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Urban people. Mixed used neighbourhood is superior.
Pure residential hoods are so suburban and useless. I need some tomatoes, ok let's drive 7 miles to buy some.
For convenience that crummy looking Cherry Hill home is much better than those rowhouses. For example that house is only 0.7 miles to Whole Foods! That is a little farther than the .4 miles to Whole Foods from the one on Quince St. However when I take the time to go grocery shopping and stand in line, I am buying 4 or 5 bags of groceries and prefer to drive. Its much more convenient to be able to easily drive to the grocery store than try to walk with all your groceries.
Eh, if you want green open space, go to a park. Street trees are enough for me, and maybe a 5 foot setback for a porch and/or flower bed. Small front yards require maintenance, and they aren't really enjoyable in any way. They're just...grass.
Front yards exist due to building setbacks, and building setbacks basically serve two functions. One is it makes it easy to widen the road if needed without demolishing houses. But this isn't really a big concern in the modern era, since the movement in cities is towards narrowing traffic lanes now. The other is to provide some separation from the road. But there are alternate ways of doing this, such as having the entrance elevated from the sidewalk (as NYC brownstones did). Either way, the point is often moot on narrow, low-traffic urban streets, where the occasional car isn't traveling much over 15-20 miles per hour.
Yeah, there is nothing like walking up a flight of outside stairs to get to the first floor of your brownstone and being at bus/truck diesel exhaust height, all while these vehicles rattle the teeth out of your head. Soot, noise and vibrations are the triple play of a happy home life.
I do. The less people around the better! Here is an example of a incredibly fantastic home in the upscale Milwaukee suburb of River Hills with a 5 acre lot. No noisy neighbors! Perfect!
Single family detached homes are practical while we have cars. Without cars, the bigger lots make longer walks. A second or third floor apartment above a business in a building only 3-5 stories tall would suit me. Every type of retail business on one street would be convenient shopping.
I do. The less people around the better! Here is an example of a incredibly fantastic home in the upscale Milwaukee suburb of River Hills with a 5 acre lot. No noisy neighbors! Perfect!
I love the 1+ acre lot and its only a 5 mile drive to the Whole Foods in Torrance.
In my fantasy, I would love to have both city and country. That first house you linked is gorgeous...minor changes to some of the bathrooms, but I could spend quality time there.
However, I still love urban living, and holidaying in the country. We were thinking of buying a country home, but I don't think at this stage of my life, I could stand feeling obligated to use it for holidays. I prefer variety.
this thread seems to be all about the East Coast. (That refers to anything East of the Great Divide to those of us who grew up in California.)
My favorite urban living is a SFH in a mixed-use commercial and residential neighborhood. Nice local market, cafes, bars, dry cleaner, shops, but nobody tromping around over your head or thumping the walls--I had problems with both of those.
I'm thinking San Francisco specifically.
I'm also in the SF Bay Area. I like a mixed-use area - that's walkable - but I really hated living in a mixed-use building. I'm in subsidized senior housing now, and the last two subsidized buildings I've lived in, were renovated in downtown areas that were being revitalized - Redding, CA, and Crescent City, CA. They took old rundown hotels in the old downtown areas and put commercial tenants on the street level, and senior apartments above.
This just didn't work as far as a quality of life for seniors, as the wine bars and restaurants and downtown events, etc., were noisy. And there were homeless problems, etc. Parking was a pain. Sounds good in theory, but mixing the two in the same building or even block/street, is just not conducive to a quiet home life.
The building I'm in now in San Jose, CA, though, is a dedicated subsidized senior apartment building, that is mainly surrounded by medical offices and a hospital across the street, and residential homes on the side streets off the main medical corridor. The commercial buildings are a couple blocks farther away. This works so much better. And any loud events or parades, etc., are blocks away, instead of right outside your door and windows.
I do. The less people around the better! Here is an example of a incredibly fantastic home in the upscale Milwaukee suburb of River Hills with a 5 acre lot. No noisy neighbors! Perfect!
For convenience that crummy looking Cherry Hill home is much better than those rowhouses. For example that house is only 0.7 miles to Whole Foods! That is a little farther than the .4 miles to Whole Foods from the one on Quince St. However when I take the time to go grocery shopping and stand in line, I am buying 4 or 5 bags of groceries and prefer to drive. Its much more convenient to be able to easily drive to the grocery store than try to walk with all your groceries.
Urban people. Mixed used neighbourhood is superior.
Pure residential hoods are so suburban and useless. I need some tomatoes, ok let's drive 7 miles to buy some. Who wants to live there?
Meh. It depends on the population density and layout of the suburb. I live in a New England coastal village. The housing stock is mostly old. Lot sizes are small. It's not multi-acre lots where you need a car to do anything. Want a tomato? In season, I walk 200 yards to the farmer's market on nearby church grounds and buy local tomatoes that were picked that morning. Or pick my own off the tomato plants sitting on my back deck. I'm walkable to all kinds of things in the village part of town that is zoned commercial and the 'High Street' part of town that is also zoned commercial. A market. Pharmacy. Bank. Liquor store. Fish market. Lots of restaurants. I'm walkable to the dinghy dock so I can get out to my boat sitting on the mooring in the harbor. I'm walkable to the beach. I ride my bicycle all the time and don't have to worry about getting run down like a dog.
Residential zoning with large lot sizes mostly exists to protect the town's school system. The land is expensive so pretty much only expensive homes are built on the land. Only college educated professionals can afford to buy their way in. That pretty much guarantees that the school system will be excellent since college educated professional parents tend to be very engaged with their children's education. Unless you're really high income where you can afford a good private school, if you reproduce and you want the best opportunities for your children, you flee to the suburb with the large lot size, expensive homes, and neighbors who are all college educated professionals. Socioeconomic segregation. If you don't ever plan to reproduce, by all means live in that convenient urban place.
Well made, well managed, well maintained massive highrises, particularly with interesting landscaping/vegetation. Convenience, privacy and majestic architectural beauty. They can be heaven or they can be hell, though, depending on who lives there (luxury towers vs public housing projects - they could be the same thing if people living in the latter had enough brains and decency to not tear down the treasure they have been given).
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