Sunday, June 27, 2010

Urban Hellhole Revolution

Reading through the comments here I'm struck once again at how people can be completely horrified by the thought that somewhere that isn't their neighborhood and is no where near where they live might actually have some dense walkable development in a relatively small area near a train station.

I find it all rather depressing because jokes about me moving you all to Manhattan aside, my urban hellhole revolution has always been very modest. Yes, more money to build better inner city and intra-regional transit rail systems. Yes, transit oriented development around stations and transit corridors. A rollback of suburban design a few decades, before some of the worst features of contemporary suburbia were implemented. You can have your yard, your single family home, even your single use zoning. But get rid of single access road development, reduce setback requirements, allow retail development, if not in neighborhoods, closer to them, etc.