this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
59 points (95.4% liked)

Solarpunk Urbanism

1790 readers
1 users here now

A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.

Checkout these related communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

In New York and elsewhere, the rules typically take the form of ratios [of parking spaces to retail and housing] that have been copied from one city to another, handed from one generation of engineers to the next without much study or skepticism.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] AA5B@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

Yeah, sorry for the brain fart: centuries ago. I was trying to make the distinction of my city being built out mostly before cars, and it’s fairly old for the US.

Despite having a small population for a city, this means it’s structured more like we think of for major cities. It has a nice walkable center with transit options including a train station and plenty of higher density housing. There are no “stroads”.

We’re part of a regional transit network centered on the nearby major city. The change I have most hope for is a state zoning mandate that every community served by transit must allow higher density housing “as of right” near the transit. If a vpdeveloper wants to build a large apartment block within half a mile of transit, it can’t be a variance or special request, but starts with the assumption that it’s allowed. We’ll see how this plays out over the long run though

We’ve generally been fairly pro-housing, but city council has tried to slow that down over the last ten years ago so infrastructure can catch up. We finished a cycle of replacing all our elementary schools and one of the middle schools, and just spent an incredibly huge amount on a huge high school campus, so that removes the argument about crowded schools