Quote:
Originally Posted by laniroj
Quite literally EVERY single suburb with beginnings before 1990 has a decent stock of duplexes, townhomes, cottages, and class C apartments. There are 0 exceptions. It's not like these places don't already have these land uses the State bill attempts to include by right and these places aren't exclusively SFH. The only thing that changed was zoning in the 90's began excluding literally everything except single family homes and big box retail...oh and giant plots of land for schools that will never get used, can't be rezoned (b/c...neighbors), and sit idle forevermore.
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I think I failed to articulate my point correctly. I live in Olde Town Arvada (in a townhome), so I am definitely aware of the diverse housing options that exist in the older parts of most suburbs. But those same suburbs also have VAST swaths of single-family zoned neighborhoods, including many ranch home neighborhoods with zoning that dates all the way back to the 1950s. There is a deep fear in the suburbs that some of these neighborhoods (take, for example,
this one) will loose their so-called "character" if this kind of legislation passes.
There is also a fear that the character of other neighborhoods (
like this one) will also change. As Stonemans_rowJ correctly pointed out, many of these places have no alleys and possess other qualities that would make it essentially pointless to build duplexes there. I would guess that the majority of the fears of these far-flung neighborhoods "changing" are unfounded.
There is absolutely a lot of demand for townhomes, apartments, and all other kinds of housing in the suburbs today. But this is largely driven by the reality that developers are looking to put housing pretty much anywhere that cities will let them, because there are so few places they can build today. Oftentimes this means shoe-horning auto-oriented apartments and townhomes into locations that were slated for commercial (reducing the city’s projected tax base), or simply aren't very desirable places to live. I can't help but wonder if the demand for suburban-style townhomes in
locations like this this might dry up if lots of new opportunities open up for townhomes in central locations where they would make more sense.
I have been using this as a thought experiment - If EVERY single-family neighborhood in the metro area started to see rapid redevelopment, it would require a population boom vastly larger than the one we are seeing. The reality is that the population of the metro area is not going to double overnight (where would all those jobs come from anyway?), so the vast majority of new construction would logically be targeted in the locations where it makes the most sense. There's no way this kind of rule change would result in wholesale change all across the metro area. In some places, the result may be a bit like a cork popping out of a bottle, and look like what we have seen in Sloan's Lake and Jefferson Park. In many other places (some of which are the most vocally opposed), I bet little to nothing would change at all.
If it would help alleviate some fears in the suburbs that would get some more senators on board with voting yes, then why not just acknowledge this reality and target the re-zoning in the places it would make the most sense (i.e. near transit corridors and places that already have most of the elements of a 15-minute neighborhood)? Or, what I was originally suggesting, would be to set different rules for suburbs as opposed to the primary economic centers - which this years draft did by creating a “tier 2.” I’m just saying maybe there should also be an intermediate tier - one that focuses middle-housing mostly near transit in the suburbs, but establishes it by-right everywhere in our true “tier 1” cities (easily definable as the cities that are the job centers).
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