But - in areas where there is already very high density, you need transportation that lets people live cheaper but still get to work. You don't need to worry about housing a bank VP in New York; but housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed.
Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added.
> housing for the people working at the bodegas is needed
Building more housing solves this problem. NYC is not even close to "very high density". I suggest you visit China - even the US's densest cities still have a 10x factor to go before they reach practical limits on density. We need more high rises and less height restrictions.
> Rent control and other "limited" things basically make company housing with a middle-man added.
No, rent control creates a black market for housing and destroys the quality of housing stock available on the market. If you live in the Bay or NYC and rent this is very obvious. It's very common to slip some extra $ or have a shittily maintained unit if it's rent controlled. I have rented units with mouse infestations, splinters in floorboards, and black mold growing out of pipes in the floor, none of which were fixed.
[1] https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2022/03/in-first-months-s...
High density is a terrible way to live. I thought we learned from the pandemic that high density living is unsanitary and promotes the proliferation of disease, and that a 600 square foot box is a really depressing place to be when you're stuck inside working from home.
The solution that the current generation loves to hate is to go back to a more suburban lifestyle. But it's possible to do suburbia without making it completely car-dependent. Look at planned cities like Portland, OR, where they have a lot of mixed use development paired with good public transportation and bicycle infrastructure well into the more suburban parts of the city. In a country like the United States where we have vast expanses of land, it makes a lot more sense to spread out than develop vertically.
But more importantly, all towns and most cities were at "suburban" densities years ago (check the "old towns" of most towns, etc) - the key was "travel to services" was limited by walking or sometimes subways, etc.
If instead of one Walmart every 30 miles you have smaller stores every 2-5 miles, suddenly density isn't as mandatory for livable cities.
Mixed usage and transit backbones are the key - you could design "pods" that are about two miles in diameter centered on train stations that would be entirely walkable/bikable - then you can even have the massive city centers.
People having cars isn't a problem if they don't use them for commuting, and some small changes in city design can lead to that.
As for cultural reasons behind preferring apartments, everyone has various reasons. I doubt you'll find consensus among those that dislike SFH development over what it is they dislike, but they're unified as a bloc in their desire for density.
And be ready to kick trashy people of course.
IMO public housing is the best tool, but it seems that in many places they just want to set up some buildings and forget about it, and that way it will never work.
It seems like for many people it's just a naive idea of getting problematic people out of the streets, but that shouldn't be the main idea. The main idea is to get the most modal income people out of the offer/demand cut, so they can save more money and use their increased disposable income locally.
If you build enough and make private developments easy enough everyone benefits.
In fact, Vienna is starting to have problems because their conservative government (I think they have a coalition now) doesn't want to spend money on the program and private developments have a set of restrictions that allow price gauging.
Not going to happen in US cities. Literally every person actually living in a city knows this, which is why many people protest having public housing built anywhere near them.
Many Americans claim to like European welfare state, but they they don’t seem to be aware as to what it takes to get there. One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the wealthy), but another thing is more ruthlessness in enforcing social norms. Nowhere in Europe you can just sit on the sidewalk and shoot up heroin: you’ll be arrested, put in rehab, and if you persist, jailed. Psychotic mentally ill who scream obscenities at passer-byes are involuntarily committed. Tent campers are arrested and forced into shelters. None of this is happening in many UD cities, which claim that their policies of looking the other way, or subsidizing the underclass lifestyle, is “harm reduction”, and continue to repeat that as number of people living this lifestyle is not reduced, to the contrary it keeps growing.
You know what your problems are and you don't even have to come up with anything new or revolutionary, as solutions are already invented and tested.
The US can build public housing and can manage it properly. The money is there, and it has already been done (built, not managed properly). Mix public housing with transit oriented development, mix-use zones, more lax private development and you'll get nice neighborhoods for modal income people which is what's really important.
As for cars, you can build multi-story car parks with commercial and/or residential development on top too. Not cheap but necessary given your constraints.
The US has IMO very strong civil society organizations. Take advantage of that and go advocate for this.
> One most obvious thing would be to tremendously raise taxes on middle class (who bear the brunt of the tax burden, unlike in US, where tax is mostly paid by the wealthy)
any good charts/data for that?
Public housing is its own problem. It creates de facto ghettos, which is a major reason why locals oppose construction of public housing. It turns out that landlords' financial incentive to screen prospective tenants generally does a good job of weeding out trashy people who destroy the unit and surrounding area.