"She said back when the work on Missing Middle started, there was a prevailing notion of “protecting the neighborhoods”—which more or less assumed people and multifamily residences were a nuisance. That people living in multifamily buildings don’t count as members of neighborhoods."
I feel like that's the real problem here. Sometimes it feels like we're a country that just hates people and feels like they are just a threat and a burden. That it's a high ideal to spread out and avoid other people as much as possible, and that the more people that are around, the worse things get.
I think a lot of this comes from failed public policy and urban planning after the 30s that lead to very disfunction cities here in the US. Now we're coming up on the limit of sprawl and coming to terms with all the problems it creates. But it's so hard to unwind the entrenched anti-urban mentality because folks are worried about losing what little they have (itself a result of our land use policies basically mandating that folks live beyond their means). It's a wicked problem that I fear will only lead to unavoidable catastrophy similar to the Great Depression that spawned it.
The problem with the YIMBY movement is that it's fundamentally about cramming as much housing as possible into a given area - often citing many politically-charged progressive/leftist reasons for doing so. It thus ends up being viewed, not without justification, as an unholy alliance between progressive activists advancing a culture-war agenda and huge corporate developers who only want to cover the land in five-over-ones.
Zoning ultimately has to be about aesthetics and the "lived experience", if you will, of residing in a given community. I prefer human-scale, mixed-use urbanism not because it advances abstract political goals, but because (generally speaking) such places are more pleasant, enriching, and convenient to live in. But building such a community is a totally different proposition from simply "upzoning" an existing car suburb. And then, everyone (and maybe the same person, at different times in their life) has a different idea about what type of urbanism is the ideal.
Covering up agendas with idiolect jargon will eventually be detected and sorted out by those who watch these conversations as coalmine canaries. Speak truthfully and avoid the appearance of obfuscation.
In some cases the in-law apt doesn't need new building. In my neighborhood many houses now have boarders or lodgers. Most of the boarders seem to be in a type of bilevel house that was mass-produced in the 70s. The two floors have the same plan, with two beds and bath on each floor. Upper has living and kitchen, lower has family and laundry. Two apts, ready to use with a little switching of appliances.
"She said back when the work on Missing Middle started, there was a prevailing notion of “protecting the neighborhoods”—which more or less assumed people and multifamily residences were a nuisance. That people living in multifamily buildings don’t count as members of neighborhoods."
I feel like that's the real problem here. Sometimes it feels like we're a country that just hates people and feels like they are just a threat and a burden. That it's a high ideal to spread out and avoid other people as much as possible, and that the more people that are around, the worse things get.
I think a lot of this comes from failed public policy and urban planning after the 30s that lead to very disfunction cities here in the US. Now we're coming up on the limit of sprawl and coming to terms with all the problems it creates. But it's so hard to unwind the entrenched anti-urban mentality because folks are worried about losing what little they have (itself a result of our land use policies basically mandating that folks live beyond their means). It's a wicked problem that I fear will only lead to unavoidable catastrophy similar to the Great Depression that spawned it.
The problem with the YIMBY movement is that it's fundamentally about cramming as much housing as possible into a given area - often citing many politically-charged progressive/leftist reasons for doing so. It thus ends up being viewed, not without justification, as an unholy alliance between progressive activists advancing a culture-war agenda and huge corporate developers who only want to cover the land in five-over-ones.
Zoning ultimately has to be about aesthetics and the "lived experience", if you will, of residing in a given community. I prefer human-scale, mixed-use urbanism not because it advances abstract political goals, but because (generally speaking) such places are more pleasant, enriching, and convenient to live in. But building such a community is a totally different proposition from simply "upzoning" an existing car suburb. And then, everyone (and maybe the same person, at different times in their life) has a different idea about what type of urbanism is the ideal.
Huge corporate developers probably built the home you are sitting in.
Covering up agendas with idiolect jargon will eventually be detected and sorted out by those who watch these conversations as coalmine canaries. Speak truthfully and avoid the appearance of obfuscation.
In some cases the in-law apt doesn't need new building. In my neighborhood many houses now have boarders or lodgers. Most of the boarders seem to be in a type of bilevel house that was mass-produced in the 70s. The two floors have the same plan, with two beds and bath on each floor. Upper has living and kitchen, lower has family and laundry. Two apts, ready to use with a little switching of appliances.