this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Yes in my backyard!
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In this community, we believe in saying yes to:
- Housing
- Density
- Public transit
- Renewable energy
- Alternatives to cars
Typical YIMBY policies include:
- Elimination of restrictive zoning
- Elimination of parking minimums, setback requirements, and other arbitrary density-decreasing deed restrictions
- Elimination of Euclidean zoning
- Elimination of "inclusionary" zoning
- Elimination of undue red tape that gets in the way of new housing and transit development
- Establishment of stronger "by right" development
- Replacement of property taxes with land value taxes (LVT)
- Construction of high-quality public transit w/ transit-oriented development
- Road diets, with more space dedicated to bikes and pedestrians and less to driving and parking
Typical housing crisis "solutions" YIMBYs are wary of:
- Scapegoating immigrants
- Scapegoating airbnb
- Scapegoating "foreign investors"
- Scapegoating "greedy developers"
YIMBYism transcends the typical left-right political divide; please be respectful of fellow YIMBYs with differing political views. That said, please report anyone saying anything hateful or bigoted.
Reading List
- Housing Breaks People’s Brains
- The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism
- Housing Constraints and Spatial Misallocation
- An Airbnb collapse won’t fix America’s housing shortage
- Cities Start to Question an American Ideal: A House With a Yard on Every Lot
- More Flexible Zoning Helps Contain Rising Rents
- Constraints on City and Neighborhood Growth: The Central Role of Housing Supply
- Progressive Cities Aren't Living Up To Their Values
- Local Effects of Large New Apartment Buildings in Low-Income Areas
- The Origins of Inequality, and Policies to Contain It
- Progress and Poverty
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Cut to a shot of the ancient city planner wondering why the city burned to the ground
I think the real trick is knowing which regulations are written in blood and/or misery, and which ones are based on bullshit (like parking minimums).
Parking was written in the pain of not finding a parking spot. While not blood, the pain was and is real. We should be against parking minimums anyway because - stores have incentive to find the right amount of parking for customers without overpaying, and parking at all is bad for transit/density and so we want to encourage less parking to encourage transit. Parking regulations thus have other unwanted effects as well.
I mean, that's still kind of bullshit. Unless you want to go full USSR, you don't mandate free stuff, because that distorts the shit out of the market, and you end up with things like cities designed around cars because the inefficiency of that is masked.
And honestly ancient stuff plus fire safety is a pretty good approximation, so the meme holds up.
Looking for a spot where I live takes me like 20min on average, not uncommon to be 45min-1h. Maybe minimum parking regulations aren't complete bullshit
I understand your frustration. I've driven through some of the larger metros in the US and marvelled at how many cars vs how little parking there is. That said, this is an issue that's easy to go deep on. There's a lot of detail beyond "it's hard to find a parking spot", and it gets into how car dependency is fucking up our cities. I can go into that if you want, but suffice it to say that adding more parking is about as poor a solution as "just one more lane, bro" is to traffic.
Good. Hopefully that will be solved with less cars.
That doesn't seem very likely, I already live in a big, dense city where everybody except the very rich live crammed in apartment buildings like sardines. We already have metro, buses, trams, municipal renting bikes, lots of kilometers of bike lane (mostly crap tho). It's all this Lemmy's wet dream, but traffic is still hell
That's cool. Most people don't even need to use cars then, so it would be a smooth transition. (I'm guessing you do deliveries or need wheelchair access or something, based on the fact you know we'll dunk on you if having to deal with parking was optional all along)
I'm not disabled, parking wouldn't be a problem if I were, there's lots of disabled parking spots, they set one at the person's home and at the workplace if needed and then some randomly (not random, there are rules, like a spot every x shops, restaurants, bars...or something, don't know very well how it works).
That's another for the list of nice things my city have, but they doesn't solve the problem, they too get saturated just like the streets and roads, we all want to get to places at the same time. There are free spots in my neighborhood when I pick my car in the morning, we go and then come back at the same time to drive around trying to park putting our fumes into the air.
The problem is the same for cars and public transportation. We need to have enough buses, trains, trams, rails and roads, people to operate them for the rush hour, and then what afterwards? And for cars is the same. Even my car, and I put an insane number of km and hours on the poor thing, is just parked, unused 92% of the time, same for the work van (a bit more use but still at 91%, so not delivery). Think of American school buses, it was really a sight for these European eyes to see one of those massive parking lot full of buses, they take the roads for two short periods five times a week and then back to the lot. There's no obvious solution to this, if you ask me I would say we do too many things, we should slow down the doing things, specially working (it's gonna be a chore to convince bosses and landlords tho).
You could say it's optional, I could commute (I posted some details in another comment) by metro-train-bus but that would be like five hours and a half round trip on a good day, or I could find another job closer to home, or another place closer to work. I just chose the option that makes my life less miserable, we all do.
Doing things miserable for drivers is not the best way imho to take cars out of the road, and planing ahead for future use is usually good practice even if it means you have to build more parking lots and lanes, yes I know 'booo lanes', planing public transit, PROPER bike lanes, pedestrian streets etc must be imperative as well. You would not say that by setting those disabled spots you are inciting them to take the car instead of the pretty accesible public transportation, because going to/back from work in those packed to the brim trains/buses can be hell even for an abled body person like me I've done it for many years, I can't imaging doing it in a wheelchair or waiting for another crammed bus or two because the chair spots are all occupied, out of the worst hours though can be a nice bus ride no matter what, wheelchair or not, or blind or whatever but accessibility goes down pretty fast when the conditions worsen.
So I would not say it's exactly optional for most people, or that there's as much as a transition yet definitely not gonna go smoothly, and you can't just through more trolleys at the problem (sorry) it has to go on many fronts, from wfh, working fewer hours, maybe banning suvs in city's (everywhere?)... but well planned parking can also take cars out of the road, they are literally parked.
Sorry for the wall of text I just got carried away
That's fine. I appreciate the effort, honestly.
You do live awfully far from work, based on your other comment. Doubly so if you're in (probably western) Europe; that could be two entirely different regions of a country. Most of the drivers will not be going that far.
If you happen to be a farmer or otherwise need to commute to or from somewhere unpopulated, you're in the "or something" in my comment, and other drivers need to get off the road (I'll address the question of if less cars is really better a bit later). If you're going from one populated area to another, it kind of seems like there should be an express bus, but I guess I don't know what exact time you go to work or what other constraints the service has to deal with.
Oh shit, I forgot about that. My bad.
Yeah, they are the same in many ways, but one's much denser than the other. That's just an incremental improvement for sure, but it's something.
There is always misery when you need to get through a crowd. Having your own car can be convenient, especially if your movements are unusual, but then you need more space to store it in that other 90% of time you mentioned. We're left with the question of which unrelated thing is better, and for the most part we've decided to solve those kinds of problems with a free market. In my country, and America, it is not a free market, but free parking has been mandated from unrelated businesses for decades.
I haven't spent enough time abroad to really understand the pain of public transit, but I do understand the pain of everything being a highway or parking lot. Maybe "the grass is always greener on the other side", but I suspect our situation really is suboptimal - even before you consider the hidden costs of emissions that have been there all along. Everywhere is flat, grey, dangerous and empty. I guess my point is, I don't know why parking is such a nightmare for you, but I'll need more than your word for it to be convinced Lemmy is wrong, and just the fact busses also have idle time isn't enough.
I was trying to not give out many details but I think I've already commented about Madrid in another post so here you go: https://www.capitalradio.es/amp/programas/movilidad-sobre-ruedas/cuanto-tiempo-pierden-madrilenos-buscando-aparcamiento_94445259.html (in Spanish sorry, but you should be able to make out the numbers, maybe some aid with automatic translation).
You are right that my case is a bit above the average, but it's not that uncommon as you could think, it's almost the same for all my tradesman friends, I drive more distance but having to go from inside the city to one of the surrounding towns or the other way around is super common.
From and to populated areas, or even some less populated areas really you can get everywhere by bus, when it's a couple connections most people choose public transports (as I said they all get saturated at rush hours, and I mean packed full. I don't know how you could push the system much further), but when it's a few of them, specially changing from one type to another (bus-train, or even bus-other kind of bus), it adds up. If you happen to work in an industrial area on the outskirts of another town the times can go crazy high, twice or thrice more than by car even with jams and parking.
As you said you don't understand the pain, but you sure understand that really most people just choose the less hellish option. For many of us that means a car, even with top notch alternatives, most of us hate it but the alternative is even worse.
I don't know if I'm sounding like a car lover or something, I'm not. I firmly believe if we put all the money we collectively put towards cars into good use we'd have futurama pipes or some shit by now, but we have to work with incremental improvements as you said.
Planed parking could improve the situation. For example here they've put lots by some metro stations at the limits of the city so people can park there and take the metro and not drive into the city. I must say I was thinking in 'regulated' as in the local government somehow controls and manages it, mandate business to build the lots/spots seems like a very American thing and I see now how it contributes to this necessity for cars over there. But having into account where the people are going to drive and park when approving any development like a residential building/area, or a mall, or anything seems like a good idea, people driving around without going anywhere is the absolute opposite of taking cars out of the roads.
About leaving it to the free market, I don't know some things that are inherently collective and limited like space and its use within a city/town should be administered more democratically by the people that live there through some rules. The market has shown it doesn't have any problem to fuck a lot of (poor always the poor) people in this regard if it's profitable when left alone.
I don't think your situation is much greener, but the costs of emissions are all but hidden over here we have a perpetual 'pollution bonnet' and all the children have lots of respiratory illnesses almost unheard of thirty years ago. Everywhere's grey and dangerous here too but not flat, you have to lean backwards to see a small portion of the sky most of the time, and everything's always full. This isn't quite optimal either.
Fucking lol there it is. I was talking specifically about my commute to work, which would be 100-120km (depending on the route) round-trip, that would be cycling 500-600km a week, and my work is already pretty demanding physically, I don't sit at a desk and do fuck-all all day. Also this is by highways when bicycles aren't permitted, the ride would be even longer. I bring with myself my work backpack with some tools, protection equipment, lunch... not huge but not small or light by any means.
Riding a bicycle is not an option for me, I've considered a motorbike but decided it's too dangerous to ride that much, which is another con for bikes. I know that the danger of riding a bike is mostly due to share the road with cars, trucks, vans... not because of the bikes themselves but the danger is mostly for the rider and I don't wanna put myself at that risk
Edit: also the parking time is only when I come back home, there's plenty of parking space at my job
Outcome of too much zoning regulation is tent cities.
Outcome of zero zoning regulation is Kowloon Walled City.
I'll take Kowloon any day of the week.
That many people that close together is my idea of hell, but you do you
Over a tent city? Keep in mind I live in Canada. Tent city in Canadian winter might or might not be Hell, but it's a good way to get there.
I’d rather freeze to death in a tent than live near that many people.
The suburbs are too dense for me.
Where you live is a compromise. I want to have 100 square miles all my own, with my front door on Time's square. (I'm using times square as a proxy for a desirable place to live, but since I've never been there I don't know if that is actually where I'd want to live) That isn't possible, but it is what I want. Sometimes I want to live on Broadway so those famous shows are easy to get to. Sometimes I want to live where I can safely shoot a gun off my back deck. When I feel like seeing people I want to live where there are a lot of people, when I feel like being alone I want to be far from civilization - yet I still want electric service. Everyone has forms of the above. suburbs are one compromise answer.
That's the neat part: I don't really ever want to be around people. Yes, theaters and museums and clubs are nice, but there's still too goddamn many people and it stops being appealing when I realize I've got to deal with a bunch of psychotic apes.
I'll drag the solar panels out to the boonies myself if want electricity. I just do not want to be around people. If they're half as awful as I am they're not worth it.
I was going to reply with my usual pro city stuff but then I recognized your name and realized we'd already had the whole conversation. So, uh, hello again. Hope you're making progress on your mountain home dreams.
Kowloon city was crazy dense because it was a tiny tract of disputed land in an otherwise regulated urban area. An ancient city is actually a much more typical example, and yeah, I choose that. I'll just get some noseplugs, avoid the most flammable areas, and wash my hands a lot.
And, funny enough, tent cities are super against zoning and other regulation. Homeless people are supposed to leave at all times, wherever they happen to be, while being complained about.
Sure, but that least that city was pretty before it burned as the planner didn't force every building to be white, yellow, or grey, with black shingles on the roof - they do require a "natural" brick facade half way up the front, but not the rest of the house. No other colors, no painting pictures on your walls. No energy efficient light color roofs.
I mean, have you seen a picture from a third world slum? No planning probably means more colours, but I'm not sure wires running all over the place is your cup of tea.