It’s taken me years to understand that a suburb does not have to built in a “suburban” model based on *detached* single family houses only accessible to anywhere by a car. Suburb is a place type for government designation while suburban are characteristics of how a place is designed and built. I’ve lived in numerous big cities that had suburban subdivisions within the central city limits because of when they were developed-typically the most car-required and least walkable areas of the city. Ironically, most of the places you mentioned and showed are full of *attached* single family housing with their own street-level entrance on their own lot. We might call them townhomes, brownstones, or rowhouses, but they’re single family houses with a wall shared. This is a key to how we accommodate the desire people have to have a small amount of private outdoor space, reduce the amount of excess infrastructure to maintain and replace, while allowing access to the Main Street/High Street with a reasonable, interesting and safe walking distance for daily needs, including access to regional transit and options to get beyond a walking distance. If we sprinkle some detached SFH among these sets of attached houses, we have the best of both worlds and provide the diversity of options that modern households are looking for. We just have to be willing to mix the uses, density, types and sizes in the same area as has been done until the recent suburban experiment started. I think you’re heading in the right direction, but there’s some nuance that you’re probably still discovering that hopefully will show up in your videos sooner than later. SFH does not have to be the same thing for everyone everywhere. Suburbs don’t have to be full of these detached SFH to be desirable places for people who want a yard and some private outdoor space.
I totally agree with you. I'm moreso addressing the American skeptics that will say they don't want to give up any part of their lifestyle for this better urban design, including having all 4 walls. While ideally a suburb would have a mix, I'm just making the point that these sorts of SFHs are compatible too in that vision.
suburb is not synonymous with sprawling single family homes. It means smaller city connected to larger one forming a metropolitan area. car centrism was a proleteriat revolt against baron railroad monopolies in California and Levittowns were Jewish monetary inventions to make money, because single family homes are more profitable, loan/mortage/addition/remodeling wise, especially compared to small dense apartment homes.
@@alexanderrotmensz you don't address enough, so it falls short, race plays a fundamental role that capitalism can never artificially elevate racial aliens into filling
Japan has tons and tons of Suburbs. They just put convenience stores in the neighborhoods so they aren't car dependent. Also a bus line to the closest train station helps if people want to leave.
Personally, I as an American wouldn’t mind living next to a grocery/convenience store, and if there’s anything that seems absurd about that statement then it comes from how the car-centric layout has relegated these spaces. If we put those types of businesses in the midst of regular homes, people would casually make shorter and more frequent trips, and it would be much safer than how we typically imagine gas station convenience stores. They could even be informal community meeting spaces to some extent. Given the typical volume of each purchase, we might not even need shopping carts then. They’re such an odd byproduct of car dependence that I don’t know how we ever got used to them.
@@DiamondKingStudios I already live that way in an American small town. I can walk 15min to a grocery store. We already have this in America, just not in the Suburbs or rural areas. I was just commenting on my experiences with Japanese Suburbia
@@linuxman7777 Really great that you enjoy that. Every small town I’ve seen is either a quaint walkable place that’s really great to live or a crumbling food desert with vacant storefronts by a Walmart. There’s almost no in between with towns of those sizes.
I think it's misleading to say that most or even any urbanists want to get rid of all single family homes. Most urbanists just want to get rid of single family zoning are give people the ability to build midrise. Neighbourhoods change and that's OK.
I want mixed use structures. There was an area in my hometown that had 3 story buildings that was very close to down town, walking distance, that were zoned so the first floor could be small boutiques and shops, and the top 2 floors were living spaces for the shop owners. It was really quite nice.
Kind of my point though. The way zoning works still sucks in many ways, but enabling midrise buildings in any neighborhood will end single family home suburbs which I'm not a fan of generally. These suburbs were built wrong, but converting them isn't the solution imo, unless you plan on building a newer, better single family home suburb somewhere else.
Suburbs built on transit are very livable. Much of San Francisco is suburban. City life is not by nature chaotic or family unfriendly. We don’t need huge houses we need well designed houses. Good cities are built around transit not cars. I’m also from LA. Pasadena, Hollywood, Santa Monica are all fine urban settings
There's nothing wrong with wanting a single family home, and mid-rises are a bit extreme in a suburb. But the market has changed and theres an opporunity to earn additional income by building a rental unit during a housing crisis. or start a local business from your house. However, it would be illegal to do that without a rezoning process (often a costly expense). When no destinations are closeby, of course people will drive.
I’d have to agree with you there. Unfortunately they can also be expensive. People want to live by college towns so much that even the adjoining communities that aren’t quite as walkable can be pretty expensive themselves. Oconee County, GA, is right next to Athens-Clarke where UGA is, and it is the third-highest county by median family income ($85,371) in my home state. Imagine the property values there!
@@alexanderrotmenszumm I didn't see that in your previous comment, where you specifically said you did not want denser buildings next to single family homes
@doom-generation4109 he is young and has been brainwashed.....to think hampstead is a good example is mind blowing. Nobody has produced a working concept so they all just fill in the blanks with what seems right at the time. Living next to or above shops and businesses is horrible. Noisy, dirty, dangerous, rodents, etc.
its crazy that the first suburbs that popped up in la were centered around the street car lines, which were then replaces with freeways and stroads. and now transit oriented development is the 'new' thing, like the vista canyon metrolink station in santa clarita. we really forgot how to build working suburbs because of car brain
I hope we rediscover interurbans that way, even if intercity buses have made them obsolete in some ways. There are probably some rural communities or individual farms that could benefit from interurbans service in certain parts of the US.
The Elephant in the room is that Real Estate of (N.)America is of a completely different nature than of anywhere else in the world. For example, many Suburbs of Afro-Eurasia and even South America are the comtinuation of medieval villages that grew outside the central cities, Kentish Town near camden is a good exmaple. In America we made rough districting & let private and local officials determine everything on their whims so we got nothing
Now that you bring it up, I think it’s rather important to consider. The sorts of urban layouts that produce the healthiest, liveliest spaces may not be the most lucrative for those who buy land, develop buildings, and sell those buildings.
@@DiamondKingStudios politics plays a big role as well. Also that these places are less than a hundred years old and wr have to guess what the best arrangement is.
Hampstead.......you fail to mention the average house price is £1.3 million. A lot of the places yoinshowed will be around £5 million. You assume everyone in hampstead works in hampstead, they don't. Many won't have the mutual working life, many will spend half their time abroad or are from another country. It's a quiet neighbourhood as there are no shops or commerce or industry, especially on the first few pictures you showed. There are more millionaires there than any other area in the uk. Absolutely shocking example of what's meant to be for the average person. The tube amd bus services are not clean and safe, quire the opposite, dirty, dangerous and smelly. They also take ages. They were also funded for at the expense of the rest of the uk. Part of its attraction is the parks and greenery around it which means no heavy traffic passes through it. This would not be the case in a walkable city when density is the aim. It's the one place in London with more green space than housing and again that is not the plan for walkable cities.....density density You fail to mention uk himes have the smallest square footage in Europe if not western world. Hampstead does not dismantle the it actually prives nothing. Shock, another video with zero details or actual evidence.
I was with you until the last sentence. It’s nice to hear a take on the suburbs that’s not so negative. I don’t think they’re for everyone, but I do think it would be nice for everyone to have a variety of options. One reason people move to the suburbs is for the schools, which I didn’t hear. Curious if that’s part of your thought process.
Your dense looking development is still car centric. It needs to be transit oriented. That’s not smart development at all Silicon Valley wealth is about to build a new city on virgin land north of the bay. instead, they should be redeveloping Silicon Valley. As you showed, Apple plays high tech but their HQ is an absurd waste of land. You also show
It is just silly to paint suburbs all the same, just like all cities are not the same. There are sprawling, far flung suburbs in the US, and very densely populated suburbs on train lines and extremely walkable. The vast majority of Americans live in suburbs, not cities, and that isn’t likely to change. Millions of suburban residents live off transit lines in the US, few in the South or West, but millions in the NE and around cities like Chicago (which is the #5 most densely populated municipality in Illinois, behind four more densely populated suburbs).
Even suburbs in/around one city can be different. Closer to the core one might find street grids, closer-together houses built 80-120 years ago, relatively narrow streets, and dense tree cover. Further out, the houses get larger, newer, and further apart, streets turn into mazes of dead ends and cul-de-sacs, and lawns are green and bare. I’ve seen this in even smaller cities.
@@richardalvarez2390many newer suburbs are about sprawl, but there are many millions of Americans who live in older suburbs with transit and walkable options. There are sprawling cities too, many far less walkable than many suburbs. The stereotypes of all suburbs being in no man’s land is simply inaccurate, any more than all US cities are densely populated with easy walkability.
@@alexanderrotmenszI feel caught in this weird chasm where I have an unusually high interest in cars but don’t like car-centric development. I like how 1950s cars look but don’t like what they represent in how the cities were paved over for them.
It’s taken me years to understand that a suburb does not have to built in a “suburban” model based on *detached* single family houses only accessible to anywhere by a car. Suburb is a place type for government designation while suburban are characteristics of how a place is designed and built. I’ve lived in numerous big cities that had suburban subdivisions within the central city limits because of when they were developed-typically the most car-required and least walkable areas of the city.
Ironically, most of the places you mentioned and showed are full of *attached* single family housing with their own street-level entrance on their own lot. We might call them townhomes, brownstones, or rowhouses, but they’re single family houses with a wall shared. This is a key to how we accommodate the desire people have to have a small amount of private outdoor space, reduce the amount of excess infrastructure to maintain and replace, while allowing access to the Main Street/High Street with a reasonable, interesting and safe walking distance for daily needs, including access to regional transit and options to get beyond a walking distance. If we sprinkle some detached SFH among these sets of attached houses, we have the best of both worlds and provide the diversity of options that modern households are looking for. We just have to be willing to mix the uses, density, types and sizes in the same area as has been done until the recent suburban experiment started.
I think you’re heading in the right direction, but there’s some nuance that you’re probably still discovering that hopefully will show up in your videos sooner than later. SFH does not have to be the same thing for everyone everywhere. Suburbs don’t have to be full of these detached SFH to be desirable places for people who want a yard and some private outdoor space.
I totally agree with you. I'm moreso addressing the American skeptics that will say they don't want to give up any part of their lifestyle for this better urban design, including having all 4 walls. While ideally a suburb would have a mix, I'm just making the point that these sorts of SFHs are compatible too in that vision.
suburb is not synonymous with sprawling single family homes. It means smaller city connected to larger one forming a metropolitan area. car centrism was a proleteriat revolt against baron railroad monopolies in California and Levittowns were Jewish monetary inventions to make money, because single family homes are more profitable, loan/mortage/addition/remodeling wise, especially compared to small dense apartment homes.
@@alexanderrotmensz you don't address enough, so it falls short, race plays a fundamental role that capitalism can never artificially elevate racial aliens into filling
Japan has tons and tons of Suburbs. They just put convenience stores in the neighborhoods so they aren't car dependent. Also a bus line to the closest train station helps if people want to leave.
Personally, I as an American wouldn’t mind living next to a grocery/convenience store, and if there’s anything that seems absurd about that statement then it comes from how the car-centric layout has relegated these spaces. If we put those types of businesses in the midst of regular homes, people would casually make shorter and more frequent trips, and it would be much safer than how we typically imagine gas station convenience stores. They could even be informal community meeting spaces to some extent.
Given the typical volume of each purchase, we might not even need shopping carts then. They’re such an odd byproduct of car dependence that I don’t know how we ever got used to them.
@@DiamondKingStudios I already live that way in an American small town. I can walk 15min to a grocery store. We already have this in America, just not in the Suburbs or rural areas. I was just commenting on my experiences with Japanese Suburbia
@@linuxman7777 Really great that you enjoy that. Every small town I’ve seen is either a quaint walkable place that’s really great to live or a crumbling food desert with vacant storefronts by a Walmart. There’s almost no in between with towns of those sizes.
I think it's misleading to say that most or even any urbanists want to get rid of all single family homes. Most urbanists just want to get rid of single family zoning are give people the ability to build midrise. Neighbourhoods change and that's OK.
I want mixed use structures. There was an area in my hometown that had 3 story buildings that was very close to down town, walking distance, that were zoned so the first floor could be small boutiques and shops, and the top 2 floors were living spaces for the shop owners. It was really quite nice.
Kind of my point though. The way zoning works still sucks in many ways, but enabling midrise buildings in any neighborhood will end single family home suburbs which I'm not a fan of generally. These suburbs were built wrong, but converting them isn't the solution imo, unless you plan on building a newer, better single family home suburb somewhere else.
@@alexanderrotmensz I think you under estimate how much people want to/have been conditioned to want single family homes.
@@badm0t0rf1ng3rI think most people want to live in single family homes. And I think it’s entirely possible to meet that demand in an urbanist way.
I think simply allowing midrise housing is really important, mainly because it's important that there's plenty of housing.
Suburbs built on transit are very livable. Much of San Francisco is suburban. City life is not by nature chaotic or family unfriendly. We don’t need huge houses we need well designed houses. Good cities are built around transit not cars.
I’m also from LA. Pasadena, Hollywood, Santa Monica are all fine urban settings
There's nothing wrong with wanting a single family home, and mid-rises are a bit extreme in a suburb. But the market has changed and theres an opporunity to earn additional income by building a rental unit during a housing crisis. or start a local business from your house. However, it would be illegal to do that without a rezoning process (often a costly expense). When no destinations are closeby, of course people will drive.
Rail suburbs and college towns are the best places to live in the US
I’d have to agree with you there. Unfortunately they can also be expensive.
People want to live by college towns so much that even the adjoining communities that aren’t quite as walkable can be pretty expensive themselves. Oconee County, GA, is right next to Athens-Clarke where UGA is, and it is the third-highest county by median family income ($85,371) in my home state. Imagine the property values there!
If the homes offices and businesses all were in the same zone, streets could be narrower and more people could have access to infrastructure
Yeah I'm in favor of relaxing zoning laws.
@@alexanderrotmenszumm I didn't see that in your previous comment, where you specifically said you did not want denser buildings next to single family homes
@@richardalvarez2390 Exactly what I was just thinking reading this. There's a lot of mixed messaging here.
@doom-generation4109 he is young and has been brainwashed.....to think hampstead is a good example is mind blowing.
Nobody has produced a working concept so they all just fill in the blanks with what seems right at the time.
Living next to or above shops and businesses is horrible. Noisy, dirty, dangerous, rodents, etc.
its crazy that the first suburbs that popped up in la were centered around the street car lines, which were then replaces with freeways and stroads. and now transit oriented development is the 'new' thing, like the vista canyon metrolink station in santa clarita. we really forgot how to build working suburbs because of car brain
I hope we rediscover interurbans that way, even if intercity buses have made them obsolete in some ways. There are probably some rural communities or individual farms that could benefit from interurbans service in certain parts of the US.
The Elephant in the room is that Real Estate of (N.)America is of a completely different nature than of anywhere else in the world.
For example, many Suburbs of Afro-Eurasia and even South America are the comtinuation of medieval villages that grew outside the central cities, Kentish Town near camden is a good exmaple.
In America we made rough districting & let private and local officials determine everything on their whims so we got nothing
Now that you bring it up, I think it’s rather important to consider. The sorts of urban layouts that produce the healthiest, liveliest spaces may not be the most lucrative for those who buy land, develop buildings, and sell those buildings.
@@DiamondKingStudios politics plays a big role as well. Also that these places are less than a hundred years old and wr have to guess what the best arrangement is.
Hampstead.......you fail to mention the average house price is £1.3 million. A lot of the places yoinshowed will be around £5 million.
You assume everyone in hampstead works in hampstead, they don't.
Many won't have the mutual working life, many will spend half their time abroad or are from another country.
It's a quiet neighbourhood as there are no shops or commerce or industry, especially on the first few pictures you showed.
There are more millionaires there than any other area in the uk. Absolutely shocking example of what's meant to be for the average person.
The tube amd bus services are not clean and safe, quire the opposite, dirty, dangerous and smelly. They also take ages.
They were also funded for at the expense of the rest of the uk.
Part of its attraction is the parks and greenery around it which means no heavy traffic passes through it. This would not be the case in a walkable city when density is the aim.
It's the one place in London with more green space than housing and again that is not the plan for walkable cities.....density density
You fail to mention uk himes have the smallest square footage in Europe if not western world.
Hampstead does not dismantle the it actually prives nothing.
Shock, another video with zero details or actual evidence.
I was with you until the last sentence. It’s nice to hear a take on the suburbs that’s not so negative. I don’t think they’re for everyone, but I do think it would be nice for everyone to have a variety of options.
One reason people move to the suburbs is for the schools, which I didn’t hear. Curious if that’s part of your thought process.
Your dense looking development is still car centric. It needs to be transit oriented. That’s not smart development at all
Silicon Valley wealth is about to build a new city on virgin land north of the bay. instead, they should be redeveloping Silicon Valley. As you showed, Apple plays high tech but their HQ is an absurd waste of land.
You also show
I've never thought of Hampstead as a suburb.
It is just silly to paint suburbs all the same, just like all cities are not the same. There are sprawling, far flung suburbs in the US, and very densely populated suburbs on train lines and extremely walkable. The vast majority of Americans live in suburbs, not cities, and that isn’t likely to change. Millions of suburban residents live off transit lines in the US, few in the South or West, but millions in the NE and around cities like Chicago (which is the #5 most densely populated municipality in Illinois, behind four more densely populated suburbs).
Even suburbs in/around one city can be different. Closer to the core one might find street grids, closer-together houses built 80-120 years ago, relatively narrow streets, and dense tree cover. Further out, the houses get larger, newer, and further apart, streets turn into mazes of dead ends and cul-de-sacs, and lawns are green and bare. I’ve seen this in even smaller cities.
Doesn't matter how they vary, the current modern suburbs are sprawling jungles of traffic congestion
@@richardalvarez2390 yes, some are and many are not. There are many walkable suburbs, many more densely populated than cities in 5he South and West.
@@mic1240 there's only a few pilot modern suburbs that are walkable I'm not talking of the first type of suburbs
@@richardalvarez2390many newer suburbs are about sprawl, but there are many millions of Americans who live in older suburbs with transit and walkable options. There are sprawling cities too, many far less walkable than many suburbs. The stereotypes of all suburbs being in no man’s land is simply inaccurate, any more than all US cities are densely populated with easy walkability.
Number 1 car hater who loves car
I like cars, just not car centric urban design. Big difference.
@@alexanderrotmenszI feel caught in this weird chasm where I have an unusually high interest in cars but don’t like car-centric development. I like how 1950s cars look but don’t like what they represent in how the cities were paved over for them.