I often hear that mixed-use zoning (i.e. Euro-style walkable urban planning) is illegal in the US. Zoning laws will always prioritize auto-centric and oil-friendly infrastructure. But which laws specifically prohibit human scale development and how can we get them repealed? What laws can we enact in their place?
So that’s an urban density test, with added cartwheel fun.
When selecting a place to live last time I moved, I set up a balanced scorecard (as one does). One of the highly-weighted criteria was “how many places can I sit down and have a beer within a 20-minute walk of my house?” The answer for the place I moved to was 34. Other places I considered scored even higher than that, but lost out on other criteria. For the previous place I’d lived: 3, though if you expanded to 30 minutes, it was 8. Still not bad if you have a bicycle. English (and many other European) cities are far more concentrated than those in the US. In the US, the closest you’d get are San Francisco, New York, Boston and a few other eastern cities.
The ironic thing is that I quit drinking beer a couple years ago. Luckily, other services like cafes, restaurants and coffee houses follow a similar pattern.