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scoofy | on: Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat experience of Sutro Tower, San Francisco
This is why incrementalism is always the best method of development.

Spread out the pain so everyone only suffers a little. Spread out the development across different architectural eras. Spread out density to the point where you have diminishing returns.

The city shouldn't be changed overnight, but the city should be allowed to change an a consistent rate that slowly accelerates. A good example is to allow each building to only double the square footage of the median building within, say, a quarter-mile radius of the property being redeveloped. This means that SFH's can only become duplexes until duplexes are the norm. After that, quad-plexes can be built, and then when that's normal, you start building large, eight-unit, european-style flats.

This allows different areas to grow at different rates, while allowing density to remain generally uniform across neighborhoods. This incentivizes people who very much want low density to have a reasonably, predictably low-density neighborhood to invest in, while giving up the ghost when a piece of land is just to valuable to reasonably keep low density.

It would work, and would work quickly in areas where lots of development is needed.

hex4def6 | parent | next
Unless I'm misunderstanding, this solves for the problem in which someone wants to put a skyscraper in the middle of suburbia. In other words, based on the assumption that developers will always want to build bigger, but the locals don't want that.

Interesting to imagine what this city would look like. If it spread out evenly, you'd get a strange "bowl", with the original SFHs in the center, and high-rises on the periphery.

I guess in reality you wouldn't have such even growth; high rises would still potentially want to clump together for business districts, etc.

As buildings get torn down, you could do the recalculation; each new building can be x% above or below the local building density "slope". So over time, even the SFH areas could grow upwards, just at a slow pace.

scoofy | root | parent
There are various ways to do it, but I genuinely think uniform is better. Low density residential likely prefers, and naturally supports, low density retail.
dragonwriter | parent
> A good example is to allow each building to only double the square footage of the median building within, say, a quarter-mile radius of the property being redeveloped. This means that SFH's can only become duplexes until duplexes are the norm.

No, it doesn't; existing SFHs can, and have when allowed to, become duplexes, triplexes, and sometimes even quadruplexes without changing square footage at all, with doubling, you can go even further. All it takes is remodeling so that each subdivided unit meets minimum habitability standards (separate access, its own restroom, whatever other facilities are mininally required.)

scoofy | root | parent
This is a general argument assuming units being arbitrary. Units should be effectively arbitrary, but every town will have different rules.
dragonwriter | root | parent
> This is a general argument assuming units being arbitrary.

Well, no, it doesn't assume units are arbitrary, it assumes units are fixed square footage, which they are not. Under most regulatory schemes, there is a practical minimum size or a habitable unit, but a pre-existing area zoned for detached single-family units exclusively is unlikely to be comprised of single-family units that happen to also be the minimum square footage for a habitable unit.