Recent comments in /f/rva

goodsam2 t1_j2xdnok wrote

Reply to comment by plummbob in Your City Is the Most Livable in America, Until We Publish This Article About It by ValancourtB

>Prices tell you if a place is nice or not. So if home prices are higher than the cost of construction, then you're not at risk of making a place undesirable, because if it was undesirable, prices would fall below construction costs.

We have elevated construction costs as well with regulations and waiting on them to approve something. This is usually financed and so more time borrowing money means more cost.

This is also why we have made projects so large to need huge financing teams and massive builders rather than some smaller places existing adding an ADU out back for some of these buildings. We have made it big developers by our own choices.

>And there is a missing middle for businesses just like there is for housing. The zoning restrictions basically create a price floor that small businesses/low income people can't ever reach, effectively pricing them out of the market.

Yeah IMO we would get better businesses if we had more cheap places for businesses. That's why food trucks became a thing, startup costs are a lot lower.

Suburbs mostly build out new chains because they can afford the space those places need.

3

goodsam2 t1_j2xcvua wrote

Reply to comment by Scuzwheedl0r in Your City Is the Most Livable in America, Until We Publish This Article About It by ValancourtB

A lot of it just seems like we've tried nothing and we are all out of ideas.

Give into urban sprawl seems like a leading statement, we've given into suburban sprawl. I think every city in this country would benefit by expanding whatever main street you have. Literally Paris has one of the highest densities of any city is extremely desirable but most of it doesn't go above 10 stories in 90% of it. I think we could really have 0 problems expanding city centers with up to 5 story buildings (cheapest SQ ft to build) emanating from the center. And a few duplexes/row houses near the city center.

I mean I think 4-6 plexes in Richmond are better looking than most suburban homes and add way more to the character.

Eugene, Oregon added 25% of it's population in the past 22 years, so less than 1% growth over the time period per year.

I think a lot of this boils down to the inherent throughput problems of cars and you can very easily hit issues with cars but with walking/biking/public transportation those are much harder to meet unless we are absolutely setting new limits to density.

That and the idea of move 5 minutes further away into a new subdivision has just gotten us into nonsense, it doesn't work after awhile and I think people are still acting like we live in a nice little suburb and the urban area is a 5 minute drive with ample parking which is just an unsustainable model.

3