{"id":3180,"date":"2025-11-14T17:46:30","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T16:46:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/transitophile.com\/chango\/?p=3180"},"modified":"2025-11-14T19:58:31","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T18:58:31","slug":"transit-oriented-development-the-big-downside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/transitophile.com\/chango\/transit-oriented-development-the-big-downside\/","title":{"rendered":"Transit-Oriented Development: The Big Downside …"},"content":{"rendered":"

… is, unquestionably, the proximity-to-neighbors issue, particularly related to noise. I\u2019ve lived in TOD housing long enough to write confidently that no other drawback comes close. I don\u2019t have this problem now (fingers crossed, knock on wood), but have in the past and could have it again. I didn\u2019t make room for it in last month\u2019s \u2018Madrid High-Rise Living<\/a>\u2019 post, will compensate now by giving it a post of its own.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not Spain specific. I\u2019m sure that high-rise dwellers worldwide could relate to what follows.<\/p>\n

\n

Transit-oriented development, or TOD = densely-built, multi-story high-rises, that can supply a high-volume rail grid with the rider masses it needs to be feasible. Folks don\u2019t live many meters away, in car-dependent tract homes or McMansions. They may live mere centimeters away, on top of, below, next to and behind each other.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t always get along. The grandmother in 5C may have very different ideas than the twenty-somethings in 6C about how often a dog should bark, how long a party should last or how loud a song should be played.<\/p>\n

I cede the dais to real-life stories told by Madrid friends and acquaintances:<\/p>\n

(\u2666<\/span>)\u00a0An elderly neighbor in P\u2019s high-rise developed psychological problems, began to yell at himself at all hours of the day, cranked up his TV to ear-splitting volumes to deliberately spite others in the building.<\/p>\n

(\u2666<\/span>)\u00a0R is happy with his home near the Moncloa station, but less happy with the racket sometimes made by nearby college students. An occasionally bold man, he has made his displeasure known by knocking on the partying students\u2019 door after midnight while clad only in slippers, bathrobe and flushed-cheek fury.<\/p>\n

(\u2666<\/span>) K congratulates herself for having bought a one-bedroom piso before Madrid prices soared, knows that her home is a personal nest egg. She could also write a tutorial about how to get the police to respond to her frequent complaints about a noisy upstairs tenant.<\/p>\n

(\u2666<\/span>)\u00a0PL\u2019s childhood was marred by quarrelsome neighbors on either side of her family piso in Toledo. She hoped she would be spared in adulthood, but hoped too quickly. Her current upstairs neighbors seem to be operating an off-the-books cleaning service; their washing machines drone almost 24\/7.<\/p>\n

Are TOD dwellers spared if sufficiently well-off, if they wield bank balances fit for a ritzy, multi-million dollar flat overlooking Central Park, with household word celebrity neighbors? Alas, no: consider Karen George\u2019s joy in living next to Madonna<\/a> in 2009. I\u2019ll bet she forgot to ask for an autograph.<\/p>\n

Americans in single-family homes contend with these issues, too. Most of the search results I found for \u201cneighbors from hell\u201d come from the U.S. suburbs. (How\u2019d you like to live next to this charmer<\/a> in SoCal, with his train horns?) But the problematic neighbor has to work harder to be a pain in the sprawling \u2018burbs. In TOD, it\u2019s all too easy.<\/p>\n

\n

The reasonable attribution of a downside doesn\u2019t mean that a given choice is undesired or wrong. Debates, political campaigns and newspaper op-eds have habituated me — habituated most of us, perhaps — to adversarial, courtroom-style presentations, in which an advocate uses time at the mike to argue passionately for enacting this, abolishing that, as if the position championed were entirely good, included no drawbacks. Real life isn\u2019t that obliging. There are usually disadvantages, minuses. One weighs pros and cons, makes a choice.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m happy with the choice I made. My transit-centric home is the nicest I\u2019ve lived in as an adult. I haven\u2019t slid behind a steering wheel in over two years, now regularly nag myself to book a rental and DRIVE somewhere, so I won\u2019t forget what to do with a gear shift. I have and eat my car-free cake, but know that this cake could be made as unappealing as an Erin Patterson<\/a> mushroom dish with a sufficiently difficult neighbor.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never seen these proximity-to-neighbors issues addressed in a TOD-centric book or article. The issues could be dealt with, via rules, rule enforcement and, perhaps, changes to the law to make strict rule enforcement feasible. But we TOD-and-transit advocates collectively seem to prefer not to think about such messy matters, to leave real-life resolution up to the individual. (Which, in my experience, means praying that one has compatible high-rise neighbors, and wringing anxious fingers when anyone new moves in close by.)<\/p>\n

I see a pattern, perhaps detected prematurely, with inadequate evidence:<\/p>\n

\u21d2<\/strong>\u00a0The political right does not want to admit that anything remotely associated with progressivism can ever work.<\/p>\n

\u21d2<\/strong>\u00a0The political left does not want to admit problems with the model.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… is, unquestionably, the proximity-to-neighbors issue, particularly related to noise. I\u2019ve lived in TOD housing long enough to write confidently that no other drawback comes close. I don\u2019t have this problem now (fingers crossed, knock on wood), but have in the past and could have it again. I didn\u2019t make room for it in last… <\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transit"],"yoast_head":"\nTransit-Oriented Development: The Big Downside ... - Transit<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A long-term resident of transit-oriented housing (TOD) describes the biggest disadvantage of this type of development.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/transitophile.com\/chango\/transit-oriented-development-the-big-downside\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Transit-Oriented Development: The Big Downside ... - 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