Ask Lemmy

It took me a moment to realise that's a circuit board of man-made canalways for waterfronts. Entirely defeating the point of why people want waterfront.

We've got to stop meeting like this tonight

Now people are poo-pooing the Burrowing Owl capital of the east?! 😄

the state that is mostly underwater half the time, or when STORM hits.

Most navigable waterways of any city in the world.

Like if you planned a city around canals, then why is it still so utterly car centric?

Water is recreation, but roads are for everyday living. You likely would not be able to shop easily or visit your vet via the water: the entire business district would have to be marina-style. This is about a fairy tale dreamed up by real estate developers more than anything else, not actually about water-based living.

Many years ago I briefly lived in a small Florida subdivision that was exactly like this. Like Florida itself, this canal-style layout has always been popular for people who want to live on the water, especially (at that time) snowbirds who didn't know better. And it would have been impossible to use boats to get anywhere, because the actual marinas were nowhere near this subdivision, and to even get that far would have required actual boating skill to get in and out of the bigger swamp all of this carved-out land abutted.

It was all kind of shitty and we weren't there long. The houses themselves tend to be overpriced because they are technically "waterfront" even if your view is the ass end of someone else's dock. Boats are holes in the water into which you pour money. Your expensive water sports equipment sits under tarps most of the year, requiring both maintenance and insurance even when you're not using it. And speaking of tarps, mosquitos breed in standing water.

Even the canals themselves interrupt the natural movement of water from point A to point B, so unless your locality is spraying regularly (which is another ecological nightmare) you are going to have a lot of problems with mosquitos, and even if you don't, the water itself just gets stagnant, nasty and stinky. Look at that aerial view someone posted: how can the water naturally move or circulate past all those artificial obstacles? Answer: except for tidal motion and some wind, it really doesn't move much at all. You cannot swim in it safely, and the nearer you get to the smell of the water the less appealing that idea of swimming even seems, which explains why you will see swimming pools behind a lot of those homes, just yards from the actual canal. Algae and excess moisture on everything exterior (and eventually interior, like on fans) is a constant problem.

I couldn't speak for it today, but at the time there tended to be a good bit of turnover: people bought in on the dream of being able to live like it was vacation, realized what an albatross they'd hung around their own neck in terms of expense, maintenance, and general unpleasantness, and then sold up.

Some people do thrive on it, love it all and take their boats out regularly. But when they do, it's not on a grocery run.