this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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Typical apartment density still results in a higher per-capita impact. Yeah - that home lot may take up a lot of space, but it'll be maybe 20-30% impervious cover. So you get triple the density with an apartment, but once you account for the parking (no garages inside the apartments), the higher percentage of impervious cover, and the lack of parkland dedication for the neighborhood you actually have more impervious cover per capita for multifamily than single-family.
And that's not even touching the extra traffic mitigation in the road network required to accommodate a dense development. Traffic isn't spread out, so more infrastructure has to be built everywhere to accommodate the choke points created by apartments. You throw in a 400-unit apartment complex you have to add another lane to the road, plus decel and turn lanes at the site. You add 400 single-family homes along that same road and it isn't a problem because you don't have the stress-point on the network created by having hundreds of cars using the same access point. When your peak-hour trips for a site get over about 100, you're gonna cause a lot of traffic.
The solution we've implemented with single-family to make it less impactful is a super strict tree ordinance. Any trees removed have to be double, triple, or even quadruple-mitigated (depending on tree size) and we additionally charge $500/inch for tree removal. We make it so fucking expensive to bulldoze nature they have to build around it.
If they "accidentally" kill a tree, they have to pay quadruple the fee, mitigate on-site, and development in the critical root zone of an improperly-removed tree is permanently prohibited. We've had million-dollar pieces of land made worthless when they tried to get around the rules.
Single-family builds around the trees and incorporates them into the neighborhoods. Multifamily just pays the mitigation fees and passes the bill to the residents.
Of course, not everywhere has the space for single-family. But if you've got the space, single-family can be way less-disruptive to the local environment than multifamily.
Triple the density sounds quite low. A five over one is going to be more like 6x or more the density.
It sounds like most of the rest of that is parking minimums and car-dependant roads. The last apartment I lived in just had on-street parking because it was in a walkable neighborhood and a couple min from the subway. I don't know how many people living there even owned a car.
The reality is that in most of the US a car is a hard requirement. Building apartments without parking means nobody will live there. You can't solve the parking problem without first addressing the need for cars. The US is sprea out enough that installing enough public transit to remove the need for a car would be the largest civil project in history.
You do both incrementally and simultaneously. Yes, this is a terrible idea in the middle of exurban sprawl. Don't build them there.
The people most likely to move into these buildings are the people best served by existing transit. If you're able to bike, train or bus to work, you're more likely to get one of those units than if you drive 120 miles to work.
A number of cities already have decent to ok transit networks. So you make it so expansions to those networks result in transit-oriented development, and upzone existing walksheds of your transit to transform them into pleasant walkable mixed-use areas if they aren't already. You improve things over time and people who prefer walkable, bikeable urbanism will move in.
Simultaneously simply isn't realistic. A developer isn't gonna drop 40 million dollars on a TOD complex without the transit being in place. Otherwise they're throwing away the money when the transit project falls through (which 90% do).