Three urbanist stories

The most interesting news I have today comes from the Chicago City Council's Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety, which voted 8-5 yesterday to lower the city's default speed limit from 30 mph (48 km/h) to 25 mph (40 km/h). Advocates have wanted this change for years. One influential group, People For Bikes, ranks Chicago 2,279th out of 2,579 cities in the US for bike friendliness almost entirely because of our speed limit. The change would instantly catapult Chicago to the top quintile of their rankings. Oh, and it would save a few dozen pedestrian lives each year.

Next up: an analysis by the New York Times showing that parking minimums dating back to the 1960s require that a new apartment building going up a block from a subway station in downtown Brooklyn has to have exactly 193 parking spaces, even though most of those spaces will likely never have cars in them. New York City has a mix of support and opposition to removing parking minimums, correlating almost exactly with the MTA subway map. This particular "transit-oriented" apartment block will have almost 200 unneeded parking spaces, though, because traffic engineering in the US hasn't progressed since 1961.

Finally, the Washington Post yesterday praised the simple townhouse, such as currently occupied by Inner Drive Technology's World Headquarters:

The new American Dream should be a townhouse — a two- or three-story home that shares walls with a neighbor. Townhouses are the Goldilocks option between single-family homes in the suburbs and high-rise condos in cities.

n the United States, [medium-density housing options] are scarce — they’ve been dubbed “the missing middle” because we need more homes of this size and spacing. And it’s here that we find townhouses.

The United States needs more homes — 3 million to 7 million, depending which expert you ask. In many parts of the world, the obvious solution would be to construct high-rises; however, financing and liability challenges for U.S. developers have meant almost no new condo construction since 2009.

I approve. Except for the four days of pounding, sanding, sawing, and yelling in Polish that I've experienced as my townhouse complex refinishes the stairs to the houses surrounding our courtyard, it's the perfect size and configuration for us. Yay townhouses!

I *definitely* do not approve of building 2 million townhomes. What ADA compliance? What livability for the elderly, who are especially vulnerable to the idea that multi-floor residences are the Holy Grail for America's housing deficit? We have a lot of space and abandoned buildings all over NY that could be converted to affordable housing with a lot less cost and fuss than renovating all those urban eyesores into multi-million-dollar yuppie pods.

Townhomes solve a problem that car-centric suburban zoning laws have caused: there currently is a huge deficit of affordable housing in large areas of the country and nowhere in those areas to build it. A 3 BR townhome can sell for half or a third what the same amount of space would cost on a 2.4-hectare lot. Plus, townhomes usually fit into zoning regulations that prohibit buildings over a certain height. My house and the 39 others around our courtyard sit on land that could hold only 6 houses, even in my medium-density neighborhood. A slightly larger lot just across the street from us has 128 rental units. And across the street in the other direction, one of the area's original (1890s) houses sits on a 1.2-hectare lot with 3-flats on both sides. That kind of variety is illegal in most North American suburbs.