The market wants denser housing because people want it. I have no problem with single family homes being allowed all over the place, I just don't think they should be mandated, which you apparently think is a good idea. It's an injustice that this preference for SFHs is written into the law when people want something else, and indeed, there are many advantages to denser urban forms.

I moved to Munich last year. I can hardly even tell which neighborhoods are affluent or poorer, it's so different from the US.

What I'm saying is that we have entrenched economic segregation in our country, and people like you defend it because "whatever is desirable is acceptable".

We tried letting cities decide on their own, the results have been atrocious. That's why recently the state legislature recently passed a bunch more laws to compel cities to allow more housing. If you want affordable rents, the status quo is clearly broken.

> Let me keep the option of living in a single family home.

This is the basic demand that effectively all of the current residents of everywhere are making.

Why not let me have the option of living in dense urban housing? If not your city or your neighborhood, then which one?

Currently, pretty much every city and every neighborhood is vetoing any increase in density anywhere. Political conflict is inevitable!

What I don't suggest is moving to a dense urban area and then complaining about it being a dense urban area.

But you got yourself a deal: I won't argue for building single family homes in downtown San Francisco (really, who is?) and you don't argue for building apartment complexes in Tracy and Gilroy.

Like 95+% of the suburbs in the USA are at little to no risk of urbanization in our lifetime.

Many people did exactly that, back when the Bay was half orchards and no one knew tech was going to explode.

You realize Manhattan used to be mostly farmland too, right?

Tiny back yards, but mine (which was built by the same developer as the cargo bike picture development in the article) is big enough for me. Not my wife, but c’est la vie.

It just doesn’t want to acknowledge that due to NIMBYs

I'm struggling to understand how this could work, except as a prior restraint on childbirth. Otherwise, if someone comes into being and no community wants to house them, what do we do? Execute them? Cast them out into the countryside, see if they can survive as a hermit off the land? (Whose land?) Lifetime imprisonment for trespassing, since there are zero places they're entitled to be?

Is the privilege revokable? Can I decide my neighborhood is too crowded, get together with 51% of my neighbors, and vote the other 49% out? Bulldoze their houses and turn them into open space preserves?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15834153

There is plenty of available space in the USA. It doesn’t have to be some crazy dog pile into desirable areas. Spread jobs and amenities out and we all don’t have to jam into a few cities or fight people off our lawns.

Successful economic centers grow; failed ones shrink. Yes, there is cheap housing around economically crumbling places, but bricks and dirt don’t sustain life. Economies do.

You could try to counteract economic centralization by restricting commercial development as aggressively as residential in growing places, but (as with housing) you’ll see all but the highest value businesses displaced. I don’t see how you could pull off decentralization without full-on central planning. Capitalism wants megacities, badly. To decentralize the economy, you need extreme policy interventions for every aspect of life and commerce. It might work, but what’s certainly not working is making the intervention only for housing.

It’s all well & good to say a solution but when that solution is a complete fantasy it’s hsrdky helping

I also grew up in the city, had loud neighbors, flooding us, elevators full of piss, sometimes didn't work and had to climb stairs 9 floors up. Public transport was fun and great, unless people step on your toes or there are pickpockets and such. For all the hate suburbia gets here, I'll pay extra for my house and a lawn.

My data point: I've lived in two 2-3 story apts in suburbs and lived in a 5 story condo in city and never had noisy or bothersome neighbors. None of these were particularly new or fancy, but not trashy either. Just middle of the road housing.

My impression is it helps if you live on the bottom or top floors. Bottom floor I think guarantees cement walls, which are good sound insulators. Some apts have multiple floors of cement which helps a lot. TMYK.

One could argue that, despite high house prices in the Bay Area, homebuyers are actually drastically underpaying for their land!

If we upzoned all of, say, Berkeley, to 3 units per lot rather than the current 1 unit per lot, SFH prices would probably double. (This is because, even if the extra supply reduces home prices, say, from $1m to $700k, each lot will now have the potential to build 3 houses on it, making the lot's land value $2.1m. Of course, this isn't exactly correct—I did not account for construction costs—but you get the idea.).

So, in a unzoned/loosely zoned/"fair" world, you would pay a pretty dime for a SF house in a desirable city like Berkeley—a lot more than SF homebuyers pay today.

This is something people don't appreciate—SF zoning actually subsidizes SF homebuyers by artificially depressing the value of the land, and therefore not making buyers pay the full opportunity cost for underutilizing the land. (Here the opportunity cost is the 3+ houses that could be built on it instead.)

(Not trying to attack OP, who doesn't seem to live in, or want to live in, Berkeley anyway, just making a general point here.)