If you divide the amount of land in Brooklyn by the population, the average person gets ~1049 sq ft of land, not accounting for roads or parking or sidewalks or anything like that. How much of yours would you like to allocate to grass?
none.. I have a 2500sqft house on a 10k sqft lot. I am eradicating the grass, rewilding as much as possible, increasing veggie garden with drip/soaker hose irrigation, expanding strawberry/blueberry patch. it is a multi-year project but it is one of those things that make life worth living.
And that's fine as long as you realize that it isn't physically possible for everyone to do that in many cities. It cannot fit into the land area of the city.
And nobody is proposing a law that requires you to knock down your house and build a multi-family unit that fills the lot, but if that's what somebody else wants to do on their property, just let them.
I agree and I paid a premium on my housing so I could have that yard. Technically, I am within the city (about 500 m from the city limits up against a more rural city. I completely understand the need to build more housing in a denser configuration. Where I live is in an old mill city, and they keep trying to revitalize downtown, but it never seems to take. I think they need to, as we geeks say, scrub and reinstall.
It doesn't matter to me if they build housing as long as it doesn't block my view of the sky and it doesn't add to light pollution.
A lot of the older housing is shit-quality tenements. To give one example of the crappy environment, there was a music festival in downtown, I walked from home (about 3 miles) because I didn't want to add to the parking chaos. I had to walk through a rundown section of town and saw a couple of families with their kids in the yard. The yard was all asphalt. Not a hint of green or dirt.
If we are going to build denser housing with social housing, we have to have green places where kids can play. I am a big fan of rewilding with few trees; that should be the kind of place kids have to play. With dirt to dig into, flowers they can smell, have room to plant a basic garden. let no kid be left inside.
we may not be able to give them a 10,000-square-foot yard, but we can make green commons, and part of their education would be understanding their responsibility to themselves and to others in how to take care of a common space.
As for knocking down my house, well, some "should-ers" have told me that I should do just that. Knock down my house (1930s era) building, put in the 4 to 6 apartments that could fit on the lot, and take a loss on the building to make it affordable.
> It doesn't matter to me if they build housing as long as it doesn't block my view of the sky and it doesn't add to light pollution.
I wish the single-family homes would stop adding to the light pollution. It seems like every Tom, Dick and Harry with a garage has a motion sensor connected to a million lumens worth of electric light that gets triggered every time the wind blows or a car drives down the street.
> A lot of the older housing is shit-quality tenements.
One of the main problems with housing policy in the US is that there is a group of people who want home values to go up and another group who want housing to be affordable and it should be fairly obvious why they can't both be satisfied at once. So instead we get rubbish political responses like rent control and The Projects and the creation of slums that nominally give poor people somewhere to live while all but purposely making it awful or otherwise restricted to Those People to make sure that no upstanding citizens would ever live there instead of paying four times what it should cost for proper housing.
We have to overcome that in order to have nice things.
> If we are going to build denser housing with social housing, we have to have green places where kids can play.
Sure, and higher density construction is one of the things that allow it. One and two-story homes make extremely inefficient use of land.
Suppose you have to fit 1000 people into a million sq ft of land and you want them to each have 1000 sq ft of indoor living space. If you build one-story buildings, you are not going to have an inch left for a single tree. If you build four-story buildings, they could each have 2000 sq ft and you'd still have half a million square feet left over from which to carve out a nice park or community garden.
> As for knocking down my house, well, some "should-ers" have told me that I should do just that.
Everybody wants to tell everybody else what to do. We need to reject "everything not mandatory is prohibited" and just let different people make different choices.
Giant cities are terrible. Everyone should strive to leave. I do agree that we remove building codes and ordinances that prohibit one from doing what he wants on his own property.
