Re: Urbanism, architecture, transit, strawmen, etc.
Posted: Tue Oct 04, 2016 5:05 pm
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https://www.bloomberg.com/businessweekThese buildings are in almost every U.S. city. They range from three to seven stories tall and can stretch for blocks. They’re usually full of rental apartments, but they can also house college dorms, condominiums, hotels, or assisted-living facilities. Close to city centers, they tend toward a blocky, often colorful modernism; out in the suburbs, their architecture is more likely to feature peaked roofs and historical motifs. Their outer walls are covered with fiber cement, metal, stucco, or bricks.
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https://www.governing.com/columns/trans ... -city.html...
I focused on the East Village in Manhattan and, for contrast, the bustling older resort strip in Virginia Beach, Va., where I grew up. When you zoom in on a digital map of either of those places, you see a finely grained pattern of land ownership. Each block has thin slivers of individually owned buildings. They look like stacks of tiles viewed from the side.
Now look at some dull places like Battery Park City or the new Town Center in Virginia Beach, which was created a decade ago out of some old parking lots and other scraps. Although both have nice street grids, what you see on the maps are large blobs of ownership, with just a few entities -- or even just a single one -- owning everything.
In the older, more interesting places, each property is its own universe. Sure, they must adhere to city rules of zoning and design. But each owner, whether individual or corporate, manages their property as they see fit, working to find the secret to livability or profitability, or just to attract an interesting tenant. When we delight in these places’ active street life and surprises, what we are really enjoying is a dance of human-scale capitalism. Great urban places have many owners. And I don’t mean this as a metaphor. I mean it literally.
Can government do anything about this? The new places typically are built through some sort of urban renewal process in which a city or development agency teams up with a single corporate entity. What if, instead, a government were to produce a master plan, do a lot of the infrastructure development itself, and then lease the property to hundreds of people or companies, who could then construct buildings and engage in their own dance of capitalism?
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If a spot is 10x20 that's 6000 square feet of parking per person.brewcrew1000 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 10, 2019 1:30 pm Americans Shouldn’t Have to Drive, but the Law Insists on It
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... e-atlantic
"Houston is estimated to have 30 parking spaces for every resident."
Good catch. 8930 sq miles of land.brewcrew1000 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 10, 2019 1:50 pm I would assume Galvaston Bay and any bodies of water are included in that 10,000 square miles, wouldn't you have to subtract bodies of Water?
That is also just the space, what about all the road and curb that is created to get to the parking space?flyingember wrote: ↑Wed Jul 10, 2019 3:17 pmGood catch. 8930 sq miles of land.brewcrew1000 wrote: ↑Wed Jul 10, 2019 1:50 pm I would assume Galvaston Bay and any bodies of water are included in that 10,000 square miles, wouldn't you have to subtract bodies of Water?
So parking is 1.6% of land area.