busyHowever, I think there is something to be said for establishing some points of stability as best we can. Too much change, especially too fast, disrupts communities and uproots people, which is bad for both community and health. Historic buildings and other sites deserve preservation.
What we want to avoid is the kind of overblown growth or stagnation that we see in many places today. Too big, too fast is usually a recipe for disaster. So is a shortage of resources. Most areas need significant flexibility. Most of the time, you want changes that improve things without disrupting the balance. Replace a single house with a duplex or add an auxiliary unit over the garage, and you have more homes. Allow a home business in a spare room or garage, or turn a house into a hair salon or thrift shop, and you gain more things for people to do in that neighborhood without attracting more outside traffic than the infrastructure or residents can support.
Well, look at nature again -- a healthy system has small-scale chance but overall it's pretty stable. Also, if you set things up properly, then something magical happens: stuff sprouts that you didn't have to pay to plant. Some of that may be a nuisance, but some of it is stuff you want to keep. So too with cities.
November 27 2020, 05:12:21 UTC 7 months ago
Yes ...
November 27 2020, 05:56:25 UTC 7 months ago
The low-hanging fruit for improvement:
* Legalize home businesses. Anything small enough to fit in a spare room or a garage should be fine. Even if you convert a house to a business -- they are often turned into a salon, bookstore, clothing boutique, or thrift shop -- it is unlikely to produce heavy traffic, because it's not going to attract more than a handful of customers at once and most of those will be neighbors. Put one public business per block and people can walk or bike to get a haircut or buy milk. It doesn't matter how many private ones (like writing) there are because those don't affect the neighborhood.
* Legalize the next step up. If buildings are 2 stories, allow 3. If there are single-family homes, allow duplexes.
My suggestion would be to make those changes on corner lots, which tend to be bigger. This has two advantages: 1) It mixes up the types of units available in the neighborhood. 2) It limits changes to those points, which maintains the mix so it doesn't all roll into the same new thing. Corner lots could hold a big house (4+ bedrooms) for sharehousing or large families, a boardinghouse, a duplex or triplex, or a small apartment building (4-12 units depending on context). Suppose you have a block of 2-3 bedroom houses. You add a 5-bedroom house, a boarding house, a triplex of 1-bedroom flats, and an apartment of 6 studios. You now have a range of studio-5 bedrooms on one block.
* But switch out zoning so that you have neighborhoods of different types. Some mixed, some single-family, some multifamily, and so on.
* Drop the old religious restrictions on unrelated people living together. Few people can afford that shit anymore. A sharehouse or boardinghouse is highly efficient affordable housing.