themselves. The mayor is a big influence, but he is also a product of his environment. He has broad support of his townfolk. They want to have a nice walkable and bikeable city and are all pitching in to make it happen, like a community should. The question is what do we do in the extremely NIMBY places like SF, Berkeley, or Oakland. In these places the conservative homeowners have formed an unholy marriage with "anti-displacement" advocates to block any new housing. The righty homeowners want to "protect their property values" and the progressive groups want to "screw the developers and stop gentrification." The net result is that you can't ever build anything but a token number of new housing units and the prices keep climbing. Ironically, this only gives more firepower to the two groups. The lefty activists scream even louder about all the displacement and the righty homeowners have even more of that property value to protect. I'd really like to hear if anyone has any solutions to this problem. It seems that we're all stumped about how we could unravel this perverse situation.
Simple, you can't because we aren't Europe. But the American suburbs can definitely be urbanised rather than apartmentalized (if that's even a word lol). Bikes and walking can also be adjusted towards a conservative lifestyle but you also have to concern over micro-racists in those areas. Or give them the money and supplies to move out of their homes. But Americans have always been about owning their own personal property and it seems that urbanists don't understand that you can't just wipe everything out and replace it with your own vision of the world vs having options including vehicles and private property.
@@lightyagami1058 Americans were completely fine owning condos in multi-unit buildings all the way into the 1940s. It was in the 1950s that living in a far-flung suburb even became possible because of the construction of highways. Before that only the very rich could afford to live far away form the city and commute in daily by train. It was expensive because it was not government subsidized. But then the government decided to subsidize massive highways and a completely new lifestyle became available. It is perfectly possible to "own your own personal property" while living in a condo. And a ton of Americans are already doing it. With the highways now reaching capacity just about everywhere, the old arrangement of living in a condo in a medium density area is becoming the norm for most people in this country.
I love what Emeryville is doing. I'm nextdoor in Oakland and we're making improvements here too. New housing is going in, cycling infrastructure is being put in place of motor vehicle travel lanes. We still have a long way to go but I feel like we're moving in the right direction. HMU if you ever want to do an Oakland episode.
Housing is expensive because of real estate investment companies. We have "affordable" new homes near us..."affordable" starting at $500,000. So-called supply and demand is a lie in modern capitalism.
I feel like “build more” isn’t always the answer to housing prices.. Here in Philadelphia the new houses and apartments often sell/ rent for far more than the old ones. I think the bigger issue is commodifying housing in general especially because the things we sacrifice to build massive shipping containers is too much to sacrifice in cities that already have decent urbanism, like my own.
4:24 is Galena, IL! My car broke down there last year, and I was stuck for a few days. One of the best things that could have happened. It was an amazing place to get stuck and spend a few days. Very lively, just needs a university or something so that there could be more young people. Right now, it's mostly retirees and tourists.
These are good improvements. But with the disconnected politica and infrastructure of the Bay Area, Emeryville will still he plagued by wide stroads and parking lots and dense traffic due to the poor transit options for getting TO emeryville. The emery go around is a good start, but its just one of 26 other transit agencies that have little to no timed transfers and connections with each other.
Why isn't Nimby considered cruel and unusual? If i were in charge, the punishment for this kind of hate crime would be civil assets forfeiture as restitution and/or prison. Weaponizing the government against the most vulnerable for your own comfort and profitability? Maybe you don't deserve to live in a society rooted in human decency and progress and kindness.... How quickly Nimbys forget the unmatched value of good people around you. They assume anyone with lower income is automatically somehow not worthy to so near to them up on their highest of horses. Plus, ask a karen! They LOVE complaining about strangers living their lives as they please. Who doesn't love a good new hobby?
Oh yeah, as an older woman, I reallllly recommend moving to Emeryville, NOT. WTF is every 'urbanist' a young healthy white MAN? Oh, prolly just a coincidence!
ngl i started skeptical because Emeryville is a traffic nightmare. But that's only the big mall east side. Everything west of the tracks are grids of narrow streets and little to no cars. The bike lanes are really impressive and can see it inspiring its neighboring cities, especially Oakland.
Emeryville is super expensive, rents are like $4000+ AND what a lot of gentrifiers don’t know is Emeryville was nothing more than factories and poultry factories c, and the ground water is contaminated. And where the apartments are built is landfill. I was born and raised in North Oakland.
I've lived in the East Bay for pretty much my whole adult life and spent a few years living on the Oakland side of the Emeryville border and several years in West Oakland just down the road. Here's my take: Emeryville does do a good job of building new buildings and they do have good bike lanes. They have the Emery-Go-Round bus which is a free hop on type bus that basically drives around the "city" in a loop and is awesome. The biggest negative I find to Emeryville is it really has no identity other than being an outdoor mall surrounded by new buildings and other big box stores. For every small business in Emeryville there's like 10 corporate chain stores (if not more). Its where everyone in the East Bay gets IKEA furniture and sees an occasional movie or gets a TV from Best Buy. Yes it's "walkable" but only because its small and there's not much to walk to. There's no central downtown Emeryville - the closest to that would probably just be the Bay Street mall? And yeah it's surrounded by freeways. Its kind of a weird place and even though technically it is its own city - it feels weird to call Emeryville a city. Parts of it almost feel like a new college campus development. And its location is right next to West/North Oakland so yeah, there's high crime compared to the national average. And while they do build new buildings which is great - they also have little in the way of rent control or tenant protections. I had friends who lived in a great apartment about 5 houses away from the Oakland/Emeryville border and they eventually moved because they were sick of their landlord arbitrarily hiking rent up every year at his own discretion. Nobody wants to keep shopping for a new place to live every 12 months. Hopefully the new buildings help with that but bay area real estate is just insane. Pros: Walkable, Bikeable, very close proximity to San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley, good city planning relative to surrounding areas, bay breeze and perfect weather year round Cons: Boring, no cultural or local identity, no downtown, too many corporate businesses, not many green spaces, limited tenant protections, crime rates not much better than Oakland, still very expensive
All well and good but CA is a terrible place to live; demented extream left politicians, absurd high taxes, outragous cost of living, out of control crime, and crack (I mean homeless) camps all over. Now they want to provide reperations and put the state even more deeply in debt which means higer taxes still! My faimly moved to CA in the late 1800s and flourished there until the 1980s living in the LA and San Diego areas. Back in the day it was a great place to live. As of now the last of them have moved out of the state. Thats about 35 well educated people with jobs homes and good incomes (you know that shrinking group who actually pay taxes) gone from CA forever. Why is that? Check my first sentence which covers it. So if you want a nice walkable city in CA no problem, just be sure to avoid the human waste, disgarded needles and passed out drug addicts. And when you get to the store (if it hasent already closed for good) deal with the locked up displays since CA encourages professional shop lifters and gangs. Then to top off you day get mugged on your walk home and come home to to find you have been robbed. Don't bother to call the police they have probably been defunded and won't show up for at least an hour. Yea, enjoy your hellscape state and thank your demented leadership for all the joy. My suggestion get hell out while you can or you will go down with the ship. If you stay you are crazy.
Interestingly, the other tiny enclaves nearby do not have any of this. Piedmont is apex NIMBY land...but it also doesn't really have much in the way of businesses either. It's just a glorified single-zone neighborhood with a graveyard. And the other one, Albany, while not so egregious, and arguably getting there, is still pretty awful. It does have one bicycle trail following the train track guideway splitting the city in two, and one bike trail on the shore, it revamped its main road to have a bit more room for bikes [it was a stroad],...but it also has a lot of big box stores, not that many apartments at all, a stroad, super wide residential roads. I didn't include the other East Bay cities nearby because they are a different can of worms, especially Oakland.
you failed to account for SF aristocracy hoarding real estate, also politically entrenched developers subverting plans for affordable housing. before you slam people as NIMBY you better take a closer look at the deal they''re against- or you're spreading lies.
I wish people would stop calling a group of people Nimby!! I realize the reason for the name and making fun of them but it doesn’t get them to change by being mean to them. The best way to persuade them to have better neighborhoods, etc. by holding an expo or something similar, and then putting a 3-D or something showing about how the neighborhood could look differently in a good way.
Vienna, Austria has very affordable housing despite having a fairly high cost of living, as all big cities do, because something like 60% of people live in social housing, government owned apartments, where the rent is kept intentionally low. Because there are so many apartments with cheap rent, private landlords have no choice but to keep their rent lower to be competitive. I wish the US would take a page out of Austria's book. There's a reason it's one of the best cities to live in in the world
There *is* enough housing. The problem is that the houses that are available are too expensive. There is an abundance of expensive houses and (debatably) "luxury" apartments that only people who already have several houses can afford.
I wish there were an equivalent Peninsula city for people who work in San Mateo County or the South Bay. Redwood City is the closest but has nowhere near the focus and nimbleness that Emeryville has.
This is for a very narrow slice of people. Good luck finding a well paying job in the Bay Area, which is near the highest if not the highest cost of living in the US, when taking driving a car out of the equation. You would need way more than one city like this in the Bay Area to do this to even start solving the housing problem. If you can afford it, go for it.
If we could spread out developments around various strategic clusters, we wouldn't have to resort to massive upscaling and gentrification in the few spots we can. If anything, this video demonstrates that you don't need to be smack dab downtown, or right over a metro line to have a grid of well balanced density. Give us a choice conservatives!
i love the mattress on the floor vibes
Lived in Berkeley for 4 years. Definitely only thought of Emeryville as a series of big box stores and the Pixar offices. My roommate and I called it "The Merchant Republic of Emeryville" and joked that no one lives in Emeryville
i mean its population is only 12,000 which is not too bad considering its just over 2 sq mi
same, i thought it was just a shopping promenade with an ikea and a theater
please get a pop filter for your mic
$21+ million for that little bridge thingy is not exactly doing things right. There’s now way that lil thingy is worth $21 million anything
No, we get it, money should only be spent on car-centric infrastructure.
Had they spent the same amount of money on a bridge for cars (except we know that in that case it would've been a lot more), no one would've batted an eyebrow, but the instant money is spent on people, there's the knee-jerk hysteria and pearl-clutching.
@@safe-keeper1042 yo, you can hate cars all you want, it doesn’t change the fact that $21 million for that tiny ugly bridge thingy is shady af, I guess people from California are used to being ripped off and that’s on them, I don’t live in that shiathole therefore that’s none of my concern 🤣
Your "normal" person VS urbanist person comments hit home. I've been becoming more and more radically urbanist over the last few years and now I can't help but look around and see all the problems in policy and apathy. My wife just LOVES when I turn every conversation into something about urbanism, walkability, public transit, etc.
Yep. After getting into urbanism I feel like I see problems everywhere I go, whereas before I was living in blissful suburban ignorance. Now my girlfriend is starting to see it too because I talk about it so much lol.
Omg it’s the same with me. Ever since I had the chance live outside the U.S. and got to experience the walkable, bikeable, good public transit lifestyle in Japan (I have since moved back), I have become so passionate about urban planning that I will somehow very often turn every conversation I have with my husband into those topics.
@@whereaboutsunknown3822 nihongo hanasemaskua
my wife wants me to stop bringing up the works of karl marx at thanksgiving 😔
@@whereaboutsunknown3822 yeah I had a similar experience. Japan doesn’t really even use big plans to get walkable neighborhoods. They have light zoning laws that allow small apartments and small shops in even the lightest L1 residential zone and they have heavier use zones up to L12 heavy industry and lighter uses are always allowed in a heavier zone creating mixed use neighborhoods you can walk in. By contrast zoning in the land of the free and the brave is strictly single use only afraid of adapting to new market demands like needing more homes and less office space now.
Finally a California city I can use as an example of how things can be better, instead of saying look at Amsterdam, Seattle, or Minneapolis. Because to most of the people I talk to in my home town, can't fathom the value of something so far away. For any European example, they'll be like "that's just how things are in Europe, and they wouldn't work here." For the others, they'll have some sort of built in NIMBY response about crime or traffic. . .
they'll just say "Oakland-Emeryville was built on a dense grid. [insert city here] wasn't."
As someone from the East Bay, it's nice to hear good things about Emeryville. It's constantly ranked as a shithole, with sky-high crime rates, and that IS true, but it's gotten so much better in the last 5 years or so and is continuing to get so much better that I'd probably direct anyone looking to move to the Bay to Emeryville. Especially for people who don't have... cars. Can't steal 'em if you don't have 'em!
I definitely consider most of emeryville a shithole. Despite living hear 19 year’s I’ve never really checked it out more than the freeway off ramps. That was enough to turn me away, perhaps I judged it too harshly
i've always known it from being the home of Pixar, as someon who always viewed the whole credits. What's odd is that Pixar is smack dab in the middle of town, yet it's also a huge suburban campus.
A big issue with Emeryville's crime stats is that they are often reported on a per-capita basis, but a lot of the crime is committed by people who do not live in Emeryville. So in raw numbers the crime may not be as bad as it seems, or could be comparable to other areas in the East Bay, but the per-capita reporting makes it seem astronomical. At least that was my understanding the last time I read up on it.
@@Pierrelourens1 for sure. It's so small, I always thought of it as just another Oakland neighborhood. It's not like you cross the line over from west oakland and it immediately gets so much worse. emeryville is just a niehgborhood in the flats that doesn't have the hills making its crime stats look better
The first time I took the train from Seattle to San Francisco, my ticket had a transfer in Emeryville. I'd never heard of Emeryville so I didn't know where it was or if my ticket was wrong. Then I got there and found out it's next to Oakland. Years later I went into Emeryville once, to the Esperanto-USA store. I used the Emery Go-Round from MacArthur BART station, and it worked well and I didn't have to wait long.
Great video. As someone who lives pretty close to Emeryville, I can certainly say this process has started a long time ago. The Ikea and Theater area were the first to really start this trend of newer, easily walkable areas with shops below and housing above, and the city continued to build off of that. There is a good mix of old buildings and newer construction in areas that were very downtrodden and bleak looking. Great video highlighting a small community doing it right in a march larger suburban area.
Yes, but I wouldn't call that area the "Ikea area." That's Bay Street! That Ikea big box store nearby is actually a symptom of the previous suburbanization period if Emeryville's history. It was built at the tail end of it, but still. We have to recognize that Ikea, while trying to pretend like they're more climate friendly, is actually a disastrous business both for the climate and for sustainability in general. They might as well have been founded in Bentonville, Arkansas.
This proves that local politics is key for building walkable towns
San Francisco is denser than most other places and people do walk there more than most places. What really needs to happen is we need to make more places like San Francisco’s layout to build enough housing to stabilize or even lower prices.
San Francisco has the 2nd highest density in the USA after New York City, and all in only 49 sq. miles. Also, Golden Gate Park (bigger than NY’s Central Park).
I love urbanization & reducing both carbon emissions & reliance on automobiles, but not everyone want to live in a gridlock dense city like SF. There is still a very small minority of the 300+ millions of Americans that want to live in “places like San Francisco’s layout “.
@@mattrancho rebuild small rural towns to how they were back in the Wild West and every else. Train station 🚉 in middle of the town , a Main Street densely packed with businesses on the first floor and apartments of second , third etc , and off the buildings off the main street are still walkable and dense. Small towns are dying due to the expensive car infrastructure and new small towns sprawling to ridiculous levels where parking lot filled lots with one business spaces hundreds of feet away from each other making walking around the business like hiking. This is what is killing small towns. Look up Alan fishers small towns don’t have to suck video
@@mattrancho San Francisco and Manhattan are the most expensive places in America showing there is more demand to live in dense walkable cities than there is supply so we should relax zoning to allow more to be built. Right now strict single use zoning only allows car driving suburbia to be built and about half of roads are paid through income taxes so suburbia appears cheaper than it is. If walkable places were allowed to be built, which could be less dense than SF, and got cheaper with the supply we’d see more people opt for urbanism and reducing carbon so they can save money driving less and might find out they like it.
@@karld1791 first off, I completely agree with the zoning laws. But SF & NY are 2 every unique cities that are in their own category (or should be). Yes there’s demand to live in those cities, but its also the popularity, image, rep, brand, attraction, lifestyle, etc that keep that demand high. These 2 cities are 2 renown international cities. Not a good example. Look at LA, one of the most expensive cities in America. Yes they are improving their public transit & are developing into more of a dense urban city, but over 90% of the city scape are low rise low density urban sprawl. After spending billions on light rail & bus rapid transit, the ridership were not as high as they projected. My point is its mainly about the “big city life, big city lights”. Some of the fastest growing cities are Seattle, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix. All these cities are majority suburban sprawl. Seattle being probably the city that really is developing an urban dense city with improving public transit (all cities listed are as well). But its mainly focused on downtown Seattle & downtown Bellevue. Seattle metro, stretching from Tacoma up to Everett to the east in Redmon are still suburban sprawl, which is over 90% of the metro.
With that being said, yea there is a demand to live in urban cities, but urbanist want people to believe majority of Americans are dying to live in urban dense neighborhoods like SF or NY. “majority” of American still prefer driving their own cars living in single family homes. Americans are just used to that suburbia car driven culture & lifestyle.
SF native priced out over ten years ago. Moved to Santa Cruz Mnts, then priced out again. Currently in LA and hating it but haven’t been able to find a way back to the bay. Sigh. Enjoy your content. Keep it up 👍🏼
Just recently found this channel, reminds me a lot of Not Just Bikes, you guys are really hitting the nail on the head and I wish more people talked about this stuff to get the conversation going. I think a lot of people don't even know that cities can be less car dependent, so this content is so important. I hope to see that you and like-minded people bring about big changes in city planning domestically and globally. Thanks for the great videos.
I feel like most of the people that watch these videos have traveled/lived abroad and thought "Why can't we do that here too?"
@@noob.168 never traveled or lived abroad but i would love to. i've lived in a city my whole life but after seeing the suburban wastelands surrounding my city i would love to travel to europe
I also know Emeryville as the terminus for some Amtrak lines, including the Cali-to-Chicago California Zephyr line.
My eyes literally bugged out in disbelief at how great many aspects of Emeryville are. I never heard of it before. Great video. I live in LA, and this makes me really want to visit Emeryville!
It's 10min from downtown SF. just over the bridge. It's also a stop on Amtrak if you ever take the coast starlight up to bay.
Same !!!
How long until Emeryville gets a stop on a BART expansion? 😁
It's not in any even long-range plans of which I'm aware, but Emeryville does have an Amtrak station with regular if not frequent service south to San Jose and north to Sacramento. I could imagine that being ramped up considerably in the forseeable future.
@@lasurflifeI arrived on an Amtrak train on a weekday and couldn't find a way out other than to take an Amtrak bus I didn't pay for into a place in San Francisco that was also a transit desert. I just wanted to get home to the South Bay!
Thank you for posting something positive about urban planning in the US
I’m always so exited for a new Thomas the Trainer Video.
This is a good spotlight on a place that doesn’t get that much spotlight. It highlights the things Emeryville is doing right compared to the rest of the Bay Area.
Thomas: "The Most Urbanist-Friendly City You've (Probably) Never Heard Of"
Me: "I've heard of many cities outside North America."
It's not a bad candidate if the scope is restricted to North America, but yeah. Better and equally obscure candidates exist aplenty in other countries. Zoetermeer, for instance. Never knew about it until today, and it looks pretty urbanist-friendly to me.
I lived in the phoenix area my entire life, and am 100% down to talk to you more about places around this city.....BOY DO I HAVE A LOT TO FUGGIN SAY.
Feel free to reach out to me!
Emeryville isn’t really a fair comparison to an actual city. Emeryville is a tiny dot on a map, smaller in area to downtown San Francisco. It’s just an area that was once industrial lots; obviously this would be an area easier to zone for high density than SF’s swaths of single family homes. Also, Emeryville was a bunch of industrial lots in one of the highest crime areas in CA; you’re not going to be seeing any NIMBYs come protect that area. I’m not saying we don’t need urban planning reform. SF definitely needs to make it cheaper for developers. I’m just saying it’s unrealistic to point to a tiny blip on a map like Emeryville and say “why can’t SF be like this?”
I agree with pretty much everything, but I wouldn't be too harsh on San Francisco, as the city proper is really only a tiny part of the metropolitan area: it's more like the Manhattan of the bay area. I personally view Emeryville as part of San Francisco, not really a separate "city".
Being in high school its nice to see people in our age range finally realize the problems literally in front of our eyes.. the city for the car will be looked at in shame in the future
Sorry to burst your "people in our age" generalization but there are people out there older than Thomas and you that have done tons of research into the negative effects of car centric development. Check out The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
I live a few blocks away in oakland and hope they annex me
Let's see the Arizona video! This video doesn't have enough cursing. Thomas holds the monopoly on cursing and urban planning content, haha.
It would also be cool to see people shed more light on California cities that are making progress. If it can be done anywhere, I'd assume California would be the first state to implement these changes
Its amazing how Emeryville has reinvented itself. But before it was all housing, shopping, and bike lanes, Emeryville was the Industrial Armpit of the Bay Area since the 1920s. A landmark animated neon sign of 60 years ago was Sherwin-Williams Paint "Cover The Earth". No one lived there. Just rail lines, tanneries, and industrial factories. But with tighter environmental regulations, by the 1980s, industrial plants were shutting down and moving.
The Scottsdale video would be interesting. I wonder if the city council will ever be accepting of light rail or BRT, though I think it’s been 6 years since Valley Metro first tried to do that.
I would not be surprised if they have some BRT or light rail at some point. But that is no panacea. The problems are so entrenched in a place like Scottsdale that they are very difficult to solve. You either have to grow yourself out of it (from a population standpoint) or take back land (shrink your physical size). More or less L. A. and Detroit (and Detroit remains a work in progress). Oh, and growing yourself out of it is really problematic given it is in Arizona (with its water issues).
i grew up in south berkeley, nearly adjacent to emeryville. over the decades, emeryville has dramatically changed into one of the best cities in the bay in my opinion. i've always noticed how much better the overall designed experiences of the city is once I leave bekeley's city limits. berkeley is now BARELY beginning to get its fucking shit together now that the nimby boomer are beginning to die off/loose power. but, it's not even close to the level of intention that i see in emeryville's urban design.
currently I live in san francisco, and yes the rents are sweaty and the prospect of ever owning a home (for anyone here) is becoming outright impossible. i've always kept emeryville in the back pocket of my mind, but never realized why until watching this video. the only thing holding me back that lack of a bart station and access to nightlife culture.
keep doing what you're doing I like these videos!
Places in the city which oppose housing, should have their funds withdrawn. Low density sprawl does not cover it's own costs anyway, unless rates are extremely high. Higher density housing means much more rate payers in a smaller area, and less traffic roads means much less expensive maintenance costs (compared to walking, biking & public transport).
What about safety? Walkable sounds nice, but I think I know lots of people who would rather drive in a car through a bad neighborhood than walk through one.
The more regular people walk, the safer it is. Car-dependant areas result in only the truly desperate walking, which means you're more likely to run into sketchy people. In San Francisco, possible the most walkable city in the US, there are all classes of life walking about, which makes it much safer.
Subbed and recommending this channel. I love urban planning. San Diego is behind the ball on this.
Have you been there? It's certainly encouraging what they're trying to do, but man, Emeryville is essentially a glorified freeway offramp with a bunch of disconnected shopping centers and condo's randomly spread about. It does have an Amtrak station, but even that looks out onto the back parking lots of random strip malls. There's a tiny neighborhood that actually has the form of a traditional streetcar suburb similar to most of the neighborhoods in the rest of the East Bay, but it's unremarkable in that sense. If urbanism can essentially be measured by the number of people outside of cars in public spaces (and I think it can be) as a proportion of the total population, Emeryville is way below average even for California. It may be headed in the right direction, but it has a long, long, long ways to go. And I'm a fan of the place, mostly because of its Amtrak station.
This is a great channel, and you produce great quality content, my friend, keep up the good work, I didn't know about this little town until today, so thank you. Also in mind about San Francisco, they are purposing some bills to combat the housing in some areas which is great news, so hopefully, more will be done, and San Francisco is amazing, I recently went there myself and it was quite the inspiring city, I would live there if the housing wasn't so high, but I'm glad the mayor is doing something, although its hard cause of politics in the way and like you said NIMBYS.
SF is the best city in spite of problems. Housing has come down a bit. Take a look.
@@franktaylor7978 yes agreed.
Used to live on the Emeryville/Oakland border and when I went out for my walks or bikes I always headed in the Emeryville direction! Lovely protected bike bath there. It’s still a bit weird in places, especially in the shopping areas and busy roads, but it is improving and a pleasant place!
I enjoyed your video and will look more into Emeryville! An unrequested technical tip though: Get a pop filter for your mic or place it at a location where the plosives (pop sounds produced when you say letters like P or T) are not so distracting. Good content though!
You and City Nerd should work together. I think you would complement each other.
As an Arizonan interested in urban planning I would love to hear your thoughts on Scottsdale
I live in the Bay Area and familiar with Emeryville. It is pretty flat and weather usually good so good for walking and biking.
Emery Go Round is such a clever name lol
The bus to BART Station is a good idea. The next thing they should do is install some cycle parking next to the station, with direct acess to the platforms. In the Netherlands there is a parking at all stations. Moderate stations usually have 3000 spaces, as well as a shit tonne of shared OV-fiets bicycles. 50% of people ride the first-mile to train stations in NL.
When I lived in Oakland I used to bike through Emeryville all the time just for fun. It's really pleasant in some areas and in others it's just traffic and parking lots like the rest of the country. Either way, it was too expensive for me at the time and now I live far away from there, but I really do think the east bay has some of the best cycling in the country.
If you're willing to live in a black neighborhood, you can have a 2-3 story brick row house plus basement here in Baltimore City for $3,000 - $75,000.
As a resident of Scottsdale, I got a good chuckle from the mini-rant at the end there. This place really sucks
@darren6458 bro is going through my comment history 😂💀
@darren6458 say clown again, I bet you won't
@darren6458 lol
The Woodlands near Houston is an example of good urbanism that includes lots of green. Not perfect but lots of clean, walkable areas.
A comic book artist I follow named Art Thibert moved from the San Diego area to The Woodlands, and he calls it "paradise". I haven't looked much into it, but if it's a good example of urbanism, I give it my blessing.
This must satire. The Woodlands is Suburban almost exurban in nature. It's entirely car dependent, transit isn't even a viable option there. The small pockets of "urbanism" are pseudo - Urban mixed used developments with large swaths of parking and/or garages that are very much disconnected from each other. Its got a walk score of 18.
@@TivoKenevil hmm didn't say it was perfect. There's plenty of nature. Plenty of areas to walk, bike and it's clean. Yes it's not transit focused but it is a good place to live and visit. Reality,
Not satire.
@@kennymccannYT No one is saying it's a bad place. But you're saying it's walkable and an example of good urbanism... Is satire, that's reality.
@@TivoKenevil there are plenty of walkable areas.
Great info Thomas. Thank you.Also a bit of constructive criticism, get a better background.
when i first moved to the bay area, Emeryville was kind of just a place for big box stores that had some apartments (I feel like people mostly referred to it as where the IKEA is). even in the short time i've been here (~decade, which is short in terms of infrastructure), Emeryville has made *gigantic* progress. I bike to and around Emeryvillle now, especially along a bunch of new dedicated low-stress bike paths and protected bike lanes. That was unimaginable back in 2012! There's so much new housing going up, basically new neighborhoods emerging from scratch. So excited to see what Emeryville will be like after the *next* ten years. Just full of jealousy from my own east bay city.
The thing about Yimby bros is that they always prioritize letting developers do whatever they want over prioritizing social and affordable housing and that’s where I disagree with them. We can and should build and design livable amazing cities but we must must must have government funded social and affordable housing in the mix from the get go. We can’t just let market rate housing projects gobble up the available land and wait for the magical trickle down theory to take place 5 years later making things a tiny bit less expensive than before but not really livable for workers like teachers janitors etc. emeryville is still one of the most expensive cities in America.
The problem is currency/economy itself. Get rid of that and we will have a superior world. We DON'T need more houses, we NEED more density, and absolutely NO cars.
Thank you for making these videos, Im trying to get my small city and county to realize the incredible benefits walkability and good city design could have for our area, and your videos keep inspiring me! To know that Emeryville can do it gives me confidence that we can do it!
You gained 6k subs in a month.
It reminds what architect Jaime Lerner did as mayor of Curitiba and governor of the of Paraná, Brazil. For his time, it’s impressive how he implemented a innovative public transport system and banned car from main streets in the city’s centre. Although the city may not be all that for today’s standards, it’s far better than the average Brazilian city (basically worsened car-centric American cities + economic stagnation and informality here and there)
Small cities are great places to actually start building a full-fledge walkable city. The area is fairly small and can run a smooth operation if urbanist minded politicians are in office, as Emeryville has clearly done. I live in a small college town about twice as big as Emeryville with good bones to become a more walk/bike friendly city, but we have no real urge to change things here. The talk is always about more downtown parking.
Keep it up, I’m loving what I’m seeing from you!
Get a pop filter for the love of god, hell just throw a sock over your mic
Now I know it as not just the last stop on the California Zephyr:
I think a sequel to the 1906 Earthquake probably will solve NIMBYism when everything in the city gets leveled to the ground in San Francisco.
Lots of info in this video, obvi considerable research on the topic has been done. Your pace and inflection are nice too.
You might want to invest in a pop filter for the mic, or just sit 6 inches away from it and don't choke the mic 🤣 Also, yeah the mattress on the floor is all anyone can focus on once they see it. Throwing serious murder vibes.
Gotta love UA-cams for it's diversity!
Can't wait for the Scottsdale video as an Arizonan lol
I thought it looked like Emeryville! Nailed it! Lol
Great video, yes, good to focus on the good and give us the majors and the people responsible information so we can follow them in social media, thank you so much I'm actually moving so SF metro area soon so this came in perfectly, New subscriber! I am not sure if this would work but if you focus on main metro areas and do series of videos of them that could be beneficial, if you do top 25 of them there's a lot to talk about and it would give the channel some consistency and direction, but that's if you're the expert, great vid anyesy, cheers!
The mayor wants to ban cars? I won't be living there.
That position basically sums up my opposition to most urban planners. Most want to top down force everyone into their vision when that's the reason we're in the mess in the first place. All the regulations, zoning regulations, deed restrictions, car centric subsidies, and tax payer funded building projects got us to today. It's naive to think this time around these top down mandates will produce the right results and even if they did at what cost?
I'm more about including public transportation along with cars than banning them completely, you're removing an entire preference of transportation simply for the sake of looks rather than accommodating for different types of people.
'Nimby's' is a straight euphemism used to manipulate people away from their mindset - it's fairly simple, if you want to replace a family's personal space and lifestyle with public transportation and housing then you better be willing to move all of their stuff for them and that accounts for paying for a new home and setting them up for a few months.
Not everyone wants to live in a giant building of box clones and even as someone who does want to live in a skyscraper you have to understand that you're forcing actual human beings out of their homes.
I live in Emeryville and it is awesome!
nice video but you need to get a pop filter bro
Not sure a bus system name has made me laugh out loud before...
I'm seeing more and more conversation about building walkable, human scaled cities. This makes me excited for the future.
Yeah, Emeryville is doing a great job of urbanizing themselves. The mayor is a big influence, but he is also a product of his environment. He has broad support of his townfolk. They want to have a nice walkable and bikeable city and are all pitching in to make it happen, like a community should.
The question is what do we do in the extremely NIMBY places like SF, Berkeley, or Oakland. In these places the conservative homeowners have formed an unholy marriage with "anti-displacement" advocates to block any new housing. The righty homeowners want to "protect their property values" and the progressive groups want to "screw the developers and stop gentrification." The net result is that you can't ever build anything but a token number of new housing units and the prices keep climbing.
Ironically, this only gives more firepower to the two groups. The lefty activists scream even louder about all the displacement and the righty homeowners have even more of that property value to protect. I'd really like to hear if anyone has any solutions to this problem. It seems that we're all stumped about how we could unravel this perverse situation.
Simple, you can't because we aren't Europe. But the American suburbs can definitely be urbanised rather than apartmentalized (if that's even a word lol).
Bikes and walking can also be adjusted towards a conservative lifestyle but you also have to concern over micro-racists in those areas. Or give them the money and supplies to move out of their homes.
But Americans have always been about owning their own personal property and it seems that urbanists don't understand that you can't just wipe everything out and replace it with your own vision of the world vs having options including vehicles and private property.
@@lightyagami1058 Americans were completely fine owning condos in multi-unit buildings all the way into the 1940s. It was in the 1950s that living in a far-flung suburb even became possible because of the construction of highways. Before that only the very rich could afford to live far away form the city and commute in daily by train. It was expensive because it was not government subsidized. But then the government decided to subsidize massive highways and a completely new lifestyle became available.
It is perfectly possible to "own your own personal property" while living in a condo. And a ton of Americans are already doing it. With the highways now reaching capacity just about everywhere, the old arrangement of living in a condo in a medium density area is becoming the norm for most people in this country.
its still too expensive
Pretty cool hearing how you're about to hit 4,000 subscribers, and you're now at 12,500! Well-deserved :)
Nice, well constructed video. It's good to learn that good stuff is going on in smaller cities.
I love what Emeryville is doing. I'm nextdoor in Oakland and we're making improvements here too. New housing is going in, cycling infrastructure is being put in place of motor vehicle travel lanes. We still have a long way to go but I feel like we're moving in the right direction. HMU if you ever want to do an Oakland episode.
Housing is expensive because of real estate investment companies. We have "affordable" new homes near us..."affordable" starting at $500,000.
So-called supply and demand is a lie in modern capitalism.
I feel like “build more” isn’t always the answer to housing prices.. Here in Philadelphia the new houses and apartments often sell/ rent for far more than the old ones. I think the bigger issue is commodifying housing in general especially because the things we sacrifice to build massive shipping containers is too much to sacrifice in cities that already have decent urbanism, like my own.
4:24 is Galena, IL! My car broke down there last year, and I was stuck for a few days. One of the best things that could have happened. It was an amazing place to get stuck and spend a few days. Very lively, just needs a university or something so that there could be more young people. Right now, it's mostly retirees and tourists.
These are good improvements. But with the disconnected politica and infrastructure of the Bay Area, Emeryville will still he plagued by wide stroads and parking lots and dense traffic due to the poor transit options for getting TO emeryville. The emery go around is a good start, but its just one of 26 other transit agencies that have little to no timed transfers and connections with each other.
Why isn't Nimby considered cruel and unusual? If i were in charge, the punishment for this kind of hate crime would be civil assets forfeiture as restitution and/or prison. Weaponizing the government against the most vulnerable for your own comfort and profitability? Maybe you don't deserve to live in a society rooted in human decency and progress and kindness.... How quickly Nimbys forget the unmatched value of good people around you. They assume anyone with lower income is automatically somehow not worthy to so near to them up on their highest of horses. Plus, ask a karen! They LOVE complaining about strangers living their lives as they please. Who doesn't love a good new hobby?
Please fix the mic popping😱
Propel did a great vid' of Emeryville with the mayor (search 'This American Mayor is Creating the Ultimate Biking City')
Good luck to the mayor!👍
...
What would your mattress say about urbanism? 😀
Surprise! I knew about Emeryville, but didn't know about the positive changes.
Definitely going to visit. Peace.
Can you do one for Canada please
The Mayor of Emeryville has one of the most entertaining Twitter accounts! Edited for bad typo
Oh yeah, as an older woman, I reallllly recommend moving to Emeryville, NOT. WTF is every 'urbanist' a young healthy white MAN? Oh, prolly just a coincidence!
ngl i started skeptical because Emeryville is a traffic nightmare. But that's only the big mall east side. Everything west of the tracks are grids of narrow streets and little to no cars. The bike lanes are really impressive and can see it inspiring its neighboring cities, especially Oakland.
Emeryville is super expensive, rents are like $4000+ AND what a lot of gentrifiers don’t know is Emeryville was nothing more than factories and poultry factories c, and the ground water is contaminated. And where the apartments are built is landfill. I was born and raised in North Oakland.
I've lived in the East Bay for pretty much my whole adult life and spent a few years living on the Oakland side of the Emeryville border and several years in West Oakland just down the road. Here's my take: Emeryville does do a good job of building new buildings and they do have good bike lanes. They have the Emery-Go-Round bus which is a free hop on type bus that basically drives around the "city" in a loop and is awesome. The biggest negative I find to Emeryville is it really has no identity other than being an outdoor mall surrounded by new buildings and other big box stores. For every small business in Emeryville there's like 10 corporate chain stores (if not more). Its where everyone in the East Bay gets IKEA furniture and sees an occasional movie or gets a TV from Best Buy. Yes it's "walkable" but only because its small and there's not much to walk to. There's no central downtown Emeryville - the closest to that would probably just be the Bay Street mall? And yeah it's surrounded by freeways. Its kind of a weird place and even though technically it is its own city - it feels weird to call Emeryville a city. Parts of it almost feel like a new college campus development. And its location is right next to West/North Oakland so yeah, there's high crime compared to the national average.
And while they do build new buildings which is great - they also have little in the way of rent control or tenant protections. I had friends who lived in a great apartment about 5 houses away from the Oakland/Emeryville border and they eventually moved because they were sick of their landlord arbitrarily hiking rent up every year at his own discretion. Nobody wants to keep shopping for a new place to live every 12 months. Hopefully the new buildings help with that but bay area real estate is just insane.
Pros: Walkable, Bikeable, very close proximity to San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley, good city planning relative to surrounding areas, bay breeze and perfect weather year round
Cons: Boring, no cultural or local identity, no downtown, too many corporate businesses, not many green spaces, limited tenant protections, crime rates not much better than Oakland, still very expensive
All well and good but CA is a terrible place to live; demented extream left politicians, absurd high taxes, outragous cost of living, out of control crime, and crack (I mean homeless) camps all over. Now they want to provide reperations and put the state even more deeply in debt which means higer taxes still! My faimly moved to CA in the late 1800s and flourished there until the 1980s living in the LA and San Diego areas. Back in the day it was a great place to live. As of now the last of them have moved out of the state. Thats about 35 well educated people with jobs homes and good incomes (you know that shrinking group who actually pay taxes) gone from CA forever. Why is that? Check my first sentence which covers it. So if you want a nice walkable city in CA no problem, just be sure to avoid the human waste, disgarded needles and passed out drug addicts. And when you get to the store (if it hasent already closed for good) deal with the locked up displays since CA encourages professional shop lifters and gangs. Then to top off you day get mugged on your walk home and come home to to find you have been robbed. Don't bother to call the police they have probably been defunded and won't show up for at least an hour. Yea, enjoy your hellscape state and thank your demented leadership for all the joy. My suggestion get hell out while you can or you will go down with the ship. If you stay you are crazy.
Interestingly, the other tiny enclaves nearby do not have any of this. Piedmont is apex NIMBY land...but it also doesn't really have much in the way of businesses either. It's just a glorified single-zone neighborhood with a graveyard.
And the other one, Albany, while not so egregious, and arguably getting there, is still pretty awful. It does have one bicycle trail following the train track guideway splitting the city in two, and one bike trail on the shore, it revamped its main road to have a bit more room for bikes [it was a stroad],...but it also has a lot of big box stores, not that many apartments at all, a stroad, super wide residential roads.
I didn't include the other East Bay cities nearby because they are a different can of worms, especially Oakland.
Very informative vlog thanks for sharing thumbs up
you failed to account for SF aristocracy hoarding real estate, also politically entrenched developers subverting plans for affordable housing. before you slam people as NIMBY you better take a closer look at the deal they''re against- or you're spreading lies.
I wish people would stop calling a group of people Nimby!! I realize the reason for the name and making fun of them but it doesn’t get them to change by being mean to them. The best way to persuade them to have better neighborhoods, etc. by holding an expo or something similar, and then putting a 3-D or something showing about how the neighborhood could look differently in a good way.
Please continue your journey, I think it's super valuable content!
Emeryville is the most magical place in the Bay when those 3:30 pm whisps of fog sprint across from the Golden Gate and dance on Marina Park!!!
Vienna, Austria has very affordable housing despite having a fairly high cost of living, as all big cities do, because something like 60% of people live in social housing, government owned apartments, where the rent is kept intentionally low. Because there are so many apartments with cheap rent, private landlords have no choice but to keep their rent lower to be competitive. I wish the US would take a page out of Austria's book. There's a reason it's one of the best cities to live in in the world
Awesome stuff to hear thoughts about the American city as a "Zwollenaar" (Zwolle, NL, not Zwolle, La)
I know this is completely unrelated but this guy's bedroom screams "top".
There *is* enough housing. The problem is that the houses that are available are too expensive. There is an abundance of expensive houses and (debatably) "luxury" apartments that only people who already have several houses can afford.
I wish there were an equivalent Peninsula city for people who work in San Mateo County or the South Bay. Redwood City is the closest but has nowhere near the focus and nimbleness that Emeryville has.
This is for a very narrow slice of people. Good luck finding a well paying job in the Bay Area, which is near the highest if not the highest cost of living in the US, when taking driving a car out of the equation. You would need way more than one city like this in the Bay Area to do this to even start solving the housing problem. If you can afford it, go for it.
haha... i agree with you... but it's hopeless in USA. I'm planning to move away.
If we could spread out developments around various strategic clusters, we wouldn't have to resort to massive upscaling and gentrification in the few spots we can. If anything, this video demonstrates that you don't need to be smack dab downtown, or right over a metro line to have a grid of well balanced density. Give us a choice conservatives!