https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/20/opinion-broadway-upzoning-parking-chicago/
“If the city becomes more dense, where will people put their car?!!” he asks.
A threat actor using bad faith arguments.
The L train: am I a fucking joke to you!?
deleted by creator
This is wild because Chicago is supposed to be one of our two walkable cities. Yet it’s still inexplicably about parking.
Edgewater has no shortage of mass transit, that guy’s just a dick.
SF and NYC are VERY walkable. Other cities are quickly becoming better at it.
I usually only hear of Chicago and NYC as being walkable. I’ll look at SF a bit more.
Removed by mod
Documenting mod abuse https://lemmy.world/post/33273727
Wow this is some bullshit. Fuck these mods and this shitty community.
If you or anyone else has feedback on the way this community is moderated, please reply to the thread PumaStoleMyBluff linked. If you could point out the particular aspect of my reasoning you think is wrong, that would be ideal. Thanks.
(BTW, a mod that was actually abusive would’ve nuked this whole comment chain by now. Instead, I’m actively inviting complaints in a different community that I don’t control. Think about that.)
Edgewater and uptown have multiple train stops and tons of bus stops. It already has the infrastructure to support more density and there’s lots of high rises already.
Increasing density without also reducing dependence on car ownership just increases the vacancy rate or makes people leave the cars they need in places that make it everyone’s problem.
Cite a source for this claim, because otherwise I’m inclined to remove your comment as misinformation. I have never heard of a single instance ever in which a multifamily housing development went vacant for lack of parking.
Can we not mod on vibes like the other place? Like I agree with you on this issue but that doesn’t mean I want you to mod away the opinions I disagree with that are not malicious.
Asking for a citation is exactly the opposite of modding on vibes.
Also, there’s a difference between an opinion and a false statement of fact.
Can you read me the second word of their post? It seems to me you are the only one here misconstruing opinion as fact.
“My opinion is that 2+2=5”
See? It’s not a false statement of fact as long as I call it an “opinion!” /s
Yeah, no, that’s not how it works.
We don’t need reddit mods on this platform
Can you cite which “rule 1: misinformation” you used to justify removal? As far as I can see, Rule 1 states that you should remain civil when faced with ideas you don’t agree with.
Spreading misinformation is inherently uncvil – in fact, it is much more uncivil than using a harsh tone, in terms of its capacity to degrade the quality of discussion. This community is not a ‘safe space’ for sealions, concern trolls, or other bad-faith commenters, no matter how polite.
Speaking of moderation policies, rule 1 prohibits being insulting to other people in this community, not (for example) insulting big truck drivers in the abstract, which is why the four reports you just made will not be acted upon.
Maybe not a single dwelling, but imagine NYC, which IS highly walkable. Now imagine how dense it is, but without walkability. Without public transportation. Without bike lanes. NYC works because it has those things.
Since when is the uptown Chicago neighborhood unwalkable and lacking transit!?
Moderator: by all means please delete disinformation.
First of all, it has those things because it has density. They become viable because of the density, not the other way around. Insisting that it has to be done backwards is a common NIMBY trope.
Second, what you wrote isn’t a citation.
You come across as insufferable, even to those who might agree with you.
In another context its a humorous thing for a .ml account to say, but your 100% right that the mod is doubling down on an L take
I am also insufferable. You’re not wrong.
I am also insufferable. You’re not wrong.
Same, but in other ways. The first step to solving a problem is to recognize it exists, but unfortunately it is also not the last step.
Its a pretty obvious conclusion.
or makes people leave the cars they need in places that make it everyone’s problem.
My my forgotten city its hard to go downtown due to lack of parking and it kinda keeps it in disrepair. University students want to save money on parking, so they clog a near by park.
Its kinda harsh to just remove a comment that makes sense and is not even against the premise of the community.
The complaint that people will park in places other people don’t like is just an argument that parking isn’t restricted enough. If you don’t want street parking to be used, remove it! If you don’t want students parking in parks, stop them!
My my forgotten city its hard to go downtown due to lack of parking and it kinda keeps it in disrepair.
Second, perhaps the real problem with people living downtown isn’t its lack of parking, but rather the people living too far away. Increase the density of the housing near downtown such that more people live in walking/biking distance, and you solve the problem.
Its kinda harsh to just remove a comment that makes sense and is not even against the premise of the community.
The claim that a housing development will remain vacant because it doesn’t parking is a false statement of fact, despite the commenter’s characterization of it as an “opinion.” I gave him the opportunity to show proof, but he chose not to. The argument he made is also repeating a common NIMBY bad-faith argument. Whether he himself intended to write in bad faith or not, that adds up to misinformation, and misinformation is uncivil (violates rule 1).
By the way, just as an example of the sorts of judgement calls I’m making as a moderator: this comment was expressing a similar misconception, but was not removed because it didn’t make quite that level of specific actionable claim.
The complaint that people will park in places other people don’t like is just an argument that parking isn’t restricted enough. If you don’t want street parking to be used, remove it! If you don’t want students parking in parks, stop them!
Exactly, so no solution. And does not help our movement to end car dependence.
Still doesn’t change my critic to your modding in that instance. Abusing public parking else where is a problem, and doesn’t spur calls for public transit. Not sure why we need a citation on an obvious conclusion.
From other comments its clear you are the one misunderstanding what was said and your hubris is blinding you. Bad look for our movement. Makes us look childish.
Still doesn’t change my critic to your modding in that instance. Abusing public parking else where is a problem, and doesn’t spur calls for public transit. Not sure why we need a citation on an obvious conclusion.
“Not providing parking causes the housing development to remain vacant” is a lie, not an “obvious conclusion.” If you think I’m wrong, prove it by citing an example of a housing development that couldn’t find tenants or buyers because of lack of parking.
The part about causing parking problems elsewhere is not why the comment was removed.
Look, I think you are going off topic a bit. I understood the comment to have said that if we don’t expand transit infrastructure we should not expand housing. They then made an a priori case that doing so is just straining already over used infrastructure. Which makes sense and don’t see why the citation is needed.
Said infrastructure includes parking lots and connection to public transit. If you don’t hook up the new construction to public options, then people will drive. And when there isn’t extra parking they will just park where ever. That means other business they are not visiting. Parks they are not visiting. Blocking parking for neighborhoods they don’t live in. That is how I understood that comment. It seems I am not alone in this reading the rest of the comments either. It is a conclusion that does not need a study. Worst of all it does not mean people will ask for more public options it just re-enforces the trend that we will want more parking.
Quite frankly you should get over your hubris and having someone else read the comment to see if you walked away with a mis-read. I think you are good natures, but you are doubling down on an L take that no one was making.
The comment was not even a pro-car talking point the way you are making it out to be. Just saying we need to be prudent with our city planing. Ironically what strong towns is about. Please don’t miss the forest because of the trees.
E: Commented this on the wrong side of the thread lol
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken
The notion that you have to have transit beforehand (or at least simultaneously) in order to justify density is that kind of answer. It’s intuitive, but it’s wrong. Short of master-planning an entire new community from the top-down, like they do in China maybe, density always — always — comes before transit. This is because if you don’t already have density-induced traffic problems demonstrating the need for transit, The Powers That Be use it as an excuse to never build it! That’s just how city planning and transit planning in America work, and it’s not going to change no matter how ass-backwards any of us might think it is.
In reality, there are three options when planning new development:
- Refuse to build the new development because it’s too dense and would ruin the traffic.
- Insist on including a fuckton of parking and maybe even turning the adjacent street into a stroad in the name of “capacity.”
- Build the new development without the fuckton of parking, knowing full well that it’s going to make driving there suck, because you understand that the public will Deal With It and adjust by walking and biking more.
Only one of those three options (edit: option #3, if it isn’t blindingly obvious from context) is good urbanism; the other two perpetuate car-dependency (either because of sprawl or because you’ve created urban canyons of car sewers lined by parking decks, respectively).
“Option #4, build mass transit along with the development” is not and never will be on that list. Insisting on it is equivalent to picking option #1. Mass Transit only becomes a possibility after the area has a well-established pattern of picking #3, and even then it takes years or decades after that.
If you’ve been around as long as I have, having spent decades not just online but especially IRL in planning meetings, listening to people arguing for mythical option #4 even though you know (because they’ve also been at the meetings for years) they understand the above perfectly well and are absolutely NIMBY concern trolls whose actual preference is #1, you’d become more skeptical of the argument.
But even then, it wasn’t just that general misconception / ‘comment difficult to distinguish from trolling’ that caused me to remove the comment. It was the addition of the much more concrete, specific, and easily provable (if it had been true) claim that development without parking causes vacancy – not traffic/parking problems for the surrounding area, vacancy for the development itself, specifically – and then refusal to prove it after I gave him the opportunity, that pushed it over the edge.
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Don’t have a source, just first hand experience. I work adjacent to multi-family construction and parking is one of the common items of discussion. It’s treated as an ante item that they would love to dispense with, as developers would love for every square foot of their footprint to be spent on units or other spaces which can be directly realized as revenue.
But that wasn’t the argument I was making, and, whether intentional or not, that’s not what the person in OP’s screenshot was saying. We were saying that there needs to be an examination of the local infrastructure to see whether it was able to support additional density before approving additional density. I’m not using this as an argument to say density bad, I’m saying that if the fucking water mains on the street don’t support another hundred units of draw during peak hours then building a hundred units on that plot is a recipe for disaster unless the water main is upgraded first, and the same goes for the transit infrastructure.
Based on the downthread comments, it sounds like this area would be great for adding additional density so there’s no problem there, but there should be a check to see if something is going to break if you add 300 car-dependent commuters to a city block someone was able to grab on the cheap because it had no meaningful access to the transit infrastructure of the area.
Don’t have a source, just first hand experience. I work adjacent to multi-family construction and parking is one of the common items of discussion.
The key thing to understand is that just because NIMBYs bitch about something, doesn’t mean it’s true. By repeating their nonsense as if it were fact, all you’re doing is spreading misinformation.
I’m not using this as an argument to say density bad, I’m saying that if the fucking water mains on the street don’t support another hundred units of draw during peak hours then building a hundred units on that plot is a recipe for disaster unless the water main is upgraded first, and the same goes for the transit infrastructure.
…but there should be a check to see if something is going to break if you add 300 car-dependent commuters to a city block someone was able to grab on the cheap because it had no meaningful access to the transit infrastructure of the area.
This argument doesn’t follow because transit infrastructure is not like water: it’s an optional enhancement, not a necessity. Specifically, people can still walk or bike if they don’t have it.
People can’t own cars if they have nowhere to put them. If you make no provision for parking you won’t get “300 car-dependent commuters;” out of necessity, you’ll get 300 non-car-dependent ones instead.
The bottom line is that transit never gets built unless the density justifies it first. That’s just how it works, in terms of winning Federal funding and such. If you refuse to build density on the grounds that there isn’t already transit, you will never get density or transit. NIMBYs understand this, and that’s exactly why they make that bad-faith argument.
Uh transit is not optional unless you want to revert to company towns. And you’re just moving people from private transit dependence to public transit dependence. Think about that for a second. Your asking people to give up their private and personal nearly unrestricted transit access and become wholly dependant on public infrastructure and governing bodies. How many people here trust and support their local governments right now. Especially enough to become trapped to “how far can you walk in 100+ weather”
Uh transit is not optional unless you want to revert to company towns.
What are you even talking about? If you don’t have public transit in a densely-built area, you can just fucking walk! Or bike, for that matter. Well-designed cities are compact enough that you can get anywhere you need to go even without transit. Transit is just an extra layer on top, so that you can more easily choose to be picky about going to store B across town instead of walking to store A in your neighborhood, but you don’t need to choose store B over store A. (And even then, in a well-designed city even store B is reasonable to get to at least by bike, if not on foot.)
I have absolutely no idea what point you think you’re making about “company towns” and “private transit.”
Think about that for a second. Your asking people to give up their private and personal nearly unrestricted transit access and become wholly dependant on public infrastructure and governing bodies.
Streets are public infrastructure. You’re already dependent on it, even if you’re driving a car.
Especially enough to become trapped to “how far can you walk in 100+ weather”
The answer to that question is “plenty far enough, in a well-designed city.” And the “in 100+ weather” part is just strawmanning, BTW – even with global warming, it’s the exception, not the rule.
I would like to see initiatives to make the area downtown car free and not allowing additional parking to be made in the area between the rivers, congress, and the lake. I would love this area to be car free in my lifetime.
Or they could invest in mass transit and park and rides?
If I lived in a city like that, I doubt I’d bother with a car.
I work in municipal development, and here’s the cold facts:
There’s little support for the extreme cost of transitioning to 24/7 universal public transit because we have infrastructure for cars.
Without universal public transit, most people still need to own a car.
While park and rides can work for places with good public transit, their real advantage is allowing businesses to share parking lots so that you don’t have to have multiple parking spaces avaiallble for the same car on a day trip (work, shopping, whatever), the owners of the cars need a convenient, secure place to store their car, and the best place to do that is where they live.
And the biggest reason - who is gonna develop the system? The thing about roads is they’re cheap and easy. Yeah - on aggregate they’re super expensive, but they usually aren’t built by the government. When a developer wants to build, they build clout the part of the infrastructure needed to support their development, which usually means connecting to and expanding existing systems.
Over time, zoning changes can mandate additional requirements for future designs, but the expansion takes decades at best. You know all those sidewalks that are 60 feet long and connect to nothing? Those aren’t the result of someone just being dumb - that’s cities telling developers they have to build out a sidewalk network when they develop a site. But it also requires everything to redevelop, so you’ve got a bunch orlf orphaned sidewalks.
Then we decide mixed-use paths for bikes and pedestrians are better, so now you’ve gor 3ft sidewalks connecting to 12ft paths. And because of accessibility requirements, it has to be concrete, which requires more impervious cover and therefore more stormwater infrastructure, but the old sewer system is located where the upgraded stormwater needs to go…
The world isn’t Sim City where things can be master-planned and executed. Cities exist across centuries, and its needs and planning theories change over that time. It’s messy. And the reality is we’ve discovered that roads and cars are very adaptable and relatively cheap to extend.
I work in municipal development, and here’s the cold facts
Spoken like a true city planner, LOL. I love how even when you folks are trying to give the “cold facts” you still end up being gentle and diplomatic about it. 🥰
Here’s my bottom-line conclusion to the above comment, from someone who doesn’t work in municipal development and thus hasn’t been required to develop that ‘public official’ speaking habit:
In order to get the government to pay to build transit, it has to be made painful to drive first. That means you have to build the density first even when you don’t have transit to support it yet.
I know a lot of you folks even in this community don’t want to hear it, but as an activist who’s been on the other side of conversations with municipal development people for decades, that really is how it works.
And the biggest reason - who is gonna develop the system? The thing about roads is they’re cheap and easy. Yeah - on aggregate they’re super expensive, but they usually aren’t built by the government. When a developer wants to build, they build clout the part of the infrastructure needed to support their development, which usually means connecting to and expanding existing systems.
I think it’s worth noting that, while infrastructure is often initially built by developers, subsequent maintenance usually falls back on the government. That means, from a municipal development perspective, that it’s super-important to go back and retrofit density to build up the tax base, before the extreme maintenance costs of building entire streets just to serve single-family houses on large lots bankrupts the city. For a long time, cities have been getting by funding maintenance of existing infrastructure using those developer impact fees in what amounts to a gigantic Ponzi scheme, but that quits working once the frontier of green-field development moves beyond the jurisdictional limits. After that, densifying becomes a financial imperative, whether the NIMBYs like it or not.
The way public infrastructure expansion works isn’t a ponzi scheme.
We typically require a maintenance contract from the developer for the first few years and a special tax for the owners of the developed land that lasts between 10 and 30 years, depending on the specifics of the agreement. That tax is put into escrow, and by the time the infrastructure needs to be maintained, there’s enough money in the fund to maintain that portion of the infrastructure off of interest.
The mistake many cities make is putting that revenue into the general fund. But if you put it into dedicated funds, it can’t be diverted to other city expenses and used by the next Council to cut property taxes while leaving future maintenance unfunded.
That sounds less like “the way public infrastructure expansion works isn’t a ponzi scheme,” and more “my city is the exception to the rule that does it right.”
Makes sense, actually. Think about it, you can live in a car but you can’t park in your house. /jk
Yet we park in a driveway and drive through a parkway. 🤦♂️
I understand we need to move away from the personal automobile as it is currently conceived, and they are building houses without parking and adding transit infrastructure and such, but if only the very wealthy can afford to buy the housing being built, these are not the same demographics of people who use transit infrastructure and therefore require parking, gobbling up all the available street parking in the area and causing businesses to suffer as they can’t be accessed by a wider majority of people from the suburbs. It’s a cart before the horse kind of thing but I don’t see it stopping anytime soon unfortunately.
if only the very wealthy can afford to buy the housing
Build it without parking. The price will drop. Now we have more affordable housing :-D
What?? Pretty soon you’re gonna be suggesting that there are better ways to transport people around than cars and that we could build better public transportation infrastructure with the tax payers money so that the same tax payers can afford mobility for a lot less while saving time in getting around and polluting a lot less the atmosphere that allows them to breath!
What’s this? Do you want to make sense? We wouldn’t want to start making sense now, would we?
…
Jokes aside now, when it comes to housing, the problem is not a lack of housing in itself necessarily. The crucial part of the problem resides in property hoarding by the wealthy and upper middle-class as long term investments in the form of assets to flip, all while they still obtain revenue in renting them to the highest bidder. Airbnb and similar initiatives destroyed affordable rent all around the world. This to say, that a lot of people in the unprivileged categories didn’t also mind screwing their peers to get ahead. This is what the capitalist system does. It re-enforces sociopathic behaviour in people through them valuing the monetary tokens more than the lives of those around them and the very world in which they have to inhabit. This is what Elizabeth Magie tried to explain the world when she created “The Landlord’s Game”. It has been explained and demonstrated as a predicted model for a very long time. And we all lose in the end. Always.
Saying that the government needs to interfere and create measures to prevent the furthering of this crisis is incomplete without acknowledgement of the required rewiring of the general public to stave off the centuries old social conditioning of appealing to the worst in human condition.
The default setting of a common citizen is not to contribute to a life shared by all that live around them and in turn benefit from the same efforts from others. It is instead to try and survive them all and and not needing the slightest from them. Which is never true, never possible but nevertheless the reason why we are always in this mess. And the reason why we all lose, and even those who lose the least, they still have to inhabit a world that would be better if this wasn’t true.
Individuality also explains the housing crisis in the sense that more and more people have the desire to live alone. And therefore more houses are required. Which in a world like the one we have, that desire is perfectly understandable but in itself also a reinforcement of the loop that causes it.
It’s a mess.
Jokes aside now, when it comes to housing, the problem is not a lack of housing in itself necessarily.
The problem is lack of housing specifically in the places where the high demand for it exists.
The notion of prices being high because everything is getting bought up by investors is an easy, comfortable scapegoat, but that’s all it is – a scapegoat. Fundamentally, landlords and flippers don’t make money unless they have an occupant to lease or sell the housing unit to. Sure, you could say that the speculative bubble holding vacant properties and waiting for them to appreciate is making the housing crisis worse, but that only comes into effect after prices start to spiral and thus cannot be the underlying cause that made housing an attractive investment for speculators in the first place.
The real underlying cause is simple: supply is not being allowed to meet demand because of zoning codes that restrict density.
Saying that the government needs to interfere and create measures to prevent the furthering of this crisis is incomplete without acknowledgement of the required rewiring of the general public
You might be right in the way that you mean, but I want to talk about how you’re also right in a different way: people are too often wired to see rezoning for density as “interference” by the government because changing the law is a government action, but in reality it is undoing the previous interference the government did when they restricted the zoning to begin with.
Individuality also explains the housing crisis in the sense that more and more people have the desire to live alone. And therefore more houses are required. Which in a world like the one we have, that desire is perfectly understandable but in itself also a reinforcement of the loop that causes it.
The way I see it, the problem isn’t that people need to be rewired to be less individualist, the problem is that the government needs to stop indulging their desires by subsidizing them at public expense. I have no problem with somebody “wanting” to live in a single-family house instead of an apartment/condo, but I have a very big problem with the government subsidizing that want by forcing developers to build single-family houses when the market demands dense housing, displacing all the other people who could’ve lived there and causing the massive negative externalities of car-dependency in the process.
I can’t speak for every place on earth, but where I live in the south of Portugal, that is very much the problem. And affordable long term rent has been destroyed in all of Europe by Airbnb and similar initiatives. And no, this is not a scapegoat theory. All you have to do is access housing registrations and match against citizenship registered to addresses in the same area and then you start to see the problem. There’s a lot more houses than people that have their permanent address registered to the same area. So then the problem can’t be housing in itself. When one starts to look closer we start to notice a lot of titles to the same people and the same last names as we all would expect. The house to person ratio is quite disproportionate in its distribution. I can tell you that this has been exposed time and time again over time, but since 2008 that it has indeed gotten worse and more so exponentially every year since then.
The problem in just simply building more housing is that the same thing will happen to those new homes. They’ll just be absorbed into this same phenomenon of asset flipping and market speculation in which even rent, not just owning property reaches prices beyond what locals can afford with long term rent even becoming entirely unavailable due to Airbnb and other initiatives alike.
That’s why the governments have to intervene. Especially at a local level. But if a rewiring of the general population doesn’t occur, it will just be lobbied back to the same as before. As it has happened. Because what is simply enforced is not learned. And this is what you are referring to when you speak to the public aversion to government intervention. If not understood and learned, what is then witnessed is the same rope pull of do and undo between governmental administrations, that wears off and alienates the public.
But yes, sometimes the problem in itself can be an increase of population density that exploded beyond the local availability of houses. And then new housing development is required or people will have to choose (more like forced without an option) to relocate.
That is why I said “the problem is not a lack of housing in itself necessarily”. In which I meant it as not always the source of the problem. I didn’t say the lack of housing in itself is NEVER the problem.
There are many contributors to this issue.
Environmental changes and war are also intertwined as they both lead to resource depletion, and become part of the same feedback loop that plays a part in the whole of the Metacrisis. In which both will cause mass migrations. And mass migrations will always cause a disparity between demand and availability in housing, which leads to more inflation and more conflicts over resources, which in turn leads to more mass migrations and on and on and on… This is “systems thinking” and the general public has not caught up to the descent we’re in yet. Or is in denial and refusing to engage in the face of its enormity.
Most problems that are detected by most people are real and feeding into one another. What I said is true and what you said is true and anyone who doubts that is possible is not engaging with the complexity of the world as it is.
Well, I have no experience with Portugal, so I will concede that, regarding Portugal, you may very well be correct, and the speculative investment housing bubble has some underlying cause other than North American-style Euclidean low-density zoning.
I believe that my argument does apply in North America (as well as other English-speaking countries that have copied American city planning ideas, such as Australia, New Zealand, and to a slightly lesser extent, the UK), though.
deleted by creator
gobbling up all the available street parking in the area and causing businesses to suffer as they can’t be accessed by a wider majority of people from the suburbs. It’s a cart before the horse kind of thing
On the contrary, building transit before density is what’s putting the cart before the horse. Transit cannot get the funding it needs to get built until after the congestion caused by density demonstrates that it’s necessary. Refusing to build density before transit just means you never get either.
Also, the notion that it’s wrong to build density that adds customers within walking distance for fear of losing customers driving in from the suburbs is pants-on-head nonsense.
You know what really helps looking at other “upcoming” dense cities. Then build from their faults, like there is no difference when you do something and it turns out to be wrong… like there are are more uses cases to have a rainbow line or upgrade tracks/switches. The more people you can move the more profit for your city and business. It’s all about how quickly can you get money to move from hand to another. Make it accessible for all, as an example certain parts of north and south sides have elevated boarding, super helpful and safe for cyclists and transit users. But having it only one side really says you’re desperate to save pennies over human safety/lives.
@Davriellelouna People who choose to live in the suburbs should be limited to working in the suburbs. No writing for a big city paper, making policy decisions for the city as an employee or consultant, policing the city, acting in downtown theaters, displaying your art in downtown galleries, even working in downtown banks. If you love suburbs and suburban lifestyles so much, marry them and don’t stray from them.
People who choose to live in the suburbs should be limited to working in the suburbs.
When WFH got popular during covid people essentially did that. And lots of smaller shops in the city suffered because of it. I know of at least 3 places I used to frequent that shut down from the lack of foot traffic around office hours post covid.
A lot of small businesses got hit from COVID and WFH growing nailed their coffin.
Oh please! You think the sort of people are actually writing according to their possibly non-existent moral system? You think it would make any difference if the author was forced to rent in the city?
