I live in a town in the west that is a population of about 13,000 but is well within the Seattle metropolitan area.
All of the new build in the city is apartment buildings with commerce on the street level. Sure there are miles and miles of suburbs around the city but downtown is all mixed use for new builds.
It’s not “common” per se, but if you wanted to live above the store you owned, as the poster was talking about, it would be easy to do so in the United States today.
It would not be “easy!” You would be severely limited in your choice of location due to lack of availability compared to other housing types, and what places you do manage to find would have an inflated cost per square foot compared to other housing types because they’re bid up by demand outstripping supply.
Maybe there are certain cities where it’s common enough to be “easy” in that particular city, but you can definitely not extrapolate that to claim that it’s easy on average in the US as a whole.
The US is a huge and diverse country, and you cannot make ANY generalizations that will apply to everything. You are right that “easy” isn’t the right word, but there are places where it is possible.
I guess my original point was that there are communities that are starting to prioritize mixed use buildings and it IS at least possible now. I’m not sure there was much new build that would fit this criteria in the 80’s or 90’s.
I’m not sure there was much new build that would fit this criteria in the 80’s or 90’s.
Or the '50s, '60s, or '70s. Maybe not even the '40s.
And that’s the problem: because it was illegal to build for like half a century, there’s a huge pent-up demand unmet by supply, and that’s what makes it very often inaccessible as per the meme.
I live in a town in the west that is a population of about 13,000 but is well within the Seattle metropolitan area.
All of the new build in the city is apartment buildings with commerce on the street level. Sure there are miles and miles of suburbs around the city but downtown is all mixed use for new builds.
Which means it’s going to be decades before enough redevelopment happens before mixed-use can be considered “common” compared to that sprawl.
It’s not “common” per se, but if you wanted to live above the store you owned, as the poster was talking about, it would be easy to do so in the United States today.
It would not be “easy!” You would be severely limited in your choice of location due to lack of availability compared to other housing types, and what places you do manage to find would have an inflated cost per square foot compared to other housing types because they’re bid up by demand outstripping supply.
Maybe there are certain cities where it’s common enough to be “easy” in that particular city, but you can definitely not extrapolate that to claim that it’s easy on average in the US as a whole.
The US is a huge and diverse country, and you cannot make ANY generalizations that will apply to everything. You are right that “easy” isn’t the right word, but there are places where it is possible.
I guess my original point was that there are communities that are starting to prioritize mixed use buildings and it IS at least possible now. I’m not sure there was much new build that would fit this criteria in the 80’s or 90’s.
Or the '50s, '60s, or '70s. Maybe not even the '40s.
And that’s the problem: because it was illegal to build for like half a century, there’s a huge pent-up demand unmet by supply, and that’s what makes it very often inaccessible as per the meme.