Not Just Bikes
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 14 months, 2021–2026
16:51 · 2.2M views · May 17, 2021
Not Just Bikes explains that car-dependent suburbs are not the only option, using Toronto's Riverdale as an example of a pre-war streetcar suburb. These walkable neighborhoods are popular but are now effectively illegal to build.
HN cites it in zoning, density and housing threads as an illustration of the missing middle between city center and car-dependent sprawl.
20 comments from Hacker News
Not Just Bikes has a recent video[0] talking about the lack of middle ground for suburbs in North America. I think a big problem is that laws as they are prevent variety. Either everything must be single family homes with huge setbacks and wide roads, or it is doomed to be bought up by large apartment developers. Is it a threat to your ability to have a yard and two car garage if the house next door is a duplex and the end of the block has a corner store with a couple apartments above it? No, but the laws make it so that only your yard and two car garage can exist in your neighborhood regardless. [0] this video
> Relative to single family homes, apartments are viewed as decreasing property values, increasing crime rates, lowering school quality, increasing traffic, and decreasing desirability. The problem is most cities only allow two kinds of development: Low density or high density. We're missing the middle! [LINK] I've really enjoyed these two YouTube channels on the subject. "Oh the Urbanity" has a great video on Montreal's "missing middle" [LINK] And "Not Just Bikes" discusses a "missing middle" neighborhood in Toronto: this video
There is something in between NYC and an American-style suburb. I encourage you to take a look at Not Just Bikes [1,2]: [1] this video [2] [LINK]
It’s a symptom of endless government regulation, bureaucratic overreach, and NIMBYism. One of the worst developments in the history of government is this incessant creep of regulations and codes that specify, in excruciating detail, how residential land must be developed. How wide the streets are, how many lanes of traffic there are, how far the sidewalks are from the road, how far the front door is from the sidewalk, how much of the back yard is visible from the sidewalk, how houses must be arranged, how wide a house must be relative to the property width, how short/tall a house must be, how many separate entrances are allowed, … and on and on and on the regulations go. This has the effect of making old style neighbourhoods (with real character) impossible to build in the modern day. It also highly restricts the usage of the land and the number of structures in a way that make it impossible to have multi-family dwellings, studio apartments above houses, artists’ cottages in the back yard, coach houses, small used book stores or cafes in residential neighbourhoods, etc. The new urbanist movement [1] talks a lot about this. They’ve argued for the return of streetcar suburbs [2] and I agree with them. These places are extremely beautiful to live in. They foster a far deeper sense of community than modern suburbia. They are wonderful spaces for humans to live in rather than places for urban planners who want to play SimCity in real life. I don’t blame old people or any other par
> that suburbanites choose to live in suburban areas because they want the isolation. I don't think most of them want isolation, I strongly suspect that most people moving to suburbs are doing so for their career, as most well-paid jobs are in metropolitan areas. In a metropolitan area your options are mostly: 1) city 2) suburb w/ very little mixed-use zoning Cities tend to be more expensive for less space. There are going to be many people who would want to live in a city with their family but simply can't afford the rent, so they live on the outskirts of the city (suburbs). Alternatively they may want the space, yard, etc. that a house provides, but this doesn't mean they want isolation . They may very well prefer suburbs with good mixed-use zoning and public transit, those are just very rare in the US. > It seems that if you took suburbs away from these people I'm not proposing taking suburbs away from people, nor are the vast majority of urbanists. We're proposing more ability to build denser suburbs (i.e. some multifamily housing in suburban areas), mixed-use zoning (so you can walk to stores), and better public transit in suburbs. See also: [LINK] . Suburbs that have these features tend to be in high-demand, they're just rare today because they're illegal to build in many places (I think there's some commentary on that here: this video ). > they'd most likely try to move into more rural areas Unlikely IMO because again I suspect that many/most have moved to suburbs for the