Living without a car in this tier: PHX v SD v DEN v ATL v HNL v Bmore v MSP v Vegas v PDX v PGH v DFW v HOU v SLC (metropolitan, Atlanta)
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Thanks for explaining it better
That's what I was trying to describe to OyCrumbler.
Most of Dallas is zoned for SFH's but the small parts that isn't are done really well because they have that advantage over the rest of the city.
Montrose doesn't have that advantage so visually it doesn't look too much different than the rest of Houston.
The only difference is Montrose was Houston's first streetCar suburb so it had a little longer to age.
Montrose has the amenities but competing with basically the entire inner loop of Houston it's going to take decades for the visual aesthetic to resemble what uptown is doing now.
Sometimes I question whether Houston even has much of a market for that type of walkability. It is more market driven than the other Texas cities due to the lack in zoning. There is a huge market for density and a huge market for outdoor activities but I don't think the market is strong for walking to do every day activities. ParaguaneroSwag described the reasoning well.
I think Houstonians want a concentration of amenities close, but they don't necessarily want to walk to them if they don't have to. Take Post Oak in Uptown Houston for example. The amount of amenities around there are great, the streets were redone recently and a BRT line was put in but it still doesn't look like much attention was paid to the walking aesthetic. Granted a lot of the 1960s, 70s developments with the street facing parking lots remain, but this area is one of the most popular for hirise living. So it seems Houstonians love the density, they love the amenities right outside but they also seem to prefer to drive across the street.
There might be a lingering stigma about walking for anything other than pleasure. Houston has miles and miles of trails and parks just about everywhere. You upgrade a park in Houston and it's going to end up being lined with Condos.
Discovery Green https://s.hdnux.com/photos/01/25/45/...4/rawImage.jpg used to be a huge collection of parking lots. They built a garage underground and capped it with a park, now it is surrounded by hirises including 2 hotels and 2 residential towers.
Market Square https://assets.simpleviewinc.com/sim...e2aae81cb4.jpg used to be a homeless camp, but after upgrades it's now host to many activities and has spurned development of 3 residential towers including Houston's tallest.
Hermann, Memorial and Buffalo Bayou parks are also popular spots for hirise living and outdoor activities, so the desire to be outdoors and higher density is there, but I don't get the feeling that Houston is shaking off the stereotype that walking other than for pleasure is for poor folks.
It's a bit scary thinking about traffic in the future. That area around lower Montrose/ Museum District is densifying rapidly, but transit infrastructure isn't improving. You have single family homes with large yards being replaced by large residential towers, eventually it is going to get crazy:
Looking at all these towers popping up and realizing that you are not looking at a CBD makes me wonder how much longer Houston can keep developing like this without more rail. All those condos and Multi-family buildings going up in Allen Parkway, River Oaks, Montrose, Upper Kirby and Museum District is going to blend in with each other eventually creating a dense mass with poor mobility.
I like to think of Dallas' urban areas as smaller in size or footprint but high in impact. The official boundaries of Uptown is only 0.925 sq mi. The other areas that are adjacent to it seamlessly flow into it like Victory Park, Harwood District, Turtle Creek, etc. but doesn't account for the official area. Because they're within proximity to Downtown, they have a higher likelihood of growing into each other.
Dallas and Houston just have different philosophies/tastes when it comes to development. Houston throws up high-rises everywhere, Dallas doesn't but focuses a little more on the cohesiveness/pedestrian infrastructure within those urban neighborhoods. Probably just the slight cultural differences that influences that.
Parks have a great ROI! That's why Dallas is building another deck park in Oak Cliff, by the Dallas Zoo. It's down the street from Bishop Arts/Jefferson. Developers are already buying up properties in the area adjacent/close to it. That's why I have a feeling with everything that's going on in the area, it could have an Uptown-like impact.
Houston's high-rise infill is impressive.
Density without the infrastructure to support other forms of transit is kinda scary. I mean, I am not gonna act like every urban neighborhood has transit in Dallas. But it's within close proximity or in most of Dallas' current urban neighborhoods. If not, it's in the very early planning stages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OyCrumbler
Right, I feel like Montrose has retail and population density that can work fairly well, but the parking lots kind of space things weirdly and make it so you have to walk just that little bit further between things and are just a little bit more likely to wait for or to have to walk around a vehicle exiting out. I think getting rid of the parking minimums can rapidly change that. I think the other thing is that Montrose doesn't seem like it has all that great mass transit so getting out of Montrose to any nearby areas seems kind of annoying.
I agree with what you're saying about Dallas as well though I think Uptown and maybe a handful of others seem more doable than Montrose with a major component of that being mass transit access. Totally agreed that it's obviously just a few neighborhoods overall within the city and urban area, but I do think they've in recent years gotten better and grown somewhat in numbers. It's still sprawling overall, but the absolute total area of places where living without a vehicle seem pretty good has gotten larger. I think that's also why even DFW and Houston are roughly in this tier despite being having quite massive metropolitan area populations in comparison to many of the other places in this tier.
Yup. They've continued to build those areas up. Making it more possible to live within those areas without a car.
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Originally Posted by Joakim3
I'm in Uptown right now visiting my mother and agree with this entirely. Uptown Dallas reminds of downtown SD minus the baseball park and bay/ocean views
It has changed a lot. That's what I've been trying to say on City-Data all the time lololol. Admittedly, downtown is still lagging behind Uptown, but I think there's potential there too. Once they finally eliminate those damn parking minimums. It's too many parking lots, but they're finally actually planning to get around to doing it. The new Convention Center development and deck park should help too.
This was just posted a few days ago on reddit. You're in Dallas, so this isn't really for you. But it shows a flyover of Dallas. You can see a small portion of Deep Ellum with the 3 high-rise towers next to I-345. Notice how dense the area gets once the plane passes Woodall Rodgers Fwy. This is a partial view of Uptown and there's over 20K people living within the official boundaries. You can also see the new high-rises going up too. A few of them are above ground.
This new urbanist expert, that relocated from NYC, call Dallas' core one of the best emerging cores in the USA. He often says Uptown is so underrated (in terms of recognition) and is one of the best examples of new urbanism in the country. He says because the core urban neighborhoods surround downtown, it gives Dallas a better advantage, in comparison to other cities. If anyone's on the Dallas subreddit, his name is NYerInTex. But that's just his opinion, clearly some people will feel the contrary.
In the 90s, Uptown was the largest amount of vacant land next to a major downtown. Most of it was demolished for new redevelopment projects like Cityplace. Only Cityplace Tower was built because of the 80s crash.
New aerial of Deep Ellum. A lot of the historical buildings are still there, but clearly some have been demolished over the decades for parking. Lucikly, a lot of the development that's taking place is on underutilized lots/parking lots. There are a few more developments there were planned to start, but I assume the high-interest rates put a pause on it for now. There's a DART light rail station here too.
I really like what Houston has being doing Downtown in terms of getting more residential units and retail. I’ve heard people on this forum say that Downtown Houston looks the same as it did in the 80s/90s but it looks completely different than it did even in 2010.
Like you pointed out, a lot of this change has been driven by parks and green spaces.
The best part about this boom is that it’s primarily residential and almost all of the new buildings have GFR compared to those bulky 80s towers that don’t engage with the street at all. Even a lot of the historical buildings had boarded up storefronts in 2010 and now are much more leased up. The problem is because of Houston’s weird zoning situation this cohesion is hard to create outside of Downtown, Midtown, and maybe EaDo. Those three areas also have no parking minimums which is a plus.
When visiting Dallas I find the downtown there a little more underwhelming than Houston’s but the surrounding neighborhoods are a little more cohesive and have slightly better pedestrian infrastructure. I think both cities are hard to live in without a vehicle but they’re both trending in the right direction.
I stayed in Montrose in 2020 just a couple of blocks away from the Westheimer-Sheppherd intersection. I regularly walked to restaurants and to convenience stores. I was surprised with how walkable the area was
But if you can afford to live in Montrose, you can afford a car. And if you can afford a car in Houston, you’re almost certainly going to buy one because even if you can walk to work, you’re eventually going to want to go somewhere that you can’t walk to. And it’s more convenient to do that than ubering all the time.
If you have to live carless in Houston and budget/commute's no concern then you probably can't do better than the area that's within walking distance of Empire Cafe.
If you have to live carless in Houston and budget/commute's no concern then you probably can't do better than the area that's within walking distance of Empire Cafe.
Yes I was literally 4 streets down from Empire Cafe right a few houses from Westheimer during that time.
Baltimore had the opportunity to build rail like DC when the federal gov was throwing away money but the city has never had control of its own mass transit authority, the state does. Gov. Hogan also killed Red-Line to allow Montgomery Co. Purple-Line to be built after the former had guaranteed federal funding so theres been a lot external factors that have hampered the city in getting comprehensive transit system.
Yes, there was a period, esp in the small Ford and 4-year Carter Administrations (even Nixon, under whose administration DC Metro was green-lighted, IIRC) where the Feds were much more freely funding new-start rapid transit systems. But let's be real: Baltimore was never realistically going to build a 7-8 line, 71+ mile all-heavy rail rapid transit network. Just because the city proposed it doesn't mean it was going to happen. Atlanta, whose metro area is nearly double Baltimore's, has only, to date, managed to build a heavy-rail network just over half that size.
Consider that, of the mega rapid-rail heavy rail systems born of that era, only DC Metro and SF's BART reached and exceeded their gaudy expectations... And both these 2 metro areas had unique circumstances. DC was both in the midst of a meteoric growth in population (both in terms of people and corporations) while, more importantly, being the nation's capital, whereby all the national pols funding WMATA and Metrorail lived there, used and/or benefited from the system.
Metro San Francisco is a huge, sprawling, and growing area. It is hosted by San Francisco which, itself, is the 2nd most densely populated city in America behind NYC whereby both the City and metropolitan area were faced with unique and challenging geographic hurdles: the bay, the mountainous hills, etc.
Baltimore, while being both historic, dense, and walkable, is absolutely worthy of substantial rapid transit -- certainly, more than it currently has was no way in line to build the 71+ mile behemoth proposed.
Yes, there was a period, esp in the small Ford and 4-year Carter Administrations (even Nixon, under whose administration DC Metro was green-lighted, IIRC) where the Feds were much more freely funding new-start rapid transit systems. But let's be real: Baltimore was never realistically going to build a 7-8 line, 71+ mile all-heavy rail rapid transit network. Just because the city proposed it doesn't mean it was going to happen. Atlanta, whose metro area is nearly double Baltimore's, has only, to date, managed to build a heavy-rail network just over half that size.
Consider that, of the mega rapid-rail heavy rail systems born of that era, only DC Metro and SF's BART reached and exceeded their gaudy expectations... And both these 2 metro areas had unique circumstances. DC was both in the midst of a meteoric growth in population (both in terms of people and corporations) while, more importantly, being the nation's capital, whereby all the national pols funding WMATA and Metrorail lived there, used and/or benefited from the system.
Metro San Francisco is a huge, sprawling, and growing area. It is hosted by San Francisco which, itself, is the 2nd most densely populated city in America behind NYC whereby both the City and metropolitan area were faced with unique and challenging geographic hurdles: the bay, the mountainous hills, etc.
Baltimore, while being both historic, dense, and walkable, is absolutely worthy of substantial rapid transit -- certainly, more than it currently has was no way in line to build the 71+ mile behemoth proposed.
I think Baltimore if it had embarked on a heavy rail rapid transit network may have seen quite different results and may have thus been compelled to move forward with expansions to a greater extent if they had development of the 70s era systems. Baltimore was a much, much more densely populated area at that point and there were also a lot of functional smaller downtowns very close to Baltimore that could have been hubs in a way that Atlanta did not have.
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Originally Posted by Kaszilla
These cities on this list aren't all necessarily in the same tier either.
What I'm testing out is if from the perspective of living without a car, these cities that are of very different metropolitan area sizes and layout might effectively be in the same tier in regards to their best neighborhoods to live in without a car. I think it's an odd one in that living without a car is very much on a specific sort of small neighborhood scale as well as what transit nodes to get to other small neighborhood scale developments you can get to, and there's an odd thing where some of the older, very industrial cities had gotten hit pretty hard while some of the very large and sprawling sunbelt cities started having to infill because land value has gotten quite high and traffic trying to get into the core from afar has gotten insane.
So with that, I'm testing out trying to form a tier via transit data with numbers for all modes, all agencies mass transit ridership total over the course of a quarter, and these cities interestingly enough clumped pretty closely to each other with a somewhat obvious break between cities / urban areas lower and cities / urban areas higher.
Yes, there was a period, esp in the small Ford and 4-year Carter Administrations (even Nixon, under whose administration DC Metro was green-lighted, IIRC) where the Feds were much more freely funding new-start rapid transit systems. But let's be real: Baltimore was never realistically going to build a 7-8 line, 71+ mile all-heavy rail rapid transit network. Just because the city proposed it doesn't mean it was going to happen. Atlanta, whose metro area is nearly double Baltimore's, has only, to date, managed to build a heavy-rail network just over half that size.
Baltimore's MSA is more than large/dense enough to justify a comprehensive RST network, but you don't need 7-8 lines to properly serve a city with the geographic footprint of Brooklyn, but the reason Baltimore & Atlanta don't have large/larger systems are vastly different.
Despite Baltimore's MSA being half the size, central Baltimore is still denser than Atlanta (1.3 million vs. 1 million in a 10 mile radius centered on downtown), more uniformly urban and whose existing rail network is directly integrated with the NEC. State administration has habitually chopped Baltimore at the knees to funnel state/federal funding to Montgomery Co because it's the largest county by population, and votes matter.
Atlanta doesn't have a DC sized system, simply because DC has over twice the amount of people as Atlanta in that same 10 mile radius and it never had a dense core until after federal funding for transit dried up.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheProf
Consider that, of the mega rapid-rail heavy rail systems born of that era, only DC Metro and SF's BART reached and exceeded their gaudy expectations... And both these 2 metro areas had unique circumstances. DC was both in the midst of a meteoric growth in population (both in terms of people and corporations) while, more importantly, being the nation's capital, whereby all the national pols funding WMATA and Metrorail lived there, used and/or benefited from the system.
Metro San Francisco is a huge, sprawling, and growing area. It is hosted by San Francisco which, itself, is the 2nd most densely populated city in America behind NYC whereby both the City and metropolitan area were faced with unique and challenging geographic hurdles: the bay, the mountainous hills, etc.
Nobody is saying Baltimore would have a DC Metro or SF BART sized system, it wouldn't just on size alone. But saying it couldn't/wouldn't have a comprehensive (or at least better than whats there now) is not stretching any truths especially when there was more or less self sabotage at the state level.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheProf
Baltimore, while being both historic, dense, and walkable, is absolutely worthy of substantial rapid transit -- certainly, more than it currently has was no way in line to build the 71+ mile behemoth proposed.
71 miles is not a behemoth system in size, it's just absurdly expensive (in the US) to build.
That being said, tunneled LST/HST are the routes the city is taking with planned mass transit going forward so who knows what the future lies.
Last edited by Joakim3; 02-04-2024 at 10:25 AM..
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