I think the most important point of this post (by Alfred Twu) about "corridor zoning", is that it is the result of a political compromise. By corridor zoning, I'm talking about the tradition in many North American cities of putting lots of density on main streets, and then almost nowhere else. It is indeed the result of a compromise.
We knew we needed to build more housing, but we didn't want to disturb any of the low-rise housing that forms the majority land use in most North American cities. So we said "look, we're going to build some taller buildings; but don't worry, they're only going to go here and maybe here. You're probably not even going to notice them that much." The result is a very spiky city, which is in many ways a suboptimal form.
I guess that is slowly starting to change with things like laneway housing and smaller-scale multi-family developments like this one here. But these housing typologies are still rooted in the above compromise. In this particular case, though, they are the answer to the question: "What could we build in our low-rise communities that still respects their "character" and doesn't piss off too many people?" The solution is still a spiky city.
What Alfred proposes in the above post it something called "second street housing." And it is what it sounds like. It is about going one street beyond main corridors and adding more, or perhaps the most, density there. Directionally, this starts to break the above compromise. It is recognition that maybe we shouldn't always respect neighborhood character; maybe we sometimes need to rethink it.
But compared to Alfred, I would say I'm less fussed about housing and density on main streets. In fact, there's something to be said about corridors with the right kind of urban grandeur. Instead, I think the important point is that "second street housing" breaks the status quo and proposes going beyond single corridors.
So I would take it even further. We know that cities work really well as circles, versus lines. And so what we really should be doing is encouraging more than a second interior corridor. What we should be doing is encouraging higher density circles around, at the very least, our transit nodes. That'll take us beyond just a second street and, yeah, that's a good thing.
Photo by Jackson Case on Unsplash
