Yeah these 5 over 1s really ruin the neighborhood character of my suburban strip mall state highway hell.
Leave them as derelict auto body warehouses tyvm.
Well, they’re building three in one go in my urban area. And they’re fucking up my neighborhood. The whole neighborhood is lower rise buildings and prewar apartment buildings, so they have character. And then they knocked down a grocery store to put up these three ungodly ass warts.
Good neighborhoods should have a mix of older and newer buildings.
From Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Thank you for sharing that excerpt! Definitely a concept I had not thought about, makes perfect sense, and is seen demonstrated in the gentrification process.
Yeah, she definitely has some thought-provoking explanations on how cities work.
I would say gentrifying 1 building is ok, and is something you can do every 5 years or so to help boost the economy and modernize the building stock. But it becomes a problem when an entire block or an entire neighborhood becomes gentrified all at once. It’ll lead to a slum in the long run.
They did a bunch of them near where I used to live. The problem with these (and really all unplanned high density housing) is that while their intent is to create walkable communities (a great idea in itself), they ignore the reality that most people are going to commute to a job, and they create the nastiest traffic bottlenecks ever. They’re not bad when they’re located next to a major highway with preplanned egress/ingress, but many of these halfwit developers will plop them with an entrance exit on an already busy 4 lane road and wonder why everything is all wacko.
If traffic gets bad enough people will make different decisions.
Only if the infrastructure is there tbh. Every time I get on my bike I have to make peace that I might just die that day because I can’t hardly get out of my apartment before a car tries to hit me. And we even have bike lanes all over here they just aren’t set up well. Tons of people don’t want to do that even if the alternative is to sit in traffic for longer than it takes me to bike somewhere
the impetus to improve the infrastructure will be stronger if conditions are worse
don’t chicken-and-egg yourself out of densification
My neighborhood has been pretty long standing in its current state. This is part of a hugely explosive new wave of gentrification. I’m seeing it happen before my eyes. It’s pretty sad.
Indeed. I will say that we certainly need to rethink the way we go about planning and engineering our cities in a way that removes the necessity for cars as a primary means of transportation, but these designs need to come from a higher collective level within local governments that allows for a more intertwined planning and management. As of now, you have individual developers doing whatever they think is best (aka most profitable) and it tells these subpar effects.
People who think you can solve the housing crisis without removing or greatly diminishing landlords, house flipping, investors, and people profiting off of a necessary and inherently limited necessity, do not understand economics.
[stares directly into the camera]
Yes.
Replace all single family homes with mixed use commie blocks. Send your strongest cops, they won’t be enough.
These aren’t commie blocks, and they usually aren’t replacing single family homes. They’re most problematic when replacing older multi unit buildings, because they’re taking low income housing and replacing it with housing only upper income people can afford (plus a couple low income units to say that they’re trying). And they get tax breaks to do this gentrification, after years of neglecting the upkeep on the older buildings it’s replacing.
Okay, I can get on board with saying fuck gentrification. But we need to be building a hell of a lot more of these than yet another shitty tract of single family homes just a few minutes’ drive from the stroad to take you to big box mart.
You’re not wrong. And to add to that the stupid building codes that lead to the type of small 500 sq ft condo unit with only one wall with windows and no air circulation. This article covers that well.
But all these condos, not only are they not human-sized and lack air cicrulation, most of them are fitted with luxury features to up the price beyond what regular folks can pay and don’t leave any room for social housing.
There should be a law for mandatory social housing in these constructions.
They knocked down my neighborhood’s lower income grocery store to put up three on the one lot. Fuck these monstrosities.
The right way to do this was to have the entire lower floor become the grocery store and build sound proof residences over it.
tbh, their funtion isn’t all that objectionable. Mixed use buildings are cool and good, actually. But the fact that they’re made of cardboard and duct tape, look like ass, and are signifiers of gentrification are what suck about them.
As an example, large Japanese cities go extremely hard on mixed use buildings and are very livable despite their crazy density.
We don’t have any of those here. What’s wrong with five over ones? Mixed use zoning is a good thing?
The overpriced luxury apartments of today are the shitty apartments of tomorrow
They’re also the shitty apartments of today. The actual good apartments are the older buildings with character and actual walls, not these fuckin paper thing barriers they pretend are walls in the newer buildings. And they just got no fuckin soul. And they knocked down a grocery store to build some in my neighborhood. Motherfuckers.
They built some near my workplace and theyre charging 3k for a studio apartment
Absolutely insane
5 over 1 are rookie numbers. I want high towers, 30 floor minimum. Entire towns per block. Comercial, office space and residential on each one. I want the grocery store, the doctor office and a metro station on the same building I live.
People are replying to you like this is a pie in the sky fantasy, but actually this is an accurate description of Tokyo.
Sao Paulo is also close to this, but they don’t have a lot of mixed use buildings. Ironically, you can find them in the richer neighborhoods, but those mfs fight tooth and nails against any expansion of the metro network close them.
Be careful, you might make a neoliberal cry with this one
The bottom one is not a five over one.
Nor is the top one
You sure? Looks like a double-height faux 2nd.