Saturday, December 06, 2008

What People Want

People don't want street level townhouses without garages everywhere, of course, but many do want them over the alternative in densely populated areas because they allow for nice walkable urban neighborhoods. Of course some people want to have it both ways - a nice house with a big yard and a private parking spot in a nice walkable urban neighborhood - but if everyone has that then you don't have the nice walkable urban neighborhood.

You don't have to have quite the density as the linked picture on the left suggests, but you do have to not have car-centric zoning rules.

...adding, I'm specifically talking about dense urban neighborhoods. You can build sensible less dense neighborhoods, too, with yards and driveways which are still built with walkable access to retail, mass transit, etc. Lower population density won't be able to support as much of a variety of retail as a dense urban neighborhood, but not everyone wants to live in a dense urban neighborhood. Tradeoffs!