Walkability/No demolition

The problem

Some cities are known to demolish perfectly good buildings in the name of walkability.

Ideally, this should be avoided, because:

• There's already a housing shortage.
• Materials & labor are not unlimited either.
• Construction has an environmental footprint.
• For the same cost & resources used, they could have built the new homes elsewhere and left the old ones intact. That would help more to increase the overall housing supply.

Why it happens

• One approach to walkability: Add more housing to neighborhoods that are already walkable.
  • This requires densification, which is often achieved by demolishing houses to make room for taller condo buildings.
  • Neglects other approaches to walkability:
    • Bring more amenities to the suburbs
    • Create entirely new walkable neighborhoods
• Gentrification
  • In some cases, the total housing supply doesn't even increase at all; it just goes to the highest bidders.
• Policy makers wanting to avoid sprawl but misunderstanding what makes sprawl a problem 💬 discussion TODO: elaborate; also discuss the general tradeoff: wastefulness of "demolish+rebuild", vs deforestation of "use more land" (note that housing's land footprint is nothing compared to agriculture)

Solutions / Better approaches

• Repurpose buildings (instead of rebuilding from scratch) 💬 discussion TODO: talk about examples: commercial-to-residential and vice versa, also how you can convert houses into denser housing without building a whole new building. Lastly, why people haven't done that already: cultural expectations that a building has to look a certain way (inside and out) to match its particular purpose - we need to think beyond that, and stop stigmatizing cheap solutions
  • If a building isn't condemned, there's probably a solution that doesn't involve demolishing it.
• Instead of trying to add more housing to the city core, bring walkability to the other residential areas.

Case studies

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Discussions

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See also

• Walkability
• Subdivide housing
• Make suburbs walkable