Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinFromTexas
Thing is, it's actually somewhat worse to have a smaller lot still with grass and stuff that needs care, but with less space in the yard for a storage shed to store your mower and other lawn equipment. Sure, some of the houses have garages where that can go, but not all of them do...I think? This creates a problem of where to store your mower, or possibly having to decide whether to pay to have your lawn taken care of so you don't need a mower. It starts to get to a point where I question the point of having a yard if you don't even have the space to store the equipment you'll need to maintain it. So, you might as well build row houses or brown stones or even go vertical.
As for building that way all over the city, it won't work unless we become comfortable with the idea of chopping down our city's tree canopy to do it. And that's not something I'd be ok with, particularly as I live in a neighborhood with 150 to 250 year old oak trees that reduce the air temperature by up to 20 degrees in the summer.
All I'm saying is that when the opportunity arises to build dense where it makes sense to, we should. Part of our urban environment is also the natural landscape - namely, old growth trees which themselves present obstacles to building around. And, no, you can't move them all. Mueller was a place that should have had more density. It was an airport. It had no trees to get in the way of development. There are other developments in Austin that will likely take longer than 20 years for build out. I hope we don't go small on those projects. The area along Riverside and even the Dog's Head should be eyeing more density. I just think it takes some of the wind out of the argument about needing more housing and complaining that we don't have it when we think small into the future with available land that is now a clean slate to work with.
|
Every non-apartment home in Mueller has a two car garage. Many people end up parking one or more cars on the street because the garages are small, but few people are storing lawn mowers. I gave mine away when I moved here, because it is more efficient to trim my tiny patch with a weed wacker. Our back yard is small, but it was nice to have when my daughter was small. Now that she is bigger, she often plays in the alley or walks to one of the three parks within a block of our house. Of course she is jealous of her friends who live in Windsor Park because they have big back yards with trampolines and swimming pools. On the other hand, her friends like to come to our house so they can play in the alley and rides their bikes around the neighborhood. Their parents actually prefer that, because the streets in Windsor Park are wider, so cars tend to drive faster and there are no sidewalks.
But you are right, Kevin, the Heritage Tree Ordinance, impervious cover limitations, McMansion, private restrictive covenants, minimum parking requirements, etc. all make incrementally increasing the density all over Austin a challenge. I'm all for protecting trees, but I think it is more important to house people than cars. A lot could be done though, if we just eliminated exclusionary zoning and minimum parking. For instance, my 2200 square foot 2 story 3-2 1/2 could pretty easily be converted into two 1100 square foot 2-1's without altering the footprint or increasing impervious cover. If I added a studio apartment above my detached garage, I could have 3 residential units on my 3500 square foot lot. That is more than 36 units net per acre, compared to 8 or less in every other neighborhood in Austin. The rest of Austin could be similarly densified with limited impact to things we care about like trees and pervious surfaces by building up instead of out, and allowing multiple smaller units per lot.
I totally agree that all new development in Austin should be at least as dense as Mueller, if not more so. Unfortunately, other than large multi-family or mixed-use projects, most new neighborhoods look more like the rest of Austin than Mueller thanks to our outdated Land Development Code.
Prev
Linear Mode
