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I’m just not counting a place where there are still buildings standing and people were living there until like 2021 and if I wanted to get nitpicky the uplands is just infill of an area that had houses on it (and by the looks of it it was structurally more dense) until 2010. So if we’re comparing from 2010…. Both of those would equate to treading water.same with murder mall redevelopment.
Everything else, I definitely understand.
As for the other projects like UMD BioPark and Morgan state that counts not housing but it counts. Coming from a city with a real boon is investment Baltimroe feels noticeably more stagnant as I watch houses and stores around my area slowly get boarded up or gradually getting razed.
The only building I haven’t seen that you mentioned is on Broening Highway.
But I suspect there used to be more houses at Broening along Gusryan Street- would I be right?
The point I was making is whether it's a pre existing building, a parking lot or a grass field... if more density is being added to "x" area of land its a positive for the city. If Perkins homes was redeveloped into skyscrapers would that not count?
Regarding developments that are less structurally dense than what they replaced, yes you can call it "treading water", but it's eons better then leaving it as a dirt patch. Baltimore isn't in anyway shape to be picky on what gets built.
Does the city feel stagnant compared to booming sunbelt cities? Unequivocally. But that's not the same as a city withering away into obscurity. It's not.
Nope. The apartments on Broening Hwy (Canton Overlooks) replaced a car lot.
Quote:
Originally Posted by airwave09
The topic of this thread is "Top 10 most urban contiguous 50 square miles. It says nothing about needing to include the exact city municipal boundaries in the urban area, especially if they aren't even contiguous or connected with the rest of the dense urban core itself.
I was responding to a person who made a comparison between Baltimore and Pittsburgh adjusted to 80 sq/mi. Nothing more nothing less.
Regarding Dundalk or Towson, they are literally more contiguous and connected to Baltimore than some actual Baltimore neighborhoods, but that's an entirely different topic.
Baltimore is increasing in structural density because it's been at net positive housing occupancy before the 2020 census. It's been adding more units than buildings are becoming vacant/bulldozed per year for the greater part of the 7-8 years, they are just concentrated in small geographic areas.
The reason the population keeps sliding is due to reduction in average household size. The people occupying all these new apartments popping up left and right are single nesters and not families. If the city wants to grow it's population, it needs to increase household size by attracting and retaining families.
If you understand the why behind it's population loss, the what and the how always fall into place.
I was talking about between 2010 and 2020. I think I'd like to see the stats on this net positive growth in structural density.
The population sliding from reduction in average household size is something that happens elsewhere as well, and I think it's probably commonly cited for Pittsburgh's population drop. I'm not sure that actually necessitates a population slide within a city though as you have very small household sizes in Austin that are about equivalent to Baltimore's despite taking in a lot of detached SFH areas that are suburban and that saw a massive population boom rather than a decrease.
It's back on! I think if this passes into reality, then the combination of three major rail projects in Baltimore will probably cement a turnaround this decade in regards to local spending on the projects themselves and the added value they bring once finished.
I was talking about between 2010 and 2020. I think I'd like to see the stats on this net positive growth in structural density.
The population sliding from reduction in average household size is something that happens elsewhere as well, and I think it's probably commonly cited for Pittsburgh's population drop. I'm not sure that actually necessitates a population slide within a city though as you have very small household sizes in Austin that are about equivalent to Baltimore's despite taking in a lot of detached SFH areas that are suburban and that saw a massive population boom rather than a decrease.
Baltimore has two separate architectural review boards. UDAAP (general) & CHAP (historical neighborhoods), both of which archive like +15 years of major development in the city. The uptick in major development started right around 2016 when 5-over-1 style apartments entered the cities housing market.
Pittsburgh's reduction in household population doesn't hit as hard because it has way less vaccines. The scope of Baltimore's vacancies in conjunction with property demoing means the city has to build substantially more than Pittsburgh to essentially tread water.
Austin retains residents so a reduction of average household size is trivial when no one is moving out of the city and 10k are moving into the city every two months. It's a compounding effect that is extremely hard to reverse without a tidal wave of economic shift (i.e DC)
It's back on! I think if this passes into reality, then the combination of three major rail projects in Baltimore will probably cement a turnaround this decade in regards to local spending on the projects themselves and the added value they bring once finished.
There's unilaterally push from the local & state level to prioritize the city and not DC burbs, and it's showing as of late. The city deserves it.
"Structural density" should be renamed "level of street enclosure," "median urbanity level," or whatever your underlying point is. It's not about density of interior space, living units, commercial space, etc., which will often put apartments+houses above rowhouses.
As they often should be. There is nothing especially urban about terrace housing.
Compared to a 20 story apartment sure, compared to SFH they that's a hard pitch to sell.
They just never approach density tracts that can be achieved with modern multi-family housing, which was the whole point of the skyscraper being created in the late 19th century.
Baltimore has two separate architectural review boards. UDAAP (general) & CHAP (historical neighborhoods), both of which archive like +15 years of major development in the city. The uptick in major development started right around 2016 when 5-over-1 style apartments entered the cities housing market.
Pittsburgh's reduction in household population doesn't hit as hard because it has way less vaccines. The scope of Baltimore's vacancies in conjunction with property demoing means the city has to build substantially more than Pittsburgh to essentially tread water.
Austin retains residents so a reduction of average household size is trivial when no one is moving out of the city and 10k are moving into the city every two months. It's a compounding effect that is extremely hard to reverse without a tidal wave of economic shift (i.e DC)
There's unilaterally push from the local & state level to prioritize the city and not DC burbs, and it's showing as of late. The city deserves it.
I see these, but I'm not sure how to collate this to understand how structural density has changed over the course of the 2010s. A rowhome being cut up from one or two households into several households is hard to argue as net growth in structural density, and so it'd be good to try to understand what would be the appropriate statistic for understanding this. Something like active square footage might make sense, but I'm not sure how we'd go about getting stats for that.
I think a start might be going by getting the number of units cleared by the city and the number of these 5 over 1 style buildings that have been built, estimating the rough average of square footage of rowhomes multiplied by those destroyed and then trying to get square footage for the more recent (and more likely to be directly listed) buildings over the course of these last several years.
I think Larry Hogan really screwed Baltimore for whatever reason. That East-West Baltimore line that already had its massive federal contributions lined up is now back on the docket, but it's probably going to be a hell of a lot more expensive when it could have been already opened or close to opening at this point. I'm glad to hear it's back on the docket, but it remains to be seen if it can line up the federal funding quickly enough and to have gotten enough done to make cancelling it less appealing in case the political winds change again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays25
"Structural density" should be renamed "level of street enclosure," "median urbanity level," or whatever your underlying point is. It's not about density of interior space, living units, commercial space, etc., which will often put apartments+houses above rowhouses.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 2Easy
As they often should be. There is nothing especially urban about terrace housing.
Terrace housing is quite urban especially in the US context of what density levels of usable space and residences they can provide. You can get denser than that with mid-rise, large tract attached mid-rises like what greater downtown DC or greater downtown Seattle is seeing or wall-to-wall highrises like in Manhattan. courtyard apartment buildings placed close to each that are several floors, or even tower in the park Corbusier style highrises, but there's not much in urban form that gets higher density in the US than rowhomes since rowhomes in the US are usually at minimum two floors and a basement, but sometimes going up into four floors and a basement. That being said, some things like close together triple deckers as some of New England has, even if detached, alongside a smattering of taller buildings would probably yield higher structural and population densities than some of the completely intact rowhome neighborhoods if the rowhomes were on the shorter side.
I think the part that is special about terrace housing is the small tracts and small landowner possibilities while still being quite dense and allowing a good lot of light in on themselves and on to streets. The problem in the context of Baltimore and some other places though is that damage to one can quickly spread to others. If the city's fairly healthy where the units are occupied and there's someone keeping them in at least serviceable levels of repair and emergency services such as fire departments are very quick to act, they're great, but Baltimore's had a really rough late 20th century and start to the 21st century where a lot of units are not occupied and the city is strapped for cash.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 06-16-2023 at 09:18 AM..
For actual density it would be possible to combine population density + total commercial space using the same boundaries.
CoStar can do this with reasonable accuracy, except they omit many/most public and institutional buildings. The service is also absurdly expensive (far more than healthcare in my case) and hard to cancel (read ALL fine print, ALWAYS). Zip codes would be the easy preset method that matches Census numbers, or you could hand-draw maps one by one to match census tracts or block groups.
That would be a reasonable stand-in for structural density in my book, including a note for each tract regarding major missing items like universities.
Then you could talk about whether you favor average/cumulative density (often favoring LA/Seattle) vs. median (Baltimore et al) in pursuit of typical feel.
I think as sort of a side argument, it'd be interesting to delineate roughly 50 square mile chunks of the larger, more densely populated urban areas and see how they contend with each other and with other places as a whole including their central core chunks. When those come into play, then it gives a bit more primacy to arguments about daytime population and office square footage, job density, and retail density.
I'll give a quick crack at NYC as I'm most familiar with it. I might do a bit with Los Angeles later.
For NYC proper, I think what makes more sense for Manhattan which doesn't reach up to 50 square miles by itself is to take in a large chunk of the South Bronx and West Bronx as the street grid goes over multiple short bridges and a lot of the development pattern from Upper Manhattan continues.
Brooklyn itself forms a core area that I'd include Ridgewood (and the M train as part of the extension and common border with Bushwick that's pretty much imperceptible) with some of its eastern parts lopped off to get to around 50 square miles.
Western and Central Queens while taking in a part of Eastern Brooklyn then form another 50 square miles.
Staten Island lopping several square miles on its western industrial and wetlands waterfront makes it about 50 square miles.
This then leaves southeastern Queens, eastern Queens, the Rockaways (in Queens) and a good chunk of the Bronx out of anything that's totally within the city proper. Eastern Queens then either forms one to three (north/south split or north, central, south split following along the LIRR lines) clumps with adjoining areas of Nassau County while a small bit of northwest Bronx joins with a clump of Westchester County.
The Manhattan + South/West Bronx core is in a tier of its own. The Brooklyn and a bit of Queens part and the Western half of Queens with a bit of Brooklyn bit are so dense they might be in a tier of their own with the Brooklyn tier denser. Staten Island is maybe in the tier we've been talking about with Baltimore through to Providence, but this one runs into difficulties when talking about job density and daytime populations even though residential population-wise it competes favorably with the upper part of the tier at about half a million in 50 square miles.
Then we get into the metropolitan area. I've already mentioned Eastern Queens maybe being split into two to join with parts of southwestern Nassau County and another part joining northwestern Nassau County and the southern part is generally denser, but I don't think it's quite dense enough to join any of the tiers mentioned so far. The same with northwest Bronx + Yonkers (and the Northwest Bronx itself is *very* suburban in character). What does get you to tier-placement though are the Bergen Neck peninsula in New Jersey containing most of Hudson County and a bit of the southern tip of Bergen County which would be in the Chicago/SF/Philadelphia/Boston/DC/Central LA tier and the Newark-Elizabeth with a touch of western Hudson County which is either in that tier or just a scooch below arguably with Seattle. Further from that, there are some blocks that can probably be formed along corridors of NJT Train lines.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 06-16-2023 at 12:40 PM..
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