u/LexingtonStreetswee

If Americans truly prefer car-dependent suburbia above all other ways of living, why is it illegal to build almost anything else? And yet, the neighborhoods that most Americans say they love when they visit Paris, or Charleston, or Greenwich Village are functionally illegal to build.

18 percent of US adults express a strong interest in living without a car, and 60 percent express some interest. The youth response may be even higher.

https://mateosfo.substack.com/p/americas-driving-mandate-dont-call

At first glance, Ulster House... doesn’t look especially different from the other houses around it. Clad in earthy clay shingles, the three-story structure sits beneath a leafy canopy of century-old trees, just like its neighbors do, and registers as a slightly taller family home.

Inside, however, the building tells a different story. It features five spacious apartments, including an elegant laneway house (read as ADU) at the back of the property, an arrangement that creates residential space for multiple individuals and families on a lot that previously made room for one.

The project was made possible by a recent ... policy change to allow multi-unit housing in residential areas.

The above is not local. It comes to us from Toronto Canada but it can be implemented in Lexington if we so choose.

Until about three years ago, small-scale multiplex development in single-family zones was not permitted, “making it a very risky proposition.” In 2023, however, a Toronto initiative called Expanding Housing Options in Neighbourhoods (EHON) liberalized single-family zoning to allow multiplex development on small lots, dovetailing with recent permissions for secondary dwellings in laneways and gardens. “Since the EHON initiative, we are seeing more and more come onto the market,”

https://www.begiant.ca/stories/places/citizen-developers-solving-canadian-housing-crisis

"In recent decades transportation practitioners would practically celebrate when people drove more total miles, because they linked that metric (known in transportation circles as “vehicle miles traveled,” or VMT) with economic growth. A new generation of practitioners (has) started to recognize that more driving doesn’t necessarily mean more prosperity."

More driving increases costs of living, as households spend more on gas, car maintenance, and insurance. Governments often pay to increase roadway capacity to accommodate more VMT, but such construction only induces more driving and fails to reduce congestion. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-more-states-are-passing-laws-to-help-people-drive-less/