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Is this heaven? Hell no, it's Iowa.

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Iowans were fooled by a prank to make a busy area of Des Moines... walkable (ody.sh)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Isn't this a bit like getting too ahead of things? Des moine is a completely car focused area. Who cares if you make a walkable area, with lots of stores, etc. If people still need to drive there? Maybe the video missed mentioning that part, but you need dense housing, so that a huge group of people don't need to drive there to begin with.

This is like building a walkable area where no one lives, and no roads to get there and surprised everyone says it would suck because there's no roads to get there.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

Take the farmers market in des moines, where they block off the streets once a week. There always seems to be parking for the massive influx of people for that. Valley Junction has parking surrounding it and plenty of streets. I just don't see it being an issue.

As for residential, you'd be surprised how quickly apartments are built after areas like this are built, immediately the value of the land goes up. Turns out, people like having nice places to hang out in.

[–] FlexibleToast 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Are you saying a city can't be made walkable until the entire city is walkable? There is definitely a point in making something walkable that still has to be reached by car. Because after you've reached it by car... It's walkable for the rest of the time you're there. Kind of like malls and strip malls in the suburbs try to emulate.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Its more, I'm uncertain how much housing is already at the location. I feel an important component to a walkable city is housing(apartments, condos, etc).

[–] FlexibleToast 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh, that's fair. Typical US cities have two huge problems. The "missing middle", which are those medium density places to live like you mentioned. Also, they've catered the downtowns to businesses instead of to people. As it turns out, the people are the important part of the city. Remote work really exposed that flaw in places like San Francisco.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah, really throughout the US this is an issue of only businesses but no homes n downtowns. My understanding is that some downtown's are not increasing rents or even decreasing them due to the amount of people leaving them spurred by being able to work remotely in cheaper homes.