This trope is repeated on HN almost every time any article resembling city planning comes up. It’s discussed here ad nauseam. Anyway, let’s do it again.
First, if you think cars are the problem, why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago?
Second, this is not a US-specific issue. Rent is just as bad in Europe and people just get by on much less space there that would be unacceptable to most people in the US who aren’t accustomed to paying $2k for an old 1-2br apartment in a transit friendly location in a city.
Finally, the reason car usage exploded was because it enabled people to have cheap housing and work in the city. All of the cheapest housing in the US is in small towns and exurbs where you can have a 3 bedroom house to yourself for $1300/mo. Houses with access to good public transit (not an hourly bus) cost significantly more.
On a square footage basis, the US has some of the cheapest housing for a developed nation.
While it legalized residential towers in DUMBO and other areas that have since gentrified, that also meant that the amount of redevelopable lots shrank. This increased the value of the remaining developable lots and made it harder for small developers to compete to get the remaining lots.
I can't find these links because they're from years ago and Google isn't great about looking up older links, but because of these policies the small-scale (<10 unit) developments did not recover their previous figures after the Great Recession, when traditionally that is how a good chunk of new housing gets built. (They also tend to be more affordable, because building a small building has a lower capital cost than building a large one and so more people can compete.)
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As far as the square footage concern goes, I think that's valid, but I think the distinction is that the housing that people would find "unacceptable" in the US is also illegal. This raises the bar on what the minimum you need to rent any space is, and increasingly we are seeing ever larger segments of the population struggling to meet that bar. At some point we're going to have to ask if we dislike SROs so much we would rather have people on the streets.
Addendum: here's a direct citation for Harlem rent hikes precipitated by subway construction in 1904 making the neighborhood more accessible to low-income would-be-renters: https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/the-end-of-the-african-ame...
"A few years after the 1900 riot [in which whites attacked blacks in midtown following the stabbing of an undercover police officer by a black man], as Harlem land values increased with the first subway line nearing completion in 1904, the black residents, once sought as renters in Harlem, became the targets of an organized removal effort by some white Harlem property owners."
"The [New York Herald] article also suggested that a rent increase “which the parlor car porters could pay, but their colored inferiors could not,” had previously been used as a strategy to remove the undesirable tenants."
This is a deep topic.
Homelessness is just one metric for an affordable housing crisis. I see estimates that there are ~80,000 homeless in NYC, being roughly 1% of the population. That's a lot and unacceptable but there's also a far bigger segment of the working poor and low-income.
I would argue that these people are less worse off in NYC than Chicago and certainly LA or SF simply because there is that transit system. Put another way: the homelessness situation would (IMHO) be significantly worse without that system.
For cities you need to consider a number of factors that play into this:
1. Minorities typically didn't have the option of moving to the suburbs post-WWII because they were excluded from purchasing or borrowing for homes;
2. Affordable neighbourhoods were demolished at a disproportionate rate to make way for freeways and interstates;
3. This all snowballed into the Great White Flight that lowered average incomes in cities, which diminished the tax base of those cities (among other things); and
4. When it suddenly became fashionable to live in cities again, those who had previously been abandoned there effectively were priced out or otherwise pushed out of their homes.
> Second, this is not a US-specific issue. Rent is just as bad in Europe and people just get by on much less space there
European countries have more of a social safety net. Some quick googling claims there are 10-11,000 homeless in London out of almost 9 million people, a rate roughly 1/8th that of NYC or LA.
But "Americans just want more space" is propaganda. We don't know that because it's extremely rare for Americans to have that choice due to almost all population centers only allowing single-family homes to be built. Low-density apartments, high-density apartments, row houses and multi-family dwellings are incredibly rare in the US because it's illegal to build them almost everywhere with exceptions confined to very narrow areas.
> Finally, the reason car usage exploded was because it enabled people to have cheap housing and work in the city
It enabled some people to do that, which is kind of the point.
But what about the people who actually can't drive? Epilepsy, vision, etc. There are a ton of reasons. But like what do these people do? There are so few places you can live without a car in the US compared to any other country on Earth.
If you’re too poor to own a car with a $300/mo payment you certainly aren’t going to pay $1800 for a studio in the city.
The only people who “hate the poor” more than those who suggest people drive are the ones who suggest people move into dense cities.
It's also hard to define "income" without going into all the direct and indirect subsidies and income, e.g. is it adjusted for US health car spending coming out of "income", which you'd get for "free" in universal health care countries. Ditto living in Paris and not needed a car. v.s. that being the case in the US.
Here's an example: one of the countries that looks more affordable to US is Italy. Let's take a look at the the top metro in Italy, Milan.
Milan is now at around 4800 EUR/square meter. Average individual income is around 32k EUR/year, so average household income will be probably under 60k EUR/year, i.e. 5k EUR/mo. That means that a 100 square meter (~1100 square feet) dwelling will cost you just under half a million euros, your monthly mortgage will be something like 2k EUR, so your mortgage will be 40% of your before-tax household income. If you're unmarried, and making average wage, your chances of affording anything bigger than a one-bedroom are extremely slim, and even that will stretch your finances a lot.
The above is by no means extraordinary. Try doing the same for Rome or Florence, they are just as unaffordable as Milan. Bologna is slightly more affordable than that, but still less than NYC. And Italy is relatively affordable as far as Europe goes! Do the same for Netherlands, or UK metros, or France, or Germany. Truly, urban housing in US is very affordable all across the board.
At the same time, prolonged living with parents, and multi generational households have, for many past centuries, been rather common in southern Europe, much more so than in the western, or, especially, northern Europe. Very high rates of living with parents is not necessarily indicative of economic situation, one also needs to consider cultural patterns.
It’s usually the best quick way to determine home valuation or reasonableness of price. Typically the scale will vary by metro area.
To visualize it, you’d need to control for different income tiers and local taxes. In my small city, a good condition average quality existing house is about $150/ft. The same house in a nearby suburb with fancy school district, etc is about $200/ft. That home in Queens, NY would be about $400-500/ft.
In most places, you need to build higher density as 3 decades of subsidized mortgage rates built out all of the usable space. Usually condos cost around 25% less per unit to build than a single/duplex home.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/qrn9i7/in_wh...
Many people simply can’t imagine a life without a car.
Many people gush about how they would love to drive less but suggest they walk anywhere or ride a bicycle and you’ll get a million excuses about why it won’t work for them.
Very few people are willing to put their money where their mouth is and choose to live a low or no-car life. Personally, I have. I grew up in the country, never learned to drive, managed with my feet and a bicycle, then rode the bus during college, and finally I moved to a city as an adult. Yes, I gave up a lot to do it, but it’s worth it to me.
Unfortunately, we need to build affordable housing in the cities we have, not in the cities in some magical world where the car didn’t take over.
Unless, of course, you want to wait a couple of decades for good public transportation to show up before housing the underserved.
Talking about how society should have done something different and casting blame moves the ball forward exactly zero steps, and talking about it in this article is an utter waste of time.
The public transpiration problem needs to be solved, but won’t be solved in the even the medium term and is a distraction from solving other problems we have today.
step one would be to abolish mandatory parking minimums. if a developer wants to use their entire lot size for housing and not provide any parking, they should be able to. if the market demands parking, the market can build market-rate parking. it's ridiculous that we have legal requirements for how much housing there is for cars, but not how much housing there is for people.
Cars are a comfortable bubble and 100% in many high dense cities, useless or worthless, but necessary to get out of the cities sometimes (Tokyo is a large exception of course, but a car is def a nice option to experience while in Japan)
The thing is, outside of USA, zoning and such do not exist to the same extent so you do have much more owner consideration w/ whatever they want with their land which is good and bad, cheap housing across asia, but parking or getting around even outside your place to the main road is def tricky, open sewers, poorly closed sewers, no car parking (which is acceptable) no/minor motorcycle parking, no bike parking, the right of way of the road and the property ingress can be really close, and it's pretty amazing.
I agree 100% with your post, I just think many Americans do not know how things used to be, and never had the experience of going to places abroad which do not have many american problems. .
7. While there is enough room on every street to build a row of houses.
I'm not sure the car is to blame for this one.
When I'm driving a long drive with the same cars around me for an extended period of time, I think how in the past travelers would be able to chit chat and get to know each other. Cars prevent that. So why do I say it isn't the car's fault?
Because even in public transport, people isolate themselves from each other. Even when packed together so you are physically touching, you don't interact with others. People walk down sidewalks don't chat with each other unless they already know one another.
If cars were the problem, we wouldn't expect to see this behavior where there aren't cars, including in countries that don't have anything like the car culture the US does. But we do. Something else is at play. I'm not sure what it is, but it doesn't seem fair to blame cars without some stronger evidence.
Possibly, because blaming the car by taking a detour through a motivated political movement doesn't make sense to people? Suburbs would be impossible without cars, true, and airstrikes would be impossible without airplanes, but that seems like a poor case for blaming government policy on an inanimate object.
>Third, all these cars new housing developments needed roads
All economic activity needs roads. Those roads get wider because of cars, but their existence is felt most strongly in the wider economy because of trucks. Being able to transport goods anywhere with low latency makes a huge difference to the operation of thousands if not millions of businesses.
>Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man.
Just earlier tonight I was driving and nearly got hit by some other driver who ran a red light.
>Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you
Liberals really need to work on not sounding like they want people to get robbed.
>I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man.
Someone in Utah honestly believes that the reason Californians won't deal with the homeless problem is because they don't go to church. But neither of you gave me any evidence.
First, it allowed the building of suburbs, which just wasn't feasible before. This in turn led people to push zoning laws such that building anything other than a SFH became illegal.
Second, it contributed to the dismantling of street cars and other forms of public transportation.
Third, all these cars new housing developments needed roads and this typically led to the destruction of poorer and usually more ethnic neighbours.
Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man. Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you because you can just drive around them in an airconditioned bubble. I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man.
Fifth, voters routinely complain about the cost and taxes of public transportation but think nothing of all the subsidies governments provide for driving (eg building roads, having gas stations, building so much parking, having cheap or free street parking even in densely populated cities with good public transportation like NYC). Yes there are fuel taxes. No they don't pay all these costs.
Lastly, we seem to be comoletely comfortable with the cost in death and crime of car ownership because of the personal convenience. Tens of thousands die in motor vehicle accidents every year. There are crimes like being a serial killer or kidnapping that almost require having a car. Do we really wonder why such things exploded post-WWII?
The affordable housing crisis is depressing because it's another stark reminder of just how little a fuck people give to people who aren't in their tribe. The many barriers erected are simply aimed at making poor people go away. That's it.
And the problems are at every level of government.