Wendover Productions
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2024
20:09 · 4M views · Feb 23, 2022
Wendover Productions explains why American towns, retail and buildings increasingly look alike, covering zoning pressures, corporate standardization and cheap construction types like 5-over-1 buildings.
HN uses it as a good explanation of how US zoning and economics produce sameness.
4 comments from Hacker News
There’s a great video by Wendover about how 5 over 1s are a way for corporate landlords to spend less to build worse apartments that they use to corner and consolidate the market. Then, once they stiffen competition, they skyrocket the rent prices. this video
> Increasingly though, so much of the U.S. looks so much like the rest in terms of retail/food that I begin to feel the entire country is in fact a mall of sorts. Here's a good video on the subject: this video
On the points of culture, there's a video [1] that talks about how common US zoning pressures towns to all build very similarly, to the point where they look almost indistinguishable from one another. There's similar videos done by City Beautiful and Not Just Bikes, but I'm having a harder time searching my history for them on my phone. (I'll try to post them once I'm back at a real computer.) Here's another video [2] that discusses how city tax revenue is primarily earned in their dense downtown regions, and spent on their more distributed suburban environments. Others in the comments have discussed this, but the issues with towns being walkable and cyclist friendly tend to intersect directly with anti-goals if car design. Places aren't walkable if there's huge roads and parking lots that people have to traverse in order to get to them. Similarly, cars are quite hazardous to pedestrians and cyclists. If we're optimizing for human-scale environments, we're inherently car-hostile. Similarly, if we're optimizing for efficiency of cars, then we're hostile to human-scale design. The ideas are largely antithetical. You can get some hybridization--metra trains from city cores to the suburbs, street cars or trams along main suburban drags alongside with automobiles, but one system constrains the other. Historically, highway systems have segregated neighborhoods whose citizens were poorer, and relied disproportionately on public transit or bikes and walking. If you have to go half a
And every apartment building, and every fast food restaurant... Why Everywhere in the US is Starting to Look the Same: this video