(I’m not sure how to delete the video’s youtube sponsorship spiel, sorry)
I feel like something that nimby’s fail to also understand when it comes to the missing middle housing is that it doesnt even have to look like mid or low rises and thick apartment blocks. For example if you look at the more populated parts of buffalo NY there are apartments spread out here and there but a good chunk of the housing is houses with lawns on good looking tree lined streets.
Now these houses are close together, in some districts they dont even have a driveway(or its barely wide enough between houses for a car to get through), but theyre still nice looking 19th to early 20th century houses with nice wood work and detail. Many of these houses are also stealthily multifamily homes. A lot of these houses were built with an upstairs and downstairs unit in mind.
So you have neighborhoods that could fit the criteria and look “suburban” but are secretly more dense than expected. And thats the big issue with the housing crisis. Its not that central downtown areas dont have enough towers, or that single family homes exist in major cites, it’s that as soon as you get into an inner suburb the density falls to like 2,000 to 4,000 per square mile. You could still have nice houses, trees, parks, and be detached and have driveways and still maintain an easy density of 10,000-16,000 within walking distance of a nice little main street.
Think of how de-congested the housing market in NYC would be if there were little cities around it(besides yonkers and NJ side of the river). If Nassau county and westchester didnt immediately drop off a cliff densitywise? Again it could still be full of trees and parks and golf courses and grass lined streets, and detatched houses, but it would just be plotted a little closer together and have a slightly more urban flair to it.
I visited Buffalo in March on the tail-end of our Niagara Falls trip on the CA said (and went to a Sabres game and some great bars/restaurants). I really loved the feel of the neighborhoods around the city there. We live in St. Louis, in a similarly old house to what we saw in Buffalo (ours was built in 1906, they’re all brick here though). As you pointed out, there are houses on tree-lined streets here as well, and I’m within a mile’s walk of 5 or 6 large parks that often host free concerts and other events, I can walk to a fair amount of bars and restaurants, and plenty of other things. The only real thing holding it back where I live is how car-centric the construction has been. I could walk to the Soulard district easily (less than a mile) but in order to do so, I have to cross a 5-lane road called Gravois, which has bad visibility in both directions, and people tend to run red lights there often. There’s no protected pedestrian crossing and people get killed there every year by cars, so we usually just drive over there. The city is finally working on walk-ability and public transpo by extending the Metrolink commuter rail to go north/south, and by adding a protected bike lane on one of the main thoroughfares (Jefferson). We’re also seeing the construction of a lot more mixed use buildings (apartments on the upper levels, retail on the ground floor) and that has been a very welcome addition. I feel like we moved from the suburbs to the city at exactly the right time, as there’s additional (booming) growth in Midtown and Downtown West thanks to the addition of our MLS team and all the land they’ve revitalized, which has in turn attracted development to a previously fairly barren area.
Yeah Buffalo is technically east coast because it’s ny but as a great lake city it has a lot more in common culturally and layout wise with a lot of midwestern cities. I visited st louis a few years ago and was also taken back at how some neighborhoods were essentially just buffalo(but with weird gated streets).
I live in one of those neighborhoods, on the West Side of Chicago. If you have a garage you get to it from the alley, not the front, but many of us would rather have a yard than a garage. The homes have room to walk between them, but only on one side. Trees line the streets and I have everything I need, including a public library and multiple playgrounds, withing walking distance. It’s a great way to live, especially while my children are young.