Top all-time · #5870
Old Urbanist
Personal blog · oldurbanist.blogspot.comeconomicsdesign
Old Urbanist is a personal blog at oldurbanist.blogspot.com about economics and design. Since 2011, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 15 times, most often “Looking at Street Area Percentages and Surface Parking (2011)”. The last post was in 2016, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for data and history on US urban planning, including zoning, single-family zoning, parking, street and road share of city land, and early car ownership.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Looking at Street Area Percentages and Surface Parking (2011)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-10-22
- /2011/12/we-are-25-looking-at-street-area.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-19
What Hacker News says?
> By your argument, they have no right to tell people living their what they can do with their property. That's a false equivalence. People moving in aren't telling people in San Francisco what to do with their property. There is a mutual transaction (between a developer in San Francisco that wants to build say a high-rise apartment and people who want to rent it), that is being blocked by NIMBYs who have no propert…
Comment linking /2011/11/ever-since-euclid.html
on “San Francisco's zoning makes it illegal to build apartments in 73.5% of the city”Submitted Looking at Street Area Percentages and Surface Parking (2011) as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThe automobile simply did not do it. Until the late 50s, most households in the US did not have a car : https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2013/02/was-rise-of-car-own... Without a car, the only solution is public transport. And public transport in early 20th century America was the dominant source of the use of animals in personal transport. The confounding factor here is transport, hence why I mentioned trucks. Go to…
Comment linking /2013/02/was-rise-of-car-ownership-responsible.html?m=1
on “Twike”Submitted When the Market, Including San Francisco, Built Housing for the Low Income as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI think you mean that "excessive parking and single-family zoning requirements" have done a number on Seattle: https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2015/12/single-family-zonin... . There are technologies that exist that allow more than a handful of people to live on a given unit of land.
Comment linking /2015/12/single-family-zoning-in-seattle-and.html
on “Amazon HQ2: Advanced talks about second headquarters in Northern Virginia”Submitted Setbacks, Suburbs and the American Front Lawn (2011) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>The Le Corbusier spirit of zoning It's not Le Corbusier. Zoning in the USA started in the late 1800s, an effort to regulate light and air in cities, and turned by the early 1900s into an effort to keep certain industries and ethnicities out of "good" neighborhoods. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/28/a-history-of-z... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-06-19/the-birth... https://fee.org/articles…
Comment linking /2016/02/american-zoning-as-expression-of.html
on “'Zoom towns' are exploding in the West”Submitted Did Zoning Ever Conserve Property Values? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionTried to be careful with "up to". LA's city center has been measured at 59%. I'll try to find the source again. But just consider: - roads - highways / major ingress/egress - sidewalks (yup. Don't really need them without cars) - parking lots & garages A nice source with color-coded maps - http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-are-25-looking-at... A nice survey/writeup from Vox: https://www.vox.com/a/new-econom…
Comment linking /2011/12/we-are-25-looking-at-street-area.html
on “Cycling heaven: The African capital with 'no traffic'”Submitted The Densest (Urban) Environment in the World as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThat's surprisingly low. Houston is ~64% streets and parking: https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2011/12/we-are-25-looking-a...
Comment linking /2011/12/we-are-25-looking-at-street-area.html
on “Next Stop for Waymo One: Los Angeles”Land isn't too valuable, rather there's very little zoned to allow for trailer parks, which can be very dense and thus a great way to use land that's valuable but not so valuable as to support skyscrapers https://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/2014/05/mobile-home-impedim...
Comment linking /2014/05/mobile-home-impediments-and.html
on “Home in a Can: When Trailers Offered a Compact Version of the American Dream”In 1930, fewer than 10% of farms in the US had access to electricity; that kind of land is still cheap. Mocking responses like yours seem to keep missing how bad 1930 living conditions were: such a lifestyle is with one where the average person had no electricity and no indoor plumbing, no phone service, no internet, no TV : sure 5 hours per week is sufficient for that lifestyle . (Also, according to this graph, jus…
Comment linking /2013/02/was-rise-of-car-ownership-responsible.html
on “How to enhance generative AI's problem-solving capabilities, boost productivity”http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/ http://pchiusano.github.io/ (was http://pchiusano.blogspot.com/ ) http://www.daedtech.com/blog http://yosefk.com/blog/ http://oldurbanist.blogspot.com/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are some blogs of really smart people you check regularly?”Thus speaks someone unfamiliar with it, it would appear. The reverse is in fact true, as @lispm points out. It's complex, it's diverse, it's tailored to each individual town and city. Big cities have urban rail or light rail or both, smaller ones have trams or trolleybuses, smaller ones may have just buses. To get to and from the stops, some cities have footpaths, some private bicycles, some public cycle sharing sch…
Comment linking /2011/12/we-are-25-looking-at-street-area.html
on “Steel Bank Common Lisp”
