The Houses that Can't be Built in America - The Missing Middle

The Not Just Bikes [1,2,3] YouTube channel also has an excellent series of videos based on work from Strong Towns. I link to these videos whenever a friend asks why I chose to leave the United States. :) [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [VIDEO]

Yes, and it's often referred to as 'gentle density'. The idea is to build relatively dense housing, but at a human scale - mostly 3-5 storeys. Combined with narrow streets that support walking and cycling, this creates enough density to support a 'real' city centre with shops, restaurants, offices and so on. I think these videos convey the idea well: * [LINK] * [VIDEO] Of course, this is not to say that you _can't_ build other kinds of housing. But many cities are badly balanced.

This unfortunately true in California. NIMBY moment is strong. Another perspective.. [VIDEO] (Love this channel!)

Seems to me you need to watch the NotJustBikes overview of the Missing Middle problem [VIDEO] Super dense cities are efficient in some ways, but they have tons of other problems and they externalize tons of costs. What we're missing in the U.S. is human-scale density, especially in the form of cohousing arrangements. Tall high-rises are not actually efficient. You know how much energy it takes to have elevators going up and down 40 floors along with all the other stuff? Land is not the single factor to calculate when we want efficiency.

It's not just density, though that's part of it. A big part is walkability (and otherwise making the city not just car accessible). That can be done without increasing density, by for example, adding wide sidewalks and bike lanes, eliminating maze-like cul-de-sac-heavy street layouts, and decreasing speeds in commercial areas (i.e. enforcing a stronger divide between low speed streets meant for people and high speed roads meant for cars). Another part is mixed-use zoning, where small businesses are intermixed with homes instead of people relying on driving to megastores in shopping centers far from where they live. By decreasing the necessity of the car you decrease the cost of road maintenance and by making places more walkable you make businesses more accessible and therefore more successful. I would suspect that many neighborhoods could be kept at the same density and be significantly rethought in line with the Strong Towns ethos to be more comfortable places to live. Density increases might be necessary in high COL areas because those places are in high demand, but there's plenty of bad city design in places outside uber-expensive metropolitan areas. And there might be strong demand for missing middle[1] housing if only it were legal and frictionless to build it. [1] [VIDEO]

They are gonna need cars and furniture, yet those are not an investment. Is USA running out of land, or Timber, or unemployed people that could be employed to build a house? We need to get institutional 'investment' out if house flipping and fix zoning. [VIDEO]

"But there's also the side of people wanting single family homes instead of apartment' Most people who can't afford a home would not reject a decent apartment, they just want somewhere to live. Also those are not the only two choices, there are duplex and triplex homes, illegal in most of us, and other variations [VIDEO] "Nothing wrong with people in a community wanting to set standards for their area." So in this "democracy" people who don't own a house have no voice and no right? Why does this remind me of some other mechanism for opressing undesirables?

> Personally I think that Americans just don't realize that it's not cities that suck, it's American cities that suck. Plenty of pleasant cities to live in in the world. The YouTube channel "Not just bikes" talks about this. In the USA, it is commonly seen that there are only two possible configurations for human settlements: sprawling suburbs, or Manhattan-style high-density towers. The medium-density style of city common across a lot of Europe and Asia is not very well known in the USA and Canada outside of a select few older cities which developed to a large enough size before the automobile took over. [VIDEO]