Suburbs that don't Suck - Streetcar Suburbs (Riverdale, Toronto)

There is something in between NYC and an American-style suburb. I encourage you to take a look at Not Just Bikes [1,2]: [1] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK]

Not Just Bikes has a recent video[0] talking about the lack of middle ground for suburbs in North America. I think a big problem is that laws as they are prevent variety. Either everything must be single family homes with huge setbacks and wide roads, or it is doomed to be bought up by large apartment developers. Is it a threat to your ability to have a yard and two car garage if the house next door is a duplex and the end of the block has a corner store with a couple apartments above it? No, but the laws make it so that only your yard and two car garage can exist in your neighborhood regardless. [0] [VIDEO]

> Relative to single family homes, apartments are viewed as decreasing property values, increasing crime rates, lowering school quality, increasing traffic, and decreasing desirability. The problem is most cities only allow two kinds of development: Low density or high density. We're missing the middle! [LINK] I've really enjoyed these two YouTube channels on the subject. "Oh the Urbanity" has a great video on Montreal's "missing middle" [LINK] And "Not Just Bikes" discusses a "missing middle" neighborhood in Toronto: [VIDEO]

I know you meant the car centric anecdote to be an analogy and not the point itself, but I must nitpick. Public transportation/buses/subways are honestly quite convenient even if you are wrangling 3 kids around. The problem is that public transportation in the US at its best (NYC, Boston) is still a far-cry from actually 'good' public transportation systems. In many places kids as young as 11 are able to independently navigate the city without the parents help when public transportation is well built. If anything, car dependence means that kids take 5 more years (16) before they can be independant and parents will often struggle to meet diverging needs of 3 children when the car is a single bottleneck. Not-just-bikes does a great contrast between North America and the Netherlands to highlight how car-dependence can lead to struggles as a parent: [LINK] Also, given that most upper middle class families usually have 3 cars (2 for parents work and 1 for a 16-yr old child), if public transport allows you to go from 3 -> 1, that's already a huge plus. It is not like families in European capitals do not own 5 seater hatchbacks. Public transport isn't against cars. It's is against car essentialism. If anything, moving people to public transport will improve the experience of those who need cars by declogging highways. Lastly, car essentialism, highways, the suburban dream and white flight were all distinctly post-WW2 phenomena and heavily subsidized to be that way. It is by no means

Do you like having to drive everywhere, to shops with massive parking lots? Or having stroads not safe for your kids to play on where cars blast past at 40mph? Have you been to places where they do density right? Paris comes to mind, as does the urban centers of the Netherlands. Not everyone wants to live in the city, that's cool. But even inherently low density suburbs in the US suck. We used to have walkable streetcar suburbs [0], then the car came along and fucked everything up. [0] [VIDEO]

Yep, you're absolutely right. The parent's youtube suggestion has a video on this too, called streetcar suburbs. [VIDEO]

It's true. The Not Just Bikes channel has a video on walkable neighborhoods in the US. They're all massively expensive because of the high quality of life. edit: here it is - [VIDEO]

> I'm not going to sugar coat it, public schooling is terrible in most dense large cities in America. I don't see how this is relevant to housing, unless you also believe public schooling worldwide is terrible in most dense cities. It's a uniquely American problem that public schooling is terrible in all but the most elite of zip codes. Rural schools suffer the same problem too, and it has little to do with housing (except for, surprisingly, Texas, which allocates funding for schools at the state level). In short, in the US, school quality is not a function of density; it's a function of funding; and in the US school funding is primarily allocated from property taxes. > BTW, I would love to know more about why you feel suburbia destroys local businesses and how it exacerbate homelessness, Suburban zoning (as designed in America ) lead to strip malls and big box dependence. When every store is 10 miles from each other, you end up in a situation where Walmart becomes the only game in town. Secondly, the parking requirements also increase the fixed costs for any business; which limits the type of businesses you can open. You can see this effect in a the types of businesses and restaurants you have in San Jose vs San Francisco. San Jose is a larger city than SF but is far more hostile to local businesses. To be clear, I'm not advocating that every city should be Manhattan. The missing middle housing ( [LINK] ) has been posted a number of times, and Not Just Bikes ( [VIDEO] ) goes