Chicago author says the city must stop building new apartments if there is no parking. Finding space to park cars is more important than housing.

Increasing density without also reducing dependence on car ownership just increases the vacancy rate or makes people leave the cars they need in places that make it everyone’s problem.
Cite a source for this claim, because otherwise I'm inclined to remove your comment as misinformation. I have never heard of a single instance ever in which a multifamily housing development went vacant for lack of parking.
- Can we not mod on vibes like the other place? Like I agree with you on this issue but that doesn't mean I want you to mod away the opinions I disagree with that are not malicious.
- Maybe not a single dwelling, but imagine NYC, which IS highly walkable. Now imagine how dense it is, but without walkability. Without public transportation. Without bike lanes. NYC works because it has those things.
- Its a pretty obvious conclusion.
  or makes people leave the cars they need in places that make it everyone’s problem.
  My my forgotten city its hard to go downtown due to lack of parking and it kinda keeps it in disrepair. University students want to save money on parking, so they clog a near by park.
  Its kinda harsh to just remove a comment that makes sense and is not even against the premise of the community.
- Don't have a source, just first hand experience. I work adjacent to multi-family construction and parking is one of the common items of discussion. It's treated as an ante item that they would love to dispense with, as developers would love for every square foot of their footprint to be spent on units or other spaces which can be directly realized as revenue.
  But that wasn't the argument I was making, and, whether intentional or not, that's not what the person in OP's screenshot was saying. We were saying that there needs to be an examination of the local infrastructure to see whether it was able to support additional density before approving additional density. I'm not using this as an argument to say density bad, I'm saying that if the fucking water mains on the street don't support another hundred units of draw during peak hours then building a hundred units on that plot is a recipe for disaster unless the water main is upgraded first, and the same goes for the transit infrastructure.
  Based on the downthread comments, it sounds like this area would be great for adding additional density so there's no problem there, but there should be a check to see if something is going to break if you add 300 car-dependent commuters to a city block someone was able to grab on the cheap because it had no meaningful access to the transit infrastructure of the area.
- What the fuck is wrong with you?
Edgewater and uptown have multiple train stops and tons of bus stops. It already has the infrastructure to support more density and there's lots of high rises already.
Documenting mod abuse https://lemmy.world/post/33273727
- Wow this is some bullshit. Fuck these mods and this shitty community.

This is wild because Chicago is supposed to be one of our two walkable cities. Yet it's still inexplicably about parking.

SF and NYC are VERY walkable. Other cities are quickly becoming better at it.
- I usually only hear of Chicago and NYC as being walkable. I'll look at SF a bit more.

I would like to see initiatives to make the area downtown car free and not allowing additional parking to be made in the area between the rivers, congress, and the lake. I would love this area to be car free in my lifetime.

Or they could invest in mass transit and park and rides?

If I lived in a city like that, I doubt I’d bother with a car.

I work in municipal development, and here's the cold facts:
There's little support for the extreme cost of transitioning to 24/7 universal public transit because we have infrastructure for cars.
Without universal public transit, most people still need to own a car.
While park and rides can work for places with good public transit, their real advantage is allowing businesses to share parking lots so that you don't have to have multiple parking spaces avaiallble for the same car on a day trip (work, shopping, whatever), the owners of the cars need a convenient, secure place to store their car, and the best place to do that is where they live.
And the biggest reason - who is gonna develop the system? The thing about roads is they're cheap and easy. Yeah - on aggregate they're super expensive, but they usually aren't built by the government. When a developer wants to build, they build clout the part of the infrastructure needed to support their development, which usually means connecting to and expanding existing systems.
Over time, zoning changes can mandate additional requirements for future designs, but the expansion takes decades at best. You know all those sidewalks that are 60 feet long and connect to nothing? Those aren't the result of someone just being dumb - that's cities telling developers they have to build out a sidewalk network when they develop a site. But it also requires everything to redevelop, so you've got a bunch orlf orphaned sidewalks.
Then we decide mixed-use paths for bikes and pedestrians are better, so now you've gor 3ft sidewalks connecting to 12ft paths. And because of accessibility requirements, it has to be concrete, which requires more impervious cover and therefore more stormwater infrastructure, but the old sewer system is located where the upgraded stormwater needs to go....
The world isn't Sim City where things can be master-planned and executed. Cities exist across centuries, and its needs and planning theories change over that time. It's messy. And the reality is we've discovered that roads and cars are very adaptable and relatively cheap to extend.
- I work in municipal development, and here’s the cold facts
  Spoken like a true city planner, LOL. I love how even when you folks are trying to give the "cold facts" you still end up being gentle and diplomatic about it. 🥰
  Here's my bottom-line conclusion to the above comment, from someone who doesn't work in municipal development and thus hasn't been required to develop that 'public official' speaking habit:
  In order to get the government to pay to build transit, it has to be made painful to drive first. That means you have to build the density first even when you don't have transit to support it yet.
  I know a lot of you folks even in this community don't want to hear it, but as an activist who's been on the other side of conversations with municipal development people for decades, that really is how it works.
  And the biggest reason - who is gonna develop the system? The thing about roads is they’re cheap and easy. Yeah - on aggregate they’re super expensive, but they usually aren’t built by the government. When a developer wants to build, they build clout the part of the infrastructure needed to support their development, which usually means connecting to and expanding existing systems.
  I think it's worth noting that, while infrastructure is often initially built by developers, subsequent maintenance usually falls back on the government. That means, from a municipal development perspective, that it's super-important to go back and retrofit density to build up the tax base, before the extreme maintenance costs of building entire streets just to serve single-family houses on large lots bankrupts the city. For a long time, cities have been getting by funding maintenance of existing infrastructure using those developer impact fees in what amounts to a gigantic Ponzi scheme, but that quits working once the frontier of green-field development moves beyond the jurisdictional limits. After that, densifying becomes a financial imperative, whether the NIMBYs like it or not.

Makes sense, actually. Think about it, you can live in a car but you can't park in your house. /jk

@Davriellelouna People who choose to live in the suburbs should be limited to working in the suburbs. No writing for a big city paper, making policy decisions for the city as an employee or consultant, policing the city, acting in downtown theaters, displaying your art in downtown galleries, even working in downtown banks. If you love suburbs and suburban lifestyles so much, marry them and don't stray from them.

People who choose to live in the suburbs should be limited to working in the suburbs.
When WFH got popular during covid people essentially did that. And lots of smaller shops in the city suffered because of it. I know of at least 3 places I used to frequent that shut down from the lack of foot traffic around office hours post covid.
- A lot of small businesses got hit from COVID and WFH growing nailed their coffin.
Oh please! You think the sort of people are actually writing according to their possibly non-existent moral system? You think it would make any difference if the author was forced to rent in the city?

I understand we need to move away from the personal automobile as it is currently conceived, and they are building houses without parking and adding transit infrastructure and such, but if only the very wealthy can afford to buy the housing being built, these are not the same demographics of people who use transit infrastructure and therefore require parking, gobbling up all the available street parking in the area and causing businesses to suffer as they can't be accessed by a wider majority of people from the suburbs. It's a cart before the horse kind of thing but I don't see it stopping anytime soon unfortunately.

if only the very wealthy can afford to buy the housing
Build it without parking. The price will drop. Now we have more affordable housing :-D
- What?? Pretty soon you're gonna be suggesting that there are better ways to transport people around than cars and that we could build better public transportation infrastructure with the tax payers money so that the same tax payers can afford mobility for a lot less while saving time in getting around and polluting a lot less the atmosphere that allows them to breath!
  What's this? Do you want to make sense? We wouldn't want to start making sense now, would we?
  ...
  Jokes aside now, when it comes to housing, the problem is not a lack of housing in itself necessarily. The crucial part of the problem resides in property hoarding by the wealthy and upper middle-class as long term investments in the form of assets to flip, all while they still obtain revenue in renting them to the highest bidder. Airbnb and similar initiatives destroyed affordable rent all around the world. This to say, that a lot of people in the unprivileged categories didn't also mind screwing their peers to get ahead. This is what the capitalist system does. It re-enforces sociopathic behaviour in people through them valuing the monetary tokens more than the lives of those around them and the very world in which they have to inhabit. This is what Elizabeth Magie tried to explain the world when she created "The Landlord's Game". It has been explained and demonstrated as a predicted model for a very long time. And we all lose in the end. Always.
  Saying that the government needs to interfere and create measures to prevent the furthering of this crisis is incomplete without acknowledgement of the required rewiring of the general public to stave off the centuries old social conditioning of appealing to the worst in human condition.
  The default setting of a common citizen is not to contribute to a life shared by all that live around them and in turn benefit from the same efforts from others. It is instead to try and survive them all and and not needing the slightest from them. Which is never true, never possible but nevertheless the reason why we are always in this mess. And the reason why we all lose, and even those who lose the least, they still have to inhabit a world that would be better if this wasn't true.
  Individuality also explains the housing crisis in the sense that more and more people have the desire to live alone. And therefore more houses are required. Which in a world like the one we have, that desire is perfectly understandable but in itself also a reinforcement of the loop that causes it.
  It's a mess.
gobbling up all the available street parking in the area and causing businesses to suffer as they can't be accessed by a wider majority of people from the suburbs. It's a cart before the horse kind of thing
On the contrary, building transit before density is what's putting the cart before the horse. Transit cannot get the funding it needs to get built until after the congestion caused by density demonstrates that it's necessary. Refusing to build density before transit just means you never get either.
Also, the notion that it's wrong to build density that adds customers within walking distance for fear of losing customers driving in from the suburbs is pants-on-head nonsense.

You know what really helps looking at other “upcoming” dense cities. Then build from their faults, like there is no difference when you do something and it turns out to be wrong.. like there are are more uses cases to have a rainbow line or upgrade tracks/switches. The more people you can move the more profit for your city and business. It’s all about how quickly can you get money to move from hand to another. Make it accessible for all, as an example certain parts of north and south sides have elevated boarding, super helpful and safe for cyclists and transit users. But having it only one side really says you’re desperate to save pennies over human safety/lives.