Your "normal" person VS urbanist person comments hit home. I've been becoming more and more radically urbanist over the last few years and now I can't help but look around and see all the problems in policy and apathy. My wife just LOVES when I turn every conversation into something about urbanism, walkability, public transit, etc.
Yep. After getting into urbanism I feel like I see problems everywhere I go, whereas before I was living in blissful suburban ignorance. Now my girlfriend is starting to see it too because I talk about it so much lol.
Omg it’s the same with me. Ever since I had the chance live outside the U.S. and got to experience the walkable, bikeable, good public transit lifestyle in Japan (I have since moved back), I have become so passionate about urban planning that I will somehow very often turn every conversation I have with my husband into those topics.
@@whereaboutsunknown3822 yeah I had a similar experience. Japan doesn’t really even use big plans to get walkable neighborhoods. They have light zoning laws that allow small apartments and small shops in even the lightest L1 residential zone and they have heavier use zones up to L12 heavy industry and lighter uses are always allowed in a heavier zone creating mixed use neighborhoods you can walk in. By contrast zoning in the land of the free and the brave is strictly single use only afraid of adapting to new market demands like needing more homes and less office space now.
As someone from the East Bay, it's nice to hear good things about Emeryville. It's constantly ranked as a shithole, with sky-high crime rates, and that IS true, but it's gotten so much better in the last 5 years or so and is continuing to get so much better that I'd probably direct anyone looking to move to the Bay to Emeryville. Especially for people who don't have... cars. Can't steal 'em if you don't have 'em!
I definitely consider most of emeryville a shithole. Despite living hear 19 year’s I’ve never really checked it out more than the freeway off ramps. That was enough to turn me away, perhaps I judged it too harshly
i've always known it from being the home of Pixar, as someon who always viewed the whole credits. What's odd is that Pixar is smack dab in the middle of town, yet it's also a huge suburban campus.
A big issue with Emeryville's crime stats is that they are often reported on a per-capita basis, but a lot of the crime is committed by people who do not live in Emeryville. So in raw numbers the crime may not be as bad as it seems, or could be comparable to other areas in the East Bay, but the per-capita reporting makes it seem astronomical. At least that was my understanding the last time I read up on it.
@@Pierrelourens1 for sure. It's so small, I always thought of it as just another Oakland neighborhood. It's not like you cross the line over from west oakland and it immediately gets so much worse. emeryville is just a niehgborhood in the flats that doesn't have the hills making its crime stats look better
The first time I took the train from Seattle to San Francisco, my ticket had a transfer in Emeryville. I'd never heard of Emeryville so I didn't know where it was or if my ticket was wrong. Then I got there and found out it's next to Oakland. Years later I went into Emeryville once, to the Esperanto-USA store. I used the Emery Go-Round from MacArthur BART station, and it worked well and I didn't have to wait long.
Great video. As someone who lives pretty close to Emeryville, I can certainly say this process has started a long time ago. The Ikea and Theater area were the first to really start this trend of newer, easily walkable areas with shops below and housing above, and the city continued to build off of that. There is a good mix of old buildings and newer construction in areas that were very downtrodden and bleak looking. Great video highlighting a small community doing it right in a march larger suburban area.
Yes, but I wouldn't call that area the "Ikea area." That's Bay Street! That Ikea big box store nearby is actually a symptom of the previous suburbanization period if Emeryville's history. It was built at the tail end of it, but still. We have to recognize that Ikea, while trying to pretend like they're more climate friendly, is actually a disastrous business both for the climate and for sustainability in general. They might as well have been founded in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Finally a California city I can use as an example of how things can be better, instead of saying look at Amsterdam, Seattle, or Minneapolis. Because to most of the people I talk to in my home town, can't fathom the value of something so far away. For any European example, they'll be like "that's just how things are in Europe, and they wouldn't work here." For the others, they'll have some sort of built in NIMBY response about crime or traffic. . .
Lived in Berkeley for 4 years. Definitely only thought of Emeryville as a series of big box stores and the Pixar offices. My roommate and I called it "The Merchant Republic of Emeryville" and joked that no one lives in Emeryville
Just recently found this channel, reminds me a lot of Not Just Bikes, you guys are really hitting the nail on the head and I wish more people talked about this stuff to get the conversation going. I think a lot of people don't even know that cities can be less car dependent, so this content is so important. I hope to see that you and like-minded people bring about big changes in city planning domestically and globally. Thanks for the great videos.
@@noob.168 never traveled or lived abroad but i would love to. i've lived in a city my whole life but after seeing the suburban wastelands surrounding my city i would love to travel to europe
San Francisco is denser than most other places and people do walk there more than most places. What really needs to happen is we need to make more places like San Francisco’s layout to build enough housing to stabilize or even lower prices.
San Francisco has the 2nd highest density in the USA after New York City, and all in only 49 sq. miles. Also, Golden Gate Park (bigger than NY’s Central Park).
I love urbanization & reducing both carbon emissions & reliance on automobiles, but not everyone want to live in a gridlock dense city like SF. There is still a very small minority of the 300+ millions of Americans that want to live in “places like San Francisco’s layout “.
@@mattrancho rebuild small rural towns to how they were back in the Wild West and every else. Train station 🚉 in middle of the town , a Main Street densely packed with businesses on the first floor and apartments of second , third etc , and off the buildings off the main street are still walkable and dense. Small towns are dying due to the expensive car infrastructure and new small towns sprawling to ridiculous levels where parking lot filled lots with one business spaces hundreds of feet away from each other making walking around the business like hiking. This is what is killing small towns. Look up Alan fishers small towns don’t have to suck video
@@mattrancho San Francisco and Manhattan are the most expensive places in America showing there is more demand to live in dense walkable cities than there is supply so we should relax zoning to allow more to be built. Right now strict single use zoning only allows car driving suburbia to be built and about half of roads are paid through income taxes so suburbia appears cheaper than it is. If walkable places were allowed to be built, which could be less dense than SF, and got cheaper with the supply we’d see more people opt for urbanism and reducing carbon so they can save money driving less and might find out they like it.
@@karld1791 first off, I completely agree with the zoning laws. But SF & NY are 2 every unique cities that are in their own category (or should be). Yes there’s demand to live in those cities, but its also the popularity, image, rep, brand, attraction, lifestyle, etc that keep that demand high. These 2 cities are 2 renown international cities. Not a good example. Look at LA, one of the most expensive cities in America. Yes they are improving their public transit & are developing into more of a dense urban city, but over 90% of the city scape are low rise low density urban sprawl. After spending billions on light rail & bus rapid transit, the ridership were not as high as they projected. My point is its mainly about the “big city life, big city lights”. Some of the fastest growing cities are Seattle, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix. All these cities are majority suburban sprawl. Seattle being probably the city that really is developing an urban dense city with improving public transit (all cities listed are as well). But its mainly focused on downtown Seattle & downtown Bellevue. Seattle metro, stretching from Tacoma up to Everett to the east in Redmon are still suburban sprawl, which is over 90% of the metro. With that being said, yea there is a demand to live in urban cities, but urbanist want people to believe majority of Americans are dying to live in urban dense neighborhoods like SF or NY. “majority” of American still prefer driving their own cars living in single family homes. Americans are just used to that suburbia car driven culture & lifestyle.
My eyes literally bugged out in disbelief at how great many aspects of Emeryville are. I never heard of it before. Great video. I live in LA, and this makes me really want to visit Emeryville!
SF native priced out over ten years ago. Moved to Santa Cruz Mnts, then priced out again. Currently in LA and hating it but haven’t been able to find a way back to the bay. Sigh. Enjoy your content. Keep it up 👍🏼
I’m always so exited for a new Thomas the Trainer Video. This is a good spotlight on a place that doesn’t get that much spotlight. It highlights the things Emeryville is doing right compared to the rest of the Bay Area.
Being in high school its nice to see people in our age range finally realize the problems literally in front of our eyes.. the city for the car will be looked at in shame in the future
Sorry to burst your "people in our age" generalization but there are people out there older than Thomas and you that have done tons of research into the negative effects of car centric development. Check out The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
Its amazing how Emeryville has reinvented itself. But before it was all housing, shopping, and bike lanes, Emeryville was the Industrial Armpit of the Bay Area since the 1920s. A landmark animated neon sign of 60 years ago was Sherwin-Williams Paint "Cover The Earth". No one lived there. Just rail lines, tanneries, and industrial factories. But with tighter environmental regulations, by the 1980s, industrial plants were shutting down and moving.
Used to live on the Emeryville/Oakland border and when I went out for my walks or bikes I always headed in the Emeryville direction! Lovely protected bike bath there. It’s still a bit weird in places, especially in the shopping areas and busy roads, but it is improving and a pleasant place!
Thank you for making these videos, Im trying to get my small city and county to realize the incredible benefits walkability and good city design could have for our area, and your videos keep inspiring me! To know that Emeryville can do it gives me confidence that we can do it!
It's not a bad candidate if the scope is restricted to North America, but yeah. Better and equally obscure candidates exist aplenty in other countries. Zoetermeer, for instance. Never knew about it until today, and it looks pretty urbanist-friendly to me.
I enjoyed your video and will look more into Emeryville! An unrequested technical tip though: Get a pop filter for your mic or place it at a location where the plosives (pop sounds produced when you say letters like P or T) are not so distracting. Good content though!
when i first moved to the bay area, Emeryville was kind of just a place for big box stores that had some apartments (I feel like people mostly referred to it as where the IKEA is). even in the short time i've been here (~decade, which is short in terms of infrastructure), Emeryville has made *gigantic* progress. I bike to and around Emeryvillle now, especially along a bunch of new dedicated low-stress bike paths and protected bike lanes. That was unimaginable back in 2012! There's so much new housing going up, basically new neighborhoods emerging from scratch. So excited to see what Emeryville will be like after the *next* ten years. Just full of jealousy from my own east bay city.
The Scottsdale video would be interesting. I wonder if the city council will ever be accepting of light rail or BRT, though I think it’s been 6 years since Valley Metro first tried to do that.
I would not be surprised if they have some BRT or light rail at some point. But that is no panacea. The problems are so entrenched in a place like Scottsdale that they are very difficult to solve. You either have to grow yourself out of it (from a population standpoint) or take back land (shrink your physical size). More or less L. A. and Detroit (and Detroit remains a work in progress). Oh, and growing yourself out of it is really problematic given it is in Arizona (with its water issues).
Let's see the Arizona video! This video doesn't have enough cursing. Thomas holds the monopoly on cursing and urban planning content, haha. It would also be cool to see people shed more light on California cities that are making progress. If it can be done anywhere, I'd assume California would be the first state to implement these changes
This is a great channel, and you produce great quality content, my friend, keep up the good work, I didn't know about this little town until today, so thank you. Also in mind about San Francisco, they are purposing some bills to combat the housing in some areas which is great news, so hopefully, more will be done, and San Francisco is amazing, I recently went there myself and it was quite the inspiring city, I would live there if the housing wasn't so high, but I'm glad the mayor is doing something, although its hard cause of politics in the way and like you said NIMBYS.
When I lived in Oakland I used to bike through Emeryville all the time just for fun. It's really pleasant in some areas and in others it's just traffic and parking lots like the rest of the country. Either way, it was too expensive for me at the time and now I live far away from there, but I really do think the east bay has some of the best cycling in the country.
The bus to BART Station is a good idea. The next thing they should do is install some cycle parking next to the station, with direct acess to the platforms. In the Netherlands there is a parking at all stations. Moderate stations usually have 3000 spaces, as well as a shit tonne of shared OV-fiets bicycles. 50% of people ride the first-mile to train stations in NL.
i grew up in south berkeley, nearly adjacent to emeryville. over the decades, emeryville has dramatically changed into one of the best cities in the bay in my opinion. i've always noticed how much better the overall designed experiences of the city is once I leave bekeley's city limits. berkeley is now BARELY beginning to get its fucking shit together now that the nimby boomer are beginning to die off/loose power. but, it's not even close to the level of intention that i see in emeryville's urban design. currently I live in san francisco, and yes the rents are sweaty and the prospect of ever owning a home (for anyone here) is becoming outright impossible. i've always kept emeryville in the back pocket of my mind, but never realized why until watching this video. the only thing holding me back that lack of a bart station and access to nightlife culture.
A comic book artist I follow named Art Thibert moved from the San Diego area to The Woodlands, and he calls it "paradise". I haven't looked much into it, but if it's a good example of urbanism, I give it my blessing.
This must satire. The Woodlands is Suburban almost exurban in nature. It's entirely car dependent, transit isn't even a viable option there. The small pockets of "urbanism" are pseudo - Urban mixed used developments with large swaths of parking and/or garages that are very much disconnected from each other. Its got a walk score of 18.
@@TivoKenevil hmm didn't say it was perfect. There's plenty of nature. Plenty of areas to walk, bike and it's clean. Yes it's not transit focused but it is a good place to live and visit. Reality, Not satire.
Places in the city which oppose housing, should have their funds withdrawn. Low density sprawl does not cover it's own costs anyway, unless rates are extremely high. Higher density housing means much more rate payers in a smaller area, and less traffic roads means much less expensive maintenance costs (compared to walking, biking & public transport).
It reminds what architect Jaime Lerner did as mayor of Curitiba and governor of the of Paraná, Brazil. For his time, it’s impressive how he implemented a innovative public transport system and banned car from main streets in the city’s centre. Although the city may not be all that for today’s standards, it’s far better than the average Brazilian city (basically worsened car-centric American cities + economic stagnation and informality here and there)
Great video, yes, good to focus on the good and give us the majors and the people responsible information so we can follow them in social media, thank you so much I'm actually moving so SF metro area soon so this came in perfectly, New subscriber! I am not sure if this would work but if you focus on main metro areas and do series of videos of them that could be beneficial, if you do top 25 of them there's a lot to talk about and it would give the channel some consistency and direction, but that's if you're the expert, great vid anyesy, cheers!
4:24 is Galena, IL! My car broke down there last year, and I was stuck for a few days. One of the best things that could have happened. It was an amazing place to get stuck and spend a few days. Very lively, just needs a university or something so that there could be more young people. Right now, it's mostly retirees and tourists.
It's not in any even long-range plans of which I'm aware, but Emeryville does have an Amtrak station with regular if not frequent service south to San Jose and north to Sacramento. I could imagine that being ramped up considerably in the forseeable future.
@@lasurflifeI arrived on an Amtrak train on a weekday and couldn't find a way out other than to take an Amtrak bus I didn't pay for into a place in San Francisco that was also a transit desert. I just wanted to get home to the South Bay!
I love what Emeryville is doing. I'm nextdoor in Oakland and we're making improvements here too. New housing is going in, cycling infrastructure is being put in place of motor vehicle travel lanes. We still have a long way to go but I feel like we're moving in the right direction. HMU if you ever want to do an Oakland episode.
Called it before even watching. I went to emeryville from SF to take the amtrak and looking around i was like "jesus christ this feels almost northeastern"
I lived in the phoenix area my entire life, and am 100% down to talk to you more about places around this city.....BOY DO I HAVE A LOT TO FUGGIN SAY. Feel free to reach out to me!
Lots of info in this video, obvi considerable research on the topic has been done. Your pace and inflection are nice too. You might want to invest in a pop filter for the mic, or just sit 6 inches away from it and don't choke the mic 🤣 Also, yeah the mattress on the floor is all anyone can focus on once they see it. Throwing serious murder vibes. Gotta love RUclipss for it's diversity!
I feel like “build more” isn’t always the answer to housing prices.. Here in Philadelphia the new houses and apartments often sell/ rent for far more than the old ones. I think the bigger issue is commodifying housing in general especially because the things we sacrifice to build massive shipping containers is too much to sacrifice in cities that already have decent urbanism, like my own.
I've lived in the East Bay for pretty much my whole adult life and spent a few years living on the Oakland side of the Emeryville border and several years in West Oakland just down the road. Here's my take: Emeryville does do a good job of building new buildings and they do have good bike lanes. They have the Emery-Go-Round bus which is a free hop on type bus that basically drives around the "city" in a loop and is awesome. The biggest negative I find to Emeryville is it really has no identity other than being an outdoor mall surrounded by new buildings and other big box stores. For every small business in Emeryville there's like 10 corporate chain stores (if not more). Its where everyone in the East Bay gets IKEA furniture and sees an occasional movie or gets a TV from Best Buy. Yes it's "walkable" but only because its small and there's not much to walk to. There's no central downtown Emeryville - the closest to that would probably just be the Bay Street mall? And yeah it's surrounded by freeways. Its kind of a weird place and even though technically it is its own city - it feels weird to call Emeryville a city. Parts of it almost feel like a new college campus development. And its location is right next to West/North Oakland so yeah, there's high crime compared to the national average. And while they do build new buildings which is great - they also have little in the way of rent control or tenant protections. I had friends who lived in a great apartment about 5 houses away from the Oakland/Emeryville border and they eventually moved because they were sick of their landlord arbitrarily hiking rent up every year at his own discretion. Nobody wants to keep shopping for a new place to live every 12 months. Hopefully the new buildings help with that but bay area real estate is just insane. Pros: Walkable, Bikeable, very close proximity to San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley, good city planning relative to surrounding areas, bay breeze and perfect weather year round Cons: Boring, no cultural or local identity, no downtown, too many corporate businesses, not many green spaces, limited tenant protections, crime rates not much better than Oakland, still very expensive
ngl i started skeptical because Emeryville is a traffic nightmare. But that's only the big mall east side. Everything west of the tracks are grids of narrow streets and little to no cars. The bike lanes are really impressive and can see it inspiring its neighboring cities, especially Oakland.
Have you been there? It's certainly encouraging what they're trying to do, but man, Emeryville is essentially a glorified freeway offramp with a bunch of disconnected shopping centers and condo's randomly spread about. It does have an Amtrak station, but even that looks out onto the back parking lots of random strip malls. There's a tiny neighborhood that actually has the form of a traditional streetcar suburb similar to most of the neighborhoods in the rest of the East Bay, but it's unremarkable in that sense. If urbanism can essentially be measured by the number of people outside of cars in public spaces (and I think it can be) as a proportion of the total population, Emeryville is way below average even for California. It may be headed in the right direction, but it has a long, long, long ways to go. And I'm a fan of the place, mostly because of its Amtrak station.
The thing about Yimby bros is that they always prioritize letting developers do whatever they want over prioritizing social and affordable housing and that’s where I disagree with them. We can and should build and design livable amazing cities but we must must must have government funded social and affordable housing in the mix from the get go. We can’t just let market rate housing projects gobble up the available land and wait for the magical trickle down theory to take place 5 years later making things a tiny bit less expensive than before but not really livable for workers like teachers janitors etc. emeryville is still one of the most expensive cities in America.
I agree with pretty much everything, but I wouldn't be too harsh on San Francisco, as the city proper is really only a tiny part of the metropolitan area: it's more like the Manhattan of the bay area. I personally view Emeryville as part of San Francisco, not really a separate "city".
Interestingly, the other tiny enclaves nearby do not have any of this. Piedmont is apex NIMBY land...but it also doesn't really have much in the way of businesses either. It's just a glorified single-zone neighborhood with a graveyard. And the other one, Albany, while not so egregious, and arguably getting there, is still pretty awful. It does have one bicycle trail following the train track guideway splitting the city in two, and one bike trail on the shore, it revamped its main road to have a bit more room for bikes [it was a stroad],...but it also has a lot of big box stores, not that many apartments at all, a stroad, super wide residential roads. I didn't include the other East Bay cities nearby because they are a different can of worms, especially Oakland.
Emeryville isn’t really a fair comparison to an actual city. Emeryville is a tiny dot on a map, smaller in area to downtown San Francisco. It’s just an area that was once industrial lots; obviously this would be an area easier to zone for high density than SF’s swaths of single family homes. Also, Emeryville was a bunch of industrial lots in one of the highest crime areas in CA; you’re not going to be seeing any NIMBYs come protect that area. I’m not saying we don’t need urban planning reform. SF definitely needs to make it cheaper for developers. I’m just saying it’s unrealistic to point to a tiny blip on a map like Emeryville and say “why can’t SF be like this?”
I knew that picture looked familiar. At first it looked like Oakland near the MacArthur BART station, but I knew it had to be elsewhere because it was too…manicured lol.
Emeryville is super expensive, rents are like $4000+ AND what a lot of gentrifiers don’t know is Emeryville was nothing more than factories and poultry factories c, and the ground water is contaminated. And where the apartments are built is landfill. I was born and raised in North Oakland.
Emmeryville is basically a neighborhood but has its own government. It's tiny. It's not as bad as many make it out to be. It's smack in the middle of a pretty dense urban area (north oakland/berkeley) and it's only 10 min from Downtown SF or Downtown Oakland. good shopping, train access. but could use a bart station.
Private developers and landlords are actually the largest factor in the Bay Area housing increase. There used to be plenty of housing for everyone until landlords catered to gentrifiers.
Vienna, Austria has very affordable housing despite having a fairly high cost of living, as all big cities do, because something like 60% of people live in social housing, government owned apartments, where the rent is kept intentionally low. Because there are so many apartments with cheap rent, private landlords have no choice but to keep their rent lower to be competitive. I wish the US would take a page out of Austria's book. There's a reason it's one of the best cities to live in in the world
What about safety? Walkable sounds nice, but I think I know lots of people who would rather drive in a car through a bad neighborhood than walk through one.
The more regular people walk, the safer it is. Car-dependant areas result in only the truly desperate walking, which means you're more likely to run into sketchy people. In San Francisco, possible the most walkable city in the US, there are all classes of life walking about, which makes it much safer.
What do you think of the woodlands and Bridgeland in Houston Texas. These huge mega developments span thousands of acres with planned communities that are walkable organized and hold a lot of people to help with housing costs in Houston. These developments also spur new development around them.
I had yearly conferences in the Woodlands. The conference center area is nice and faced a river walk or pathway and had some walkable pockets. But trying to walk to the nearby mall for food just felt awful to reach with nothing but parking lots in the view. Forget about accessing the conference center if you stay at a hotel across the interstate highway. Just not that enjoyable IMO.
At a glance it looks like a decent enough idea, but it falls into the old trap of building on pristine lands way the heck outside the city instead of doing something with the mistakes of the city itself. From The Woodlands Mall to downtown Houston is almost 50 km/30 miles, while the downtown core has several similarly-sized areas filled with single-family residences and undeveloped brownfield lots within a two-mile radius. Just look at the area called South Central Houston. Two thirds of it appears to be brownfields, and it's less than a mile from the skyscrapers of downtown. Why the heck hasn't more been done there, instead of building new mega-developments out in the sticks thirty miles away?
@@Codraroll a lot of this has to to do with Texas Property taxes. In Texas, they're relatively high in comparison to other states. For example, a developer will have to pay taxes for the land AND the assessed value of the structure that sits on the land, until development starts. Where as with Greenfield developments this is not the case. Land is cheaper and no structure...That's why some developers tear down structures in the core, to stop paying the taxes on some older buildings. But even that costs money. Typically developments in Texas core cities, are done by big developers that have financial capital to pull it off. Brownfields just are more expensive, and then there's blow back sometimes from the neighborhood or preservationist...it takes a savvy developer to do a brownfield. Most Developers want Fast and Easy. Brownfields are the opposite of that.
So happy to see Emeryville, who i still remember only for its Ikea store, doing all this. It is a big step into the right direction, hopefully the other cities will follow and elect the right people to gear their cities towards modernty and away from car centric america that really f# so many generations in the US... try to google Amsterdam to see how city should look!
The mayor wants to ban cars? I won't be living there. That position basically sums up my opposition to most urban planners. Most want to top down force everyone into their vision when that's the reason we're in the mess in the first place. All the regulations, zoning regulations, deed restrictions, car centric subsidies, and tax payer funded building projects got us to today. It's naive to think this time around these top down mandates will produce the right results and even if they did at what cost?
I'm more about including public transportation along with cars than banning them completely, you're removing an entire preference of transportation simply for the sake of looks rather than accommodating for different types of people. 'Nimby's' is a straight euphemism used to manipulate people away from their mindset - it's fairly simple, if you want to replace a family's personal space and lifestyle with public transportation and housing then you better be willing to move all of their stuff for them and that accounts for paying for a new home and setting them up for a few months. Not everyone wants to live in a giant building of box clones and even as someone who does want to live in a skyscraper you have to understand that you're forcing actual human beings out of their homes.
i love the mattress on the floor vibes
Your "normal" person VS urbanist person comments hit home. I've been becoming more and more radically urbanist over the last few years and now I can't help but look around and see all the problems in policy and apathy. My wife just LOVES when I turn every conversation into something about urbanism, walkability, public transit, etc.
Yep. After getting into urbanism I feel like I see problems everywhere I go, whereas before I was living in blissful suburban ignorance. Now my girlfriend is starting to see it too because I talk about it so much lol.
Omg it’s the same with me. Ever since I had the chance live outside the U.S. and got to experience the walkable, bikeable, good public transit lifestyle in Japan (I have since moved back), I have become so passionate about urban planning that I will somehow very often turn every conversation I have with my husband into those topics.
@@whereaboutsunknown3822 nihongo hanasemaskua
my wife wants me to stop bringing up the works of karl marx at thanksgiving 😔
@@whereaboutsunknown3822 yeah I had a similar experience. Japan doesn’t really even use big plans to get walkable neighborhoods. They have light zoning laws that allow small apartments and small shops in even the lightest L1 residential zone and they have heavier use zones up to L12 heavy industry and lighter uses are always allowed in a heavier zone creating mixed use neighborhoods you can walk in. By contrast zoning in the land of the free and the brave is strictly single use only afraid of adapting to new market demands like needing more homes and less office space now.
As someone from the East Bay, it's nice to hear good things about Emeryville. It's constantly ranked as a shithole, with sky-high crime rates, and that IS true, but it's gotten so much better in the last 5 years or so and is continuing to get so much better that I'd probably direct anyone looking to move to the Bay to Emeryville. Especially for people who don't have... cars. Can't steal 'em if you don't have 'em!
I definitely consider most of emeryville a shithole. Despite living hear 19 year’s I’ve never really checked it out more than the freeway off ramps. That was enough to turn me away, perhaps I judged it too harshly
i've always known it from being the home of Pixar, as someon who always viewed the whole credits. What's odd is that Pixar is smack dab in the middle of town, yet it's also a huge suburban campus.
A big issue with Emeryville's crime stats is that they are often reported on a per-capita basis, but a lot of the crime is committed by people who do not live in Emeryville. So in raw numbers the crime may not be as bad as it seems, or could be comparable to other areas in the East Bay, but the per-capita reporting makes it seem astronomical. At least that was my understanding the last time I read up on it.
@@Pierrelourens1 for sure. It's so small, I always thought of it as just another Oakland neighborhood. It's not like you cross the line over from west oakland and it immediately gets so much worse. emeryville is just a niehgborhood in the flats that doesn't have the hills making its crime stats look better
The first time I took the train from Seattle to San Francisco, my ticket had a transfer in Emeryville. I'd never heard of Emeryville so I didn't know where it was or if my ticket was wrong. Then I got there and found out it's next to Oakland. Years later I went into Emeryville once, to the Esperanto-USA store. I used the Emery Go-Round from MacArthur BART station, and it worked well and I didn't have to wait long.
Great video. As someone who lives pretty close to Emeryville, I can certainly say this process has started a long time ago. The Ikea and Theater area were the first to really start this trend of newer, easily walkable areas with shops below and housing above, and the city continued to build off of that. There is a good mix of old buildings and newer construction in areas that were very downtrodden and bleak looking. Great video highlighting a small community doing it right in a march larger suburban area.
Yes, but I wouldn't call that area the "Ikea area." That's Bay Street! That Ikea big box store nearby is actually a symptom of the previous suburbanization period if Emeryville's history. It was built at the tail end of it, but still. We have to recognize that Ikea, while trying to pretend like they're more climate friendly, is actually a disastrous business both for the climate and for sustainability in general. They might as well have been founded in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Finally a California city I can use as an example of how things can be better, instead of saying look at Amsterdam, Seattle, or Minneapolis. Because to most of the people I talk to in my home town, can't fathom the value of something so far away. For any European example, they'll be like "that's just how things are in Europe, and they wouldn't work here." For the others, they'll have some sort of built in NIMBY response about crime or traffic. . .
they'll just say "Oakland-Emeryville was built on a dense grid. [insert city here] wasn't."
Lived in Berkeley for 4 years. Definitely only thought of Emeryville as a series of big box stores and the Pixar offices. My roommate and I called it "The Merchant Republic of Emeryville" and joked that no one lives in Emeryville
i mean its population is only 12,000 which is not too bad considering its just over 2 sq mi
same, i thought it was just a shopping promenade with an ikea and a theater
This proves that local politics is key for building walkable towns
Just recently found this channel, reminds me a lot of Not Just Bikes, you guys are really hitting the nail on the head and I wish more people talked about this stuff to get the conversation going. I think a lot of people don't even know that cities can be less car dependent, so this content is so important. I hope to see that you and like-minded people bring about big changes in city planning domestically and globally. Thanks for the great videos.
I feel like most of the people that watch these videos have traveled/lived abroad and thought "Why can't we do that here too?"
@@noob.168 never traveled or lived abroad but i would love to. i've lived in a city my whole life but after seeing the suburban wastelands surrounding my city i would love to travel to europe
San Francisco is denser than most other places and people do walk there more than most places. What really needs to happen is we need to make more places like San Francisco’s layout to build enough housing to stabilize or even lower prices.
San Francisco has the 2nd highest density in the USA after New York City, and all in only 49 sq. miles. Also, Golden Gate Park (bigger than NY’s Central Park).
I love urbanization & reducing both carbon emissions & reliance on automobiles, but not everyone want to live in a gridlock dense city like SF. There is still a very small minority of the 300+ millions of Americans that want to live in “places like San Francisco’s layout “.
@@mattrancho rebuild small rural towns to how they were back in the Wild West and every else. Train station 🚉 in middle of the town , a Main Street densely packed with businesses on the first floor and apartments of second , third etc , and off the buildings off the main street are still walkable and dense. Small towns are dying due to the expensive car infrastructure and new small towns sprawling to ridiculous levels where parking lot filled lots with one business spaces hundreds of feet away from each other making walking around the business like hiking. This is what is killing small towns. Look up Alan fishers small towns don’t have to suck video
@@mattrancho San Francisco and Manhattan are the most expensive places in America showing there is more demand to live in dense walkable cities than there is supply so we should relax zoning to allow more to be built. Right now strict single use zoning only allows car driving suburbia to be built and about half of roads are paid through income taxes so suburbia appears cheaper than it is. If walkable places were allowed to be built, which could be less dense than SF, and got cheaper with the supply we’d see more people opt for urbanism and reducing carbon so they can save money driving less and might find out they like it.
@@karld1791 first off, I completely agree with the zoning laws. But SF & NY are 2 every unique cities that are in their own category (or should be). Yes there’s demand to live in those cities, but its also the popularity, image, rep, brand, attraction, lifestyle, etc that keep that demand high. These 2 cities are 2 renown international cities. Not a good example. Look at LA, one of the most expensive cities in America. Yes they are improving their public transit & are developing into more of a dense urban city, but over 90% of the city scape are low rise low density urban sprawl. After spending billions on light rail & bus rapid transit, the ridership were not as high as they projected. My point is its mainly about the “big city life, big city lights”. Some of the fastest growing cities are Seattle, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, Phoenix. All these cities are majority suburban sprawl. Seattle being probably the city that really is developing an urban dense city with improving public transit (all cities listed are as well). But its mainly focused on downtown Seattle & downtown Bellevue. Seattle metro, stretching from Tacoma up to Everett to the east in Redmon are still suburban sprawl, which is over 90% of the metro.
With that being said, yea there is a demand to live in urban cities, but urbanist want people to believe majority of Americans are dying to live in urban dense neighborhoods like SF or NY. “majority” of American still prefer driving their own cars living in single family homes. Americans are just used to that suburbia car driven culture & lifestyle.
My eyes literally bugged out in disbelief at how great many aspects of Emeryville are. I never heard of it before. Great video. I live in LA, and this makes me really want to visit Emeryville!
It's 10min from downtown SF. just over the bridge. It's also a stop on Amtrak if you ever take the coast starlight up to bay.
Same !!!
SF native priced out over ten years ago. Moved to Santa Cruz Mnts, then priced out again. Currently in LA and hating it but haven’t been able to find a way back to the bay. Sigh. Enjoy your content. Keep it up 👍🏼
I’m always so exited for a new Thomas the Trainer Video.
This is a good spotlight on a place that doesn’t get that much spotlight. It highlights the things Emeryville is doing right compared to the rest of the Bay Area.
Subbed and recommending this channel. I love urban planning. San Diego is behind the ball on this.
I also know Emeryville as the terminus for some Amtrak lines, including the Cali-to-Chicago California Zephyr line.
Being in high school its nice to see people in our age range finally realize the problems literally in front of our eyes.. the city for the car will be looked at in shame in the future
Sorry to burst your "people in our age" generalization but there are people out there older than Thomas and you that have done tons of research into the negative effects of car centric development. Check out The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
Thank you for posting something positive about urban planning in the US
Its amazing how Emeryville has reinvented itself. But before it was all housing, shopping, and bike lanes, Emeryville was the Industrial Armpit of the Bay Area since the 1920s. A landmark animated neon sign of 60 years ago was Sherwin-Williams Paint "Cover The Earth". No one lived there. Just rail lines, tanneries, and industrial factories. But with tighter environmental regulations, by the 1980s, industrial plants were shutting down and moving.
Used to live on the Emeryville/Oakland border and when I went out for my walks or bikes I always headed in the Emeryville direction! Lovely protected bike bath there. It’s still a bit weird in places, especially in the shopping areas and busy roads, but it is improving and a pleasant place!
Thank you for making these videos, Im trying to get my small city and county to realize the incredible benefits walkability and good city design could have for our area, and your videos keep inspiring me! To know that Emeryville can do it gives me confidence that we can do it!
Thomas: "The Most Urbanist-Friendly City You've (Probably) Never Heard Of"
Me: "I've heard of many cities outside North America."
It's not a bad candidate if the scope is restricted to North America, but yeah. Better and equally obscure candidates exist aplenty in other countries. Zoetermeer, for instance. Never knew about it until today, and it looks pretty urbanist-friendly to me.
I enjoyed your video and will look more into Emeryville! An unrequested technical tip though: Get a pop filter for your mic or place it at a location where the plosives (pop sounds produced when you say letters like P or T) are not so distracting. Good content though!
when i first moved to the bay area, Emeryville was kind of just a place for big box stores that had some apartments (I feel like people mostly referred to it as where the IKEA is). even in the short time i've been here (~decade, which is short in terms of infrastructure), Emeryville has made *gigantic* progress. I bike to and around Emeryvillle now, especially along a bunch of new dedicated low-stress bike paths and protected bike lanes. That was unimaginable back in 2012! There's so much new housing going up, basically new neighborhoods emerging from scratch. So excited to see what Emeryville will be like after the *next* ten years. Just full of jealousy from my own east bay city.
The Scottsdale video would be interesting. I wonder if the city council will ever be accepting of light rail or BRT, though I think it’s been 6 years since Valley Metro first tried to do that.
I would not be surprised if they have some BRT or light rail at some point. But that is no panacea. The problems are so entrenched in a place like Scottsdale that they are very difficult to solve. You either have to grow yourself out of it (from a population standpoint) or take back land (shrink your physical size). More or less L. A. and Detroit (and Detroit remains a work in progress). Oh, and growing yourself out of it is really problematic given it is in Arizona (with its water issues).
Let's see the Arizona video! This video doesn't have enough cursing. Thomas holds the monopoly on cursing and urban planning content, haha.
It would also be cool to see people shed more light on California cities that are making progress. If it can be done anywhere, I'd assume California would be the first state to implement these changes
I live in the Bay Area and familiar with Emeryville. It is pretty flat and weather usually good so good for walking and biking.
This is a great channel, and you produce great quality content, my friend, keep up the good work, I didn't know about this little town until today, so thank you. Also in mind about San Francisco, they are purposing some bills to combat the housing in some areas which is great news, so hopefully, more will be done, and San Francisco is amazing, I recently went there myself and it was quite the inspiring city, I would live there if the housing wasn't so high, but I'm glad the mayor is doing something, although its hard cause of politics in the way and like you said NIMBYS.
SF is the best city in spite of problems. Housing has come down a bit. Take a look.
@@franktaylor7978 yes agreed.
As a resident of Scottsdale, I got a good chuckle from the mini-rant at the end there. This place really sucks
@darren6458 bro is going through my comment history 😂💀
@darren6458 say clown again, I bet you won't
@darren6458 lol
Nice, well constructed video. It's good to learn that good stuff is going on in smaller cities.
When I lived in Oakland I used to bike through Emeryville all the time just for fun. It's really pleasant in some areas and in others it's just traffic and parking lots like the rest of the country. Either way, it was too expensive for me at the time and now I live far away from there, but I really do think the east bay has some of the best cycling in the country.
keep doing what you're doing I like these videos!
The bus to BART Station is a good idea. The next thing they should do is install some cycle parking next to the station, with direct acess to the platforms. In the Netherlands there is a parking at all stations. Moderate stations usually have 3000 spaces, as well as a shit tonne of shared OV-fiets bicycles. 50% of people ride the first-mile to train stations in NL.
Keep it up, I’m loving what I’m seeing from you!
Pretty cool hearing how you're about to hit 4,000 subscribers, and you're now at 12,500! Well-deserved :)
i grew up in south berkeley, nearly adjacent to emeryville. over the decades, emeryville has dramatically changed into one of the best cities in the bay in my opinion. i've always noticed how much better the overall designed experiences of the city is once I leave bekeley's city limits. berkeley is now BARELY beginning to get its fucking shit together now that the nimby boomer are beginning to die off/loose power. but, it's not even close to the level of intention that i see in emeryville's urban design.
currently I live in san francisco, and yes the rents are sweaty and the prospect of ever owning a home (for anyone here) is becoming outright impossible. i've always kept emeryville in the back pocket of my mind, but never realized why until watching this video. the only thing holding me back that lack of a bart station and access to nightlife culture.
I'm seeing more and more conversation about building walkable, human scaled cities. This makes me excited for the future.
Please continue your journey, I think it's super valuable content!
Great video! Always nice to learn more about these things!
Emery Go Round is such a clever name lol
The Woodlands near Houston is an example of good urbanism that includes lots of green. Not perfect but lots of clean, walkable areas.
A comic book artist I follow named Art Thibert moved from the San Diego area to The Woodlands, and he calls it "paradise". I haven't looked much into it, but if it's a good example of urbanism, I give it my blessing.
This must satire. The Woodlands is Suburban almost exurban in nature. It's entirely car dependent, transit isn't even a viable option there. The small pockets of "urbanism" are pseudo - Urban mixed used developments with large swaths of parking and/or garages that are very much disconnected from each other. Its got a walk score of 18.
@@TivoKenevil hmm didn't say it was perfect. There's plenty of nature. Plenty of areas to walk, bike and it's clean. Yes it's not transit focused but it is a good place to live and visit. Reality,
Not satire.
@@kennymccannYT No one is saying it's a bad place. But you're saying it's walkable and an example of good urbanism... Is satire, that's reality.
@@TivoKenevil there are plenty of walkable areas.
Places in the city which oppose housing, should have their funds withdrawn. Low density sprawl does not cover it's own costs anyway, unless rates are extremely high. Higher density housing means much more rate payers in a smaller area, and less traffic roads means much less expensive maintenance costs (compared to walking, biking & public transport).
It reminds what architect Jaime Lerner did as mayor of Curitiba and governor of the of Paraná, Brazil. For his time, it’s impressive how he implemented a innovative public transport system and banned car from main streets in the city’s centre. Although the city may not be all that for today’s standards, it’s far better than the average Brazilian city (basically worsened car-centric American cities + economic stagnation and informality here and there)
Great video, yes, good to focus on the good and give us the majors and the people responsible information so we can follow them in social media, thank you so much I'm actually moving so SF metro area soon so this came in perfectly, New subscriber! I am not sure if this would work but if you focus on main metro areas and do series of videos of them that could be beneficial, if you do top 25 of them there's a lot to talk about and it would give the channel some consistency and direction, but that's if you're the expert, great vid anyesy, cheers!
Super video - thank you for doing it! Great to hear about a positive example of a town trying to do right. Well explained and presented, bravo!
4:24 is Galena, IL! My car broke down there last year, and I was stuck for a few days. One of the best things that could have happened. It was an amazing place to get stuck and spend a few days. Very lively, just needs a university or something so that there could be more young people. Right now, it's mostly retirees and tourists.
Hey, I'm here a month on, and you're up to 12K+ subscribers! Enjoy the skyrocket. Looking forward to more :)
My fave new RUclipsr. Great job.
As an Arizonan interested in urban planning I would love to hear your thoughts on Scottsdale
How long until Emeryville gets a stop on a BART expansion? 😁
It's not in any even long-range plans of which I'm aware, but Emeryville does have an Amtrak station with regular if not frequent service south to San Jose and north to Sacramento. I could imagine that being ramped up considerably in the forseeable future.
@@lasurflifeI arrived on an Amtrak train on a weekday and couldn't find a way out other than to take an Amtrak bus I didn't pay for into a place in San Francisco that was also a transit desert. I just wanted to get home to the South Bay!
Emeryville is the most magical place in the Bay when those 3:30 pm whisps of fog sprint across from the Golden Gate and dance on Marina Park!!!
I love what Emeryville is doing. I'm nextdoor in Oakland and we're making improvements here too. New housing is going in, cycling infrastructure is being put in place of motor vehicle travel lanes. We still have a long way to go but I feel like we're moving in the right direction. HMU if you ever want to do an Oakland episode.
Love the channel. Keep up the good work
I thought it looked like Emeryville! Nailed it! Lol
I live in Emeryville and it is awesome!
I live a few blocks away in oakland and hope they annex me
Surprise! I knew about Emeryville, but didn't know about the positive changes.
Definitely going to visit. Peace.
Now I know it as not just the last stop on the California Zephyr:
I live in Emeryville and it's wonderful how walk able it is here compared to most other east bay cities. The city is also pretty and clean.
10K in one month is nothing less then impressive Thomas. I subbed from Ohio.
Can't wait for the Scottsdale video as an Arizonan lol
Called it before even watching. I went to emeryville from SF to take the amtrak and looking around i was like "jesus christ this feels almost northeastern"
I lived in the phoenix area my entire life, and am 100% down to talk to you more about places around this city.....BOY DO I HAVE A LOT TO FUGGIN SAY.
Feel free to reach out to me!
Thank you for making these videos
Lots of info in this video, obvi considerable research on the topic has been done. Your pace and inflection are nice too.
You might want to invest in a pop filter for the mic, or just sit 6 inches away from it and don't choke the mic 🤣 Also, yeah the mattress on the floor is all anyone can focus on once they see it. Throwing serious murder vibes.
Gotta love RUclipss for it's diversity!
I feel like “build more” isn’t always the answer to housing prices.. Here in Philadelphia the new houses and apartments often sell/ rent for far more than the old ones. I think the bigger issue is commodifying housing in general especially because the things we sacrifice to build massive shipping containers is too much to sacrifice in cities that already have decent urbanism, like my own.
I've lived in the East Bay for pretty much my whole adult life and spent a few years living on the Oakland side of the Emeryville border and several years in West Oakland just down the road. Here's my take: Emeryville does do a good job of building new buildings and they do have good bike lanes. They have the Emery-Go-Round bus which is a free hop on type bus that basically drives around the "city" in a loop and is awesome. The biggest negative I find to Emeryville is it really has no identity other than being an outdoor mall surrounded by new buildings and other big box stores. For every small business in Emeryville there's like 10 corporate chain stores (if not more). Its where everyone in the East Bay gets IKEA furniture and sees an occasional movie or gets a TV from Best Buy. Yes it's "walkable" but only because its small and there's not much to walk to. There's no central downtown Emeryville - the closest to that would probably just be the Bay Street mall? And yeah it's surrounded by freeways. Its kind of a weird place and even though technically it is its own city - it feels weird to call Emeryville a city. Parts of it almost feel like a new college campus development. And its location is right next to West/North Oakland so yeah, there's high crime compared to the national average.
And while they do build new buildings which is great - they also have little in the way of rent control or tenant protections. I had friends who lived in a great apartment about 5 houses away from the Oakland/Emeryville border and they eventually moved because they were sick of their landlord arbitrarily hiking rent up every year at his own discretion. Nobody wants to keep shopping for a new place to live every 12 months. Hopefully the new buildings help with that but bay area real estate is just insane.
Pros: Walkable, Bikeable, very close proximity to San Francisco/Oakland/Berkeley, good city planning relative to surrounding areas, bay breeze and perfect weather year round
Cons: Boring, no cultural or local identity, no downtown, too many corporate businesses, not many green spaces, limited tenant protections, crime rates not much better than Oakland, still very expensive
Very informative vlog thanks for sharing thumbs up
ngl i started skeptical because Emeryville is a traffic nightmare. But that's only the big mall east side. Everything west of the tracks are grids of narrow streets and little to no cars. The bike lanes are really impressive and can see it inspiring its neighboring cities, especially Oakland.
Have you been there? It's certainly encouraging what they're trying to do, but man, Emeryville is essentially a glorified freeway offramp with a bunch of disconnected shopping centers and condo's randomly spread about. It does have an Amtrak station, but even that looks out onto the back parking lots of random strip malls. There's a tiny neighborhood that actually has the form of a traditional streetcar suburb similar to most of the neighborhoods in the rest of the East Bay, but it's unremarkable in that sense. If urbanism can essentially be measured by the number of people outside of cars in public spaces (and I think it can be) as a proportion of the total population, Emeryville is way below average even for California. It may be headed in the right direction, but it has a long, long, long ways to go. And I'm a fan of the place, mostly because of its Amtrak station.
Thomas Y, master of the graphic tee
The thing about Yimby bros is that they always prioritize letting developers do whatever they want over prioritizing social and affordable housing and that’s where I disagree with them. We can and should build and design livable amazing cities but we must must must have government funded social and affordable housing in the mix from the get go. We can’t just let market rate housing projects gobble up the available land and wait for the magical trickle down theory to take place 5 years later making things a tiny bit less expensive than before but not really livable for workers like teachers janitors etc. emeryville is still one of the most expensive cities in America.
Not sure a bus system name has made me laugh out loud before...
I agree with pretty much everything, but I wouldn't be too harsh on San Francisco, as the city proper is really only a tiny part of the metropolitan area: it's more like the Manhattan of the bay area. I personally view Emeryville as part of San Francisco, not really a separate "city".
Love to see the new urbanist movement taking off.
New subscriber here. Just wanted to say I love your content
Interestingly, the other tiny enclaves nearby do not have any of this. Piedmont is apex NIMBY land...but it also doesn't really have much in the way of businesses either. It's just a glorified single-zone neighborhood with a graveyard.
And the other one, Albany, while not so egregious, and arguably getting there, is still pretty awful. It does have one bicycle trail following the train track guideway splitting the city in two, and one bike trail on the shore, it revamped its main road to have a bit more room for bikes [it was a stroad],...but it also has a lot of big box stores, not that many apartments at all, a stroad, super wide residential roads.
I didn't include the other East Bay cities nearby because they are a different can of worms, especially Oakland.
Emeryville isn’t really a fair comparison to an actual city. Emeryville is a tiny dot on a map, smaller in area to downtown San Francisco. It’s just an area that was once industrial lots; obviously this would be an area easier to zone for high density than SF’s swaths of single family homes. Also, Emeryville was a bunch of industrial lots in one of the highest crime areas in CA; you’re not going to be seeing any NIMBYs come protect that area. I’m not saying we don’t need urban planning reform. SF definitely needs to make it cheaper for developers. I’m just saying it’s unrealistic to point to a tiny blip on a map like Emeryville and say “why can’t SF be like this?”
very good - did not know of this place
I knew that picture looked familiar. At first it looked like Oakland near the MacArthur BART station, but I knew it had to be elsewhere because it was too…manicured lol.
Awesome video!
Great video, thanks.
I'm all in you've got yourself a new sub.
Love your channel
Emeryville is super expensive, rents are like $4000+ AND what a lot of gentrifiers don’t know is Emeryville was nothing more than factories and poultry factories c, and the ground water is contaminated. And where the apartments are built is landfill. I was born and raised in North Oakland.
Emeryville seems like the kind of place that could easily become a really hot place to live.
I think a sequel to the 1906 Earthquake probably will solve NIMBYism when everything in the city gets leveled to the ground in San Francisco.
I hope it continues to get better
Love this!
Emmeryville is basically a neighborhood but has its own government. It's tiny. It's not as bad as many make it out to be. It's smack in the middle of a pretty dense urban area (north oakland/berkeley) and it's only 10 min from Downtown SF or Downtown Oakland. good shopping, train access. but could use a bart station.
Amazing video, you and our cause need much more reconignition!
Private developers and landlords are actually the largest factor in the Bay Area housing increase. There used to be plenty of housing for everyone until landlords catered to gentrifiers.
Dublin, CA needs some love
You and City Nerd should work together. I think you would complement each other.
Vienna, Austria has very affordable housing despite having a fairly high cost of living, as all big cities do, because something like 60% of people live in social housing, government owned apartments, where the rent is kept intentionally low. Because there are so many apartments with cheap rent, private landlords have no choice but to keep their rent lower to be competitive. I wish the US would take a page out of Austria's book. There's a reason it's one of the best cities to live in in the world
What about safety? Walkable sounds nice, but I think I know lots of people who would rather drive in a car through a bad neighborhood than walk through one.
The more regular people walk, the safer it is. Car-dependant areas result in only the truly desperate walking, which means you're more likely to run into sketchy people. In San Francisco, possible the most walkable city in the US, there are all classes of life walking about, which makes it much safer.
What do you think of the woodlands and Bridgeland in Houston Texas. These huge mega developments span thousands of acres with planned communities that are walkable organized and hold a lot of people to help with housing costs in Houston. These developments also spur new development around them.
those places are not walkable. the closest shops are miles away on stroads
I had yearly conferences in the Woodlands. The conference center area is nice and faced a river walk or pathway and had some walkable pockets. But trying to walk to the nearby mall for food just felt awful to reach with nothing but parking lots in the view. Forget about accessing the conference center if you stay at a hotel across the interstate highway. Just not that enjoyable IMO.
At a glance it looks like a decent enough idea, but it falls into the old trap of building on pristine lands way the heck outside the city instead of doing something with the mistakes of the city itself. From The Woodlands Mall to downtown Houston is almost 50 km/30 miles, while the downtown core has several similarly-sized areas filled with single-family residences and undeveloped brownfield lots within a two-mile radius. Just look at the area called South Central Houston. Two thirds of it appears to be brownfields, and it's less than a mile from the skyscrapers of downtown. Why the heck hasn't more been done there, instead of building new mega-developments out in the sticks thirty miles away?
@@Codraroll a lot of this has to to do with Texas Property taxes. In Texas, they're relatively high in comparison to other states. For example, a developer will have to pay taxes for the land AND the assessed value of the structure that sits on the land, until development starts. Where as with Greenfield developments this is not the case. Land is cheaper and no structure...That's why some developers tear down structures in the core, to stop paying the taxes on some older buildings. But even that costs money. Typically developments in Texas core cities, are done by big developers that have financial capital to pull it off. Brownfields just are more expensive, and then there's blow back sometimes from the neighborhood or preservationist...it takes a savvy developer to do a brownfield. Most Developers want Fast and Easy. Brownfields are the opposite of that.
Good luck to the mayor!👍
...
What would your mattress say about urbanism? 😀
So happy to see Emeryville, who i still remember only for its Ikea store, doing all this. It is a big step into the right direction, hopefully the other cities will follow and elect the right people to gear their cities towards modernty and away from car centric america that really f# so many generations in the US... try to google Amsterdam to see how city should look!
The mayor wants to ban cars? I won't be living there.
That position basically sums up my opposition to most urban planners. Most want to top down force everyone into their vision when that's the reason we're in the mess in the first place. All the regulations, zoning regulations, deed restrictions, car centric subsidies, and tax payer funded building projects got us to today. It's naive to think this time around these top down mandates will produce the right results and even if they did at what cost?
I'm more about including public transportation along with cars than banning them completely, you're removing an entire preference of transportation simply for the sake of looks rather than accommodating for different types of people.
'Nimby's' is a straight euphemism used to manipulate people away from their mindset - it's fairly simple, if you want to replace a family's personal space and lifestyle with public transportation and housing then you better be willing to move all of their stuff for them and that accounts for paying for a new home and setting them up for a few months.
Not everyone wants to live in a giant building of box clones and even as someone who does want to live in a skyscraper you have to understand that you're forcing actual human beings out of their homes.
You gained 6k subs in a month.
I will continue to petition with a like and comment until you get a curtain and a mic stand.
until then, no subscribe, sry gotta seize the means of production.