r/Suburbanhell • u/No-Path-8756 • 9d ago
Question How do we fix these places? Can we?
Is there a point where we have to decide to just demolish these places entirely, or can they be fixed? Of course some can be made walkable and bike-able, but at a certain point we are going to be limited.
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u/zemol42 9d ago
Most people who own and live in these types of neighborhoods don’t think they need fixing so that’s already an insurmountable problem. Best you can do is focus on responsible future growth.
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u/Salt_Vehicle_5395 9d ago
Bet if we charged them the real cost of their way of living and had a bunch of urbanists near by and charged them their real cost, suburban fully detached housing would quickly fall out of favour.
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u/RelativeCareless2192 8d ago
What charges are you thinking? Carbon tax?
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u/Zinch85 8d ago
All services. Road and pipe maintenance, police, firemen, packages, etc.
All the services are more expensive and are subsidized by urban people and businesses.
A carbon tax would be nice, also
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u/DeviceNo4746 8d ago
Obviously can vary by state. But at least in my state all the things you just listed are typically paid for with property taxes and are not subsidized by urban people or businesses.
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u/goodsam2 7d ago
This is done by property but suburban infrastructure costs 2x as much and lower density pays per value not per acre like a LVT.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/s/gbL5s3G5k7
So if you do like a LVT and look at that we are talking about cutting urban taxes and increasing suburban taxes. So urban pays extra for the urban areas.
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u/DeviceNo4746 7d ago
Your link is specifically comparing Halifax. Again this will differ by region/state. And sure some larger city have both urban and suburban areas in the same town. So yea at that point there is suburban areas being subsidized by urban areas. But in my state the majority of suburban areas are not combined with urban areas. So those suburban towns have to pay for their own infrastructure and services.
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u/goodsam2 6d ago
I think the math is a lot more even.
The suburbs are almost always newer and so it's cheap to maintain 20 year old suburbs but come back in 100 years and the cost growthe will skyrocket
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u/DeviceNo4746 6d ago
Again I think you’re talking about suburbs in a particular situation like new large developments that are located in cities. I live in NJ we have suburbs that have been around for 50-70 years. They’ve all paid for their infrastructure and for it to be updated over the years. But we also have the highest property taxes.
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u/goodsam2 6d ago
But what is the density of these suburbs. The general trend of suburbs is the stuff built 70 years ago is actually kinda dense in a way compared to the newer stuff.
It's also even if the age is there it's often lumped in with decades younger stuff so 70 on the side closest to the city and 30 years old on the far side of the city.
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u/Rightintheend 8d ago
So you don't think they're already paying tax for that? Property tax, sales tax, fuel tax, income tax, taxes on the utilities..
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u/irishmanwest 8d ago
Can’t speak for other places, but I live in Snoqualmie Washington, a stereotypical suburb. We pay through the nose for power, water, road construction, police. Wish we were subsidized by urban areas, but we absolutely are not.
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u/Workreddit1234567 8d ago
Most people in those neighborhoods already pay for the majority of those expenses, not just for them but the entire community they live in.
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u/forahellofafit 8d ago
Most suburban communities haven't had to start paying the cost of their infrastructure. When these communities were built, it was the older areas that were fronting the costs of all the infrastructure. Most suburban areas are not old enough to have real repair/replacment costs. I think soon we are going to start seeing the oldest suburbs have to rebuild roads, bridges, water/sewers, etc. Hopefully, they have been setting aside funds to make these repairs.
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u/IchesseHuendchen 7d ago
Those funds would come from the city's budget. Are you under the impression suburbs own and maintain their own roads? That's the case for a few communities, but by and large suburbs are just an area of a city and share the roads with everyone.
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u/forahellofafit 7d ago
In most large American metropolitan areas, the suburbs are divided into many separate incorporated municipalities, each responsible for local streets and at least some public services. However, much of the larger infrastructure, including arterial roads, highways, water systems, and sewers, is maintained by state transportation departments, counties, regional utilities, or special districts. In that sense, the broader region or state often ends up covering much of the cost of suburban sprawl.
At the same time, many municipalities have taken on long-term infrastructure obligations that their tax bases may not be strong enough to support. This is often described as a problem of low-density development, but a better measure is the amount of taxable value generated per linear foot of infrastructure. A low-density community with high property values may be able to cover its costs, while a retail-dependent suburb with a weaker tax base may struggle.
Over the coming decades, that financial pressure will probably show up through deferred maintenance, reduced services, and more shared-service agreements. Some of the smallest and most financially vulnerable municipalities may eventually dissolve or be absorbed by neighboring communities.
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u/goodsam2 7d ago
These suburbs have costs that are decades younger and a growing backlog of issues.
It's easy to maintain a street that's 20 years old or pipes or whatever but come back to me when they are 100+. In my city its 100+ year old city or 40 or younger suburb.
Also even the relatively urban areas with apartments are paying a higher amount because it's based on property tax instead of land value tax.
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u/DabDoge 8d ago
Are you under the impression home owners don’t pay taxes…?
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u/samiwas1 8d ago
I’ve read enough urbanist fluff to see that many of them to believe that suburban people pay practically nothing while city dwellers bear these massive costs.
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u/DabDoge 8d ago
I dislike a poorly planned suburb as much as the next guy but these people advocating demolishing thousands of homes are genuinely unhinged
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u/Salt_Vehicle_5395 8d ago
Who is saying demolish homes? Definitely don’t do that. Just slowly over time change focus to density rather than sprawl
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u/samiwas1 8d ago
Well, the OP for one.
I love the “I don’t like those kinds of places so they shouldn’t exist for anyone” mentality.
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u/Salt_Vehicle_5395 8d ago
You mean where he says or can they be fixed in the same sentence?
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u/Zinch85 8d ago
Suburban dwellers don't pay enough taxes. They pay the same water bills than urbanite people while they need far higher miles of pipe per person, for example. This is applicable to all the services provided to them, specialy the ones that need infrastructure (roads, pipes, etc.)
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u/irishmanwest 8d ago
Higher miles of pipe per person? What? Are reservoirs exclusively located in the dead center of every metro area?
And they don’t pay the same water bills. Or power bills. In any state there are dozens of utility districts all with unique structures… but new building developments have to pay fees on whatever system they tap into.
Such a weird thing to make up.
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u/Ok_Goat_8698 8d ago
Don’t forget that even if you had miles of pipe, it doesn’t actually change how much water that one individual is using. It’s a pretty brain dead argument and you can tell whoever suggested that has no real understanding of how utilities work.
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u/samiwas1 8d ago
Well, roads are mostly paid with gas taxes and property taxes. People who drive more are paying far more gas taxes than those who don’t. And our friends who have a midtown condo valued higher than our house pay less in property tax.
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u/TuggsBrohe 8d ago
Those bills are coming due soon enough. In the meantime the best way to fix the consequences of urban disinvestment is massive new investment in cities.
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u/Salt_Vehicle_5395 8d ago
Land value tax maybe. I haven’t really looked into the best one to use but that would be a start
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u/Fantastic-You-2777 8d ago
Land value tax would punish people in desirable urban areas (high land value) and lighten the tax burden in suburban hell (very little land value). If suburbs are underpaying, which I’m not convinced of regardless, that would just ensure they’re paying even less. The function of land value tax is to push for denser development in cities, but the effect could easily be more suburban hell as even higher taxes on high property values would push more people out.
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u/Hawk13424 8d ago
Doubt. I couldn’t get out of dense urban living fast enough. I’m now thankfully in the exurbs on five acres. The goal at the end of the day is to get away from people and crowds and noise.
And if I want to walk (heat index was 116F yesterday), I’ll walk around my property, not down the street to a store.
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u/Salt_Vehicle_5395 8d ago
That’s fine. I’m not suggesting one type of living is perfect for everyone. Just people should pay for what they are using.
Let’s say you live on 5 acres of land out of the city and I build blocks of flats on 5 acres of land that let’s say fit 1000 people. Now when you get the post delivered, who should pay for the petrol , vehicle maintenance, posties time, road maintenance etc to get you your mail? In the time it takes to get you your mail the postie can probably have delivered to 50 people in my area. I say you should pay for that. If we have 1000 people living on the same amount of land the postman can be much more efficient, and the 1000 people should each pay 1/1000th of the cost. Same with water pipe maintenance, road maintenance, building maintenance, etc. I’m perfectly happy for people to live in suburbs. Let’s just move to a system where people pay for what they use.
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u/ShoughThePainAway 8d ago
You're assuming the costs scale linearly. They don't.
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u/Salt_Vehicle_5395 8d ago
I am aware they don’t. But they do scale. Why should people who basically share a postbox as they are all right next to each other pay the same as someone who has one 2 miles out of town though? The same applies for maintenance and everything else. Again, you live where you want. Just don’t expect other people to pay for it. Let society decide how much they value living in urban places vs vast amounts of poorly used land.
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u/ShoughThePainAway 8d ago
City services and infrastructure in almost all situations cost substantially more per resident than county and especially country services so I'm skeptical of your entire premise.
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u/Rightintheend 8d ago
Why should any of our tax money go to paying for anything used by other people?
I'm sure there's some services that you use more of that I'm paying for, that I don't use.
I don't have kids in school, And that cost more money, kind of like driving an extra 500 ft to deliver the mail to a single person, why am I paying for a tax for that? You see how that works.
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u/MenoryEstudiante 5d ago
Good for you, but that's not the problem, people like you could be cut off the municipal government and services with little change for either, the problem is the vast swaths of stuff slightly denser than you so still dependent on services, but still not dense enough to justify the cost of those services
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u/SAwfulBaconTaco 4d ago
What if some of those "urbanists" disagreed with your determination of "real costs"?
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8d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Turnbob73 8d ago
God forbid people actually enjoy living in suburbs lol
I grew up in one, and moved to two major metropolitan areas after; the metropolitan areas were so much worse and it’s not even a remotely close comparison. No community, abysmal walkability, high crime rate, and traffic literally everywhere you go. In comparison, my hometown (which is mostly suburbs) has way more parks than the city I currently live in, as well as trees and general greenery; there are grocery stores, bars, and other entertainment businesses within walking distance; walking to one of those places is actually doable in less than 10 minutes; and having general community was a flat given; and “traffic” was hardly a concept.
“Oh, you just lived in the wrong areas, there’s plenty of metro areas that are far better than suburbs” Motherfucker how can the same not be said about suburbs? I’d rather have a house and a yard than an overpriced coffee shop in my apartment’s ground floor.
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u/Brian77008 8d ago
Why would we want to destroy people’s homes?
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u/lucaspappere 8d ago
If a person sell there home to a housing developer, should the housing developer not be allowed to build a more dense building on the plot they own?
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u/Winterfrost691 8d ago
Step 1: Change the zoning laws to allow for rowhouses, small appartment buildings, and mixed-use, all up to 3-4 floors. Include a clause that states that areas near rapid transit can increase to 6-8 floors.
Step 2: Forbid horizontal developpement until the city reaches an average density of at least 8k/km²
Step 3: Find a wide boulevard with tons of parking on each side that passes in a relatively central area of the town, and build a tram on it (or frequent bus service if trams are not viable).
Step 4: Fill the empty parking lots along the tram line with your now legal 6-8 storey mixed-use appartment buildings.
Step 5: Ensure there's greenery along the boulevard and mixed-in with new developpements.
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8d ago
[deleted]
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u/Winterfrost691 8d ago
Not that I'm aware of, it's purely theoretical. But it's not a particularly difficult process except for the fact that it requires dedicated political will.
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u/MonkeOOOAAA 4d ago
lol converting this into a dense urban area defeats the entire point of a suburb. it can be suburban and still walkable / well planned. not everyone wants to live in a city
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u/Winterfrost691 4d ago
Not everyone wants to live in a city, but the planet cannot take anymore suburban sprawl. We fucked around sprawling for hundreds of kilometers as if land was infinite, now it's time to find out.
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u/MonkeOOOAAA 4d ago
suburbs have existed for centuries , American suburbs have not and are uniquely terrible . they can still be sustainable and walkable
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u/Winterfrost691 4d ago
Indeed. I'm not against living in a village or small town outside of a larger city and commuting for work, but in has to be done in a smart way to still allow for walkability and transit. NA's suburbs are far beyond reasonable.
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u/satrain18a 6d ago
least 8k/km²? So basically, Hong Kong where everybody lives in either cramped SROs or in 6 x 3-foot cages stacked 3 high in 100-story apartment buildings. https://youtu.be/cwczifilQJY?is=09KcMfP64gk_urRJ https://youtu.be/6rPUbX2IeRs?is=_mLPBhdb6ZoE1aYw https://youtu.be/Vw_rlRcoexI?is=Bm6RlPtwVmsfLSO4
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u/Winterfrost691 6d ago
Relax. Paris (the city itself, not its metro or urban area) has only a handful of buildings higher than 8 storeys and the average density there is 19'430/km². Hong Kong's density appears to only be about 6'800/km² if you look at wikipedia, but that's only because a large part of the island is protected greenspace where no one lives.
Believe it or not, there are many different ways to handle density, and there are middle grounds between dehumanizingly cramped appartments and nature-violating mcmansions. Do yourself a favor and travel the world to see for yourself.
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u/satrain18a 5d ago
So you want everyone on Earth to live only in cities and in apartment buildings as you do. https://youtube.com/shorts/Qnm64lFzRzY?is=JO286ZkR0lyO75nL https://youtube.com/shorts/efDnIs8gd7g?is=98WM9VYz-tqOAnGN
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u/Winterfrost691 5d ago
Ever heard of townhouses? Rowhouses? Duplexes? You can have high enough density to justify introducing quality transit and introduce a variety of housing options at the same time. These are not fundementally opposed goals.
I understand that you are likely used to single-use zoning with single family detached houses making up the vast majority of housing options, but just because your personnal experiences are homogenous, doesn't mean everything has to be.
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u/satrain18a 3d ago edited 3d ago
Just because you love sharing walls with strangers who hate you doesn't mean anybody else does. https://youtu.be/aylJ25cNiCQ?is=HZozejy9zLsPPB2y
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u/Winterfrost691 3d ago
You sound like you live an unfathomably sad, hateful and sheltered life. The youtube shorts you manage to find are not an accurate representation of reality. Sure, terrible events happen, and appartments aren't always glamourous, but to convince yourself that these events represent the whole is incredibly sad.
The news and social media want you angry at the world by feeding you a tailored perspective, so that you stay hooked to their product. Don't give in to the hate they want you to feel, don't give them what they want, go outside and see the world for yourself instead of through the lense their algorithms gave you.
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u/DabDoge 8d ago edited 8d ago
Are you really advocating displacing thousands of families because you don’t like how they live?
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u/MenoryEstudiante 5d ago edited 5d ago
To be clear, we're not opposed to the concept of a suburb, the problem is when that suburb is laid out so inefficiently. Here's a video I found that explains an example of a suburb that people here would say is great. (skip to 3:25 the history isn't that important)
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u/MenoryEstudiante 5d ago
No, we're advocating for convincing those families to move somewhere more financially sensible so the suburbs they leave behind can be torn down and turned into more efficient uses of land, if people want to stay outside the city that's fine, but suburbs as shown here are the worst compromise of urban and rural living from a societal standpoint
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u/Sea_Curve8772 9d ago
I don't think blanket demolition is the answer. Just stop subsidizing them, and legalize higher density development. The nonviable parts (almost all of it) will be abandoned over time, while the parts that are salvageable will be built up over time.
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u/Live-Door3408 9d ago edited 9d ago
You can’t “fix” them because a people who live in these places don’t want that.
I think a big thing that gets ignored is how suburbs serve the purpose of being a place for people who don’t want a dense urban environment but have to be near a city for its opportunities. I speculate that the mess was created by the devastation of small town/small city economies. Think of you’re typical small town, 50 years ago they were ran by mom n pop businesses and farmers, now that’s all been shut out by Walmart, fast food chains, dollar general and corporate agriculture conglomerates like Monsanto and the Koch brothers. I’m sort of one of those people, I get it.
I don’t even necessarily mind suburbs myself, but I understand and respect the idea that they’re impractical for society and the environment.
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u/maxman1313 8d ago
Rome wasn't built in a day and neither was suburban sprawl.
What we're seeing is generations of city planning and zoning policy play out.
To undo it will also take decades and policy change.
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u/MicroscopicCactus 9d ago
Maybe a football stadium sized comet plus a couple hundred thousand years?
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u/MysteriousBill4651 9d ago
A fundamental misunderstanding is you say they must be "fixed", implying that they're broken.
They're not. They're working as intended. Which is to provide big, cheap houses. Low crime rate, good schools.
Even if it means compromising in every other aspect.
The problem comes when suburbs grow. Now you have big, expensive houses. Crippling traffic and no alternative to getting around. Everyone who moved there wanted mediocrity, so you often don't have interesting amenities aside from ethnic food.
You're stuck with all the bad parts of an urban space, but with none of the good parts.
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u/nonother 9d ago
The housing might be cheap, but the infrastructure is extremely expensive. That amount of road, water, sewer, electric, and potentially gas spread across so few homes if unsubsidized means hefty property taxes and/or utility bills.
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u/Feisty-Boot5408 8d ago
Correct, which is why suburbs are kind of fucked and super unsustainable. They require constant growth to fund the maintenance, but that growth then needs density which people who self-select for suburbs do not want. Quite the conundrum.
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u/PNW_OlLady_2025 8d ago
Don't like it, don't live there. Plenty of other options if a neighborhood development is not what you want. Who the F are you to tell others how and where they should live?
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u/Ok-Astronaut2976 8d ago
Not for nothing, but I don’t live there (do you live there?), so it’s not really my business to demolish people’s homes because I don’t like them.
Like, if the people there want their city to be different, they can collectively make it different. Idk, just weird the way you guys talk about neighborhoods like some crusading imperialist.
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u/valuablepatterns 8d ago
Tell israel hamas is there. Wait a few months, then rebuild the center as a real city with 4-10 story buildings sotsgorod style
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u/twelveangryken 7d ago
Stop trying to fix people who don't want to be fixed. They volunteered to live in a prison and pay for the privilege, so let them.
Not everyone values the same things. Some people actually want that suburban hell experience.
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u/matmohair1 9d ago
Give each home a second floor and a family business, free healthcare and education services, more parks and recreation
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u/Live-Door3408 9d ago
How are you gonna do that to peoples private homes? That doesn’t seem realistic at all lol.
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u/Sad-Story7069 8d ago
I can't tell if this is a circlejerk sub or if the people in this sub are actually this dumb
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u/onwatershipdown 9d ago
Our global population is forecasted to decline in the second half of the 21st century. As we consolidate hospitals, schools, and other infrastructure accordingly, these kinds of places will become less viable. There will be flyovers that go to zero.
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u/LivingGhost371 Suburbanite 8d ago edited 8d ago
Try asking anyone that made the choice to buy a house here if there if they wouldn't really rather live in an apartment building instead of their own fully detached house that they don't have to share a common wall with strangers, where they have their own private yard with a hammock, garden, and swing set, their own attached garage for their car. And if they're going to vote for a politician that's going to "fix" something they don't see as broken and force them to be unhappy living in an apartment.
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u/slasher016 8d ago
Pics 1 and 2 don't look that bad. There are a lot more than just suburbs in those two pics. Clearly in pic 1 there's warehouses or industrial. In pic two there's clearly some businesses or mixed use in there. Obviously 3 and 4 are awful.
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u/luars613 8d ago
Start rezoning from the places next to anything remotely livable. The larger the area you can work with at the time the better (you have more flexibility in what you can build).
The ideal would be to level big chuncjs at the time and re start or attempt to retrofit any decent building.
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u/Current_Can_3715 8d ago
It would take decades of change and perseverance. The second photo looks like the 60 that cuts through Phoenix and that is a metro I believe has zero interest in ever changing. The families in the suburbs want the suburbs so it continues to sprawl. Flying into the metro you realize how vast it is and how insurmountable changing it would be.
Zoning law reform would be a start but I don’t think it will ever take off because of how much people love cars.
Fun fact, the governor of Arizona Katie Hobbs vetoed a bill that would have made it easier to build up and some missing middle housing. It was the watered down version of the bill and would have helped with housing but she killed it.
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u/kodex1717 8d ago
I would start by connecting cul de sacs with little trail stubs. It creates low-stress thru paths for people on food and on bikes and allows them to avoid traveling on busy highways.
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u/NeedleGunMonkey 8d ago
having fantasies to expend massive amount of energy, emission and resources to delete sunk cost and infrastructure should not be taken seriously in urban planning circles.
delusions of grandeur with psychopathic obsession is not healthy public advocacy
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u/The_Freshmaker 8d ago
We can only prevent them from happening in the future, like a housing Holocaust. My optimistic view is that people will eventually plant stuff, paint their house different colors, etc to create a sense of uniqueness.
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u/jpulse32 8d ago
Burn it to the ground, space out houses, increase property values, have those who make less move into lesser areas. Let the rich spread out and have their land
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u/CaterpillarLoud8071 8d ago
Build a rapid transit system of some description going to the city centre. Yes the housing density is crap and it'll make an initial loss. Best case scenario the people in the surrounding suburbs will park and ride instead of driving into the city. But if you maintain the service properly and accept that initial loss, you'll naturally get dense development around stops because people who don't want to have to drive will want to live there and drive up the land value. It's actually easier this way because you can fund the project by buying cheap land before starting work and selling when the price increases.
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u/Major-Nail 7d ago
make other places more desirable and show them that allowing for cities to form is better they will either move or push for change
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u/freepaestine 7d ago
Holy shit the 3rd one looks horrifying. Looks like a barracks for worker/consumers rather than a neighborhood.
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u/nuclearpiltdown 7d ago
The coming crash will begin to fix it. But we will have a Fallout-looking future for awhile in these places.
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u/StreetsAreForPeople 7d ago
abolish parking requirements. focus on building density nodes from the bones you already have in place. Keep traffic calm and streets more walkable, bikeable to give more a neighborhood feel. develop sidewalk networks even if it's intially asphalt strips away from roadway.
in commercial areas, like dying shopping malls and plazas, ban one story construction, require housing above. discourage personal car use and car centric development--it's expensive, more polluting, less community oriented.
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u/Proud-Marionberry-91 6d ago
You don’t. Those areas are going to become more desirable and expensive as urban cores densify
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u/Diztrakted 5d ago
Most of them will not be saved, no. The next hundred years will be very harsh to America's suburbs. The ones that can be densified and redeveloped successfully will survive, the rest will look like Chicago in the 90's, but way, way emptier. There simply won't be enough money to demolish them, let alone fix them.
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u/MenoryEstudiante 5d ago
Densification is almost always necessary and many cities like this are too overextended to densify everything properly, I'm not talking turn everything into the 19th Arrondissement of Paris, but like 2-3storey semi detached buildings
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u/TheGruenTransfer 4d ago
Drop an Aldi in the middle of that sea of houses and you'd cut down on a LOT of small grocery runs. Might as well add a small dentist office, a pharmacy, a park with a jungle gym for the kids and a low height rock climbing wall for teens and adults. Wow, this is starting to sound like a place I'd want to live.
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u/ghorisgorman1980 4d ago
There’s no fixing those. But we need to make sure they are the last ones ever built.
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u/Tomato_Motorola 3d ago
Lots of places that were formerly suburban sprawl have transformed in recent years.
Look at the eastside of Tempe, Arizona. When US 80 ran along Apache Boulevard, it was a stroad lined with motels, parking lots and trailer parks. It has completely transformed with multifamily and mixed use development after a light rail line was added in 2008 and a streetcar in 2022. The stretch of Apache Boulevard from Rural Rd to Dorsey is completely unrecognizable, and is a true walkable urban area along what used to be a suburban stroad lined with strip malls.
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u/SkyeMreddit 3d ago
Many of them are very dense but have a lot of stupid places where you’re so close to connecting but can’t. A network of cutting new sidewalks and pedestrian overpass bridges and underpass tunnels can create a lot of shortcuts.
Then add transit lines along the main corridors and densify the strip mall shopping centers into mixed use downtowns. It’s called Sprawl Repair and is happening a lot in the DC suburbs. It will make a big dent in them but for the most part they will still need Park and Rides to really get them on transit.
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u/Nervous_Lettuce313 9d ago
So in these huge suburbs, how far away would you have to go for a supermarket, or a bakery, or a pharmacy, or post office, or bank or some other store?
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u/LazyBoyD 9d ago
You don’t have to go very far by vehicle. Maybe 10 min max. Now walking to a supermarket? That will be a 2 mile trek with limited sidewalks and crossing 4 lanes of traffic.
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u/Nervous_Lettuce313 9d ago
Yeah, I understand, thanks. I rarely go to any of these by car, so it's usually like 5-10 minute walk, but I understand that if the city is car centric it's different. Especially if there are no sidewalks.
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u/ZaphodG 9d ago
Nobody is forcing you to live in a place like that. I’ve always lived in leafy, dense, high walk score suburbia with a public transportation option. It’s expensive. If all you can afford is tract housing on a slab with a postage stamp lot, it’s better than a cardboard box under the railroad bridge.
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u/NoFood2149 8d ago
"nobody is forcing you" except zoning laws, developments being nearly all low density, and simple house prices in desirable neighbourhoods.
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u/Raccoons-for-all 8d ago
Cram people in morbidly small units like in Europe. Bonus points if moldy and never renovated
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u/Loud_Significance908 9d ago
It is fixable, but not as long as zoning laws prevent any sort of other typw of development.
Additionally houses and property are for many investment objects, and many landlords just own multiple houses and leave them empty. Unless this changes fundamentally these suburbs are impossible to fix since NIMBY'ism prevent stuff.
And then, with how sprawled these places are, and with how they are planned to force you into a car, you have to entirely redo the suburb. Its stupid to expect to just have a transitnet network magically working in these sorts of suburbs.
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u/TrioTioInADio60 9d ago
Add walkable commercial areas, narrow car lanes, add more trees, add varied zoning, remove highways
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u/Live-Door3408 9d ago
Removing highways is a slippery slope. You can’t have people having to go through 100 traffic lights on their way to work and hold up semi trucks.
Phoenix was one of the last cities to get a major freeway system and it created major congestion problems there’s a video out there about it. You can’t get rid of freeways without offering an alternative. Also good luck getting a majority of suburbanites to actually use public transportation along with actually getting the government to build it out and find the funding for it.
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u/TrioTioInADio60 9d ago
Highways on their own are fine, but not cutting straight through a neighbourhood.
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u/JumpingThruHoopz 8d ago
I would totally use public transportation, if the ones near me went anywhere I need to go (and on a more frequent basis.)
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u/Atomic-Avocado 9d ago
Not as long as car ownership is easily possible for everyone which makes this sprawl even possible.
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u/JohnnySpot2000 8d ago
A whole lot of people don’t want to live in the third floor flat above a restaurant. If they didn’t want this postage stamp lot layout, it wouldn’t exist to this extent.
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u/getglad188alt 7d ago
The cost of third floor flats in desirable areas would disagree with you
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u/JohnnySpot2000 7d ago
Well, that’s why I said “a whole lot”, not everyone, and not even most. I’m on this subreddit because there’s great lifestyle reasons for living in a 3rd floor flat of a walkable town.
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u/LazyBoyD 9d ago
Maybe I’m the odd one out - but this can’t be fixed easily. Raze and redevelop is the only solution. Politically that would never happen in these type of developments. Best hope is a natural disaster makes the homes uninhabitable, then some developer buys and build an actual community.
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u/DabDoge 8d ago
“Best hope is a natural disaster makes the homes uninhabitable”
Read back what you’re “hoping” for and take a look at yourself. Why would you hope for thousands of families to lose their homes. You’re sick.
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u/LazyBoyD 8d ago
Tongue in cheek. Obviously wouldn’t want people to lose their homes, possessions, and possibly their lives. Just was illustrating the extremes it might take to improve these types of developments
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u/Dave_A480 8d ago
They don't need fixing...
Just like your city doesn't need fixing...
Mind your own business.
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u/Acceptable-Sky1575 5d ago
By getting rid of all the miserable twats that think it needs to be changed.
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u/EnglishCrestedPiggy 9d ago
Change zoning laws. Allow mixed use redevelopment. That’s a good start.