3w ago

The issue is not space, but how we move through it

159 comments

Let's also get rid of golf courses in arid deserts in the midst of droughts
- You had me at "Let’s get rid of golf courses"
  
  This is a municipal course as well, so Seattle could literally do this. The city government doesn't want to.
  This heavily neglected sidewalk, next to the fenced off golf course, alongside a high speed and very busy highway onramp just 2 blocks from a light rail stop, tells you just how much the city cares about the area.
  There is no excuse not to cleanup and widen this sidewalk except apathy and malaise from the city.

You're probably not going to save 95% of the trees given the major earthworks likely needed for managing sewage, stormwater, and other utilities. You'll probably save most of them, though.
40k looks pretty optimistic for the size and number of buildings, too.
- probably not going to save 95% of the trees
  I was wondering that too... maybe they meant: plant new trees, and the total number of new trees would be 95% of the number of old trees?
  
  I’m guessing they’re just not aware of construction impacts on trees. It’s not something most people think about.
- Depends how many floors they have but yeah, that would be quite high density at 60k/km²
- I don't know if it's the same in USA but with all these new regulations building houses these days is an environmental disaster

Not sure how it works in the US but here in Oz (where water scarcity is always present in our collective psyche) golf courses are usually placed on flood plains where it would be dangerous/too expensive to build housing. In addition most allow people to walk through them and many even allow dog walkers so they have quite a lot of public amenity.
I would still prefer if they were just designated as public parks rather than having huge swathes of grass that needed frequent watering, but they're not nearly as bad as most make them out to be.
- Yeah, here in the US, golf courses can be extremely wasteful. There's two golf courses on my drive into the city, one is on a river floodplain, the other is a HOA golf course full of sprinklers that could absolutely be more housing. If I go the other way, there's another HOA golf course that could be housing too. So, to start with, there's three golf courses in a 15km radius.
  One of the HOA ones is exclusive access to the surrounding retirement community, the other HOA one doesn't have a fence or anything, but idk if they chase people off. The one on the floodplain you have to pay to access the grounds.
  
  But you know you have to be a certified rich asshole to live in those HOAs.
- Public golf courses are one of the best things about Oz. They provide a forest island for birds and mammals among the suburbs. Many golf courses have large swathes of natural bushland around them. They are often run by the local council, and are hence not for profit, and generally they are very cheap to play.
  They make most of their money via selling beer and expensive golf clubs.
  Turn them over to property developers, and they'll pave it with cheaply built single dwelling houses and flog them for way too much money resulting in just more urban desert and padded the obese wallets of billionaires.
  That's if they are even build able. Some areas on floodplains and marshes that serve as a local soak for stormwater, hence the water hazards. Some are built on landfills that contain mu icipal waste or even asbestos, hence you can't risk putting houses on them where someone might dig up the asbestos or waste. Turning them into a revenue-generating forest parkland is one of the few good things you can do with that land.
  The revenue earned by the golf course that is used to offset local parks and recs costs would otherwise be gained by taxing the local residents through land rates.
  I used to hate on them a lot before I learned that the economics of public courses is way different to that of private ones. There are still some private courses, and I wouldn't be opposed to these being taken back into public hands and/or converted into affordable housing. To the gallows with the greedy exclusive fucktillionaires.
- In Germany most courses only have a few public walkways and if you leave them security will escort you right out

I work at a golf course and I'd rather be doing something meaningful like building homes so this post speaks to me directly.
Unfortunately the big thing lately is we've been dropping a bunch of trees.

If you just repurpose for housing you just wind up with 40,000 people needing transit and overloading the system you're trying to promote.
We need to think beyond housing and towards having communities that largely provide the needs of the people living with them. Shops, offices, other non-office/shop jobs, and recreational activities need to be considered as well.
- The neat part is that businesses can be in the bottom couple of floors. Though often this doesn't seem to be done unless it's the CBD...

Why building something on it instead of converting it into a park? People love green stuff, you know.
- Why does it need to be a dedicated park? They're not proposing getting rid of all the green stuff. Even better than having green stuff some distance away is living in the middle of the green stuff.
  
  @FooBarrington @Krik
  Close the asphalt streets. Rip them up and plant trees and grass. A 9 foot wide pathway for pedestrians and bicycles in the middle. Subways and streetcars to transport people from one green belt to the next one road with access for emergency vehicles, public service vehicles and deliveries circling every 9 square blocks.
  
  Look at the picture. There'll be not much green left. They'll only leave the trees alone and based on the figure of 40 000 new residents the buildings will be taller than the trees. I don't think that is great.
  Cities are more livable when there are parks every few blocks. I mean big ones, at least half a mile long. People need nature, not a tree here and there.
- People love green stuff, you know.
  Exactly, this is why we should legalise weed!
- I think the proposed homes near the highway should be forested as a buffer.
- Why building something on it instead of converting it into a park?
  Because rich people need money to build a bigger golf course somewhere else
  
  because poor people are already living on the golf course and would really appreciate roofs
  
  In lots of cities vacancy rates are too low making it hard to find housing
- This particular golf course is a park. Seattle Parks and Rec uses a management company, but it is one of the cheapest ways to play.
  https://premiergc.com/-jackson-park-golf-course

BuT wHeRe WouLd i PaRk mY cAr?!?!!?
- That's the neat part, you don't.
  
  car
  car go
  car go bye
  cargo bike
- In the water hazard on the 14th hole.

The best part about this is that this will give blackrock more homes to purchase with cash to the rent out to people at ridiculous prices. /s
Sorry, I've become way to cynical these days about virtually everything, I need to go touch grass.
- We need to go touch pitchforks.
  
  https://youtu.be/acT_PSAZ7BQ
- You should move to a golf-neighbourhood.
- Even Blackrock is affected by supply and demand. We clearly haven’t been building enough in most high demand places and that is not under Blackrocks control. Insufficient supply leads to high prices, regardless of corporate ownership
  Let’s start with how can we help supply catch up with demand, then take additional steps if that doesn’t bring prices down
- There's a few solutions out there to this, but it's going to take a push to get city councils to agree to them.
  The city can provide loan guarantees to co-operative housing projects. Once the loan is paid off, everyone owns their condo.
  The city can also build its own housing rather than relying on developers.

But that runs counter to my need as a developer to bulldoze the entire area, build mcmansions 6 inches apart from eachother and at the barest mimimum of code (and perhaps even lower with a $$friendly$$ inspector), and then plant like a grand total of 5 trees that wont survive the first year.
Oh, and also pave everything over. Gotta pave everything over. No one wants green space! /s
- When I was first committing to my no automobile lifestyle, one of the first things that struck me was the pavement. Fucking everywhere.
  Next time your about town , take a mental picture. Then subtract the parking lots. The huge road. Put the buildings closer together. Make a nice bikelane, something just wide enough to get a fire engine down. Plant some trees. Pretty nice right?
  Instead we have salted earth. It really is just rude to the earth. Fuck your car!
  
  All I want is the infrastructure to be more convenient. I cant walk anywhere unless I want to spend an hour+ walking, which is just impractical when i need to run and grab some fucking garlic powder real quick in the middle of dinner.
  Neighborhoods should have special commercial zoning inside of them to allow small shops, cafes, bakeries, etc
  
  Welcome to why the sim city games don't have visible parking. They consciously removed parking spaces because it spread everything out too far.
- My local public golf course was closed and sold to developers a few years back.
  Promises were made to the community of keeping all the trees and lots of green space, as there was vicious community opposition.
  The developers have of course instead done what you suggest, and every house is crammed in next to each other just like every other new suburb. Its still in progress but it looks like once they're done you wouldn't even know it used to be a golf course.
  This meme is so stupid because it doesn't present an even remotely possible outcome. A far better option is to keep the public golf courses for people to spend time outdoors and to provide homes for wildlife - and then remove regulations limiting building heights to encourage multi-storey development.
  Build up, not out - because once green space becomes houses it never changes back.
  
  it never changes back
  Ahem... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat

When there's no more golf you'll know the rich fucks are gone.

but then where should the rich people go golfing?
- in hell
- On Mars

Plus you can live in a pentagon! Just not the Pentagon.

Now add in mixed use zoning, and affordable housing units and this could be a winner

Not for nothing, but this wouldn't fly in the USA. You'd need to replace most of those trees with roads.
Or better yet, reduce the number of housing units and keep the trees.
- This is Seattle btw, but I think the meme is that it won't fly.

Golf courses aren't inherently bad, but I think just about every one out there is weirdly exclusive and definitely wastes water.
Disc golf is a good example of a sport that doesn't monopolize space. It's built into existing trails. Generally speaking the public can't walk on golf cart trails (I'm sure there are exceptions)
- There are city-owned golf course around me that I presume aren't that exclusive (I dunno, I don't play). That said, they're also implicated in draining all sorts of toxins into the local waterways.
  I think they are inherently bad. They waste water, their turf needs constant care that puts nasty stuff into the rest of the water supply, and the space can't be used for anything else. It's not merely a game, either; it's the defacto way for rich people to network and talk about how they're fucking the rest of us.
- Disc golf is just sticking a few goals into otherwise typical park. You are gently tossing a soft disc over maybe 60-90 meters so you don't need to be extra careful to make the way clear.
  Golf by its nature demands huge amounts of space for few people to enjoy. Further the landscaping and irrigation demands on a golf course are immense. You can't have too many things on a course or people walking around, because a pretty hard ball comes flying from 200 meters away.
  
  Correction: The discs are not soft. They are hard and can be sharp-edged as well. Keeping throws away from walking and bike paths is super critical.
  
  Minigolf is the superior and family-friendly alternative to golf, TBH.
- I do. It is a giant waste of fucking space and resources so that some rich people can enjoy hitting a ball around.
  
  The worst part is usually they take an undeveloped scenic natural space and turn it into a waste of water that pollutes from all the lawn chemicals.

Same weirdos who defend the horrid use of land will say "Fuck off we're full" to immigrants trying to not die from wars and ethnic cleansing.
- The US is very sparsely populated overall. Of course cities are densely populated, but that's because they're cities.

This is Jackson Park golf course, owned by Seattle Parks and Rec. It is one of the cheapest ways to play the game in all of Seattle.
It opened May 12, 1930. That's before the Interstate and the light rail.
There are plenty of places to shit on golf courses. This one is probably a miss. Without mixed use space, this area has been a heavy car use zone with low walkability. The section from the freeway north of the park is also a steep hill, reducing the accessibility of the area.
Additionally, the plans provided do not meet the requirements for development. Specifically, how are you going to get a fire truck to the six story buildings in the middle. Is there enough space for.emergeny services to maneuver and to keep a fire from jumping buildings.
Talk and MS Paint is cheap. Good urban planning in not.
- Reminds me of AtomEve's situation in Invincible. Everyone think they are an architect till shit isn't engineered correctly.
- Okay, so put a road or two through the middle for emergency access. The walk ability part is supposed to be solved by the light rail they mentioned.

Most suburban streets are 50 feet wide, many suburban front yards are 50 feet deep. That's a wasted space 150 feet wide and however long the street is long. Think of how much housing could be built in that space if you tore up that road, and in its place put a pair of alleyways housing in the middle
- Good luck with the NIMBYs. Or NIMFYs now I guess?
  
  Oh yeah it would never actually happen but a person can dream, right?
- I would argue closer to 30, unless you’re including all the easement and sidewalks?
  
  I did some measuring on Google Earth and the distance from sidewalk (or on roads without a sidewalk from the road) to the front of houses in a major city nearish to me and found a few neighborhoods 50 feet to the house was about the standard. They also had 50 foot deep backyards!

What if we just altered zoning laws so they don't restrict high-density residential buildings?
- Oh, they didn't change that, people living there need to get real good at dodging golf balls.

This is literally how ussr built things
- Micro-Districts are a solid idea. While the USSR had many problems, this was not one of them.
- That’s way over simplification. Higher density neighborhoods have been a feature of cities Ed since cities existed, and plenty of successes were planned ahead.
  Soviet Union had many failing but the general idea is not one of them. Perhaps the failing here is centrally planning such districts without regard for what people want.
  Modern societies instead use things like zoning to guide development while leaving the details up to developers. we’re used to complaining about zoning when it creates exclusive single family home neighborhoods but it can also serve as a tool to guide walkable or transit oriented neighborhoods or more affordable housing without relying on central planning

Keeping all of the trees while also building a 40,000 unit apartment building on the same lot is gonna be a bit of a trick. Unless the building is 30 stories high. That might be normal in New York, but that’s not something you’re gonna see very much outside of the city.
I’m all for vertical city building, but keep in mind what is likely to happen in your local community.
- I'm pretty sure you've misunderstood the idea here in a couple of ways
  
  No, I get it. I was just trying to make a joke.
  Apparently, it wasn’t very funny.
  ¯(ツ)_/¯

But where would we play golf?

Yeah but then rich fucks wouldn’t have a place all to themselves to be rich fucks, so that’s a fuck you, poors, just be rich like us, thanks.

🤤

I guess that technically counts as a public sex forest then
- Lovely weather we're having in Minneapolis this weekend!
  Edit: Here, for anyone who didn't get the joke. NSFW
  
  Thank you so much for sharing this.

https://youtu.be/Z4w7H48tBS8

Just as soon as somebody buys the LA and and develops it into affordable homes. Because I'm sure as hell never gonna be rich enough to fix a stupid golf course into something useful.

I wish we'd just do non luxury apartment high rises with underground parking in HCOL areas. Then there is room for green spaces, and more people can be accommodated.
- Parking is always expensive, and even more so for underground. The counter argument is that you can build much cheaper without, so the units can be more affordable.
  I don’t entirely buy that, since developers could already choose less high end finishing for more affordable units and they usually don’t.
  Also, “less parking” is not the same as “no parking” and that hinges on their being useful transit or walkability. I know that’s one of the points of a district like this, but this is why you do need to think big, so that an individual developer can make the choice
  See also “transit oriented development”. Boston is one of the cities that has been pursuing that idea. Recently it was extended into the suburbs with new higher density zoning being a requirement for every community served by the regional transit authority
  
  All that goes up are luxury units that nobody can afford and it is usually the same stick built BS that is inefficient in use of space and adds more tarmac

There isn’t any context on where this is, but:
there aren’t enough golf courses to really impact housing supply
parks and recreational facilities also serve a societal good assuming they’re accessible and serve the community as a whole
golf courses aren’t usually located along transit
- There are enough to reduce housing supply issues.
  Private golf courses provide little to no benefit to anyone especially after we factor in the environmental costs.
  Golf courses not being on pubic transit is the only part I agree with.
- 1 and 3 are not good reasons not to try something like this. 2 feels like bad faith because this isn't either of those things, it's a golf course. Less than a quarter of golf courses in the US are freely open to the public, and a quarter of them are members only. That's thousands of golf courses that are taking up space/land and water and returning next to nothing of value to the community or the environment, or worse than nothing in many cases.
  Source for numbers: https://mygolfspy.com/news-opinion/study-percentage-of-public-vs-private-courses-in-the-us/
  
  Sure I’m not arguing against, per se, more that it’s not enough to be worth worrying about.
  Of the private golf course that are where people would want to live and where transit would be viable, that would not be better turned to more public parks and recreation, and where a locality can afford eminent domain, go for it. I’m sure there there are such projects. However I’m also convinced it would be a lot of work and expense for a vanishingly small percentage increase in housing supply.

Michael Moore in one of his books suggested we repurpose golf courses into public housing. They tend to be in better school systems to begin with so there’s an added bonus.

That area should hold about 400 people, not 40,000. The trees won't survive unless they can see the sky.
- In the United States of America, the average lot size for a single-family home is 0.19 acres (which is equivalent to 8,176 square feet). This math means that around 5 average-sized single-family homes can fit into one acre of land.
  (Source)
  So even if we're talking regular single-family homes you can already build 800.
  Many trees do very well in the shade, as long as their crowns get sun part of the day. Leave some room between buildings and you can easily build 4-6 stories tall and still have trees in between. You can easily fit 20 apartments per acre that way. That's about 3200 apartments. With 3 people per household that's close to 10k people.
  I agree 40k is optimistic, but 400 is way pessimistic
  
  Look at me on my .23 acres, essentially a sprawling compound. It's really a perfect size.
  I don't think the setup here is at all realistic. ADA would probably have some qualms with it. I have seen golf courses repurposed for residential though, and it's great.

or we could not sacrifice our very limited green space to property developers overlords?!
i'm not saying don't use green space better.. but keep it green.
ps: i live in a very high density area and love it... but build up not out.
- Public park > private golf course
- I see a lot of people saying build up not out, but you still need a place without houses to build denser housing (parking oceans should be place #1). I would keep way more of the green space than they do (and add in some community gardens?), but this might be a good option depending on the surrounding (sub)urban context. Its certainly not a good option for every (or probably most) golf course, but its going to be the best option sometimes.
  
  my suburb is build on old light industrial area. close to everything, great transport and bike paths.
  the main problem we have is land banking property developers just sit on land and wait for its value to go up so they can flip and make bank for doing nothing. also what gets built is to maximise profits not provide appropriate housing for all, so we get a lot of "executive suites" with italian tiles, european appliance and other wank shit that's only there to drive up the price.
  the answer as always is good quality public housing available to all (see vienna and singapore).

What are all those stupid shapes, and why does it look like there about 3 feet between each one?
- Looks like normal European four-story buildings. I live in one with some strange corners. No Problem with them.
- There's no reason cities have to be boring squares. And those shapes could preserve the most trees.
  
  There's a reason houses aren't shaped really oddly. Also a reason there's more space between them.

Cause no way in crap would that many people living that close together not cause issues
- Under which rock have you been living? Ever heard of "a city"?
- imagine being so antisocial that you'd rather drive to buy some fucking bread
- you should visit honkers

housing
no parking, all walkable BS
You people just want to give a huge middle finger to every single person with mobility issues, don't you?
Fuck you.
- I have mobility issues and car infrastructure does nothing for me and in many cases makes my life harder.
  Nobody said you couldn't build paths between places.
  Fuck you.
  
  For people with no assistance that just have to walk, it's ableist and hateful. And if you really had mobility issues, you'd be against these dystopian car-hating people, too.
- Fun fact: massive parking lots also cause problems for those with mobility issues. So do really wide roads. Dense and therefore walkable city infrastructure is also the most disability-friendly city infrastructure, full stop.
  
  God, I don't want to imagine how awful it must be for a person with mobility problems to cross those wide ass roads they have in the US...
- What. Effective public transport and less car centric infrastructure is far and away better for those with mobility issues. Walkable areas does not mean the abolishment of cars, it means more effective use of space and transport. Try visiting Austria or the Netherlands. Getting around is far, FAR easier than any city in the US. I have mobility issues, and require a cane to get around if I'm standing for significant periods, and yet the easiest time I had getting around was the time I spent in Vienna after living in different parts of the US for my whole life.
  
  How do you have an easier time with a cane walking around everywhere than riding in a fucking car? I think you're lying.
- Why wouldn't it make more sense to provide mobility assistance like motorized chairs for the 1% of users who need such to get them to and from transit options including parking even if its not house side.
- Lol, what makes you assume they couldn't build parking?
- I fucking hate me, so this tracks

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