Quote:
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Originally Posted by Sam Hill
In order for this town to change into what I would like it be, public transportation would have to become exponentially more convenient and ubiquitous.
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You know, I used to think the answer to all of this was to have better transit. Blanket the arterials with transitways, have TOD along the arterials, and things'll be better.
I think I was wrong. The transit is a symptom, not a cause, and changing land use along the arterials only works to push on the margins. It's better maybe, but only a little.
To really change things, change the root cause: Single-family zoning in the central city. Denver has a dense downtown, a couple of sort-of-dense neighborhoods around it, and then basically suburbs. Wash Park, Highlands--those are suburbs, structurally. So of course most of the jobs and most of the housing is inherently car-oriented. It's no wonder TOD has not made a meaningful difference, when we never legalized a meaningful amount of TOD in the first place.
If you want a European-like city, you need your city to have European-like land use. That means neighborhoods full of apartments. Not just one street of apartments between the arterial and a bunch of houses,
neighborhoods full of apartments. It means making it legal for the detached houses that define most of the central city to become apartments. Not just rowhouses, apartments.
There *are* that many apartments in Denver. But they're spread around in little complexes here and there, surrounded by parking lots. Instead of making 5% of the land in every neighborhood apartments, and instead of building a bunch of garden apartments along Colorado Blvd or down Leetsdale, cluster them in the central neighborhoods. You can't change the past, but you can do it for the next generation if you want to.
With that density and that growth, you get a virtuous cycle in which it becomes obvious to rededicate street space to transit, and more jobs and people locate in the central city rather than Commerce City, etc etc. But the base condition isn't the transit, it's the land use.
Yes yes, I can hear the detached-house apologists already:
But you're forcing us to become something we're not! Fascist! No. I don't want to force anybody to do anything. I only want to
legalize the change that I think people would make on their own if we let them. I want to stop forcing people to drive to Commerce City even when they don't want to. I want to give them a meaningful choice, and this is how. If you don't believe people want to make that choice, then there's no reason to hold onto zoning laws that ban that choice today. I am not the preventer of freedom in this argument. If we legalize it and it doesn't happen, fine with me. But don't ban that freedom of choice and then pat yourself on the back for being a champion of freedom.
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