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It's not a suburb, the hint is in the name of your home itself: townhouse. That's like saying Kingston or St. Albans are London suburbs.
They don't? They harp on and on about the missing middle housing, from semi-detached houses through townhouses to five-over-ones.
I've lived in townhomes and condos in suburbs. They certainly weren't in the city and were surrounded by suburban houses. That's a townhouse in the suburbs. It's not a contradiction.
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In the American context, they're suburbs because they are newly built and at a distance from the city. We don't have cathedral cities with deep history.
I live in a townhouse, a couple blocks away from a four-over-one, in a neighborhood with parks and dedicated walking trails. It seems half my neighbors are upwardly mobile Indian and Chinese professionals.
It's the suburbs though, and we get smeared by young blue tribers in the city, because they grew up in places like this and they want to feel superior to us.
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As an aside, the number of townhouse and condo developments I see going up in the suburbs near me suggests that the whole "missing middle housing" thing is a bit of a scam. The problem isn't that you can't build medium density in the suburbs, it's that these places are still going to be car dependent and have huge parking lots or include garages. Unless these urbanists are proposing to completely level the existing built environment to satisfy their aesthetic preferences, changing a few zoning regulations isn't going to have much of an impact.
It will help on the margins, which is all that I person hope for these days. But, does your municipality enforce parking minimums and what are they? An frequent new urbanist complaint is that in many places parking mimums regs are significantly higher than they need to be.
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What would work best is if local government worked with developers to create contiguous multi-developer corridors of medium density developments linked together, but that would likely require strong incentives.
That's not really possible because there aren't contiguous sites available for development.
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Of course it won't have immediate impact. But you can't run public transit into SFH suburbs. Medium density suburbs of townhouses can get away with on-street parking and can support buses or trams. With an established route into the suburb you can upzone the land around the stop to support higher density without parking minimums, just on-street parking and maybe a multilevel garage.
As much as urbanists like to talk about parking minimums, they're as much a creation of the market as of local government. Show me a suburban residential development without guaranteed parking and I'll show you a development that won't sell any units. Why combine the inconvenience of urban life with the inconvenience of suburban life?
Removal of parking minimums doesnt necessarily mean no parking. The urbanist thesis is that code-enforced parking minimums are often higher than would be supported by the market
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Even the cities largely cannot support buses or trams. The problem with public transit is it is either: 1) Almost always empty; or 2) Isn't convenient enough for all your needs so you need a car anyway.
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Kingston and St Albans are London suburbs, though. Even if they’re more ancient than the expansion of the city, towns that become bedroom communities for people who work in the city (as both of those have) become suburbs. You can stretch it and call them exurbs, maybe.
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In modern usage, "townhouse" is a particular type of home. They are quite common in suburban condominium developments in the US.
I know what a towhouse is. I meant that they provide sufficient density to count as urban. Brooklyn brownstones are townhouses, and it's definitely not a suburb of Manhattan.
Well, that depends on what percentage of the housing is composed of townhouses, right? The mere fact that OP lives in a townhouse does not mean that his community is not suburban. See my links to townhouses for sale in Simi Valley, which is clearly suburban
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I think whether or not a townhouse is suburban or not has more to do with its location and surroundings than it does with the type of housing. In the US ‘townhouse’ developments are common housing for the poor and working class in the suburbs (eg. one sees many in outer Queens and Brooklyn). In the previous user’s case they’re more affluent and so these townhouses tend to be semi-dense planned neighborhoods built by a single developer in the suburbs but designed with some limited walkability within the complex.
Technically a large Brooklyn brownstone is a townhouse but for various reasons (including most saliently lack of any off-street parking) they tend to be much denser than townhouse developments built from the late 20th century onwards.
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