See also the resort towns Americans love. Vail has free mass transit within the city and extremely cheap transfers to regional transportation. Resorts are all walkable or have free internal shuttles.
Also possibly the biggest reason so many of us spend most of our lives wishing we were still in college: it was the last time most of us lived somewhere walkable where friends lived nearby.
My work brought me to Barcelona for 24 hours, so I went for a walk to take in some of the “superillas” or “superblocks”. These are neighborhoods which have been blocked off to through-traffic for cars, with much of the street space reclaimed for pedestrian use.
It’s kinda insane how much more pleasant these intersections are than the typical neighborhood intersections elsewhere in the city! Compare that to another block a few streets away:
Due to the hexagonal blocks, there is load and loads of space between the buildings, and soooooo much is handed over to cars usually. Some to parking, but so much more to just… open road surface?
If this was shown to be an option for my neighborhood I’d be livid if it wasn’t implemented as soon as possible.
I mean, kids are literally playing football in the street, without even thinking about danger or emissions or whatever.
I regard Barcelona to be the template for how all cities should be laid out.
Not as a literal 1 to 1 replication. The fact that the roads with traffic are mostly one way and organised in a grid, there’s no rat racing.
There’s tonnes of space for pedestrians, cyclists and buses.
Most things are at a walkable distance.
Also, trees!
Fascinating look at how architectural rules and building codes prevent US apartments from being bigger.
Right now in the US there is a term “public housing”. This term refers to residential real estate that is owned and operated by the local, state, or federal government. However, it is nearly universally used as a type of welfare housing. The people who live there have low, or no, income, and it’s generally not a great place to live. Even in some cases where it is a nice place to live, it’s heavily stigmatized because of classism.
What if there was another kind of public housing. It’s still residential property that is owned and operated by the government. It’s just, normal housing. Anyone can live there. Pay rent like any place else. It’s just the government is the landlord.
Oh, there is such a thing, and places are doing it, and it works.
A socialism??? pikachu.jpg
Isn’t that kind of antithetical to the whole concept?
How much would they pay anyhow, and especially if they have no income?
It’s not housing for no/low income people. It’s housing for people who have money. Except the landlord is your town. It allows the town to increase the amount of housing supply, lowering the price of housing for the whole town. It allows the town to have the housing built on their own terms, and not have to negotiate with a private developer. It allows the town to get all the revenues, instead of just what they can extract via property taxes.
And what the towns have been doing is providing lots of varying priced rentals in the same developments. They got penthouses in there, but they also have cheap ones. This gets everyone living together in the same building, and without some segregationist poor door.
