But, ultimately I think you should be free to live however you want to live. What you should not be free to do is enforce your way of living via regulations that prevent density. If other people want to build density on property they own, then they should be allowed to do that, even if you don't like it.
Somebody once said that buying a plot of land near a city and expecting the areas around it never to densify is like buying a puppy and getting mad when it turns into a full-sized dog. Cities have to be allowed to grow, your preferences notwithstanding.
One issue I see is that ultimately when there are enough people, choice is removed. Eventually there is only density left. My town isn't very dense right now, but there is definitely pressure to build more homes. When that happens, my interests will be harmed, and the interests of people who would like more density would be served. It's effectively a zero-sum game. You could say "I have a choice to move somewhere less dense" -- but so too do the people who would prefer density: they can move somewhere else and leave me alone.
Now I'm not arguing that I should be able to prevent people from making my area more dense. What I am arguing is that under this regime, people who like density will always eventually win, and people who abhor density will always eventually lose. Why is it fair that one group's preferences matter and another group's preferences do not?
Say your neighbor wants to build a duplex. You might not like it, but that's as far as your harm goes. To enforce your preference, though, you have to restrict your neighbor's behavior. The metaphorical "lines" here are pretty easy to draw, because they're literally property lines with direct physical representations.
Here's an example. I absolutely do not believe that this is actually a fair comparison. I do believe it follows the same logic as your example.
Let me explain what I mean. Let's say that I lived in an apartment, and developed a habit of listening to extremely loud music with bass starting at 10pm, and ending at 5am. My neighbors have a "preference" to be able to not hear that loud music at all, and certainly not when they're trying to sleep. They may not _like_ the loud music, but that's as far as the harm goes. To enforce _their_ preference, they would have to restrict my behavior.
Now all reasonable people would agree that playing deafening bass in the middle of the night is inappropriate, and that it would be perfectly fine to restrict my behavior. In other words, we restrict others' behavior pretty frequently. And, this restriction is based on "common sense" judgements. When the preferences of somebody falls outside of the norm under this regime, they may not have much recourse.
Now to be clear, this is far from a perfect comparison: there are laws against noise pollution, and property lines are not really the same issue as "being obnoxious on purpose." In other words, I agree and admit that these two scenarios are not interchangeable in effect. (I do believe that they follow the same logic, however.)
It's also not the case that in the "duplex" scenario that the greatest ill is not simply that I must "see" the duplex. Really, population density in an area has a number of effects:
- More people means more noise pollution. (and in some cities, kids will play loud bass in their cars no matter what time of night it is)
- More crime. (if not per-capita, then in absolute terms)
- More trash, debris, and pollution in my general vicinity.
- Longer travel times.
- More crowds.
- Etc.
And again, I'm not suggesting that I should have a legal right to prevent density from occurring. However it seems that when density occurs I have no recourse but move. I don't have any way to preserve something which is singularly important to me.
Sure, and what's wrong with that? If your goal is to live in a rural area without many people, then many countries today have plenty of depopulated areas on the outskirts of rural towns. Why not live there?
It's like the parent commenter said; expecting desirable land near a city not to densify is like expecting a puppy to never grow into a dog.
I think that's fair. I'm worried that some of this conversation is just a misunderstanding between the California-based population on HN. I'm fine with residents of California voting to modify their zoning laws to allow more density in principle.
My claim is that even areas away from dense urban environments seem to be getting more crowded. It seems like every place is. If it were restricted to urban environments and their suburbs I wouldn't worry so much. Even the rural areas are growing up and getting more crowded.
Of course it is. No one likes density, even those that say they like it (they enjoy the benefits, not the drawbacks) so it gets voted down almost literally everywhere - such as how you feel about greater density in your community.
Due to this, the only option to build was sprawl as density was banned.
The US really doesn't have "urban" other than for a few legacy pre-war cities that have marginally functional mass transit. The suburban/exurban way of life is pretty much the default for most of the country.
I'd feel a lot better about this debate if there were truly reasonable urban living choices. It would be nice to remove all forms of subsidy so everyone was paying their actual externalized costs.
One thing I've made note of my entire life as I watched sprawl continue unabated was that this is a historical anomaly. The human condition seems to be enough density to keep agriculture going in the hinterlands, with only a very select few being able to afford the upkeep/transport/etc. costs of maintaining an estate outside of the "dirty" city. To me it seems we might have spent a couple generations building a wildly unsustainable house of cards.
Look at this picture:
http://www.dannyquah.com/writings/en/files/2015/09/2015.09.2...
Notice how even in that circle most of that is water. People are moving out of that area for a variety of reasons, some density, some environmental (both natural and pollution), and some economic.
The current low-density north american way of living is a historical anomaly outside of agrarian lifestyles (farms are just open air biological farms). Expecting post-war living to continue is like expecting the post-war economy to continue.
Personally, I bought a 100 acres that are remote and off-road to build my own place off-grid. This is put-up-or-shut-up. You cannot expect to find less dense living without purposefully securing it.
Most of what we do today is a historical anomaly, because our times are very unique. However, it is the dense city living that's historical anomaly. As recently as 100 years ago, majority of Americans lived in rural places. Before 1900, only a small minority of people globally lived in urban environments, and before 1700, it was a very minuscule minority indeed.
If your goal is to live in a dense area packed with people, then many countries today have plenty of densely populated areas in the center of urban cities. Why not live there?
People who want their village life surrounded by farmland can go live in a small village with a train line stop and commute into the huge downtown city for work within 45 - 60 minutes. Look at berlin for example:
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dabendorf,+15806+Zossen,+Ger...
"Move to another country" is a complete non-starter for most Americans too.
What Americans have done to their country is a fence sitting exercise that creates the worse of both worlds. Cities in Europe are smaller, more dense and the drop off into nature is significantly faster. When americans attempt to make something city like, they're noisy, dirty, traffic clogged and crime ridden because it's against the culture to make walkable, transit orientated cities that are significantly quieter, than an american car dependent 'city'. They still give themselves long commutes, but you get huge suburban sprawl that never really ends until your hours out, so you still don't get your log cabin lifestyle anyway.
By allowing cities to properly happen, you ironically create the conditions that make what you want more frequent and would still let you work close enough to a city core to actually make good money. A key issue with rural living is a bad income, because your too far away from other humans to make large productive groups than can make money.
Go to https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/region_rankings_c... and check out some European cities you know by name. I recommend looking at the "Mortgage as Percentage of Income" metric:
Mortgage as Percentage of Income is a ratio of the actual monthly cost of the mortgage to take-home family income (lower is better). Average monthly salary is used to estimate family income. It assumes 100% mortgage is taken on 20 years for the house(or apt) of 90 square meters which price per square meter is the average of price in the city center and outside of city center.
90 square meters is around 1000 square feet. In San Francisco, that's 50%. Sounds bad, huh? Well, it's 70% in Madrid, 92% in London and Munich, 101% in Rome, and 117% in Paris, and these are not even the worst: Kiev, Moscow, Minsk, Krakow or Dubrovnik are much worse than that. Maybe it's better in 2nd tier cities? Well, in some (e.g. 31% in Antwerp or 37% in Aarhus), but not in most: 115% in Brno, 93% in Zagreb, or 61% in Lyon.
Back to US: San Francisco 50% is basically as bad as it gets in US, outside of NYC (where it's 66%). Most places in US are in 20-30%s. You think Seattle or Denver are not affordable? Well, the mortgage-to-income ratio there is only around 27%. That's cheaper than basically any major European city.
So yeah, compared to most of European cities, San Francisco houses are a steal.
As a counterexample, my partner and I require wherever we live to support life without a car. There's a handful of places in the US we can do that, all super urban. We'd be open to a lot of other places in the US were that possible, but it's singularly important to us.
I wouldn't say you're making the following point exactly but, there is definitely a contingent of people who argue for rural or single-family housing by saying "it's just objectively better". But I really think that's incredibly hard to substantiate. Probably the best we can do here is that people have strong preferences for one or the other (though they can change over time) and we should try to get people what they want without destroying the planet/creating infested hell pits.
I completely agree. I know there are a large number of people (perhaps a majority?) who prefer dense urban environments. I certainly don't want those to go away. I just also don't want to lose rural spaces.
Well, have you thought about buying a larger plot of land? Seems like the obvious solution if you are intent on controlling wide swaths of land surrounding your house.
We can call this idea “zoning”.
Of course human beings want to restrict what other people do on their own land. History is full of groups of people just, you know, taking land whenever they think it suits their purposes. That's why the right to private property is in the Constitution. It's why Euclid was wrongly decided. And it's why you don't get to appeal to "democracy" in an attempt to abridge a fundamental right.
No?
Oh great, I guess I'll be commuting 2 hours to get to an office that is walking distance for my boss.
I think there's a big difference in this case between what I should practically do to meet my goals and the philosophical argument at issue. In other words, even if I always lose the philosophical argument, I can simply try to buy some large plot of rural land as you suggest.
Philosophically, I worry about what happens when density is the only choice left for people, and a large majority of them don't or won't understand why that might be so unpalatable for a significant minority of people.
Your social life and neighbors will more skew towards the grey haired spectrum, but that is the sacrifice you will need to make!
The issue is that classic democrat “I believe in climate change but a large house and a F-150 / giant SUV is a want I don’t want to compromise on” is why we’re not making progress on any of this. Those things will still consume a ton of electricity when they’re electric.
> My town isn't very dense right now, but there is definitely pressure to build more homes. When that happens, my interests will be harmed, and the interests of people who would like more density would be served
When you bought your house, you bought the land, not the right to decide what other people do with their property.
> Why is it fair that one group's preferences matter and another group's preferences do not
Because you preferences lead to my grand kids having a noticeably worse planet to live in?
"Why would I do this? Over hundreds of years society has advanced to the point where I can easily have a ton of job opportunities without tearing myself away from the rest of my family and friends. I don't have to spend significant chunks of my time traveling back and forth from stores for basic necessities. If I have a medical emergency there's definitely a major trauma center close by, not to mention any chronic issue where I have multiple specialists in dozens of fields and access to ongoing treatment facilities at my fingertips. I don't want to live like some dystopian partial apocalypse set us back 80 years. A lot more people think like me. We didn't go through 20+ years of education so we could only see family at holidays and birthdays all to live like having to drive half an hour for groceries is actually some pastoral & pure way of life. Honestly it sounds like it sucks."
Both your point of view and the one that I presented above (which is not my actual opinion) get it wrong. The truth is that we all make tradeoffs in these decisions, and we all choose where our own lines are, and there aren't just 2 options, it's a spectrum.
Sure there are, at the federal, state & local level. Here's a few examples that a quick search turned up:
https://www.rd.usda.gov/programs-services/all-programs
https://www.ahfc.us/buy/loan-programs/rural-programs
https://www.kansascommerce.gov/program/taxes-and-financing/r...
https://www.harmony.mn.us/index.asp?SEC=022F2A6B-7FAA-4E0D-8...
Maybe somewhere in the US, but in no areas I spent considerable time enough to be tuned into local politics and policies was this remotely the case.
Since I've been alive the political power has decidedly and unashamedly been fully in the "suburban living" policy group. Every meaningful infrastructure spending, expansion, zoning policy, etc. served to further those interests either directly or indirectly. The "urban policy" group wins were generally not material and mostly window dressing stuff like BRT routes and a few more miles of unconnected bike lanes.
If there was actual choice between "good urban living" and "good rural living" I'd totally agree. The issue is we've spent 100 years building suburbia at the expense of everything else, both as a political and financial investment.
I'm not sure how we can hope to stop that inertia short of being limited by cheap energy or running out of actual land.
Having the residents of the suburbs paying for their true cost seems like a great way to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
As the video points out, would people be willing to start paying $9000 in property taxes instead of $1800 to stop operating the city at a loss every year?
I completely agree. I think the point I was trying to convey is that it's not just financial inertia going on here - it's probably the single most cohesive and politically active power bloc there is in the country.
From FHA to single-family home zoning, there are many laws that specifically encouraged sprawl into what were, at the time, rural areas. That became the suburbs.
https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/postwarera...
I've lived in both "sardines in a can" and "sardines scattered all around the room" (less dense) levels of density for significant portions of my life, and I've experienced firsthand the many benefits and downsides of each. I imagine you have, too.
One thing I've only recently learned is suburbs are subsidized by the people living in the denser areas that you seem to strongly dislike.
This video gets into the math behind why that is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
In my low density town of ~4,300 lots of us pay > $9,000 a year in property taxes.
But can a city “un-annex” land? I imagine the residents in the lower density area would not want to spin off, both because of the schools and other civic institutions they use, but also because of the higher taxes.
I had FiOS for a brief glorious time though!
Largely because traditional suburban/rural designs are not climate conscious, nor economically solvent. Your tax receipts wouldn't cover the maintenance costs of infrastructure.
If the actual economic costs of maintaining the above weren't subsidized by people living in apartment blocks, you would probably change your tune.
Also even though you get less room, the cost of living inside a city is insane. The trade offs don't make any sense. You can often live a much better QoL, for half as much anywhere else. Address the cost of living issues, then more people might be interested in the city lifestyle. The truth is even those that live in suburbs or rural areas that are interested living in the city simply can't afford it. If they work there they're paid just enough that they have to commute an hour or more to afford to live somewhere.
It really wouldn't. I don't think there is a mechanism for making the above infrastructure sustainable short of tearing it down.
In some places, the debt payments exceed total annual incomes for residents.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfQUOHlAocY&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...
I think this does need to change, but I'm the minority here. Most people "need" to drive because of the weather.
https://rockinst.org/issue-areas/fiscal-analysis/balance-of-...
Note that 2020 is an outlier year due to COVID, so probably best to look at 2019 or before.
In 2019, 9 states paid more than they got back. And wow do some states make a lot of money: Virginia and Kentucky both have a per capita "more money than they take in" that's 3X that of Montana. But Montana still is raking in ~$4000 per capita than they pay out, whereas each Massachusetts resident sent out ~$2100.
I grew up in North Dakota, so can I get a free day ski pass next time I come out west and swing by Montana? :)
Perhaps in your exact individual case this is true, but statistically speaking it is not.
Rural areas as a general rule receive (in many cases far) more federal tax dollars than their residents remit. Many rural areas would simply not be tenable much less solvent if they did not receive these dollars to assist with infrastructure.
This is one of the most pervasive myths my rural family members believe in.
This is is opposite of how things actually work.
Generally, rural areas are fairly heavily subsidized by urban ones. The more taxes become localized, the less money from urban areas gets funneled to rural ones and the poorer the rural areas become.
So you've got the rural 1/3rd of the population depending on 7x more roads and 20x more bridges than the urban population. If those folks actually bore the full cost of maintaining their own roads, I'd be willing to bet many of them would decide their rural lifestyle wasn't worth quite as much as they claimed.
I assume if it's vital infrastructure to a couple mega-farms they'll happily take over maintenance. They're not gonna just shut down operations because some rural bridges on their preferred routes aren't maintained anymore. They'll either accept longer routes using a smaller set of still-publicly-maintained bridges, or solve the problem some other way, maybe by maintaining the roads themselves. Public spending drops, and one or both of food prices go up slightly and profits go down slightly. Seems fine. May well be cheaper, overall—forcing companies to choose between longer routes and maintaining their own roads seems like a good way to weed out routes that are being maintained at a net loss.
Why do folks act like farmers are doing what they do out of altruism or something? "You owe farmers! They feed you!" Yeah, I do owe them. I owe them what I paid for the food. Right? If they decide I'm not sufficiently grateful they can stop. I'm not a "the market solves all problems" sort but I'm pretty sure it'd solve that one, no problem. Others will happily increase production to make up for the loss, because it's a market. Throw a fit that urbanites aren't subsidizing rural living & businesses enough, and stop producing, and someone with more sense will gladly take that market share.
If that wasn't the case, I am not sure the US would be a competitive position to grow staples compared with much of the rest of the world, which in itself is a whole topic of discussion.
Given that it already is being subsidized, I think thought needs to be done for handling the topic of broad agricultural good distribution and subsidies. Frankly I think corn, bioethanol, meat etc... should lose their subsidies but that in itself would be quite a vote loser.
E.G. How about canals, barges, railways instead of roadways
I just object to framing things like urbanites must subsidize rural living because "that's where their food comes from". Sure, of course... but that's why there's a food market. We're not propitiating the farm-gods to shower food upon us, but, instead, paying for food. Subsidies might make sense for several other reasons, but, as someone who spend much of his childhood in the country and sometimes living on small farms, the defensive "but you owe us" attitudes from some people when this topic comes up seem downright bizarre.
This would make subsidization more transparent to the general public, while also enabling free-market competition and innovation rather than free-money stagnation.
The vast majority of people don't live like that.
Paved roads and sewage are probably least important to me. What's wrong with a septic system?
I am getting older. I was born in 1987 so I am already 30+. With my sedentary lifestyle, I am pretty much guaranteed to have health problems well before I am eligible for Medicare and there is no sign that we will have medicare for all in my lifetime. Therefore, I can only afford healthcare as long as I work. Long story short, I cannot afford to be airlifted out of the middle of nowhere when (not if) I have a major health crisis in the next thirty years.
If we can use a septic tank for sewage, we can also use solar (and batteries) for electricity, a state of the art in-ground heat pump for heating (and cooling) the house, satellite Internet for remote work. We can do all that but we still need paved roads.
I think (please don't quote me on this) this is the thing that the stronger towns dude keeps saying. We can probably afford to build sparsely populated suburbia and rural utopia ONCE where everyone has half an acre of backyard and where you aren't woken up in the middle of the night because your neighbor decided to do laundry at 3 AM on a Tuesday. However, who is paying to keep up all these roads?
> for example, a representative cost in 2014 for reconstructing an existing lane of [...] a collector street in a small urban area would have set you back $1.5 million per mile
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-...
I wonder if building out railroads would be cheaper than building out paved roads to everywhere. Thoughts?
I don't see any issue with state tax subsidizing roads a little anyway, especially for the farmers we depend on. Not sure about railroad costs but it would be great if passenger rail was invested in more again.
The reason people cluster together in cities is so that they can trade with each other and have sex with each other and learn from each other and attend gatherings with each other and look at each other's art and so on. And even most sexless, joyless, introvert-art-haters need to sell their labor or their wares. So, sure, everybody would like more space, more privacy, etc, but the way the world actually works is that you have to make tradeoffs.
That's the beauty of technology though. I really don't have to make these tradeoffs anymore.
I can work from home which means I'm no longer limited to the job market in my immediate geography.
I can order practically any product I want online so it really doesn't matter if I live close to a city with great stores or not.
I can use a plethora of apps to meet people and date.
And of course, I have my car (and uber as a backup) so I don't need to be cramped into some terrible apartment in order to make the world accessible.
We love to romanticize these crowded industrial era cities, but when given the choice, most people would rather not live in dense cities at all.
Not Just Bikes did an excellent series on this specific problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0
I sure do understand it, but I also understand that when it comes to comparing the environmental impact of upper middle class urbanites and suburbanites, we're splitting hairs. Neither of these lifestyles as they exist now are sustainable, so what this really boils down to is a bunch of rich folks living in cities looking down their noses at us middle class plebs in the burbs, simply because they find suburbs aesthetically distasteful rather than out of any genuine concern for the environment.
Yea that is not at all true. You can literally compare the CO2 per capita for an average American/Canadian and someone from Europe and in general they produce 1/3 of the CO2. It is not a negligible difference.
This is largely caused because of the urban designs which don't focus on gas dependent suburbia. Or the benefits from efficiency at scale which can only be achieved in high density living accommodations.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
It is also a plain fact that downtown urban blocks are the profit generators for cities whilst suburbia is largely a financial hole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
You looking at a classist angle is I think an internal bias. There are poor/rich in both areas. It's just a straight fact though that suburban design is not sustainable both economically and ecologically.
I've never disputed this fact. It's true, the American suburban model is not sustainable. However, the urban lifestyle common in North America or Europe is likewise not sustainable either. So it does become a class/political issue since neither lifestyle actually address the issue at hand. It's just a bunch of people judging each other for their unsustainable lifestyles.
What do you mean by this? There is a large gulf of difference between the two, and I feel you are more commenting on the consumerist patterns of the above. That pattern is a lot more sustainable model in high density urban environments from a logistics, CO2 perspective.
From a modern quality of living perspective, it is vastly more sustainable both economically and ecologically to have people in high density housing. Hence why it was the traditional form of infrastructure for huge portions of history up until the failed US suburban experiment.
It's much easier to hook up good quality and efficient infrastructure to a high density block than to a suburban neighborhood. The above infrastructure would be better utilization rates, cheaper to install, and easier to offset than what you propose.
Ruralia and Suburbia are not financially or environmentally sustainable, not as modern society.
And even in rural areas, you expect all that technology to come to you.
So yeah, it works for you, because a lot of people think like you and you're a big voting bloc, but ultimately, you're increasing debt levels for everyone and burning the planet down.
But hey, you got yours, so we're cool...
That's fine, but cities like New York are not sustainable either. Ditto for commercial air travel, so the entire conversation is unproductive and pointless. It just degenerates into wealthy urbanites saying something along the lines of "You terrible suburb dwellers need to give up your unsustainable lifestyle and embrace our unsustainable lifestyle instead".
I'll take all of this more seriously when I start seeing environmentalists swear off things like commercial flight or eating food and wine that's been shipped halfway around the world. Until then, I'll enjoy my suburb and my car and my lawn with the picket fence.
CO2 emissions for households living in cities are noticeably lower (just goggle it).
> I'll take all of this more seriously when I start seeing environmentalists swear off things like commercial flight or eating food and wine that's been shipped halfway around the world
This is pure whataboutism and you know it. Just look at the co2 emissions of your lifestyle versus those of wine shipped from across the world.
This kind of network of mutually codependent systems is just the way things are.
You think your city is sustainable? Just two simple questions to put that lie to rest:
1. Where does your food come from?
2. Where does your water come from?
It's all about money. More people have more money.
The fact that we've pulled people out of agriculture and we can grow food for 100 with just 1-2 actually growing it is great for the planet, for the economy, for human development.
“Ruralia” is already entirely ecologically sustainable.
If you don’t want to subsidize rural infrastructure through your tax dollars, then frankly, we should just charge you exorbitant rates for our food and water, and then — by your metric — we’ll be entirely financially sustainable, too.
If you live largely "off the grid", grow much of your own food, don't go out much (since any going out means a lot of driving, if you're in the country), and rarely order goods delivery... sure.
Do you have your own paved road infrastructure, or are you relying on others to pay for that? Road infrastructure for low-density housing is a net drain on the public purse (unlike e.g. free healthcare, space exploration, etc. which are a net win, economically)
I'm a big fan of space exploration, but I seriously doubt that it's an economic net win.
> With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that in such sections very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities-until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Under these circumstances, apartment houses, which in a different environment would be not only entirely unobjectionable but highly desirable, come very near to being nuisances.
What is this nonsense? "[T]he apartment house is a mere parasite." So the Court prefers suburbs to apartment living? Who cares? This is no basis for overturning fundamental property rights.
The Court in Euclid did what NIMBYs often do, which is to listen to all the arguments and then say, ultimately, "yeah, yeah, productivity, property rights, freedom, etc, I get it, I get it, but I don't want more density near me and isn't the intensity of my preferences on this issue what really matters?"
If urbanisation became mandatory I'd literally emmigrate to anywhere it wasn't even if it meant giving up my profession, I'd rather be lonely in a foreign land than forced into an urban life I'd actively despise a good 2/3s of my existence in. I cannot stress enough how deeply I reject the idea of moving to a city, and the lengths I will go to so that I can retain a rural life.
I'm lucky that most of my hobbies are either outdoors by definition or don't really need anything more than a plug socket which isn't the case for everyone, I get that lots of people couldn't hack living out in the country away from the things they do and if others want to urbanise I don't have an issue with that but for me personally I couldn't do the reverse either. It just grinds my gears when people think all humans are compatible with urbanisation because for me it really is the difference between an ordinary life and being profoundly depressed on a permanent basis.
Basically all of those skills would become worthless and living my frugal and resource efficient lifestyle would be impossible.
In fact, it sounds like what you want is the freedom to live the lifestyle you want, and that's all that YIMBYs really want: freedom to build houses on their land, and people paying their fair share of the costs of their infrastructure.
- environmentalism, which asks people to make personal sacrifices for the greater good (environment)
- urbanism, which asks people to allow others to live in denser, more efficient configurations
The problem we have is that the rhetoric is environmentalist but the policy is urbanist. I don't want to argue that you should make sacrifices. It's not essential to what I see as the core political-economic program I'm advocating for city development. Nobody anywhere ever is proposing to make you live in an apartment. But you're constantly asking me to defend this:
>I hate this dystopia you people envision of living packed like sardines in a can.
I never argue for this. I argue that zoning restrictions should be relaxed. I argue that bike commuters should be supported. I argue that buses should be funded. I argue that old poorly insulated buildings should be replaceable.
But radicals always talk more. I have a job. I can't join every discussion about urbanism and re-re-re-reiterate the case for liberty as a form of moderation.
Stop hyper-focusing on the most extreme version of urbanization in your complaints. It's not going to happen anyway.
This is a strawman. I live in a city and am not packed like a sardine in a can. We even have single-family homes in my city (here's one in a decent school boundary for $340k [1]). Lots of people also live in condos in 3-story walk-ups where they each have a private deck and share a large backyard. This is in Chicago, one of the largest and densest cities in the US. Your view of city living as exclusively high rises and tiny living quarters does not represent reality for the vast majority of city-dwellers.
> A lot more people think like me. We didn't work so we could move back into cities and live like broke 25 year olds. The life you're envisioning honestly sounds like it sucks. If not I'm open to hear why, but you'll need to convince most people that it's better, not just that it's greener.
According to PEW the breakdown is 14% Rural, 31% Urban, and 55% Suburban [2]. Rural preferences are in the minority, not majority.
[1] https://www.redfin.com/IL/Chicago/5019-W-Wilson-Ave-60630/ho...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2018/05/22/demogra...
We could build roomy apartments with private outdoor areas that would still be more space efficient than a normal house.
I wouldn't mind living in an apartment, a backyard isn't a huge priority and these are perfect for single people, couples and small families.
The key thing is that an apartment and what your perception of an apartment is aren't the same. There's nothing that says it has to be this way.
Why would a commercial (or government) development project invest in something unprofitable (or unnecessary to their requirements)?
A state-level entity could mandate it as part of construction code for 2 reasons:
1) Even the higher construction-cost apartments would be more financially solvent over the long-run than continuing to subsidize the alternative rural or suburban lifestyles.
2) Having nicer attractive apartment lifestyles would entice more people to move to more sustainable urban areas rather than the environmentally and economically unsustainable rural and suburban areas.
City living (at least near me) is definitely worse than suburban or rural living, but I don't think that's an unchangeable fact. More and better dense housing, mixed use areas, public transportation, and public common space are all vital to a healthy city. I believe that the lack of these is what drives people out of the city and into suburbs.
Well, optimally, light transit would carry you to and from heavy public transit.
The problem is that this requires good heavy public transit available. On places that rely on cars, it's normally not there.
This is not 1970 anymore, have you ever spend time in a modern building?
I've had to listen to my neighbours arguments and sex and whatever else in every apartment I've ever lived in.
I couldn't get out of that lifestyle fast enough.
How much space constitutes "cramped" in your view? My current apartment isn't that much smaller than the suburban house I used to live in, and that house had rooms that were almost never used.
You will have a small kitchen, only one bathroom, one bedroom, and not enough room in your living space for much more than a couch and a table.
In a small space like that you can't have any hobbies that take up space. You certainly can't have a family. You can't have people stay over unless they are ok sleeping on a floor or couch. Chances are you can't even have two people use the kitchen at the same time. You can't host big gatherings like Christmas or Thanksgiving.
Anyways I'm glad your experience with apartments was ok. Mine sucked. I'm also willing to bet that you not hearing your neighbours was a function of having respectful and quiet neighbours more than any quality in the construction of the apartment.
You mean you never had people stomping on the roof above you? You never had people arguing in the hallways next door? You never had people blasting music so loud it shook the floor at 2am?
Lucky.
While good neighbors always helps, good sound isolation is better. The biggest source of noise in most of the places I've lived is always exterior windows. I have lived in places where you could play music surprisingly loudly without it leaking into the hallway, never mind the neighbors. We'd test it just to calibrate -- barking dogs, screaming kids, giant home theaters, etc and it was essentially inaudible.
Some apartments have terrible sound isolation, after all some decent hotels have worse sound isolation than any place I've lived, but it isn't a fact of nature.
I can't hear my neighbors at all. They can't hear us. It's absolutely the construction.
The reason your experience with apartments sucked is because you probably paid as little as you could for them too.
Yeah I did. And every time they still cost more than 50% of my paycheque every month. And in some cases they cost more than the mortgage I pay now.
I used to be an advocate for high-density buildings, but they do suck, and suck a lot.
OTOH, high density buildings allow me to have two GP clinics literally within 1 minute of walking whereas if I lived in a smaller rural village... good luck with that. Same goes for groceries, public transport (forget about parking, and you can text or read a book while you drive)
High density buildings are very convenient, eco-friendly, practical, and allow land developers to get more money out of the same land, and governments to claw back more tax from the same horizontal footprint.
But I still will avoid apartments like the plague and get myself a semi-d at the very least, if I can help it.
Global warming --> climate change --> climate crisis --> climate apocalpyse
What models are you looking at that you're seeing doom and gloom in the next few decades?
But just like in normal life, you can chop both ends of the hysteria off because they're not useful, they're just the loudest.
Global warming was probably a bad name choice, but it described the "thing happening" and not the effects. Climate change is probably a better term for it. It is a crises. Places like the American Gulf Coast and West Coast are in for a rough time ahead that's going to require gigantic expenses that probably won't materialize to solve problems.
Aside from the actual effects that will occur, the degree of severity and location can certainly be debated within some sort of reasonable parameters, we really fucked ourselves with this car-first infrastructure. It's a gigantic tax on productivity. All the money that goes into maintaining cars, roads, parking lots, etc. while losing natural habitats, gaining obesity, and unnecessary deaths because instead of walking a half mile round trip to a local grocery store you have to drive 30 miles to go to Costco.
I've also noticed comments about "living packed like sardines", which shows me that those making these comments really haven't thought much about this walkability thing. While I'd argue something like Hong Kong is better than Houston on just about every metric except the illusion of having "land", it's also not a desirable outcome. Better to look at Europe where small towns and villages, and medium-sized cities dot the landscape. If you still want to live in a rural community or live on a property with a lot of acreage nobody is stopping you! What we're trying to stop is a top-down program that enforces suburbia, to the benefit of car manufacturers and government transportation budgets, and to the degradation of the rest of us.
You should be looking at mixed-use walkable neighborhoods as your model for the future. This "either Hong Kong or Houston" discussion is nonsense. And us Americans know this at their core. That's why they all "love Europe" and "love the cafe on the corner".
Building in this way solves just about every problem we have. It can't be stressed enough how fucked up urban planning and architecture are making our country.
Is this something that can't be solved by building codes?
In some sense I prefer a Lamborghini to the Hyundai I own. I guess everybody would. So why don't we make the Hyundai illegal? Because all things are not equal and when I'm free to weigh my options I make tradeoffs. In my case, I have decided I would rather own the worse car, so that I have the flexibility to use my money for other things.
Some people would prefer to do this with apartments, too -- maybe to save money or maybe to be close to the urban center or for some other reason -- except that most cities have made them illegal in most districts. It's no good to say in the abstract, "most people prefer houses to apartments, so developers should only be allowed to build houses." People don't make decisions in the abstract. They have constraints. They weigh tradeoffs.
Single-family zoning is a bunch of rich people making Hyundais illegal, because they're rich enough to ignore the tradeoffs and they think it's pretty obvious that everybody prefers a Lamborghini, anyway. Meanwhile, the rest of us would really like the option to buy a Hyundai -- the option to make tradeoffs.
Why would you think that? I for one definitely would not prefer a machine that not only has hideous resource consumption but also makes it much easier to kill myself in it.
And we have to weigh all those benefits against...the fact that you personally don't like it? I don't think it's a tough call.
I'll be 100% onboard when all these apartments kicking people out of homes are equity-based for residents.
I know I moved the goalposts a bit, but equity is a huge issue for me with dense living.
To your original point, I get it, but I've been in the world so long that the idea my neighbor can build a skyscraper against my property line feels... unfree, ironically perhaps. Your assertion is that dense housing is for the greater good, an opinion I share. So I guess I'm just human in my contradiction.
Pretty much no, by definition, in the US. If you buy something like an apartment in the US, it's generally referred to as a condo. An apartment in the US is pretty much strictly a rental. Additionally, the construction of buildings intended for purchase vs intended for rental are fundamentally different. I would consider it a raw deal to buy the typical US apartment, while most condos can be quite decent.
A Condo is basically any individual-owned (e.g. you can buy it) premise within a communal property (e.g. a multi-family dwelling). One of the defining characteristics of a Condo is that owners of Condos within a building pay monthly or quarterly fees to help cover maintenance of the building, grounds, and common areas outside their premise and are fully responsible for the inside of their premise. In other words, with a condo, you have to hire a plumber to fix your sink on your own, you have equity and can get a mortgage to buy it because you own the premise you live in, but you still have to pay additional monthly fees for shared maintenance of things like landscaping outside, parking areas, building exterior, and common areas like a pool or gym.
An Apartment is basically any communally or developer-owned premise within a communal property (e.g. a multi-family dwelling). The defining characteristic of an Apartment is that you pay a single monthly amount (maybe split by line items) which includes rent for the premise you have possession of, as well as maintenance for that premise which is handled by the owner of the Apartment (not you), and any communal maintenance. Most apartments in the US are developer-owned, but there are some which are communally owned, e.g. all renters are also investors into a community association which in turn owns the building (e.g. like a coop), however the communal rather than individual nature of ownership ensures this is still an Apartment and not a Condo under US definitions.
This isn't entirely uniquely American, but it's pretty much so. Outside of the US, there is usually less distinction in ownership structure and any premise within a multi-family dwelling is generically referred to as a flat, unless it's a fully open floor plan in which its called a loft. In the US, a loft is specifically an open floor plan dwelling with an open second-floor area (the loft is the upstairs), a single floor open floor plan is called a studio, and both lofts and studios in the US are subsets of apartments or condos.
More importantly, while it is somewhat commonplace for condos to "age out" and end up as apartments in the US (this is a called a "condo conversion"), you very rarely see apartments become condos. That is, as a building ages and decreases in value or maintenance costs become untenable to individual residents, someone may buy up multiple units until they own the building, and then convert it to apartments. In some condos, individual owners may buy and then rent out individual units to tenants as an investment as well, which when done by a business entity is a form of condo conversion. The major reason why this happens pretty much only in one direction is that apartments and condos tend to be constructed differently in the US. Nearly by definition, condos are considered luxury properties, and are built to last a long time with a high degree of privacy for residents, which means the buildings use a lot of construction techniques from concrete or other long-lasting materials and have thicker fully insulated walls between units. Apartments in the US generally are constructed as cheaply as possible and so that it's easy for them to be "turned" between tenants, which preferences drywall on stick-frame construction, meaning interior walls between units are thinner and less sound insulating, although exterior facades might be stone, brick, or concrete to reduce maintenance.
Generally, the term "condo" can refer to an individual unit or the building, and "apartment" only refers to the individual unit, and the building would be referred to with the suffix "building" or "complex" for a multi-building development. Condos generally are not developed as complexes, but as single buildings, and typically are on higher-value real estate locations (city centers).
As if houses are any different these days. It's not hard to find a lot of real estate investors encouraging people to buy houses for the sole purpose of renting them out.
It's one thing for someone to have a second home to rent out, it's another to have 20, 30, or 30,000.
The real problem with densification is how fast it occurs. An area will change its zoning and you'll see absurd things like a row of single story houses bookended by 6 story apartment complexes.
I'd rather see policy that allows the changes to happen slowly (e.g. you can build up to 5 feet higher than the average height of other buildings in the zone) but, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, some places have been applying no-compromise protectionist policies for so long that the pressure for immediate and drastic change is intense.
Buying a house doesn't grant you permanent rights to freeze the entire block for all time, otherwise why do property deeds have boundaries? The north american housing crises is almost entirely the result of many decades of terrible zoning laws, but we've let it fester so long it's going to take a lot more than just zoning fixes to get out of it.
Real estate in most areas is one of the least free markets you can participate in and I'd love to see neighbour-power reduced to almost nothing so that cities can grow organically again. If people really want single family homes that's fine, but the full and true cost needs to be priced into that purchase. Current zoning laws have productive urban areas massively subsidizing unproductive suburban ones.
I live in a single family home near a downtown. My street should be way more dense than it is and I look forward to that happening. If the neighbourhood character ever changes enough to the point I don't like living here anymore I'll sell and move somewhere else. I own my property, but that shouldn't give me any real sway over what is on the adjoining lot.
As for cramped/yard, the square footage and presence of a balcony are easily determined by the buyers. But building codes should accommodate balconies by exempting them from limits on floor-area ratio and building footprint.
You try riding an e-bike? I have grandmas passing me on trails and I'm avid cyclist, it's great to see more folks on bikes than every before.
for example if you live in the city there's no point on having a car and you should rely on a bicycle and public transports
if you live in a rural area you should be able to get some of the electricity you need from solar panels and windmills.
we have room to allow choices and live more sustainable, without forcing one way of thinking to everyone..in the same it was done with this car centric world
I've lived in both (most recently moved out of a house about a year ago and into an apartment), and prefer apartments for a lot of reasons of reasons too numerous to list here.
I wouldn't bike, either. Distances are too long
Well, duh. You just said that you chose to live in a rural area. No kidding distances are too long. That was your choice. But if you live in a city, they're not. Because of my jobs, I've gone back-and-forth between city life and rural/suburban life several times. Every time I move back to a city, I'm so happy to sell my cars and not have a car payment; or pay for car insurance; pay for gas; oil changes (which are expensive now); worrying about it getting dinged, scratched, stolen, or crashed into. Cars were fun when I was a teen-ager. But I'm an adult now, and have better things to do with my life and money.
A lot more people think like me.
Because real estate agents, real estate developers, and construction companies spend billions on advertising to make people think that way. Congratulations, they've successfully implanted all these fears into your mind, and you fell for them.
We didn't work so we could move back into cities and live like broke 25 year olds.
Older, wealthier, people tend to move into cities because the benefits of city living outweigh the hassles and expense of living in the suburbs.
Chicago's Lake Shore Drive isn't lined with apartment buildings with students "packed like sardines." They're filled with $5-$20 million condos inhabited by bankers, lawyers, and the people who own the companies that the people who live in the suburbs work for.
Overall, it's not really surprising that living in cities is associated with a sharp increase in depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders.
I'm sure there are ways we can improve our ecological footprint without trading off everything that makes life worth living (maybe we should ship less plastic/electronic trash from China?).
When you refer to people that don’t make the same choices as you as an “other”, do you find it surprising when you and them want the same things, but in different ways? And that you can _both_ actually help each other?
It inconveniences me personally, and only assists the survival of the species?
But boy, the companies selling us things sure have done a great job of convincing that happiness comes from buying disposable plastic goods and driving big cars dozens of miles to get groceries collected from around the world haven't they?
And you need to take on your own share of that suckiness to help out. Refusing to do so means you are pushing more burden onto everyone else, and that is nothing but pure selfishness.
I, for one, plan to be on the right side of history on this topic.
If the oil is running out or is otherwise untenable lets make some rational plans for something better (oil is dirty anyway and makes life suck) rather then running around in rough goat haired shirts flagellating ourselves and congratulating each other on how much we have made life suck and how virtuous we now are.
Now, according to the media coverage, this will have the exact opposite effect - think about all the articles about "green jobs" and the "green economy", all the column inches claiming that ordinary people will be better off and rich right wingers are just trying to trick them into thinking otherwise to protect themselves. The propaganda can't go on forever though. Sooner or later, the true social costs of all this and who is actually losing out will become undeniable, and at that point a lot of people are going to be very angry.
I wouldn't bike, either. Distances are too long (can be over 40 miles to go somewhere) and I'd be soaked in sweat after even a short ride most of the year.
A lot more people think like me. We didn't work so we could move back into cities and live like broke 25 year olds. The life you're envisioning honestly sounds like it sucks. If not I'm open to hear why, but you'll need to convince most people that it's better, not just that it's greener.