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Originally Posted by IC_deLight
Apparently you did not see the part about condo housing. Owners do not have the freedom you suggest.
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Granted, condo association rules (like those of any HOA) do restrict what owners can do. My only riposte as far as what
ilovelondon posted would be that you're either looking at individually owned homes (don't forget many streets in several East Coast cities are lined with rowhouses whose occupants own them outright) or that if they're condominiums, the rules are permissive regarding plantings.
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The problem wasn't limited to a square. Instead it was block after block of needles, feces, trash, etc. Should urbanists concede San Francisco is a design failure?
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Not a design failure but a political one, and maybe a cultural one too (San Francisco evolved into its current form because of its longstanding reputation as a live-and-let-live place).
I noticed that was a report off Laura Ingraham's Fox News Channel show, and I wouldn't take evidence presented on it as either generally applicable to the country as a whole or as unbiased (or perhaps more accurately balanced) reporting.
But that particular story does jibe with other reports I've read about the general physical condition of San Francisco's -- not "shared spaces" as
ilovelondon or I posted photos of but streets in general in the non-Skid-Row parts of town. Which, as I said, makes it not a failure of design but a failure of policing the public realm.
And some of it may be tied to local conditions too: I can find you public spaces in Philadelphia that are filled with homeless people living in the open - these are encampments of opioid junkies, crammed beneath a wide railroad underpass in the northeast part of the city. Our public squares, however, don't look like those San Francisco scenes you see, nor do our subway concourses, which did about 15 or so years ago.
(I'll do some reading and get back to you)
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Not sure when you are talking about Philadelphia vs. Kansas City. Nonetheless, whenever the city receives tax revenue from something it usually tries to pursue action that leads to more tax revenue. Does Kansas City receive tax revenue from bars? If so, it's no wonder the city supported extended hours for bars.
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I was referring to Kansas City in that passage. And yes, the city receives tax revenue from bars. But liquor policy is unusual in that in much, maybe most, of the country, it exists to make it harder, not easier, to buy and consume booze. Following your argument to its logical conclusion, every large city in this country would resemble New Orleans, where the bars have no doors (and takeout windows to boot) and people drink in shifts. (I don't think the Federal stick of loss of highway funds changed Louisiana's liquor laws to the point where New Orleans' watering holes now have to close for some part of the day.)
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You seem to have a misconception about "suburban" areas. However there are many venues where you can "interact with others". You don't need large amounts of shared/common space provided by a city nor riotous crowds or masses of jaywalkers to interact with other people.
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I'm pretty familiar with our suburban environments, having spent many years driving around those in the city I grew up with and St. Louis and traveling to, through and around the ones in Boston, Washington, New York and here. (I've also visited suburban communities in several other cities I've visited.)
I'd still say that the East Coast (and Chicago) railroad suburbs and places like the edge city of Bellevue, Wash., do not represent the majority of our suburban landscape, especially not that part that was farmland before the end of World War II (Bellevue was not). In most places I've seen, the environment is not set up so that one can simply run into people while in transit from one place to another - it's in those settings where the "chance encounters" we urbanophiles prize occur. Yes, you can have those in spaces that you head to, like supermarkets or shopping malls, but you have to take deliberate action to get to them first. Those new suburban mixed-use developments in autocentric downtowns ("edge cities") I refer to as Instant Urbanism are designed to make the kinds of chance encounters I'm talking about possible within their confines, but they're surrounded by have-to-drive-there (and if you don't live in one, you have to drive to these too).
I once saw a map of Philadelphia's principal edge city, King of Prussia, superimposed over a map of Center City Philadephia. In terms of commercial space (office, retail, industrial - K of P has more of that last category than most edge cities), King of Prussia is second only to Center City, but the space is scattered across an archipelago of buildings in a sea of parking lots and grass across a territory about half again as large as Center City's compact island. I would not get rid of all the grass, but were I planning something like this, it would much more closely resemble Kansas City's Country Club Plaza, an edge city that developed at the dawn of the Auto Age (and like many edge cities, had a shopping center - the oldest planned one in the United States [1921] - as its nucleus). It's got plenty of free parking, but it's tucked under, behind or on top of the shops and offices (mostly under and behind), and what you see from the street are the shops and offices, not the parking. The streets also tie into the city's larger grid, meaning there are multiple paths in and out of the place as opposed to a handful of entrances off some main roads. Traffic still backs up there - one of the few places in the city where that happens regularly - because everyone wants to be there.
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