Read up on the Pacific Electric Railway. It makes the transportation history of Los Angeles all the more tragic. Ever seen the movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”? “Hey Mister. Ain’t you got a car?” “Who needs a car in LA? We’ve got the best public transportation system in the world.” Most US cities had an extensive system of surface transit that was thoroughly extirpated and forgotten in favor of automobiles.
To be clear, I didn’t mean to use Bozeman as typical of “a city”, and what works well there probably won’t work well in other places (though it might work well in other college towns).
I think that the most relevant definition of “a city”, here, would be the region covered by a transit system. In Cleveland, for instance, that would cover the entire county, which includes the entirety of the city of Cleveland itself, and multiple rings of suburbs around that metropolis.
In that transit system, there are some buses that stay entirely within the downtown area. Those are generally pretty well-used (of course, it helps that most of the downtown-only lines are fare-free). Some lines go from the outer parts of the area to downtown, and those are generally pretty crowded for about an hour in rush hour (when there might be a bus every five minutes), but almost empty for the rest of the day (when there can be anywhere from a bus every fifteen minutes, to one every hour). And some lines never go downtown, and those are always pretty empty.
I lived in Minneapolis proper - two miles from the city center (very close to where George Floyd died) (I now live in the near suburbs). I did not own a car and worked downtown.
- Getting groceries was difficult. There aren’t a lot of grocery stores in the city. You couldn’t get groceries delivered and could only carry so much on the bus.
- The bus would come during rush hour only every 20 minutes - if I had to leave work mid day - the bus was every half hour.
-Buses would pretty much go downtown - and then you’d transfer from there. Which was fine for me, I worked downtown. But a lot of jobs around here are actually in the suburbs. - There was no way to get to my parents who lived 30 miles outside the city.
- Minnesota gets COLD and stays COLD. Waiting at a bus stop for 40 minutes can be literally dangerous.
I’ve spent some time in London and between the underground, the overland trains, the buses and the ferry, its such an easy city to get around in. And city in this case includes the suburbs going out for 30 or 40 minutes by train any direction. Getting to someplace like Croyden is easy - that’s a lot like the Chicago example - Croyden is really the city like Elmhurst is really part of Chicago.
And yep, part of that has to do with when cities were developed (Boston is easier to get around in and much more walkable than Chicago). Part of it has to do with London investing in a world class transit system at a point in time where it was affordable (putting in something with the scale of the London Underground now would be cost prohibitive - and U.S. projects ALWAYS cost more than their other first world counterparts - see Boston’s Big Dig for an example of why we aren’t sinking subways) - so for London its now a matter of maintenance and expansion.
To the OP, we have solar panels on our single family home - we still need natural gas for heat. But the solar takes care of almost all our electricity needs - its a lot of solar panels and requires a lot of square footage roof to do. I live a mile and a half from shopping and drive a Prius - and don’t drive it often (it gets gas less than once a month). Both my husband and I work from home - but as tons of people who live in smaller spaces than we do discovered - that can take some space to achieve sanity (especially since he spends his days on the phone with clients) - so the house almost always has people in it - and there isn’t extra space provided for us during the work day by our employers. The house was built 20 years ago, to high energy standards that we specified - as opposed to a developer throwing in the cheapest windows possible.
Another anecdote. We are in a 8 apartment building. According to an energy assessment, it doesn’t make sense for us to upgrade our 30 year old windows, unless we upgrade the insulation for the walls, which are stucco-covered block, as well.
And, because anything we want to do to the building, has to be approved by all 8 owners, we probably won’t do anything to make this building more eco-friendly, because at least one of the owners won’t pay for it / doesn’t think it’s necessary.
Last year we voted to replace the lighting in the shared garage with LED lighting and motion sensors. Out of more than 29 owners, only 1 owner, the one in my building, voted against it.
The other thing I would add to the equation is elevators. For a tall building, there will be 1 or 2 elevators, which is an energy cost most single-family homes do not have.
Huh? Those are cities by the US definition, because they are officially cities, not by my definition. I’ve only even heard of two of them, so can’t really say much about them.
But if it’s a city in itself then, by definition, it’s not a suburb.
1285 people per square km really doesn’t sound densely populated to me at all. That’s half the density of Exeter, England, which is not a place anyone here would ever consider densely populated.
I agree that we’re not comparing apples and apples here - I did say the same myself.
… not in the US.
I suspect there are legal differences at work here, as in the US one city very much can be a suburb of another city. It’s actually pretty common.
It’s not a matter of a legal difference- SciFiSam said way back
I don’t mean the “technical” UK definition of a city, which is a place that has officially been granted city status, because that includes a couple of teeny tiny places, but what we actually think of as a city, which a lot of people quite reasonably confuse with “large town.
She hasn’t ever been talking about the legal, technical definition of a city. She has been talking about form and function - perhaps it would be better to replace “city” with “urban area” but she’s trying to draw a distinction between places with enough density to have good public transportation to travel within the city/town/village and places where either there is no good public transportation or where the public transportation is best used to travel to a another city for work.
In a hi-rise there are a lot of extra things that add up.
Usually there is a lobby and other common areas as well as all of the hallways which are climate controlled and lit 24/7.
Also, in many, things like hot water are provided by the building and not the individual unit owner/renter. In my case, the building provides hot water, gas for cooking and driers and air conditioning (we have to pay for our own heat with in-unit heaters which are terribly inefficient).
I have no idea if those things are more efficient on a massive scale or if we’d be better off with each unit having its own hot water heater and so on. On the upside, you never run out of hot water like you can at home with its own water heater.
Elevators certainly eat a lot of electricity but probably not as much as you might think (still a hefty electric bill from them though).
That has to be weighed against 230 single family homes (my building has 230 units). Also consider land use (hi-rise has a relatively small land use footprint).
This is one of those things which is complicated. My building is only 5 floors, of which 4 have apartments. The elevator is hydraulic, so there’s also the potential of an oil spill, and is almost 30 years old, so it’s not the newest technology.
If we were comparing a set of row houses, let’s say 4, to 4 individual houses, compared to a building with 4 floors, one apartment per floor, which would include an elevator, probably the row houses would win out, except for the footprint. But each structure has it’s own challenges in regards to how plumbing, heating, etc. is handled. A newer building is going to have a lot more of the newest eco-friendly technology, but building it will have it’s own ecological impact.
Actually, I would go with the footprint needs of a single house to be one of the biggest reason a house is ecologically unfriendly. Especially if the house only has one floor.
Pavement is horrible. It doesn’t allow water to seep through. Many houses have driveways which are big enough for 2 cars, plus extra width. This is in addition to the garage space, which is more footprint, only for cars. So a typical house has concrete or something similar, for at least 4 cars.
As soon as the house has two floors, the garage shares the footprint of the house. But it’s still part of the framework of the house and therefore the insulation, wiring and plumbing just became a bit more complicated. Most people have their garages partially heated. I say partially, because the walls and ceiling between a garage and the rest of the house is not the same as an exterior wall.
Parking houses are better, as are many modern apartments, as they reduce the footprint for cars. More than half of the cars in my complex are in underground parking, covered by greenery. The only link between the building and the gararge is a hallway, which is also underground.
Communal underground parking may be more ecologically friendly but they can be a safety hazard for residents, especially the women. Which is an obstacle to some “eco-friendly” types of construction - keeping them eco-friendly AND secure from bad elements of society. Low-income high rises also turned out to have safety problems in other communal building spaces.
Just about the only downside I can see to (comparably new) apartments is elevators, and possibly some disadvantages to high density if the city is badly designed when it comes to transport. Some of the advantages do go away if the building is very tall.
The advantages are lower footprint and more efficient energy usage in most cases, which I consider huge advantages.
I see that it might be different in the US, where apartments are sometimes associated with low-income and crime, but here it is often just as desirable to live in an apartment, and most people own instead of rent.
Over here if you rent a unit in a building it’s an “apartment”. Seen by most as low-class.
If you own that same unit then it’s a “condo” or “condominium”. Definitely more up-scale - wealthy people would NEVER say they “rent an apartment”. If they are renting they’ll claim they’re “renting a condo”, just never, EVER will someone with pretensions to high status admit to renting an apartment. No matter how nice.
And exception for New York City, where even upper class and wealthy people might admit to renting.
Just throwing that out there because without knowing that subtlety to American English international discussions of these topics can become very confusing on all sides.
I was made aware of the difference between an apartment and a condo in another thread. It just seems to me to be strange that there is no common word for it. It is the same thing, only difference is whether you rent or own. So is this discussion only about the kind that you rent?
Over here you would never know if anyone rented or owned, unless they told you. Most people own, unless they are young and haven’t been able to buy yet.
Eh, it’s a cultural difference. In the US own vs. rent is an important indicator of social status. I agree, the distinction from outside the US culture seems nutty at best.
Not sure, actually - as an American I assumed it was based on the word “apartment” but that could be a product of my own cultural bias.
I suppose we could ask for clarification or a consensus.
I assumed it was not based only on rentals- mainly because I don’t see how an X-unit rental building is automatically a different level of eco-friendly than the identical building next door which is an X-unit condo or co-op building. Especially since there is such a thing as a detached condo , which looks exactly like a single-family house
Yes, we’ve been talking about urban areas; the problem is, with (sub)urban sprawl, what used to be small to medium city centers are now part of an extended city landscape. I am well aware of the extensive streetcar network - common to many urban centers in the North American cityscape that grew up in the early 1900’s when electricity was common but cars less so. Toronto managed to avoid losing much of their network. Unfortunately, street cars were typically not as fast as private cars, and more easily delayed by traffic. More cities now are going to LRT (R is for “Rapid” for various definitions of Rapid.) These tend to have automatic crossing gates and decicated right-of-ways, which are difficult to retrofit. Both Calgary and (I think) Minneapolis, the private right of way becomes city street downtown where its’ too late to grab property. Calgary has closed one city street IIRC to traffic for the LRT but still regrets now not burying the downtown stretch as Edmonton has done, while Ottawa had no end of issues with their LRT being buried through the downtown. .The point is, nothing beats a full subway for speed and convenience, but it requires an active and dense downtown, as generally that’s where all lines lead.
As I said before (Dangerosa reiterates) suburban sprawl without good transit encourages jobs to locate outside downtown, thus lessening the need for transit to downtown and encouraging car ownership. Shopping from the suburbs (or almost any other errand) requires a car, due to sprawl. Zoning and low density discourages corner stores, which also cannot compete, even if small stores could compete with large supermarkets. The old European/downtown lifestyle where one visits the market nearby on the way home several times a week is replaced with weekly automobile grocery trips, often consuming large amounts of fuel to drive a long distance, hauling home carloads of groceries and filling a large fridge and home freezer which consume even more energy.
Our whole lifestyle in North America is centered around the automobile and the result high carbon consequences, except for the few who live in the core of cities.
As for building upgrades - unfortunately (fortunately?) fuel prices, especially natural gas for heating and power generation, are very low and likely to stay that way absent a serious carbon tax. As a result, all the potential upgrades to save energy have rather poor payback potential, thus making them unlikely to applied soon. Some utility companies offer government rebates to encourage this, but stll the payback tends to be poor. We also see the side effect of a form of “tragedy of the commons” where collective metering (i.e for things like water and hot water) mean limited connection between an individual effort at conservation and the resultant cost savings.
Just out of curiosity, what do most condo association rules typical say about expensive upgrades? Do they need unanimous consent, majority, 2/3?
While a condo is “owned”, ownership of a condo usually involves membership in an owners’ association, which will put contractual limits on modifications that can be made to the building. What exactly those limits are will vary from place to place (it’s a matter of the individual contract, not of the law itself), but it’s not uncommon for major changes to a building to require agreement from all of the owners of units in that building. Or maybe just a majority, or maybe a set supermajority. Getting the requisite number of owners to agree may or may not be easier than getting the landlord of a rented apartment to agree. And there (or may not) may be some improvements that a condo owner can, in fact, unilaterally implement, to their portion of the building or grounds.
For that matter, even ownership of a complete plot and standalone house often involves membership in a homeowers’ association, which will also usually put some restrictions on modifications a homeowner can make (though usually not as restrictive as for a condo). Though it’s also possible to own a home without an HOA.
It was not my intention to draw a distinction between owning and renting, but rather between single-family and multi-family homes, especially high-rises. I suppose there might be some small distinctions in terms of what one can or will do with their apartment/condo unit, practically speaking, depending on whether they own or rent, but I was looking mainly for ideas of how to make a SFH less of an ecological disaster. But hey, these side discussions are interesting too!
Regulatory obstacles, at whatever level they exist (Federal, state, local, HOA, etc.) are also part of the equation, too.
I wouldn’t have thought it made much difference - the tenants might not have much say, but someone owns the property.
Although my flat (the lower two storeys of a four storey house) is rented, it’s social housing, and I actually am allowed to add solar panels to the back roof (the lower levels extends out further than the upper). However, it’s too slightly small for solar panels (at the moment, anyway). I guess one advantage of single family homes is more roof space per home, so more space for solar panels, if the owners choose to get them.