The Houses that Can't be Built in America - The Missing Middle

It's not just density, though that's part of it. A big part is walkability (and otherwise making the city not just car accessible). That can be done without increasing density, by for example, adding wide sidewalks and bike lanes, eliminating maze-like cul-de-sac-heavy street layouts, and decreasing speeds in commercial areas (i.e. enforcing a stronger divide between low speed streets meant for people and high speed roads meant for cars). Another part is mixed-use zoning, where small businesses are intermixed with homes instead of people relying on driving to megastores in shopping centers far from where they live. By decreasing the necessity of the car you decrease the cost of road maintenance and by making places more walkable you make businesses more accessible and therefore more successful. I would suspect that many neighborhoods could be kept at the same density and be significantly rethought in line with the Strong Towns ethos to be more comfortable places to live. Density increases might be necessary in high COL areas because those places are in high demand, but there's plenty of bad city design in places outside uber-expensive metropolitan areas. And there might be strong demand for missing middle[1] housing if only it were legal and frictionless to build it. [1] [this video]

> Personally I think that Americans just don't realize that it's not cities that suck, it's American cities that suck. Plenty of pleasant cities to live in in the world. The YouTube channel "Not just bikes" talks about this. In the USA, it is commonly seen that there are only two possible configurations for human settlements: sprawling suburbs, or Manhattan-style high-density towers. The medium-density style of city common across a lot of Europe and Asia is not very well known in the USA and Canada outside of a select few older cities which developed to a large enough size before the automobile took over. [this video]

This is a false choice. Limiting limitless consumption is not automatically reduction in the standard of living for most people. There is a huge effect when cutting emissions of the top 10%, even a tiny bit. [1] The graph is likely hiding that if the top 10% was segmented more, it would be very hop heavy - even limiting it to the median of the top 10% should do a lot. The US is also uniquely positioned here to cut their emissions in half and still have more emissions per capacita than Europe[1]. And no, the problem is not that the US is large and cars are required; cars are fine for rural people, but they are not fine for the spawling car-dependent suburban areas US cities keep creating. [2] [1]: [link] [2]: (video) [this video]

I will grant that Seattle is currently investing in public transit. And that in the next 10-15 years, they have the opportunity to improve that situation greatly (providing people good/consistent transit to downtown). There's a lot of the missing middle in Seattle for housing: [this video] Which has been demonstrated to pay for itself (and support other businesses). Zoning for this would go a long way towards helping to alleviate the increasing cost of housing. (Also actively/readily) makes more money than it costs to maintain. I think there's also something to be said for getting rid of cars in Downtown Seattle (still need to provide good accessible options). I originally clicked on this article in hopes that was what people were doing. Tangent: Shuffling homeless people around with cement "eco" blocks (legitimately interested in the etymology of that name) turned out to be the sad waste of resources we were going for here... Mental Health feels a lot more difficult than this. Probably needs more of a national fix cause healthcare is too expensive and inaccessible in the US.