“Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month.
Also, all of this is about NIMBYism, which is about house prices being inflated to make up most of households’ wealth, which is not fixable without triggering a massive wealth redistribution. Most western societies are stuck in a very non-ideal Nash equilibrium and it is not going to be solved any time soon.
The point is the city's parking code assumes that every car has a human driver that needs to park and then exit the car. This informs the choices about how wide the spaces and how wide the aisles are.
Even if only some of the cars had the ability to park themselves - onsite or offsite - you could drastically reduce the floor space required for parking. Reducing the floor space reduces the building height, the construction cost, and the required rent.
We are going to be stuck with the choices we make now about how much space to allocate for parking for the next ~75 years or however long this building is there for. I don't think humans are going to be driving for a lot of that time.
People have been saying that self-driving cars are so imminent that we don't need to bother making any improvements to public transit for... at least 10 years, probably closer to 15 years at this point. It's still too premature to shape your entire land use planning around still largely theoretical predictions of how the technology could evolve.
Sure. One thing we could do is waive requirements about how wide parking stalls need to be, and parking aisles, and how many parking spaces you need, and then let builders make those decisions for themselves.
25 years from now, if half the cars are then capable of autonomous nav-and-park, we could convert some of the excess parking lots to buildings. (Any lot large enough to have “aisles” will also be large enough to build on.)
It's extraordinarily difficult, and expensive, to convert parking garage space to housing - the heights are different, it's not designed with the same egresses, the floor material is concrete.
It also affects what the ground floor of buildings looks like - you can't have ten ground floor pedestrian exits or bike parking in the courtyard if the courtyard is on the third floor.
Just as you wouldn’t use the asphalt parking surface of an open parking lot as the floor of the house, there’s no obligation to use the actual garage structure.
25+ years from now, if it’s more economical to use for housing, knock it down and build high-density housing.
> “Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month.
Where did you see that sentiment expressed? I couldn't find anything along those lines in the article. The closes was about parking, which I think is very different.
I'm just doing a Ctrl+F through the document, but I can't find "5 years" or "Human driven". But if it does appear somewhere, taken out of context, it could mean "no more than 5 years" or "at least 5 years". A bit of ambiguity.
“A self driven car cannot block anyone in. "Humans park their own cars" will be true for maybe five more years“
Ok “human parked”, apologies. Maybe not as out of touch but still pretty out of touch.
Thank you for the direct quote. I can envision large parking lots with two sections, one for tighter spaces and one for larger spaces. Even now you can find parking spaces labeled "compact only". It would be a way of slowly phasing out human driven/parking cars. The 2012 Ford Focus could self-parallel park.
> Maybe this building in 2026 can't assume robots are parking the cars. But we could change the city's rules now and maybe a building a year from now will be able to dedicate less space to parking.
I remember what feels like forever ago hearing that truck driving is basically solved and there won't be any human truck drivers soon. Yet now more than 10 years later trucks are still driven by humans.
Right, the difference is you can see from charts of miles driven by Waymo etc. that the technology is clearly ready. If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation.
> If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation.
Oh, in the current market, you can raise obscene amounts of money on pure hype. Look at how much money SpaceX raised on an S-1 prospectus that everyone looked at and went "this is pure fantasy."
lmao. Average age of a car on the road right now is 12 years. Yes, I'm sure my mexican housekeeper will be selling her 15 year old corolla for a self driving car any time now.
With respect, people who drive used cars are not renting brand new apartments in downtown Walnut Creek.
It does not make sense to mandate parking standards in new buildings that assume 100% of cars will be driven by humans who park and then need to open the door to exit the car.
You should be looking places other than California before asking this question. In my suburb of Iowa we have apartments that are very similar to this one as far as sizes but the rent is much cheaper. There are also a number of three bedroom apartments in those new buildings, for much more reasonable rent. These apartments have the large parking lots required in the U.S. They have the large elevators required in the U.S. They have the dual staircase required in the U.S. I guess they don't have windows that provide cross ventilation, but realistically in a modern building, insulation is so good you don't need those, and our climate is enough harsher than most of Europe that you will be using HVAC most of the year.
As soon as you look at comparisons like this that are also in the US but somehow managed to be much cheaper, you realize the problem isn't whatever this analysis is about. It's got to be something else.
I moved to California from Nebraska, so I'm well familiar with what you're talking about. And while that's true, it overlooks a few things:
* My salary:housing ratio is better in California than in Nebraska. I have to work fewer hours each month to pay for my home here than I use to, for roughly similar niceness.
* What is spendy is services, like paying someone to do work on the house. Those workers make more here, too.
* On a side note, anything you buy from a national retailer costs the same in both places. An iPhone or a minivan both cost $X whether you live in CA or IA, so I only have to work about 1/4th the amount of time to buy a new phone here as I use to.
Yes, the cost of living is a lot higher here. Especially for those in tech, in my experience the pay difference far outweighs the cost difference, even including housing.
Nebraska housing is actually a bad deal given the wages. It's cheap by national standards, but my wages doubled moving from CBIA to Chicago. Rent in Chicago is of course much higher, but adjusted for income, my place is way nicer and actually a similar portion of my income
Preach it, neighbor. And nothing whatsoever against NE or IA. Those are nice places to live with a lot to commend for them. Still the low cost of living is kind of misleading unless you’re on a fixed income such that moving elsewhere would raise expenses without raising pay.
Yeah i mean, i get why my friends with kids didn't leave, but at the same time, i would so much rather raise my kids in Chicago. Some of them i think are starting to realize the same, as they come out to visit.
Des Moines and Omaha are pretty good, though. I'm especially partial to Omaha. However I personally still wouldn't live there by choice, either one. But i know people that are happy in both all the same.
I'm Googling for "Des Moines apartments" and clicking on any that I find that have double loaded corridors and so far I'm 0 for 4 on finding any that have a three bedroom apartment.
I disagree on HVAC: i have proper ventilation on both ends of my apartment, if it's under 75 my apartment never gets uncomfortable with windows open on both ends, and i grew up with 69F Des Moines houses.
And in Des Moines, you HAVE to drive, you HAVE to have parking at home, everyone owns a car, there is no alternative way of living.
Where i live now, i have a car, i still live in an apartment, i can walk to the train or the bus or the grocery store or the bar, and i still use my car sometimes, but if i couldn't, i wouldn't really be missing out.
That to me is the problem: places where kids have no room to explore or play, where people's livelihoods are attached to their ability to maintain a car, where people on foot are treated as second class. That's definitely most of my experience in Iowa suburbs
It's a juxtaposition of optimistic futurism (in 5-10 years, most people will just rely on robocars and robotaxis) and anti-regulatory sentiment (critical of the requirement that elevators accommodate stretchers).
Some of the more difficult problems are hand-waved away as, "We could solve this if we just put our engineering hats on."
That said, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's true that other countries and cultures have very different approaches to residential development. But a big part of that is cultural differences in how people live and what they want. Cultures that are more family-oriented are naturally going to have housing that is more family-oriented.
I just spent a week in Austin and took a half dozen Waymo rides. Robotaxies are definitely here and they are awesome. There's no reason why they won't be coming for Walnut Creek.
I think Waymo was approved to operate in Walnut Creek and a lot of northern California in November 2025, but hasn't really expanded outside the peninsula.
Since then, Waymo has actually regressed and stopped driving on freeways, which is a big problem for suburbs. Distances are farther and parking is more available, which suggests people would be taking Waymo less than in more dense areas.
Being against bad housing regulations is not "anti-regulatory sentiment". Some regulations just aren't good. We shouldn't valorize rules for the sake of rules.
"Most of the apartments have a window on just one side. The interior facing rooms on the lower floors are going to have a lot of trouble getting light in. With a window on only one side, you can't ventilate your apartment by opening windows on multiple sides. This increases the demand for HVAC, which increases the cost of living."
I doubt A/C costs are anything but negligible compared to the other design decisions.
Even then, opening two windows require that the wind is blowing and in the right direction. I purchased a box fan just so I can put it in a window to get more ventilation (and it was to blow out allergens, not temperature control). Best $18 I ever spent.
This is someone who is just looking for an excuse to not like the apartment.
Are you suggesting that people in Walnut Creek are being dishonest about not liking specific features about housing because they're against housing in general? I'm shocked! Just utterly shocked, I tell you.
I don't really like being called dishonest, there's a pretty broad literature showing the potential gains of cross ventilation even with a small amount of wind. It's extremely rare to have a day without wind at even 2mph and even if such a day exists, running your hood or bathroom fan are also extremely effective ways to create a pressure differential and draw air into your house. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1755660/FULLTEXT...
"there is a reduction of 90% of hours of a possible use of mechanical ventilation, showing the feasibility to achieve thermal comfort within the house by using passive ventilation"
" Indoor thermal conditions were found to be within the comfort zone for more than 70% of the time under cross ventilation operation while single-sided ventilation provided adequate thermal conditions for only 1% of the time. Results from this study highlight a significantly better performance of cross ventilation over single-sided ventilation." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787...
Walnut Creek is in PG&E territory where peak hour energy is 54 cents/kwh right now.
And the difference is A/C is paid by the renter not the building owner. If you want to address cost of living one thing we could do is make it easier to have the wind cool down apartment buildings.
> The global leader in self driving cars has a headquarters thirty miles from here - the city could invite someone from Waymo to give a talk on the future of onsite parking and how our codes should adapt.
I agree with pretty much everything in your article, Kevin. But I wonder whether Waymo actually has a holistic vision for how families would use their service? Do they expect people with small children to haul around a carseat or booster seat (possibly multiple) for these trips until all their kids are old enough? And spend the extra couple of minutes double parked while they install/remove it?
My sense is that parents are pretty tired of driving their kids to and from things and if it was possible for your kids to take a self driving car to school or to activities or to camp that would be a pretty attractive proposition.
The schools or daycares or camps could help figure out unloading on the other end.
the only thing I can imagine in the near-term are a subset of vehicles in the fleet which have carseats for infants and todlers which stay installed in the vehicle. We also already see vehicles from Volvo which have integrated/convertable booster seats for children 4+ and maybe the entire fleet could have these.
Integrated car seats were popular in some minivans and SUVs a number of years ago. Then they fell out of favor. I think it was because safety standards changed faster than the vehicle lifespan.
the world today is banning kids from the internet largely to prevent them from talking to strangers online. i think a scenario where the pedophiles can use waymo to snatch up kids from summer camps might encounter some resistance.
The far bigger danger to kids from an abuse perspective is the adult driver in the front seat and from a safety perspective is the poor average quality of human driving.
And a self driving car is capable of locking all the doors, identifying threats, calling 911 etc.
The article mentions a lot of the reasons. Our building codes, especially the double stairway requirement, eliminate a lot of reasonable layouts and have downstream effects on the economics of apartment buildings. Another reason that isn't mentioned in the article is that there are different ideals for family housing, especially in suburban areas like Walnut Creek. Family apartments just aren't as desirable.
While building codes are different, those are not different enough to explain the difference. I've seen plenty of people try to propose layouts for apartment buildings that would meet the U.S. requirements and be much cheaper, but no one builds them, even though they should be legal.
The real problem is families in the US don't desire apartments and so no one builds apartments that families would desire to live in, thus perpetuating the problem.
Family apartments could be really desirable, but nobody builds them because of the building codes so people don't look for them. The point that a single-family home costs 1.5 million dollars is very applicable here, as the monthly payment on that loan is cripplingly expensive or totally out of reach. A 4-bedroom apartment for a family of 4 would be extremely desirable in that market.
I think it's really a simple, cultural bias. Most wanting 3+ bedrooms and having the means are also programmed to be inclined to want detached houses with a yard.
Also, in California, "apartment" means short-term leasing and is usually full of young singles, couples, divorcees, and retirees. It is often a big building with many studio, 1, and 2 bedroom units. A similar multi-dwelling structure with individual unit ownership is referred to here as a condominium (condo). These often have slightly larger units since they are targeting the home-buying family rather than the itinerant renter.
In SF Bay Area suburbs like Walnut Creek, there are also neighborhoods with town-homes. These are like condos in ownership structure, but often only have 2-3 units per building, wrapped with a small private yard maintained by the owners. And these lots are in turn surrounded by larger common grounds, which are maintained jointly by the HOA for the whole neighborhood.
In the US the nuclear family is usually two parents and two children. The parents share one bedroom and each child gets one.
In Asia I would guess families make room for their older relatives which would mean an extra bedroom is needed. Immigrants to the US typically do that but I think it's uncommon among the rank and file Americans.
The article actually explains it: with 2 staircases requirement the cheapest[+] option is to have the internal shared corridor and thus you get just one external wall for an apartment in general (unless it's in a corner where it gets two). If you arrange a bunch of bedrooms along the wall you end up with an internal corridor, wasting space, and making your whole apartment looking like a sleeper train car.
Houses, on the other hand, have 4 external walls at the very least. Not to mention most 4+ bedroom houses are 2+ stories as well.
[+] It might be also required to have staircases at decent distance, as a second staircase going through the same stack of apartments is not of much use as it's likely to be blocked by fire at the same time as the other one.
Mostly US apartments don't go beyond a certain size, after that you need a house or maybe a townhouse. Double maybe a condo, but those usually don't go bigger than apartments either.
Apartments are for dense housing, big apartments aren't dense, therefore look elsewhere for your large apartment, I guess. You could have 4 tiny bedrooms, I guess, but that's weird too.
It's nice to have an office/guest room, but if you're raising a family that needs three bedrooms in apartments, you're compromising.
Because there’s a heavy bias for people who have use for 4+ bedrooms to also not want to live in an apartment building.
The reasons vary, but I have lived in Boston/Cambridge area for 40 years and can’t think of literally any of my friends who raised a kid past the age of 3 in an apartment, despite many of them (including me) enjoying the apartment life while young and single. But, literally as soon as we could [barely] afford to, we bought a house and only then added to the family.
Smaller units rent for more per square foot in general, so if the building project is limited by gross-floor-area ratios, developing it into more, smaller units produces more rent than fewer, larger units.
There’s also a pretty strong effect in the US that selects towards raising 4+ person families in a house (whether rented or owner-occupied) if at all possible, so a 4 BR apartment is likely to be occupied by the (relatively) rare tenant who prefers to live in an apartment, but more likely one who is forced to by lack of option. I suspect this effect is much smaller in Asia.
In the US, when you start to get to planning to have a larger family, especially the size of family that would necessitate 4 bedrooms (multiple children, or maybe having a parent live with you), most people expect to move out of an apartment building into a house anyways (maybe detached single-family home, maybe duplex, maybe condo). So there's just not the demand for 4-bedroom apartments or even 3-bedroom apartments to a large degree.
Why look at a single building and generalize a whole city?
Less bedrooms generally means more units and rent. Kids in units means much higher wear and tear. Design is highly dependent on the goals of the building developer.
2 exit stairs makes sense, so long as one of those can be a fire escape. I think a lot of places banned those though because they're "ugly".
Elevator laws make sense so long as they apply to general areas and not every single building. It would really suck for the majority of builders to decide to cost-skimp and skip elevators, effectively locking disabled people out of dense living.
Parking laws need to be removed and replaced with minimum transit requirements. Provided transit options are accommodating for disabled people (which is totally possible, all the buses around me do it) then the only thing hurt (read: no longer subsidized) by making parking optional are car manufacturers, dealers, and gas companies.
It's not the elevator requirement that is the problem, it's that they have to be very big. Can't use the small elevators that fit inside a stairwell for example.
You've got this backwards - big elevators with union labor mean that they're an expensive undertaking that only large multifamily buildings can afford.
Smaller, more affordable elevators mean that they're less of a luxury item. You could put an elevator in your house, or retrofit an older apartment with an elevator, much more easily. This is incredibly common in other countries
Nowhere can build 3 bedroom apartments, except penthouses. It’s not only a national problem, but an international one - almost the entire west can’t build these.
To me it's somehow emblematic of the situation that we can have an article that starts off talking seemingly reasonably about indoor corridors and building heights, and then halfway through pivots to arguments based on self-driving cars being an imminent game-changer.
They already don't have those parking requirements in Copenhagen, and it sure as heck ain't because they've got cars parking themselves with one inch of clearance.
Adam Sandler's "Click" has a scene explaining it (though it is about hotel there, the "forget all the niceties and maximize the profit" principle is universal) https://youtu.be/BRl2ZM-YguE?t=61
It takes the explicit will of the government (dare i equal it to the will of the people?) to force developers to build at least half decent stuff i a half decent way. Note that the market - "people would vote with their dollar" - doesn't work here due to highly constrained, in many ways by the government, supply.
Did you read the article. Half the problem is the government regulations ( stairwells, elevators, parking ) that force the developer to build things worse.
I'm sorry but the assumption that robotaxis will make parking spots obsolete in 5 years is the sort of thinking that probably keeps Elon Musk a rich little boy. About 10 years ago we had conversations about autonomous driving coming by 2020 and how it would likely make auto insurance irrelevant. That hasn't materialized yet, and granted we are much further along now, but it seems like we're still a long way away from it being the norm to the point where it disrupts city building codes.
I'm just saying that people should have the choice to build a building without parking if they think that it makes more sense to use the ground floor for other things. Currently, they do not - they are required to build 9 foot wide parking stalls and 16 foot wide parking aisles.
And you do not need to have an entire building of self driving cars to make a large dent in the building footprint that is currently dedicated to parking.
“Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month.
Also, all of this is about NIMBYism, which is about house prices being inflated to make up most of households’ wealth, which is not fixable without triggering a massive wealth redistribution. Most western societies are stuck in a very non-ideal Nash equilibrium and it is not going to be solved any time soon.
The point is the city's parking code assumes that every car has a human driver that needs to park and then exit the car. This informs the choices about how wide the spaces and how wide the aisles are.
Even if only some of the cars had the ability to park themselves - onsite or offsite - you could drastically reduce the floor space required for parking. Reducing the floor space reduces the building height, the construction cost, and the required rent.
We are going to be stuck with the choices we make now about how much space to allocate for parking for the next ~75 years or however long this building is there for. I don't think humans are going to be driving for a lot of that time.
People have been saying that self-driving cars are so imminent that we don't need to bother making any improvements to public transit for... at least 10 years, probably closer to 15 years at this point. It's still too premature to shape your entire land use planning around still largely theoretical predictions of how the technology could evolve.
Sure. One thing we could do is waive requirements about how wide parking stalls need to be, and parking aisles, and how many parking spaces you need, and then let builders make those decisions for themselves.
25 years from now, if half the cars are then capable of autonomous nav-and-park, we could convert some of the excess parking lots to buildings. (Any lot large enough to have “aisles” will also be large enough to build on.)
It's extraordinarily difficult, and expensive, to convert parking garage space to housing - the heights are different, it's not designed with the same egresses, the floor material is concrete.
It also affects what the ground floor of buildings looks like - you can't have ten ground floor pedestrian exits or bike parking in the courtyard if the courtyard is on the third floor.
Just as you wouldn’t use the asphalt parking surface of an open parking lot as the floor of the house, there’s no obligation to use the actual garage structure.
25+ years from now, if it’s more economical to use for housing, knock it down and build high-density housing.
The garage sits underneath the housing in this case.
> “Human driven cars are going to be around for about 5 years” is one of the most out of touch quotes I’ve seen this month.
Where did you see that sentiment expressed? I couldn't find anything along those lines in the article. The closes was about parking, which I think is very different.
I'm just doing a Ctrl+F through the document, but I can't find "5 years" or "Human driven". But if it does appear somewhere, taken out of context, it could mean "no more than 5 years" or "at least 5 years". A bit of ambiguity.
“A self driven car cannot block anyone in. "Humans park their own cars" will be true for maybe five more years“ Ok “human parked”, apologies. Maybe not as out of touch but still pretty out of touch.
Thank you for the direct quote. I can envision large parking lots with two sections, one for tighter spaces and one for larger spaces. Even now you can find parking spaces labeled "compact only". It would be a way of slowly phasing out human driven/parking cars. The 2012 Ford Focus could self-parallel park.
Well, it's gonna be 2027!
> Maybe this building in 2026 can't assume robots are parking the cars. But we could change the city's rules now and maybe a building a year from now will be able to dedicate less space to parking.
It is ridiculous to be building infrastructure with a seventy five year lifespan under an assumption that may never come in its entire life.
When was the last time you looked at a chart of Waymo passenger miles driven?
Also: The lack of three+ bedroom units means that there are going to continue to be few product types available in Walnut Creek for families.
Humanity has manage to make it this far, almost entirely without three+ bedroom units.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
pretty sure I saw this quote from Elon in like 2015.
I remember what feels like forever ago hearing that truck driving is basically solved and there won't be any human truck drivers soon. Yet now more than 10 years later trucks are still driven by humans.
Right, the difference is you can see from charts of miles driven by Waymo etc. that the technology is clearly ready. If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation.
> If it was not ready they would not have been able to raise money at a $126 billion valuation.
Oh, in the current market, you can raise obscene amounts of money on pure hype. Look at how much money SpaceX raised on an S-1 prospectus that everyone looked at and went "this is pure fantasy."
lmao. Average age of a car on the road right now is 12 years. Yes, I'm sure my mexican housekeeper will be selling her 15 year old corolla for a self driving car any time now.
With respect, people who drive used cars are not renting brand new apartments in downtown Walnut Creek.
It does not make sense to mandate parking standards in new buildings that assume 100% of cars will be driven by humans who park and then need to open the door to exit the car.
You should be looking places other than California before asking this question. In my suburb of Iowa we have apartments that are very similar to this one as far as sizes but the rent is much cheaper. There are also a number of three bedroom apartments in those new buildings, for much more reasonable rent. These apartments have the large parking lots required in the U.S. They have the large elevators required in the U.S. They have the dual staircase required in the U.S. I guess they don't have windows that provide cross ventilation, but realistically in a modern building, insulation is so good you don't need those, and our climate is enough harsher than most of Europe that you will be using HVAC most of the year.
As soon as you look at comparisons like this that are also in the US but somehow managed to be much cheaper, you realize the problem isn't whatever this analysis is about. It's got to be something else.
I moved to California from Nebraska, so I'm well familiar with what you're talking about. And while that's true, it overlooks a few things:
* My salary:housing ratio is better in California than in Nebraska. I have to work fewer hours each month to pay for my home here than I use to, for roughly similar niceness.
* What is spendy is services, like paying someone to do work on the house. Those workers make more here, too.
* On a side note, anything you buy from a national retailer costs the same in both places. An iPhone or a minivan both cost $X whether you live in CA or IA, so I only have to work about 1/4th the amount of time to buy a new phone here as I use to.
Yes, the cost of living is a lot higher here. Especially for those in tech, in my experience the pay difference far outweighs the cost difference, even including housing.
Nebraska housing is actually a bad deal given the wages. It's cheap by national standards, but my wages doubled moving from CBIA to Chicago. Rent in Chicago is of course much higher, but adjusted for income, my place is way nicer and actually a similar portion of my income
Preach it, neighbor. And nothing whatsoever against NE or IA. Those are nice places to live with a lot to commend for them. Still the low cost of living is kind of misleading unless you’re on a fixed income such that moving elsewhere would raise expenses without raising pay.
Yeah i mean, i get why my friends with kids didn't leave, but at the same time, i would so much rather raise my kids in Chicago. Some of them i think are starting to realize the same, as they come out to visit.
Des Moines and Omaha are pretty good, though. I'm especially partial to Omaha. However I personally still wouldn't live there by choice, either one. But i know people that are happy in both all the same.
I'm Googling for "Des Moines apartments" and clicking on any that I find that have double loaded corridors and so far I'm 0 for 4 on finding any that have a three bedroom apartment.
Finally found one on my fifth try. Here is one of the three bedroom floor plans that they offer. None of the bedrooms have a window https://capi.myleasestar.com/v2/dimg/178334024/2000x1333/178...
https://www.thepitchia.com/floorplans?Beds=3. New building.
Yes - this proves my point - both of those 3 bedroom floor plans are for corner units. They have windows on two sides because they are corner units.
In a podium building you only have so many corner units, everything else is 1 or 2 bedroom units. In this particular building that means only 12 units out of 66 https://www.costar.com/article/939748887/lloyd-companies-bra...
And it takes 15 minutes in a car to go anywhere.
I disagree on HVAC: i have proper ventilation on both ends of my apartment, if it's under 75 my apartment never gets uncomfortable with windows open on both ends, and i grew up with 69F Des Moines houses.
And in Des Moines, you HAVE to drive, you HAVE to have parking at home, everyone owns a car, there is no alternative way of living.
Where i live now, i have a car, i still live in an apartment, i can walk to the train or the bus or the grocery store or the bar, and i still use my car sometimes, but if i couldn't, i wouldn't really be missing out.
That to me is the problem: places where kids have no room to explore or play, where people's livelihoods are attached to their ability to maintain a car, where people on foot are treated as second class. That's definitely most of my experience in Iowa suburbs
Definitely a tech entrepreneur's take.
It's a juxtaposition of optimistic futurism (in 5-10 years, most people will just rely on robocars and robotaxis) and anti-regulatory sentiment (critical of the requirement that elevators accommodate stretchers).
Some of the more difficult problems are hand-waved away as, "We could solve this if we just put our engineering hats on."
That said, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's true that other countries and cultures have very different approaches to residential development. But a big part of that is cultural differences in how people live and what they want. Cultures that are more family-oriented are naturally going to have housing that is more family-oriented.
Exactly my thought.
People have been saying that robotaxis and self driving cars will take over in a couple years for at least a decade.
It hasn't happened, and not only that, but if the companies making them want to be profitable, they will price out a huge percent of consumers.
My guess is that humans will remain the majority operators of vehicles for at least 20 more years, maybe more.
That isn't to say we need parking requirements though. We should still get rid of them and let the market determine how much parking we need.
"The future is unevenly distributed"
I just spent a week in Austin and took a half dozen Waymo rides. Robotaxies are definitely here and they are awesome. There's no reason why they won't be coming for Walnut Creek.
I think Waymo was approved to operate in Walnut Creek and a lot of northern California in November 2025, but hasn't really expanded outside the peninsula.
Since then, Waymo has actually regressed and stopped driving on freeways, which is a big problem for suburbs. Distances are farther and parking is more available, which suggests people would be taking Waymo less than in more dense areas.
I'm sure they'll exist. I'm not sure they will be used for a majority of trips.
It's the single escape stairway thing again.
Is there a paid lobby behind this?
No, there are people who look at the better and cheaper housing the rest of world has and who want that for us too.
Most of the world lives in concrete multifamily housing.
Being against bad housing regulations is not "anti-regulatory sentiment". Some regulations just aren't good. We shouldn't valorize rules for the sake of rules.
Notify my neighborhood, where the majority of our 65,000 residents are families living in apartments
This exists in America. It's not foreign culture. We just pretend it is to avoid change.
This seems like a specious argument:
"Most of the apartments have a window on just one side. The interior facing rooms on the lower floors are going to have a lot of trouble getting light in. With a window on only one side, you can't ventilate your apartment by opening windows on multiple sides. This increases the demand for HVAC, which increases the cost of living."
I doubt A/C costs are anything but negligible compared to the other design decisions.
Even then, opening two windows require that the wind is blowing and in the right direction. I purchased a box fan just so I can put it in a window to get more ventilation (and it was to blow out allergens, not temperature control). Best $18 I ever spent.
This is someone who is just looking for an excuse to not like the apartment.
Are you suggesting that people in Walnut Creek are being dishonest about not liking specific features about housing because they're against housing in general? I'm shocked! Just utterly shocked, I tell you.
I don't really like being called dishonest, there's a pretty broad literature showing the potential gains of cross ventilation even with a small amount of wind. It's extremely rare to have a day without wind at even 2mph and even if such a day exists, running your hood or bathroom fan are also extremely effective ways to create a pressure differential and draw air into your house. https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1755660/FULLTEXT...
"there is a reduction of 90% of hours of a possible use of mechanical ventilation, showing the feasibility to achieve thermal comfort within the house by using passive ventilation"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03062...
" Indoor thermal conditions were found to be within the comfort zone for more than 70% of the time under cross ventilation operation while single-sided ventilation provided adequate thermal conditions for only 1% of the time. Results from this study highlight a significantly better performance of cross ventilation over single-sided ventilation." https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03787...
Walnut Creek is in PG&E territory where peak hour energy is 54 cents/kwh right now.
And the difference is A/C is paid by the renter not the building owner. If you want to address cost of living one thing we could do is make it easier to have the wind cool down apartment buildings.
> The global leader in self driving cars has a headquarters thirty miles from here - the city could invite someone from Waymo to give a talk on the future of onsite parking and how our codes should adapt.
I agree with pretty much everything in your article, Kevin. But I wonder whether Waymo actually has a holistic vision for how families would use their service? Do they expect people with small children to haul around a carseat or booster seat (possibly multiple) for these trips until all their kids are old enough? And spend the extra couple of minutes double parked while they install/remove it?
My sense is that parents are pretty tired of driving their kids to and from things and if it was possible for your kids to take a self driving car to school or to activities or to camp that would be a pretty attractive proposition.
The schools or daycares or camps could help figure out unloading on the other end.
the only thing I can imagine in the near-term are a subset of vehicles in the fleet which have carseats for infants and todlers which stay installed in the vehicle. We also already see vehicles from Volvo which have integrated/convertable booster seats for children 4+ and maybe the entire fleet could have these.
Integrated car seats were popular in some minivans and SUVs a number of years ago. Then they fell out of favor. I think it was because safety standards changed faster than the vehicle lifespan.
the world today is banning kids from the internet largely to prevent them from talking to strangers online. i think a scenario where the pedophiles can use waymo to snatch up kids from summer camps might encounter some resistance.
The far bigger danger to kids from an abuse perspective is the adult driver in the front seat and from a safety perspective is the poor average quality of human driving.
And a self driving car is capable of locking all the doors, identifying threats, calling 911 etc.
I thought it was about the CD-ROMs lol.
I had no idea it was a town also.
The CD ROM people are named after the town. :) It's where they started.
The Maxis offices are about two hundred yards from this site!
I wonder why 4b apartments are so rarely seen in the US. In Asia they are quite common.
The article mentions a lot of the reasons. Our building codes, especially the double stairway requirement, eliminate a lot of reasonable layouts and have downstream effects on the economics of apartment buildings. Another reason that isn't mentioned in the article is that there are different ideals for family housing, especially in suburban areas like Walnut Creek. Family apartments just aren't as desirable.
While building codes are different, those are not different enough to explain the difference. I've seen plenty of people try to propose layouts for apartment buildings that would meet the U.S. requirements and be much cheaper, but no one builds them, even though they should be legal.
The real problem is families in the US don't desire apartments and so no one builds apartments that families would desire to live in, thus perpetuating the problem.
Family apartments could be really desirable, but nobody builds them because of the building codes so people don't look for them. The point that a single-family home costs 1.5 million dollars is very applicable here, as the monthly payment on that loan is cripplingly expensive or totally out of reach. A 4-bedroom apartment for a family of 4 would be extremely desirable in that market.
I think it's really a simple, cultural bias. Most wanting 3+ bedrooms and having the means are also programmed to be inclined to want detached houses with a yard.
Also, in California, "apartment" means short-term leasing and is usually full of young singles, couples, divorcees, and retirees. It is often a big building with many studio, 1, and 2 bedroom units. A similar multi-dwelling structure with individual unit ownership is referred to here as a condominium (condo). These often have slightly larger units since they are targeting the home-buying family rather than the itinerant renter.
In SF Bay Area suburbs like Walnut Creek, there are also neighborhoods with town-homes. These are like condos in ownership structure, but often only have 2-3 units per building, wrapped with a small private yard maintained by the owners. And these lots are in turn surrounded by larger common grounds, which are maintained jointly by the HOA for the whole neighborhood.
In the US the nuclear family is usually two parents and two children. The parents share one bedroom and each child gets one.
In Asia I would guess families make room for their older relatives which would mean an extra bedroom is needed. Immigrants to the US typically do that but I think it's uncommon among the rank and file Americans.
I think in the US a home office and a guest room is also usually needed, so 4-5 bedrooms makes total sense.
In fact 4-5 bedroom single family houses in the US are extremely common. What I don't understand is why apartments always seem to stop at 2b or 3b.
The article actually explains it: with 2 staircases requirement the cheapest[+] option is to have the internal shared corridor and thus you get just one external wall for an apartment in general (unless it's in a corner where it gets two). If you arrange a bunch of bedrooms along the wall you end up with an internal corridor, wasting space, and making your whole apartment looking like a sleeper train car.
Houses, on the other hand, have 4 external walls at the very least. Not to mention most 4+ bedroom houses are 2+ stories as well.
[+] It might be also required to have staircases at decent distance, as a second staircase going through the same stack of apartments is not of much use as it's likely to be blocked by fire at the same time as the other one.
Mostly US apartments don't go beyond a certain size, after that you need a house or maybe a townhouse. Double maybe a condo, but those usually don't go bigger than apartments either.
Apartments are for dense housing, big apartments aren't dense, therefore look elsewhere for your large apartment, I guess. You could have 4 tiny bedrooms, I guess, but that's weird too.
It's nice to have an office/guest room, but if you're raising a family that needs three bedrooms in apartments, you're compromising.
Because there’s a heavy bias for people who have use for 4+ bedrooms to also not want to live in an apartment building.
The reasons vary, but I have lived in Boston/Cambridge area for 40 years and can’t think of literally any of my friends who raised a kid past the age of 3 in an apartment, despite many of them (including me) enjoying the apartment life while young and single. But, literally as soon as we could [barely] afford to, we bought a house and only then added to the family.
Smaller units rent for more per square foot in general, so if the building project is limited by gross-floor-area ratios, developing it into more, smaller units produces more rent than fewer, larger units.
There’s also a pretty strong effect in the US that selects towards raising 4+ person families in a house (whether rented or owner-occupied) if at all possible, so a 4 BR apartment is likely to be occupied by the (relatively) rare tenant who prefers to live in an apartment, but more likely one who is forced to by lack of option. I suspect this effect is much smaller in Asia.
In the US, when you start to get to planning to have a larger family, especially the size of family that would necessitate 4 bedrooms (multiple children, or maybe having a parent live with you), most people expect to move out of an apartment building into a house anyways (maybe detached single-family home, maybe duplex, maybe condo). So there's just not the demand for 4-bedroom apartments or even 3-bedroom apartments to a large degree.
>rarely seen in the US. In Asia they are quite common
Here's a recent story of what happens when Asian family sensibilities move into a typical American neighborhood
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/realestate/massive-home-a...
neighbors were upset about this addition, built to house aging parents
https://wjla.com/resources/media2/16x9/1280/986/center/90/fd...
Why look at a single building and generalize a whole city?
Less bedrooms generally means more units and rent. Kids in units means much higher wear and tear. Design is highly dependent on the goals of the building developer.
This is why we can't have nice things. Huge additional costs and design constraints because of
* 2-exit-stairwell requirement
* elevator laws
* parking laws
Article contrasts with an apartment building in Denmark to show what could be possible.
2 exit stairs makes sense, so long as one of those can be a fire escape. I think a lot of places banned those though because they're "ugly".
Elevator laws make sense so long as they apply to general areas and not every single building. It would really suck for the majority of builders to decide to cost-skimp and skip elevators, effectively locking disabled people out of dense living.
Parking laws need to be removed and replaced with minimum transit requirements. Provided transit options are accommodating for disabled people (which is totally possible, all the buses around me do it) then the only thing hurt (read: no longer subsidized) by making parking optional are car manufacturers, dealers, and gas companies.
> Elevator laws make sense
It's not the elevator requirement that is the problem, it's that they have to be very big. Can't use the small elevators that fit inside a stairwell for example.
Who gets to be the builder who is allowed to be one of the minority to not have to put an elevator into a building where only a majority must have it?
You've got this backwards - big elevators with union labor mean that they're an expensive undertaking that only large multifamily buildings can afford.
Smaller, more affordable elevators mean that they're less of a luxury item. You could put an elevator in your house, or retrofit an older apartment with an elevator, much more easily. This is incredibly common in other countries
Nowhere can build 3 bedroom apartments, except penthouses. It’s not only a national problem, but an international one - almost the entire west can’t build these.
In France it is quite common. Cannot say about other countries though.
Pretty funny that in an article that's 99% about apartments, the top comment here is about cars
To me it's somehow emblematic of the situation that we can have an article that starts off talking seemingly reasonably about indoor corridors and building heights, and then halfway through pivots to arguments based on self-driving cars being an imminent game-changer.
They already don't have those parking requirements in Copenhagen, and it sure as heck ain't because they've got cars parking themselves with one inch of clearance.
Anyone else expecting this to be about Walnut Creek Software?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek_CDROM
Adam Sandler's "Click" has a scene explaining it (though it is about hotel there, the "forget all the niceties and maximize the profit" principle is universal) https://youtu.be/BRl2ZM-YguE?t=61
It takes the explicit will of the government (dare i equal it to the will of the people?) to force developers to build at least half decent stuff i a half decent way. Note that the market - "people would vote with their dollar" - doesn't work here due to highly constrained, in many ways by the government, supply.
Did you read the article. Half the problem is the government regulations ( stairwells, elevators, parking ) that force the developer to build things worse.
I'm sorry but the assumption that robotaxis will make parking spots obsolete in 5 years is the sort of thinking that probably keeps Elon Musk a rich little boy. About 10 years ago we had conversations about autonomous driving coming by 2020 and how it would likely make auto insurance irrelevant. That hasn't materialized yet, and granted we are much further along now, but it seems like we're still a long way away from it being the norm to the point where it disrupts city building codes.
I'm just saying that people should have the choice to build a building without parking if they think that it makes more sense to use the ground floor for other things. Currently, they do not - they are required to build 9 foot wide parking stalls and 16 foot wide parking aisles.
And you do not need to have an entire building of self driving cars to make a large dent in the building footprint that is currently dedicated to parking.
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