In this picture of damaged buildings in the town of Joplin you can see what appear to be houses towards the left. What confuses me is that these houses don’t appear to have driveways, it looks like the people who live there have to park in the yellow-lined spaces on the far left and then walk to their home. Is this a common layout of housing? It seems inconvenient especially when you have a lot of shopping or are taking a large delivery (or it’s raining hard) to have to park so far from your front door.
I believe the idea is to give the nieghborhood a more park-like appearance and foster more of a community feeling by not having as many roads and driveways between the neighbors. As you mention there are some trade-offs.
I’d bet those aren’t single family dwellings but rather multi-family townhouses.
Those are probably multi-unit townhouses. When I was in college I lived in a development like that – big parking lot, footpaths to each townhouse that had four or six apartments in it.
They were…
Wow, it’s like a Residence Inn. (Well, the old ones before they started building cheap towers instead.)
Looks like it’s Section 8 housing, given that the Housing Authority building is right nearby.
(Thanks to this Google map overlay for the spring tornadoes.
Agreed on the multi-unit theory…note that each building had two sidewalks leading up to what were, presumably, front doors.
Even the farthest ones aren’t really a long walk. It’s telling that we can see this as an inconvenience, not being able to park the car right next to the house. The cars are still much closer than a very convenient train or bus station would be.
The particular design looks uninspired to me, but the concept of decoupling the parking from the individual residences I think can be a great one. One neighborhood I like has a block of houses which surround and share a courtyard. Most of the parking is placed so that you end up parking outside the block, walking into the courtyard, and then up to the particular house. It makes the courtyard itself a very strong transition between “out” and “home.”
Each of those structures is actually two apartments, if I’m not mistaken. I’m not sure where that is, but there were a few such complexes in the Blendville neighborhood where the tornado touched down, & probably more further east.
On W. 24th St, but I don’t know Joplin - it’s about the only place where it bends. The larger building on the side is on W 26th/Gabby St. (See the map link previously posted.)