>>I like the idea of The New Urbanism. My only complaint is the manifestations we're seeing our cities: huge buildings which mimic what a group of many buildings would once have served in order to provide for mixed uses. It is not a durable way to build a neighborhood, because old and obsolete buildings can't be removed and replaced piecemeal as time goes by. When that huge neighborhood-mimicing building becomes old and obsolete, the only way to replace it is by tearing out the whole neighborhood and displacing hundreds of peoples' dwellings or jobs.
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If you look at older buildings within downtowns, you often find many old buildings on a single city block crammed together, each with a tiny footprint. You unfortunately don't see much of that anymore. Most new developments tend to consume at least 1/4 of a city block, if not more (unless that city has unusually large city blocks). It would be nice to see more new buildings on plots of land less than 30 feet wide, but probably because of economics, you don't see much of that anymore.
As for parking requirements, all they do is needlessly inflate the price of real estate to the point where some people can't afford to live in an urban area who would otherwise be able to because a single space in an underground garage can cost $20,000+ to build.