Everyone where I live wants a corner store or corner bar 2 or 3 blocks away from them. Close enough to walk to conveniently but far enough they never have to know it exists unless they are personally interacting with the establishment in the moment.
No one wants such a thing a few houses down. So the local neighbors get their friends who live close by to join the local neighborhood meetings and rail against the noise/traffic/crime/etc. And of course the ever-present “property values” boogeyman. Houses directly next to a corner shop I guess are worth a bit less than the same house a block away. There also might be traffic!
Sitting through local neighborhood association meetings is exhausting. Anyone who actually desires to get things done burns out pretty quick.
This could be true but I would want to see some data. I have paid extra for an apartment before because it it had a grocery store on the first floor, so it's not obvious to me that being adjacent and having to walk past the shop every day would drive a home price down. I know apartments and detached homes are different, but still.
I just think the common explanation for NIMBYism, that everyone wants to protect their property value, doesn't actually make sense when it seems like the densest American cities are also the most expensive to live in. I have the same confusion about public transit. It's common for suburbs to fight very hard to keep public transit out of their town, but it's incredibly expensive to live within walking distance of a train station, so property values don't work as an explanation for this either. You also hear people say it's because the NIMBYs are afraid of the city folk invading their suburban paradise, but if you go to NYC or DC nobody is taking the train from the city to the suburbs to have fun, there's nothing to do there. These stops are almost exclusively used by upper middle class office workers going into the city for work. You don't have to worry about poor city people because as soon as the stop is built, they won't be able to afford a house anywhere near it.
Lots of places in the US have walkable neighborhods. You just have to live in a place that was developed before WW2 and car ownership wasn't assumed.
Although in this instance I think NIMBYism is less useful than having functioning local government, police, and homeless services.
Any more than the problem of loud neighbors, is a problem of having neighbors.
It's not just that it's not a fundamental characteristic of stores, but it's also not a fundamental characteristic of homeless people, it's just a characteristic of these homeless people and this store. Depending on the type of store, I'd grant you that other issues could have arisen, such as rodents, smells, etc.. but also any other neighbor could be hosting parties, smoking near your window, leaving debris around. In some cases, you either need to accept it, adapt, or find somewhere else to live.
I had a neighbor in the burbs growing up that didn't like the way we behaved on our property, or how it looked, and stuck her nose in and intruded frequently, often threatening to call the police for all sorts of absurd reasons.
Having lived in a dense walkable place with plentiful stores mingled with residential housing, I can say I’ve never seen that particular problem before.
I'm not sure however that there's anything to indicate that mom and pop stores are especially susceptible to these kinds of outcomes. It sounds more like you got a case of shitty neighbour which is possible whether or not the neighbour is a commercial lot or a small home.
If your negative experience had been with a neighbour living in a private home instead of a neighbour who owned a small business would that change your view around the matter of zoning for small businesses in residential neighbourhoods?
Additionally I spend so much less on transport and no longer waste time driving. When I'm riding public transport I can read stuff. I don't see any negatives.
had a similar experience in RDU in NC. Or Anacortes, WA.
plenty of cities can and do run these locations. it's not just an NYC thing.
I miss it so much.
Not my preference but also not out of bounds as a democratic outcome.
If we want our respect for democracy to be taken seriously we need to respect democratic outcomes ... even when they are not the ones we prefer.
The definition of democracy is that we hold regular elections for political office. It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level. 51% of my neighbors cannot decide that they'd like expropriate my house or checking account. The point of YIMBYism is that these kinds of decisions have negative externalities and a larger group of voters- at the state or national level- are removing that decision-making power from a smaller group at the local level. This is a democratically legitimate outcome!
Come on, you know that's not analogous.
> It does not mean that every single decision in society is up for a vote at the local level.
It also doesn't mean "any policy the voters want, as long as long as it's the one I want."
Nowadays, when people bring up examples like you did above, it's usually part of an attempt to shut down democratic decision making, by making false comparisons.
The flaw in this argument here is that the opposition is trying to prevent these folks from even having a voice, which is fundamentally undemocratic. So this isn't a relevant statement here because this isn't a complaint about a democratic outcome. It's a complaint about people trying to eliminate voices who want to solve a problem. It's an attempt to silence discussion, which has the effect of preventing action.
Effectively, we are all living in a shrinking prison of all decisions made before us. A "democratic" dystopia.
Respecting an outcome doesn't mean you have to (1) give up on differing views, or (2) stop working respectfully for another outcome.
If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.
>> The question is, -- is it a deliberate democratic outcome, or is it an accidental consequence of local zoning codes and city planning?
>> If governments are involved in planning, it's legitimate to use laws and the planning process to try and push these processes out of local minima towards more globally optimal outcome.
In a democracy, government planning is supposed to push the process towards local preferences. It's not supposed to "push these processes...towards more globally optimal outcome," which when decoded means "what you or what some distant technocrat prefers."
If the people disagree with you, then you're not talking about democracy, you're talking about "benevolent" authoritarianism ("we know what's good for you, and that's what you're going to get, like it or not").
Just be clear what you're really advocating for.
Who gets to decide on expanding an interstate or zoning has a huge impact when the votes are counted, so drawing lines on a map is suddenly where the power lies not with the people.
Traffic? Parking?
Yesterday I went to a neighborhood corner coffee shop that I'd never been to before. They had a little parking lot across the street that was full (and a disaster, I had to back out onto the street), so I had to park around the block in front of someone's house. All the street parking near the shop was full.
I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
> People would rather stay marooned in the middle of an endless desert of houses with essentials being a 30-45m drive away
There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away." I can literally drive all the way across my metro area in about 45 minutes, passing dozens and dozens of grocery stores, coffee shops, and restaurants during the journey. A 45 min drive is a huge distance.
The difference is pedestrian/cyclist-dominant vs. car-dominant. Personally I’m in favor of the one that doesn’t involve carting a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee.
You did it again. There nowhere in the US where you need to "[cart] a big SUV across town for 16oz of coffee." Big SUVs aren't even very common anymore. They got replaced by sedans styled to look like SUVs (aka "crossovers").
That kind of black-and-white thinking does no one any good. And it's probably a big part of the reason why, like you said above, you "can’t wrap [your] head around it". You're not going to understand things without empathizing (or at least reasonably hypothesizing) about the other group's feelings and experiences.
> Ideally these places wouldn’t even need parking space, because yes, there’s lots of tiny shops dotted throughout the neighborhood and each serves the surrounding residents. The residential areas encircling Tokyo work exactly like this and it’s perfectly economically viable.
So? No American city is going to be bulldozed to build a clone that works like Tokyo, even assuming the Americans want to make the same tradeoffs the people of Tokyo make. If you want to any progress towards walkability, you're going to have to make serious compromises away from that ideal.
You should be smarter than that because...
> New coffee shop opens and it's so busy that people who can't walk there can't find parking either? Sounds like demand for more coffee shops closer to those who can't walk to the first one. Someone is going to take that business opportunity.
...situations like are a nuisance and engender resistance. Because the neighbor's formerly quite street turns into a parking lot before people "can't find parking." The people who have quiet streets will also see that and fight to keep a shop from opening near them.
So I think "get rid of parking minimums" is actually a pretty bad idea. You need parking minimums (but maybe not as large as is typical nowadays), plus zealous parking enforcement, to control the negative externalities on the surrounding neighborhood.
I say this living in a suburb and driving a crossover myself. The charms of this lifestyle are not lost on me, but I would kill to have consistent coverage of proper sidewalks, bike paths, and corner shops. I'd love to not need the car at all.
And no bulldozing is necessary. Just tweak zoning to allow small businesses and people will organically start live-in corner shops.
If thats not your thing, Walmarts, or Stop and Shops, you know for people who don’t want to spend their whole pay check on a single meal worth of food (we exist)
A 1990s Ford Explorer weighs around 4000 lbs. That was considered big at the time. A current one is a couple hundred pounds heavier, a Ford Edge around the same, Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V a little less but still almost 4000 lbs. By contrast a 1990s sedan was generally under 3000 lbs with ~2400 lbs being pretty common.
The main difference isn't that SUVs got smaller, it's that sedans got bigger. A 1989 Honda Accord was ~2500 lbs, the 1990s ones were ~2800 lbs, the current ones are well over 3000 lbs.
dunno what america you're in. unless your point is they're big pickup trucks now?
I know this isn't your main point but I was sadly laughing at that sentence. Pretty much anywhere I go in the U.S. there are giant SUVs. Plus crossovers and even sedans are just getting bigger, with smaller cars like subcompacts being phased out and compact cars growing in size.
Also median commute times in car dominant cities are usually less than 30 mins. The narrative of people driving far distances to work represents a few (loud) supercommuters in most american cities. What people forget about with suburban sprawl is that jobs have sprawled as much as housing; oftentimes the old downtown is not even the major job center any longer for the region, a vestigial center whether the city realizes it or not (many a cases of new build american hub and spoke rail networks to long faded downtowns only because that’s how it used to be done not because that is reflective of most people’s travel patterns today. hence poor ridership capture of many of these newer networks).
Commute times in large transit oriented cities are often longer with metros averaging less than 20mph, an hour or more is not unheard of in places like nyc. It is really hard to beat the convenience offered by a car and a say flyover american city barely 25 miles wide with 60mph point to point travel pretty much everywhere at any time. That is why people drive almost exclusively in those places.
The premise of these places is that it's on your way. That's not any more traffic, it's just the people already passing by stopping there momentarily.
> Parking?
That's this:
> I suppose that wouldn't be so much of an issue if there was a lot more of these shops, but then they might not be economically viable.
This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
You would also get things like part-time shops. You have someone with a work-from-home job and they put out a sign in front of their house saying you can get coffee and food there. They mainly get a few customers during the morning rush and a few more at lunchtime and do the work-from-home job the rest of the day.
Those would be everywhere if it was allowed, and they wouldn't even need parking lots because they wouldn't have enough simultaneous customers to fill one and there would generally be one within walking distance of any given place anyway.
> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
> This is "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded". You would get as many of them as were viable, which would be enough that none of them were inundated.
No, I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. What I'm saying is a busy coffee shop has negative externalites on its surrounding neighborhood (traffic, people parking in front of your house all the time). That could be mitigated if you had so many coffee shops that none of them were busy enough for those externalites to matter (e.g. at most a handful of cars out front), but a coffee shop that slow may not make enough money to actually survive.
So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
>> There's a lot of space between "walkable" and "30-45m drive away."
> Except that if you concentrate it all into the same place, that's how you get serious traffic congestion, and then going to that place means you get stuck in traffic. Which means there isn't actually that much space between them, because the middle isn't an option. Either you put shops near where people live and it's walkable or you concentrate them downtown and you're stuck in traffic or circling to find parking to get there.
Like have you lived in a suburb? Shops aren't usually walkable, but they're not "concentrated downtown" either. The middle is totally an option, and that's probably the usual situation. I don't know why people are gravitating to this false dichotomy (walkable OR 45min away, NO in-between). Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
As many of them would survive as could be sustained. You don't get a situation where there are too many and then they all go out of business, you just increase the number until the constraint hits how to cover the now-lower costs instead of it being the locations where one can be built to begin with.
Your premise is that the median one couldn't survive unless it was inundated, but that's contrary to all the currently operating ones in locations where that isn't happening.
> So you may have a natural and legitimate resistance to more, because of the externalites.
What really happens is that people look at the traffic at one when there is a severe constraint on where they can be built and expect that to happen everywhere without that constraint, when the constraint is the reason for the traffic being concentrated in that one place to begin with.
> Grocery stores and coffee shops are like 10-15 minute drive away from most suburban homes, and there's never a jam.
The problem is the example was "45 minutes" which is actually pretty excessive, whereas the overall issue is "have to sit in traffic or circle to find parking to get there".
And then isn't your contention here contrary to your previous premise? If there is no traffic with that number of shops, what result when there are more, smaller shops so that each one has less traffic than that?
> but then they might not be economically viable
I want a source for this. I've never been to Tokyo or Amsterdam, but everyone I know who's been there describe the zoning working exactly this way and it seems economically viable.
Not in Cambridge, Massachusetts traffic!
Somehow all our neighborhood corner stores, cafes, village centers, and such seem to get by without a huge amount of parking. Likely because there's bus service and lots of housing within walking distance and actual bike lanes and such to get around.
I live far enough out of DC where there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me. On the way to my parent’s house, there’s a bison farm. But I’m also a 5 minute drive to the closest strip mall (which has a CVS and several restaurants, both sit down and fast food). The ALDI is 10 minutes, and almost everything else, including the Apple Store, is within 15.
There are some suburbs where it’s 30 minutes to get to essentials, but most aren’t like that. Heck, the average one-way commute to work in Dallas Texas is under 30 minutes.
The thing to note is that NIMBYs are loud and obnoxious, but they do not have broad democratic support. What the average person has is a deep aversion to change they were not consulted with. What gives NIMBYs power is the fact that the average zoning agency is not very good at explaining the rationale of their changes or collecting and incorporating public feedback. It's very easy for a NIMBY to take a few things out of context, bring out a parade of horribles, and scare the average guy into opposing something they otherwise might have liked.
Since NIMBYs are inherently minoritarian, the real base of their power isn't even democratic outrage. Their favored tool to stop projects they don't like is paper terrorism: i.e. finding as many legal complaints as possible that they can sue over to block the project. Even if they're bullshit, it'll take a year or two to get the lawsuit thrown out. Which means that, congratulations, you just increased the cost of the project by about 10% or so, and you're probably gonna have to explain to the feds why the grants you applied for aren't enough and your project is late.
[0] And, in the process, piss off a bunch of locals as they bumble their way through the city using their translator app
[1] In fact, a lot of the hype surrounding self-driving cars is just to make it possible to completely shut off one's brain while driving. I would argue that trains and buses already do that, but...
Not saying these people are right or wrong. Just that it isn’t so black and white an issue. It is one thing when a place is already “lively” and tacitly accepting of all that comes with that vs going into that especially when it is unknown and easy to just say ‘no’ before seeing it how it may play out.
Allowing cafes into neighborhoods doesn't mean mandating you turn your living room into one.
I personally find it quite pleasant - and if not I can just shut my damn window - but many others apparently get super annoyed at even the tiniest of potential inconveniences.
At the end of the day, it is going to cause friction something happening somewhere there wasn’t something going on previously. Not saying these people are right or wrong, just that they have grievances that are based on real issues, however big they may be in the grand scheme of things, that they may value more than the prospects of an $8 latte a few minutes sooner than the one already down the road at the strip mall in a sort of containment zone.
God forbid.
What if my neighbor has a BBQ?
I'd love more 24/7 options around, even if it's just a 7/11