Quote:
Originally Posted by sirkingwilliam
Well, firstly, it's not about selling units, it's a requirement. Second, not every one who lives those developments will have a car, hence why they'd choose to live in a walkable neighborhood. But even people with cars want to live in urban areas because they want to walk and bike places. Having a car allows them.to go to work or go see family or friends who live long distances. To go on vacataion, etc.
Having a car doesn't make you anti-urban or pro sprawl. It just makes you a car owner.
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I'm not saying car ownership is necessarily evil, obviously most people need one even if they aren't using it for all trips, and you're right it's more about city regulations than selling units (though I have a hard time imagining a project that got a variance to have no parking spots selling as well as a project with ample parking). All I'm saying is that we have two completed projects up on Broadway right now that look like they're probably very similar to what these proposals are, and so far it appears to me that residents overwhelmingly choose to drive. I hardly ever see any pedestrians or bikers along Broadway in Midtown except on Saturday mornings for the Pearl farmer's market.
I think an equal part of the problem is that there isn't any "daily" retail in lower Broadway/Midtown/river north to walk to (yet). No drug store, no grocery etc. Everything apart from that really great new bike shop at 1800 is a boutique (all retail at Pearl) or restaurant that's too nice or expensive to go to on a regular basis. At this point I don't even know what I'm complaining about, I just hope as RN fills in we'll see it mature into a real urban neighborhood, which in my mind is a neighborhood where hardly anyone drives regularly. I worry it will end up being like those lifeless "urban" residential areas that ring downtown Houston and Dallas; where the built environment suggests walkability but the empty sidewalks connote car dependence.