Mixed Use Residential

Last year, I wrote a post about building towers in the middle of residential neighborhoods. Maybe that was a little dreamy but the point was to create a more mixed-use residential neighborhood. I look around where I live and it makes no sense to me that there are big, single family homes facing a very busy street. There is a missed opportunity here.

I think it would be a lot better for everyone if we had mixed-use development along the main roads inside residential areas. You would have shops on the ground floor, with wide, well shaded sidewalks with trees and benches and parking hidden behind or underneath. A wide variety of apartments would be on the two floors above. This would avoid having families being forced to build a second or third floor in their existing houses to accommodate an expanding family, yet still allow people to live close to their old house.

The young people living in those apartments would be within walking distance to their ‘family house’ and also to a walkable, dense neighborhood that is underneath them. There is a demand for places to live (and also for places to work), but they don’t all have to be big houses.