This argument is commonly thrown around, but makes no sense in practice.

The denser the place, the more efficient the infrastructure use. 50 families in a single apartment building use massively fewer pipes & power lines than 50 families in single family homes. But the tax revenue for the city can still be the same. In a denser area, those families are less likely to own or need cars, and if they do, they drive less.

On the other hand, low-density suburban neighborhoods are often so inefficient that the maintenance cost of their infrastructure is more than the tax revenue the residents bring in. (Here's a good overview of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0)

It's more true to say that "we don't have the infrastructure for single family homes" than it is to say that we don't have the infrastructure for apartment buildings.

Key quote: "When you lose money on every development, you don't make it up in volume."

India must have the most efficient real estate in the world then. Let's take a nice hard look at their infrastructure.

Do you own a home? Would you willingly let it be replaced alongside surrounding properties with an apartment complex? After all, it's more efficient.

You shouldn't own a washing machine either, that's silly. A laundromat helps reduce the need to own the appliances and create a more social environment.

And we haven't even begun talking about that car you own. Gross. Public transportation is so much more efficient.

Oh you actually wanted to travel somewhere and not have to spend 4 hours of your day to go there, take care of your business, then come home? Weird.

Per capita urban water usage in California has decreased by double digits percentages since 1990. See page 10 at https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/PI_Water_Use_... Older cities have done even better; newer urban developments further away from the older coastal areas pulled the average state-wide decrease down.

IOW, there's plenty of slack in existing cities, especially the older coastal cities, which were originally planned and built for far greater density than permitted now, and at a time when per capita usage was far greater. If anything, continuing to incentivize urban sprawl is the surest way to overburden water infrastructure, especially supply.

In fact, depending on where you live, water appliance efficiency has reduced sewer flows to the point where systems stop functioning, since a lot of systems are designed around a minimum amount of flow to make things move.

Most water consumption these days comes from the state's agriculture, which bringing more residents in would not really impact since denser housing would not really go in areas that are rural.

As with living in a crowded bug-hive apartment building instead of a house, reducing water consumption by making showers, toilets, washing machines, dishwashers, and other appliances function poorly is just masking a real decline in standard of living by clipping coins.

“We’ve reduced water, power, meat, and space consumption by XX%” is not good news. That just means we’re getting poorer. Good news would be “we’ve halved the cost of water, power, meat, and space, so everyone have a good time”.

The contradiction here is that, overwhelmingly, the most effective way to decrease the price of space (in terms of square mile per person of land) is to increase unemployment -- which basically nobody actually wants.

Some Northern California cities are literally out of water.

https://ktla.com/news/california/please-conserve-water-touri...

In the Monterey Peninsula area residential building permits have been restricted for years due to a persistent water shortage. That's been going on since well before the current drought.

Not just per capita but absolute. East Bay MUD total deliveries fell by half in the last 40 years while the population increased by 70%.

That’s an exaggeration since there wouldn’t be as many lawns to water and apartments are more energy-efficient.

Also, infrastructure like water treatment plants are expensive and scale well, so you can spread the cost over more people.

But yes, there are problems that come with density and they have to be thought through.

Yes, there are many places in the US that are currently having infrastructure crises due to too little density. There might need to be infrastructure upgrades as neighborhoods become denser, but over the long run, the infrastructure will be much more sustainable because the cost per user will be significantly lower.

I think a lot of people would actually embrace getting rid of their cars if they weren't necessary

I live in a sfh in a Bay Area suburb and a lot of my neighbors have multiple cars for fun/hobbies and family. One of my neighbors has a household of three (two parents & a 10year old kid) and they have FIVE cars. I never realized how big "car culture" was in California until moving out of the city and into a suburb. In my experience living here, you can pry their cars out of their cold dead hands.

> And convince people to part with their cars because street parking will become impossible.

Convince nothing, price them out. The state is not obligated to pay for permanent storage for your private property on public land. If you want a car, you need to pay for its permanent storage.

People who have been become accustomed to abundant free street parking will not be happy about paying for it. They will vote accordingly. You can complain that this isn't fair but that's the reality of living in a democracy.

I don’t think that’s actually true. There is certainly a very noisy minority that would like us to believe that they’re the majority, but revealed consumer preference does not seem to reinforce this statement.

Consider the street closures during the pandemic for outdoors eating. The parking crowd has screeched endlessly about the traffic and parking issues caused by this, but the majority of the populace love these areas now. A bunch of them are actually becoming permanent.

Similarly, the cute, street car suburbs with high walkability and insufficient parking are absurdly expensive everywhere I’ve ever lived. Turns out people like living places that are nice, and that sufficient parking is a relatively minor deciding factor.

No it's true. The street closures during pandemic were mostly in downtown commercial areas and were broadly supported by restaurant owners. They hardly impacted residential areas. Politicians who try to increase charges or reduce availability for residential street parking inevitably face a lot of resistance.

Building a new walkable neighborhood is fine. Trying to drastically alter an existing neighborhood is nearly impossible.

There are also examples from Europe where mayors have outright banned or drastically reduced access for cars, and won re-election over the complaints of car owners. And these aren’t podunk towns either, one of them is Paris.

Of course, the counter argument is “but Paris has a good metro system”, to which I say maybe we should fix that.

The state really wants its people to be as mobile and economically active as possible and cars facilitate exactly that.

Cars are actually one of the least efficient means of achieving that.

Sure, but only if your world begins and ends with the urban public transit map and only includes white collar workers. Outside of areas with good public transit cars are the next best thing, and those areas start much closer to urban cores than you want to admit and even within good transit areas there is a huge amount of economic activity where the point to point nature or cargo capacity of cars enables economic activity that is not otherwise economically in the black. We need to have some amount of car infrastructure to enable all that. A side effect of this is that a bunch of urban workers who don't really have a good argument for commuting by car can and do because they can afford the luxury.

It always amazes that the universal response to arguments about reducing parking in cities is that someone will immediately cry “well what about the country!” It’s always hard to come up with a response more polite than “I wasn’t talking about them, why are you bringing it up?”

It depends what you mean by efficient. A bus is more energy-efficient but a car is way more time-efficient.

They’re incredibly time efficient, until everyone else tries to do the same thing. This is why commutes in places like Atlanta and Los Angeles are notoriously bad.

Also, cars are literally the least space efficient means of transit ever devised. Depending on cars for transit means everyone has to live further apart in order to make roads and parking big enough to accommodate all the cars[0], making commutes worse.

Cars are also time inefficient over longer distances, trains (if we bothered to make them) and airplanes trivially beat cars.

0 - Underground parking solves the storage issue at a ludicrous cost. In many modern buildings the cost of the underground parking structure is often more than the cost of the apartment building above it.

That depends. Water? Probably not. Most of the water goes toward Ag. Electrical? Probably, especially as we add more electric transportation options. Sewer and trash, yes.

That said, as others have mentioned, urban living arrangements can be more efficient. There is a big question though if that is compatible with the historical CA dream ideal. Sure, that ideal is becoming more and more incompatible with reality, but people want what they want. CA could offer me a free condo in a high-rise urban environment and I'd still leave because that's not something I would ever want to live in.

In the South Bay Area, the SR-17 highway to Santa Cruz also presents a significant bottleneck. On hot weekend days everyone tries to drive to the beach, and the traffic gets backed up onto surface streets so badly that Los Gatos residents are literally trapped in their homes. There is a bus line but it's not a practical option for most people.

Los Angeles was zoned for, and plumbed for, ten million people, but down-zoned to only 4 million currently.

https://abundanthousingla.org/downzoning-in-los-angeles/

So pack people into towers as densely as possible and take away their ability to freely leave. Wasn’t this the plot of Escape From LA?

This seems like hyperbole. Would east coast like density be that bad in urban portions of California like the Bay?

Yes

You should tell the people living in tents and cars to be grateful they're not locked in a tower.

An open air prison is worse than an enclosed one?California got the state they voted for. Save the hollow moral indignation.

People who live in a tent don’t do so because apartments in SF are too expensive.

But the effects of high housing costs ultimately does impact those people. Everyone, from the well-off to the impoverished, will seek housing. Those with more money have more options and when the market gets tight, what otherwise would be middle class accommodations in any other market, are only accessible to the wealthy. Middle class families are living in what would be normally be for working class, working class are living in poor housing, and the poor are pushed out. The homeless person may have been evicted and could not afford a place and subsequently lost their job for reasons relating to their lack of housing. Even if this happens in Oakland, they may set up camp in places that have better services for homeless or larger homeless communities like SF.

They do so because zoning banned boarding houses, which is a variant of the same thesis.

Well, the good news is the majority of us are too broke to move anywhere, so the tower sounds fine to us, gotta be cheaper than the rent now.