Here’s Atrios:
I Want A Big Yard In A Walkable Community
But you can’t have it! Or, more
specifically, if everyone has a big yard the community ceases to be
especially walkable. That isn’t to say that you can’t have developments
with yards relatively near to retail, so that there is stuff within
walking distance. You can still have corner shops or similar, but
having sufficient residential density to support significant
neighborhood-serving retail isn’t really compatible with everyone has a
big yard.Keep your yard! Just understand the tradeoff.
or you can move to tyson’s corner, and have neither!
But “big” is a highly relative term. I live in a very walkable neighborhood (as evidenced by the amount of walking my family and I do in it) and we have a front yard that’s big enough for lots of flowers, a big tree, and has plenty of room for the kids to play. The back yard is big enough for my 18×3 vegetable garden, two large lilac bushes, the grill, a patio, and more playspace.
Does that make it a big yard? It’s bigger than my north side neighbors’ yard and smaller than the one to the south of me.
Maybe I can’t have a lawn that Atrios defines as big and still live in a walkable community. But I can have one that’s big enough to make me happy (or unhappy, when it’s time to weed.)
Where are the kids making forts and whiffleball, the adults playing frisbee or practice chipping, the badminton games, the sunbathers and the other stuff that explain why you have a big yard in the first place?
If these activities are no longer popular, a big yard is an expendable expense
Like many things, there’s usually more satisfaction from the idea that you *could* do all the things that a large yard offers than actually doing the things that a large yard offers. I think we all know how the economy would suffer if we only purchased stuff that we were actually going to use.
Really, the benefit of actually using the item rather than simply owning it is secondary, and often enough using the item *decreases* the satisfaction. I have a lot of fun dreaming about my upgraded computer hardware. Then I finally assemble it and turn it on, and suddenly it’s just another computer. ho hum.
I’d rather have a smaller yard, a walkable community and public spaces (that is, a shared yard).
The average lot size in Rancho Santa Fe (covenant) is probably well over 3 acres. It has 45 miles of riding/walking trails despite being less than 7 square miles in size.
I would rather ditch the yard if it makes ditching the car easier.
Where are the kids making forts and whiffleball, the adults playing frisbee or practice chipping, the badminton games, the sunbathers and the other stuff that explain why you have a big yard in the first place?
They’re in the BACK yard, behind the fence. For good or ill, the main reason for a big yard is space between you and your neighbors. With the trend toward smaller offices (and cubes) even for management, and the general clutter of life, folks will pay a premium for a peaceful, quiet yard.
I would love to live in a walkable neighborhood with more shared public space except for the problem of having to deal with the breeders’ brats. As it is now, in our neighborhood park, small kids are warned by their parents not to talk to strangers and parents have actually been known to call 911 if a stranger approaches their kid. Who wants to share public spaces with brats you can’t talk to or, even better, discipline?
What makes places like Brazil a hell of a lot more fun is that there you can freely approach any person of any age in any public place and have a human interaction, something missing in Amerika.
I’d rather have a smaller yard, a walkable community and public spaces (that is, a shared yard).
Posted by: wintermute at Aug 6, 2008
?
Second that completely….
I really don’t get what people use lots bigger than this for.
We’re on half-acre lots. I tell people that my neighborhood is zoned for clear fields of fire.
Just find the population dense, but walkable community you want to live in, buy 2 houses (or lots), knock one down and use that space for your yard.
A few comments…
-If you have a yard, you can send the kids out to play and still get something done around the house (like laundry, cooking dinner, etc.). This is not possible if you are at a park a few blocks away.
-If you have a large yard and your kids play in it for four hours (likely nonconsecutive) every day – pretty heavy use, I’d say – that still leaves 10-12 hours a day that it is not being used, so at a glance (say, by a passing bicycler) it would seem that it gets virtually no use at all.
-People with yards still go to the park, often quite frequently. They aren’t really substitutes in my experience. The yard is for things like digging in the sandbox, climbing on top of the playhouse, playing in the inflatable pool or slip-n-slide – the park is for, mostly, riding your bike to, but also for playing on the jungle gym, riding bikes/scooters on the unused tennis court, playing baseball on a real baseball field. We aren’t going to lug our inflatable pool to the neighborhood park nor do we have room for a fullsize baseball field in our yard.
I might add that public parks don’t alleviate the situation as much as one would like.
Kids can’t do much playing in small townhouse yards. If you make parks into communal yards, expect to spend more time or money on child care. You can’t just let kids below 9 or 10 years old run around in the park without supervision. Furthermore, treehouses (and–depending on the municipality–volleyball,badminton and barbecues) are not allowed in public parks. Not to mention the convenience factor. Public goods aren’t always strong substitutes for private goods.
The US is large and diverse. You can have any kind of community you like, just move there.
It seems not many people in this comments section have a lab.
I’m willing to walk a mile to the train station or half mile to the market if it means I can grow my own vegetables and berries or play with the dog without getting up from my rocking chair. Some people would prefer otherwise.
“I would rather ditch the yard if it makes ditching the car easier.” Consider a horse?
To me, it’s more of a problem that some people want to dictate which of the two you need to choose…
We who are neither urbanites nor suburbanites, which is to say country folk, consider this a rather narrow definition of ‘walkability’ anyway. We can walk around for hours without leaving our land, getting exercise in walking and swimming (the gym), seeing nature (the park), and thoroughly enjoying ourselves. Closer to home I am harvesting veg out of the garden (the grocery). If I am feeling sociable I walk down by the road and say hi to the neighbors, if not, I walk down by the riverside and see wildlife.
By ‘walkability’ standards all of this scores absolute zero, however, because I do not pay someone else in the process. I don’t buy the veg at a shop, scoring zero. I don’t pay taxes for a nearby park, scoring zero. I don’t join a gym, scoring zero, etc. Worse yet we cook our own food (no restaurant bill).
This makes it clear, to me at least, that this narrow definition of ‘walkability’ is really mostly about ‘shopability’ and a particularly suburban kind of consumerist attitude.
And we walk a heck of a lot more than we ever did in our years in a pre-50′s suburb.
Dan Stanley is correct about the change from grid-systems for residential areas to layouts featuring main roads with cul-de-sacs branching off being the most significant impediment to walkability. But, sorry to say, that’s a trend that looks to be sticking around (except in places like Austin, Charlotte, and Portland, that have banned cul-de-sac-centric land planning).
People have peculiar tastes when it comes to their living situations, and among them is the desire to live on a quiet street. Grid systems annoy residents because they encourage outsiders to cut-through the neighborhood, something cul-de-sacs prevent quite well.
I work for a developer/home builder and live in a new townhouse I bought from the company. Not only is my street very narrow with a dead end and next to no street parking; even the rounded cul-de-sac shape has been nixed and the street just ends, without any provision to turn a car around without using someone’s driveway. I’m personally surprised the county approved the plan, given it impedes access and maneuverability for emergency vehicles.
So I have the worst of both worlds. I’m far enough from the shopping center to require me to drive (though my husband will frequently bike there if he only needs one or two things from the store), and I have narrow streets and little extra parking, coupled with a small private yard.
I see it as more an issue of land use and design.
These are important, though I think density is also. Having a grid layout , or short blocks with lots of cross streets, helps a lot. It shortens distances. I’m also surprised that no one has mentioned sidewalks, which IMO make a huge difference in the walkability of a community.
Ethnic Austrian -
I’m pretty sure that if you left a 10-year-old (and certainly an 8-year-old) unsupervised for more than 30 seconds in the US that someone would call child services and you would be a “bad parent”. I have 2 cousins who are 12 and 9 and wondered why my aunt would not want to leave them home alone for short time periods during the day (20 years ago – ouch, was it that long – I used to baby sit my younger sisters when I was 12 for a few hours during the day) and that was what she was worried about. Not that they would be unable to care for themselves or burn the house down or get taken by someone, that she would end up losing the kids because she didn’t provide 24-hour supervision for them. And to be honest, someone calling child services was probably the most likely of those 4 events …
How big is big? And what are the criteria for ‘walkable’? We have about 1/3 of an acre, I think (it’s an odd-shaped lot) with plenty of space for yard activities like throwing a ball for the dog. It’s very quiet and green, and doesn’t feel at all urban–yet the neighborhood is very walkable. Not in the sense of grocery shopping just around the corner, but it’s about a mile downtown, which we do walk and bike even more often.
Seems like it’s entirely possible to surround a compact business district with a few thousand residents in detached houses with usable yards but within walking and biking distance of Main St — there are countless small towns in the U.S. exactly like this.
Didn’t our ancestors already solve this problem by inventing the courtyard house? In even the most dense and “walkable” urban environment (Beijing, ancient Rome, Golden Age Seville, Cairo, etc.) the courtyard house accomplished essentially the same thing as the modern “big yard” in terms of privacy, vegetation, and quiet.
A yard itself is not useful for me, but it is desirable for what it is correlated with: low crime and good schools.
An added benefit is not having to hear my neighbors shouting at each other or hacking up phlegm all night long, which is unavoidable in apartment or row house/condo living.
The thru-traffic situation is easy enough to solve but I suspect Americans won’t like the solution. Narrower roads so it’s harder to drive there (Swiss even put obstacles there you have to curve around which works wonders) and very low and strongly enforced speed limits. No I’m not talking about 25mph, think more like 10-15mph. At that point it’s no longer very attractive to leave the main roads.
eccdogg: “I really don’t get what people use lots bigger than this for.”
I “use” a big lot – and a big house – to reduce greatly the number of people who can afford to live next to me. The only time I want to see someone from the lower economic strata around my neighborhood is when they’re mowing my lawn or replacing my roof. I’ve spent enough years of my life in “walkable” and “econmically diverse” neighborhoods to know they’re not for me.
Back to the benefits of the main topic, and recapping my comments above, an increasing number of studies find that walkable neighborhoods have residents with lower BMIs (self-sorting a side-topic).
These neighborhoods (what Atrios describes) have replicable characteristics. Sure, neighborhoods can still be walkable (like mine, with some of these characteristics missing, and South Austin as described above).
But the more of these characteristics you have, the higher likelihood of walkability and greater health outcomes – both personal health and public health outcomes.
These characteristics? In loose order of importance IIRC:
o connected non-motorized network,
o gridded streets,
o short blocks,
o destinations,
o varied route choice (related to connectivity and gridded streets),
o interest along the route (yards, fenestration, articulation, landscaping, shops, things to look at, neighbors to talk to),
o perception of safety,
o slower (thus quieter) traffic (with ped separation, related to safety),
o dense developments,
o mixed-use developments
Further reading on the walkability topic.
ethnic austrian: “Allotment gardens and rooftop gardens do the trick
Doesn’t do anything for me. My garden will be just as large as I wish it to be. If it cannot fit on the yard I have, and it means enough to me, I’ll just buy a bigger yard. That’s how I believe all land should be “allotted”.
ethnic austrian: “Empty lawns are such a waste.”
Not for me. As I said before, big yards and big houses keep residences in my suburb expensive enough that people from the lower economic strata cannot live anywhere close to me. That’s important to me.
Big yards also give my dogs plenty of room to run around in when I’m busy and can’t walk with them.
Big yards throughout my neighborhood mean that fewer cars will be interfering with my access to the arterials that connect me to restaurants, supermarkets, and my golf course. There will be less traffic to maneuver around when I walk to the park with my dogs.
Big yards throughout my neighborhood mean that fewer people will be making noise within my hearing range.
Big yards throughout my neighborhood mean that more birds and squirrels and rabbits will be within a few hundred yards of me.
Big yards allow many of my neighbors to enjoy their own large swimming pools.
There’s lots to enjoy in places where homes are spread out. Those might not be important to you, but they are to me and my neighbors.
Dan Staley: “As long as you realize that the fraction who want what you describe is shrinking and you allow folks the freedom to choose density.”
What a joke! The demand for low density housing in the fast growing states is as strong as ever. People are voting for low density with their dollars all over my part of the country.
Dan Staley: “Not everyone wants what you want, so exclusionary zoning that provides only for 4 dwelling units/acre limits the freedom and importance you place on property.”
I think you miss my point. Not only do I want a large yard, but I want to live around only other people who can afford a large yard and a large home. The overwhelming majority of people who live in my upper middle class suburb want that also. So we voted in exclusionary zoning for our entire town. We don’t want people in our community who desire high density housing. They can live in plenty of commnities around Dallas and Fort Worth that allow high density housing.
Dan Staley, we don’t care in the least about the “freedom” of low income folks to live next to us. In order to prevent low income folks from moving in, we’ll gladly restrict the “freedom” of everyone to build high density housing in our town. Can that be any more clear? It certainly is clear to our elected officials, who have no intention whatsoever of changng our zoning laws.
Can that be any more clear?
Right.
You don’t like people and believe everyone else thinks like you do.
Dan Staley: “You don’t like people and believe everyone else thinks like you do.”
I like the people in my neighborhood and the people I work with. My golf buddies are fun to be around. Almost all of those folks have segregated themselves from the lower classes just as I have.
It’s not that I dislike everyone who is less affluent than I am. I just prefer the company of confident, successful people in the evenings and on weekends. Blue collar attitudes and blue collar culture? Been there, done that, moved on.
if you want to walk you can walk around your house for sevral rings
all things should be stick on
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