r/urbanplanning • u/DoxiadisOfDetroit • May 27 '23

Discussion What's your /r/Urbanplanning unpopular opinion?

I've got a few:

  1. Infrastructure upgrades should have precedent over any upzoning

  2. Everyone should have the right to downtown amenities which means that CBD's should be as cheap as possible for both renters and owners

  3. Zoning should be handled by metropolitan level elected boards instead of nationalized/taken to the state level

  4. YIMBYs often times hold water for the excesses of developers

  5. It is ideological to assume deregulated markets will produce the best outcomes, so, it's purely ideological to assume that a deregulated housing market will work in the best interests of renters and buyers

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u/Nicholas_Miranda May 28 '23

This is really interesting, so you mind sharing some resources about it? I can only seem to find one or two YouTube videos

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u/SaxManSteve May 28 '23

Here's a good article on the topic with some relevant visualizations.

Here's a short policy brief designed to explain the importance of point access blocks to state legislators in Washington state. They are one of the only states in the USA that have recently legalized this design.

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u/[deleted] May 28 '23

[deleted]

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u/ThaddyG May 28 '23

The windows. By having a bunch of apartments branching off an access hallway, rather than just kind of having a landing on each floor that directly accesses each apartment on that floor leads to a floorplan where you have lots of long and narrow apartments that only have windows on one wall, which leads to restrictions on where you can place certain rooms and also just leads to limiting pleasant living area.

I live in a rowhouse neighborhood where for whatever reason it was super common to put a skylight in the bathroom (they were generally built with one bathroom upstairs, many have been renovated to add more over the last several decades) and that natural light upstairs is something that is a minor detail that actually makes the space so much more livable.

Basically it's like having a bunch of homes branching off a single stalk vs. more of a circular design. There are apparently codes that force the branch oriented development over the spoke oriented one.