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You mean any city over 100,000 escapes being called a suburb? A lot of LA suburbs exceed that.
My hometown could count as that; most government services and local rules (zoning, etc.) was done at the town level, which is about 200,000. There are smaller subdivisions, but other than school districts, most hold no legal power and are little more than addresses. Other suburban NY towns have a village subdivision. The town of Hempstead has 750,000 but maybe half live in incorporated villages. I'm not sure how to compare them to western suburban cities.
I don't get why you like to bring up past posts by others so much, but whatever. Any absolute statement "none at all" is hyperbole; but is true overall suburbs tend to have less multifamily housing than central cities. It also depends on where a poster is from; some regions and suburbs have far fewer multifamily housing than others.
I was in the DC suburbs this weekend; I noticed a lot of apartment complexes and townhomes. Their location mostly wasn't where I'd prefer; many on busy arterial roads often without much in walking distance; depends on the suburb obviously. Noticed in general rental buildings tend to big instead of lots of small ones scattered around.
It's all the same old shtick. One of the articles linked in the OP talks about a dearth of small homes in the burbs. None of them mentioned or even pictured multi-family homes. We're not supposed to think they're part of the burbs.
Any absolute statement "none at all" is hyperbole; but is true overall suburbs tend to have less multifamily housing than central cities. It also depends on where a poster is from; some regions and suburbs have far fewer multifamily housing than others.
Looked up some maps; can't post them as it's from a competing site. Denver barely has any city-suburb distinction excluding the area within a couple miles of downtown, which has a much higher multifamily % than the rest of the metro. A lot of western cities are similar. Boston has lots of multifamily in its closer in suburbs; there's any dramatic difference between city of Boston vs not in, but there's a drastic decrease the further you go out from the city center. DC does has lots of multifamily in its burbs, but again a decrease with distance similar but a bit weaker than Boston. Long Island has a large section with almost no multifamily.
There wasn't much subsidized housing in 1950. Early efforts at subsidized housing were very small scale up until 1937 and the leadup to WW II but even that was a different order of magnitude than 1949. And let's just be perfectly clear about what 1949 was. It was slum clearance much more than it was about providing affordable housing. Cities all over the country were rushing for a piece of that sweet federal money to raze some slums far, far faster than they were rushing to it to build anything. What little was actually built tended to be wonderful things like the mid-rise/high-rise Cabrini-Greens (1957-1962). The real success was that for every unit built, cities got to tear down 3.4 units. That's really what was going on all across America, ala Filmore in San Francisco. Sacramento was particularly successful.
And really, nothing has changed. In 2008 CHA came to an agreement to "temporarily" relocate the residents of the remaining Cabrini-Greens development, the rowhouses built in 1942. The "renovations" have mostly consisted of a fancy chainlink fence and some boards since the plan was to actually just raze them and maybe get around to replacing the lost units those pesky regulations required them to do in a suitable neighborhood somewhere in one of Chicago's numerous ghettos. So you have 440 units of public housing sitting behind a chainlink fence in a decent neighborhood because CHA wants to build market rate condos there.
And it's not just to pick on Chicago. One of Sacramento's fabulous uses of affordable housing money was Hotel Berry, a cockroach SRO. $239,000 per unit to renovate a crack hotel. Rather a lot considering the units are mostly 220-240 square feet. On the upside while it's a pretty good example of how little subsidized housing can we provide for the most amount of money, it wasn't the condo grab that the CHA pulled with the Francis Cabrini-Greens row houses.
As we enter the era of forcing suburbs to take money to build affordable housing, we'll see the same games. Affluent suburbs aren't quite as well situated to fully take advantage of it as, say, Chicago is. They typically don't have ghetto areas to put the "renovated" units in as CHA intended to do with Cabrini-Greens but they'll play the same games Sacramento does to spend as much on affordable housing as possible while providing as little as they can. Hotel Berry, Maydestone, J-Lofts, 700 K project are all examples of that. 700 K is $209,000 in affordable housing in exchange for 50 years of guaranteeing rents in the $926-$1,218 range for a 1bd apartment. Looking at a perhaps comparable J Lofts located a block away, market rate 1bd units go for about $1,800/mo for pretty large units (750-900 square feet). So $209,000 for in exchange for 50% below market rate rent for 50 years. Meanwhile, it's not actually difficult to find a 1bd apartment in the grid (central city area) for less than $926/mo. It won't be nearly as nice as J Lofts is or 700 K will be, but for the target income group ($32,000-$42,000 for a one-person household) of 700 K's welfare units, it's not like they're priced out of the area to begin with. Sacramento's just basically found a way to spend $13,000,000 so a single person making $30-40k/yr can live in a luxury building instead of a semi-crumby one. It's great stuff. Sacramento likes that type of "poor" people. $13 million gets spent, no unsavory poor types meet the income requirements, and a new luxury apartment mixed-use building goes up, and the right type of poor person (probably a 20-something) making $30-40k/yr gets to live in a fancy building instead of a rundown one. Then you just play whack-a-mole, which is what our anti-camping laws are for!, to keep those pesky poor people from staking tent cities all over the place ala Seattle.
Maybe it's right under my nose and I'm just not noticing it, but I'm not seeing any "childless burger flipper" housing being built or offered.
It's all the same old shtick. One of the articles linked in the OP talks about a dearth of small homes in the burbs. None of them mentioned or even pictured multi-family homes. We're not supposed to think they're part of the burbs.
In my experience, most affluent suburbs historically allowed very little multifamily construction. At the same time, a handful of suburbs - such as Farmington Hills outside Detroit - have allowed substantial to vast multifamily construction. In my observation, developers and homeowners and compete politically to, respectively, expand or restrict multifamily development. Usually homeowners prevail but sometimes - as in Farmington Hills - developers prevail, at least for a period of time, until homeowners again regain the upper hand.
It's all the same old shtick. One of the articles linked in the OP talks about a dearth of small homes in the burbs. None of them mentioned or even pictured multi-family homes. We're not supposed to think they're part of the burbs.
They rarely are-so many suburbs have strict zoning codes that prevent this. NIMBYism is rampant in America's burbs (as well as a lot of cities), and it's why we have such a horrific housing shortage
They rarely are-so many suburbs have strict zoning codes that prevent this. NIMBYism is rampant in America's burbs (as well as a lot of cities), and it's why we have such a horrific housing shortage
Duly noted. In the past, people have kvetched about there being "no" multi-family housing in the burbs, which is patently untrue.
That is, indeed, demonstrably false, as you say.
But there is a broad problem with zoning limiting the construction of multifamily housing in suburban civic entities. It's not that it doesn't exist, but that far less of it exists than the market would freely produce, leading to a deeply distorted market with, yes, horrific housing shortages where demand in increasing.
He said rarely, not no multifamily; and he agreed the no is false below.
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