Let's also get rid of golf courses in arid deserts in the midst of droughts
You had me at "Let’s get rid of golf courses"
This is a municipal course as well, so Seattle could literally do this. The city government doesn't want to.
This heavily neglected sidewalk, next to the fenced off golf course, alongside a high speed and very busy highway onramp just 2 blocks from a light rail stop, tells you just how much the city cares about the area.
There is no excuse not to cleanup and widen this sidewalk except apathy and malaise from the city.
But that runs counter to my need as a developer to bulldoze the entire area, build mcmansions 6 inches apart from eachother and at the barest mimimum of code (and perhaps even lower with a $$friendly$$ inspector), and then plant like a grand total of 5 trees that wont survive the first year.
Oh, and also pave everything over. Gotta pave everything over. No one wants green space! /s
When I was first committing to my no automobile lifestyle, one of the first things that struck me was the pavement. Fucking everywhere.
Next time your about town , take a mental picture. Then subtract the parking lots. The huge road. Put the buildings closer together. Make a nice bikelane, something just wide enough to get a fire engine down. Plant some trees. Pretty nice right?
Instead we have salted earth. It really is just rude to the earth. Fuck your car!
All I want is the infrastructure to be more convenient. I cant walk anywhere unless I want to spend an hour+ walking, which is just impractical when i need to run and grab some fucking garlic powder real quick in the middle of dinner.
Neighborhoods should have special commercial zoning inside of them to allow small shops, cafes, bakeries, etc
They do exist, even in the US. In general, look for a place that was built out before cars were everywhere
Welcome to why the sim city games don't have visible parking. They consciously removed parking spaces because it spread everything out too far.
Golf courses aren't inherently bad, but I think just about every one out there is weirdly exclusive and definitely wastes water.
Disc golf is a good example of a sport that doesn't monopolize space. It's built into existing trails. Generally speaking the public can't walk on golf cart trails (I'm sure there are exceptions)
There are city-owned golf course around me that I presume aren't that exclusive (I dunno, I don't play). That said, they're also implicated in draining all sorts of toxins into the local waterways.
I think they are inherently bad. They waste water, their turf needs constant care that puts nasty stuff into the rest of the water supply, and the space can't be used for anything else. It's not merely a game, either; it's the defacto way for rich people to network and talk about how they're fucking the rest of us.
Disc golf is just sticking a few goals into otherwise typical park. You are gently tossing a soft disc over maybe 60-90 meters so you don't need to be extra careful to make the way clear.
Golf by its nature demands huge amounts of space for few people to enjoy. Further the landscaping and irrigation demands on a golf course are immense. You can't have too many things on a course or people walking around, because a pretty hard ball comes flying from 200 meters away.
Minigolf is the superior and family-friendly alternative to golf, TBH.
Correction: The discs are not soft. They are hard and can be sharp-edged as well. Keeping throws away from walking and bike paths is super critical.
I do. It is a giant waste of fucking space and resources so that some rich people can enjoy hitting a ball around.
Not sure how it works in the US but here in Oz (where water scarcity is always present in our collective psyche) golf courses are usually placed on flood plains where it would be dangerous/too expensive to build housing. In addition most allow people to walk through them and many even allow dog walkers so they have quite a lot of public amenity.
I would still prefer if they were just designated as public parks rather than having huge swathes of grass that needed frequent watering, but they're not nearly as bad as most make them out to be.
Yeah, here in the US, golf courses can be extremely wasteful. There's two golf courses on my drive into the city, one is on a river floodplain, the other is a HOA golf course full of sprinklers that could absolutely be more housing. If I go the other way, there's another HOA golf course that could be housing too. So, to start with, there's three golf courses in a 15km radius.
One of the HOA ones is exclusive access to the surrounding retirement community, the other HOA one doesn't have a fence or anything, but idk if they chase people off. The one on the floodplain you have to pay to access the grounds.
Public golf courses are one of the best things about Oz. They provide a forest island for birds and mammals among the suburbs. Many golf courses have large swathes of natural bushland around them. They are often run by the local council, and are hence not for profit, and generally they are very cheap to play.
They make most of their money via selling beer and expensive golf clubs.
Turn them over to property developers, and they'll pave it with cheaply built single dwelling houses and flog them for way too much money resulting in just more urban desert and padded the obese wallets of billionaires.
That's if they are even build able. Some areas on floodplains and marshes that serve as a local soak for stormwater, hence the water hazards. Some are built on landfills that contain mu icipal waste or even asbestos, hence you can't risk putting houses on them where someone might dig up the asbestos or waste. Turning them into a revenue-generating forest parkland is one of the few good things you can do with that land.
The revenue earned by the golf course that is used to offset local parks and recs costs would otherwise be gained by taxing the local residents through land rates.
I used to hate on them a lot before I learned that the economics of public courses is way different to that of private ones. There are still some private courses, and I wouldn't be opposed to these being taken back into public hands and/or converted into affordable housing. To the gallows with the greedy exclusive fucktillionaires.
This is Jackson Park golf course, owned by Seattle Parks and Rec. It is one of the cheapest ways to play the game in all of Seattle.
It opened May 12, 1930. That's before the Interstate and the light rail.
There are plenty of places to shit on golf courses. This one is probably a miss. Without mixed use space, this area has been a heavy car use zone with low walkability. The section from the freeway north of the park is also a steep hill, reducing the accessibility of the area.
Additionally, the plans provided do not meet the requirements for development. Specifically, how are you going to get a fire truck to the six story buildings in the middle. Is there enough space for.emergeny services to maneuver and to keep a fire from jumping buildings.
Talk and MS Paint is cheap. Good urban planning in not.
The best part about this is that this will give blackrock more homes to purchase with cash to the rent out to people at ridiculous prices. /s
Sorry, I've become way to cynical these days about virtually everything, I need to go touch grass.
Same weirdos who defend the horrid use of land will say "Fuck off we're full" to immigrants trying to not die from wars and ethnic cleansing.
The US is very sparsely populated overall. Of course cities are densely populated, but that's because they're cities.
Why building something on it instead of converting it into a park? People love green stuff, you know.
I think the proposed homes near the highway should be forested as a buffer.
Why does it need to be a dedicated park? They're not proposing getting rid of all the green stuff. Even better than having green stuff some distance away is living in the middle of the green stuff.
@FooBarrington @Krik
Close the asphalt streets. Rip them up and plant trees and grass. A 9 foot wide pathway for pedestrians and bicycles in the middle. Subways and streetcars to transport people from one green belt to the next one road with access for emergency vehicles, public service vehicles and deliveries circling every 9 square blocks.
You're probably not going to save 95% of the trees given the major earthworks likely needed for managing sewage, stormwater, and other utilities. You'll probably save most of them, though.
40k looks pretty optimistic for the size and number of buildings, too.
probably not going to save 95% of the trees
I was wondering that too... maybe they meant: plant new trees, and the total number of new trees would be 95% of the number of old trees?
If you just repurpose for housing you just wind up with 40,000 people needing transit and overloading the system you're trying to promote.
We need to think beyond housing and towards having communities that largely provide the needs of the people living with them. Shops, offices, other non-office/shop jobs, and recreational activities need to be considered as well.
This is literally how ussr built things
Micro-Districts are a solid idea. While the USSR had many problems, this was not one of them.
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