They have a good YouTube channel but you’d have to watch a bit to get an idea. Basically they’re advocating for building towns and cities that aren’t car-centric. Talking about overhauling planning standards to stop single-dwelling only suburbs that are only accessible by car, proper transit planning, not just enlarging freeways and then finding induced demand makes them even slower over time, etc.
> why do they want this particular lifestyle to be forced on everyone?
You mean why is everyone forced to drive a car to a nearest shop or bakery?
I am perplexed too. As an European, I find it insane there is an organisation (HOA & zoning) that puts all sorts of limits up and prevents shops being put up in your suburban neighborhoods.
You can walk too. 15 min walk or 1 minute drive. Nobody is forced to do anything, and for the longest time I’ve lived in suburbia without a car.
who drives for groceries? it’s a waste of time. I get everything delivered.
But, as a European, are you not surprised your government also imposes all sorts of regulations on your European housing? Just like the elected municipal government imposing zoning…in every European city too? You made it sound like anyone can just do whatever in Europe. Except cookies and GDPR, and all sorts of other regulations from shoes to how bad circulation in your house must be to compensate for your silly energy politics.
Not everywhere has an HOA. The reason for uniform standard is so that I don’t setup a crackden next to your house and devalue your largest asset by half a million dollars.
Pretty sure 10 annual European salaries is just pocket change to you and is of no consequence.
Everything I’ve read about American suburbs tells me you must be an exception - stores are usually much farther than a 15 minute walk, and often there are simply no sidewalks at all.
“Nobody is forced to do anything” is hand waving away all of the context around housing, jobs, city planning and transportation. There is a reason 99% of trips to the supermarket are made by car, it’s not simply a matter of “choice”: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2015/august/most-us-hou...
There is a reason why giant stores are not on every corner - they are designed to be huge warehouses that at times are large enough to service the entire city, given a small enough city.
It is definitely a matter of choice. The US as a country is just as large and diverse as EU. You can certainly live in a very dense city centre somewhere in North East that will be very much “European”, with public transit and everything. It would be too much hassle to even have a car.
Or you could live on a ranch somewhere hours away from “civilization”
People set up car repair shops, computer repair services and whatever else you can think of in their garages, because you know what - doing stuff in your garage actually lowers the bar to start a business.
And thru streets limited to 30kph are actually a very nice route for cycling.
And you know what? There's really no price difference between a house next to bakery, house next to a car repair shop or a house next to just other houses.
By "this particular lifestyle" he largely means not designing residential streets like highways where thousands are killed and the response is simply "Oh well, accidents happen"
Not sure how this relates at all to the context. The author of Strong Towns is against engineering design which enables drivers to drive faster at the cost of everyone else's safety. By making roads wider, clearing trees from the edges, rounding out turns, etc, it naturally pushes drivers to drive faster regardless of what the listed speed limit is.
So while speeding drivers and drink drivers are at fault, the engineers who designed a world where they can go as fast as possible are at an even greater fault. Placing highway style roads in residential areas is killing people.
Austin is the 11th largest city in the US by population, of course it doesn't fit a model of over-expansion. In what world is that representative of the type of city or town that Strong Towns is talking about?
> The median household income in Lafayette is $41,000. With the wealth that has been created by all this infrastructure investment, a median family living in the median house would need to have their city taxes go from $1,500 per year to $9,200 per year. To just take care of what they now have, one out of every five dollars this family makes would need to go to fixing roads, ditches and pipes. That will never happen.
> It’s just got 3-4x higher property taxes and highly productive economically
My point is that Austin is cherry-picked. If we need a huge city with a dense urban center, high property taxes, and high economic productivity to prove low density suburban development is viable then maybe we still have a problem. If we broke out Austin into smaller sections we would likely find large portions of the city would be completely unable to sustain themselves. Just because the urban portion can out-fund the problem (for now?) doesn't mean there isn't a fundamental issue.
For every Austin there are dozens of Lafayettes. I can think of a dozen towns near me that have similar size, density, and tax bases and who are almost certainly running a budget that doesn't account for long term liabilities (which is how publicly traded companies in America are mandated to do their accounting, for example).
You can look at their case studies[1] for different types of developments and you can look at municipal budgets and see that it doesn't line up, we just haven't been around long enough to see what happens when the party stops.
You're so hung up on Austin, which isn't at all relevant to this conversation. Austin has nearly an order of magnitude more people than even the largest towns under discussion here. Austin has a median income 40% higher and median home price 160% (!) higher. If anyone is cherry-picking it's the person who, when talking about typical cities in the US, picks an internationally-known large city instead of something actually representative.
3-4x higher sounds like a good bit of the distance between $1500 and $9200. Maybe you implicitly agree with the premise, and are mistakenly thinking TFA is talking about Austin when it’s not?
