Houston’s cars vs. Rotterdam’s bombs

The Overhead Wire illustrates the destruction that wanton parking lot construction wreaks upon downtowns.

Left is Houston “at one point.” Photo from the book The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings Through History via Transit Miami. Right is Rotterdam after bombing in World War II, via Wassenaar Expat.

The Overhead Wire writes,

Europe had war, yet we dismantled our cities in a similar way in the name of progress. So much parking though, what has that done to the city’s value? What has it taken away in terms of tax revenue from land and greater employment agglomerations? A study by Anne Moudon and Dohn Wook Sohn showed that offices that were clustered had greater values than those that weren’t in the Seattle region. In addition to the spending on highways that expanded our regions to their current far reaches, how much real estate value did we destoy?

The post concludes with a look at Hartford, CT’s downtown before and after Interstate 84 blasted through, from a presentation by Norman Garrick to the Congress for the New Urbanism: