Here we are talking literally the cost of construction, but there is also the cost of infrastructure, and the cost of transport. The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable. If everyone were to live in a single family home, then after the transportation infrastructure reaches capacity, there is a cascade of issues that leads a region becoming totally unaffordable and ultimately unsustainable.
I would recommend the Strong Towns organization for anyone more interested in the interaction between long-term affordability issues and surburban infrastructure problems: https://www.strongtowns.org
It's a bit of a red herring. You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute, and other knock-on differences like that, which can be debated for various other reasons like ecological impact, but you still end up running into the same issues around ability to do new, denser constrution, desire of new, denser construction, and political issues and resistance to change regardless of if your urban area is full of SFH or 5-story buildings.
Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?
Yes, you can get an affordability crisis anywhere you make it illegal to build housing. Nobody is arguing that. The point is that you also get an affordability crisis simply by pushing the transportation infrastructure to the point of failure, and then reject density.
>Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?
This is literally what's happening in every tech satellite city, the point is that many-if-not-most of our urban centers are already at their transportation capacities, simply because that is the suburban development model: it's extremely cheap until suddenly it's no longer functional. The suburban model has no equilibrium, it's a cascade, once the planned automobile infrastructure reaches capacity, you cannot increase it at a rate that is sustainable. Thus, once that capacity is gone, suddenly the real estate in the core becomes extremely valuable -> which incentivizes density -> which further strains peak infrastructure -> which increases the value of core real estate -> which further incentivizes density -> etc. -> etc. -> etc.
We can't wish this away, beyond wishing other people just didn't exist. It's like wishing that other people would take the bus, but not wanting to take it yourself. Nobody in the bay area wants to move to affordable Red Bluff, CA, without a reason, much less the CEO of a major corporation moving their entire company there out of the kindness of his heart we he or she already has a house and friends in Atherton.
Why are you acting like driving a vehicle and being a passenger in a vehicle are the same experience? One is clearly more demanding and inhibiting than the other.
On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat... Lots of things you can't do while in a car. Unless your job is driving. Which, if you commute for work, it kinda is.
I do all of those things in my car while driving too. Maybe not read but I’ve listened to audiobooks. I also sit in Teams meetings, read and respond to emails and IMs on my phone as well when I’m at a stop light. Maybe some people can’t do these things while driving but plenty of us do.
It's not that those people are unable. It's that they're not idiots that risks other's lives.
You write as if you believe you're a better driver than most, but that's wrong. People doing the things you mention are bad and dangerous drivers.
But it's fine, the poors (pedestrians, cyclists) deserve to die, anyway.
I commuted for awhile between Baltimore and DC on Amtrak and apart from being hellaciously unreliable it was great for working. But my commute from the upper west side to east midtown when I lived in NYC was completely different—being crammed into the 1/2/3 and then fighting through the masses to take the S across town.
I see lots of people watching movies/series or reading books (physical or ebooks) while standing up in various Paris transit during rush hour.
I just plugged in upper west side and midtown Manhattan into google maps... It said 18 minutes via transit. Maybe your commute had more complications, last mile and so on.
Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Ex: The bus & light rail is bad and slow, so therefore it will always be bad everywhere. Americans haven't lived or even travelled to places in europe and asia with functional transit systems and do not realize what they are missing.
Another common american assumption is: apartments are only for the poor, so they will always be made shitty with bad soundproofing when you can make them with good soundproofing as a standard and a good amount of square feet. Or metros are always dirty, dangerous and the gross homeless live there, while that is also a pure policy choice of america.
I grew up in north america, lived in places with good metros and good apartments, and then moved to America. America doesn't know how bad they have it.
You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!)
In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.
The best transit is generally thought to be in NYC.
The NYC Subway is a relic from a foregone age, from a time when we built things and wasn’t mired in bureaucracy and carbrained thinking.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City...
Something that I think often makes this discussion tough is that there are a LOT of well-known historical European cities that are at under-2M population that I don't think Americans typically realize are THAT much smaller than, say, an Atlanta. I think the challenges of serving a growing city of 5M+ are much harder than a well-established old city of 2M.
Cars are not really an option when it comes to moving people en mass. It's just too low capacity.
Rome's metro system in particular is stymied by buried Roman artifacts and laws for archaeology. That's not really the worst thing, given that NYC subway construction cost are some of the highest in the world.
That said, I saw what Atlanta looks like. Aside from down Atlanta, a lot of Atlanta is literally just low rise, even downright suburban sometime. It's a smaller city than people thought, given that only half a million people lives within its border proper, but nonetheless traffic is somehow a nightmare.
I will say using US definitions, commute times are very sticky around the 30 minute time period. Longer commutes and people have a large incentive to move closer, short ones and they don't generally bother.
So in the US Tulusa Oklahoma population 400,000 (1M metro) has a 20 minute commute and NYC population 8,800,000 (20M metro) is 50% worse at 32 minutes average and ~100 cities between those extremes. https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/planes-trains-and-...
Edit: This suggests allowing people to move easily move around the metro area would meaningfully lower the need for transportation infrastructure. I suspect NYC has issues with people living in rent controlled apartments having long commutes but being unwilling to leave their cheap apartment, but don't have data backing it up.
“Do you have examples of cities that are literally utopia? No? Checkmate, urbanists!”
And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transit, what does that tell us about fundamental assumptions about "city should grow forever, number must always go up!"?
The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s.
The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.
I once had a commute longer than 15min in Silicon Valley and decided I'd never do it again.
This is actually an argument for transit systems. Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises, with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. They would be, if not for the car. There are people who commute daily from the suburbs of Stockton to the SF bay area.
Yes!
> with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong.
YES!
> They would be, if not for the car.
...what?
They are not because their local governments prohibit construction and actively oppose growth, which is only vaguely related to the car. Approximately zero "global metropolises" have single-family zoning in 95% of their inner core land area. Not "have single family homes", sure maybe Tokyo has that. But zoning that prohibits denser development in such a way that most (yes, most) current housing in those areas is too dense to be built today under current rules. (This last part is true even of NYC.)
The US went hardcore anti-density in the 70s. And sure, that has something to do with the car.
The reason we zone this way is because people are unable to imagine their lives without being able to drive around. The very first thing people say in my town when an apartment tower goes up is "where am I going to park? Do they have a plan for moving the parking spots that this tower displaced? Traffic on tower St. is going to get so much worse!"
If the expectation is that everyone owns a car, upzoning is a huge problem -- it actually is, because everything that scares a car brain ("I can't park!" "It's going to be loud!" "This will increase traffic!") is actually true. Rather than limiting cars, of course, we choose to limit zoning. Which is actually quite a logical thing to do if everyone is to own a car.
If you get rid of cars you get rid of collectors, arterials, onramps and offramps, turn lanes, parking spots... Those are things that are fundamentally incompatible with a major, dense, vibrant city. You can easily fit 50,000 people, their workplaces, senior care homes, schools, and restaurants into the land area of a 4 way cloverleaf that is designed to service 50,000 round trip commutes by car.
To make alternatives you can look at what the Netherlands does. They have much more relaxed lot coverage, height limits, parking requirements, etc. so they get the same single family square footage in way less geographic area and they intermix that with much higher density so their cities proper are 3-4 times denser than where I live while not feeling cramped. They didn't get rid of the car, what they did do was ensure people had great walking, biking and transit options to fulfill the normal trips that make up their lives. That is vs where I live where I am fine getting downtown with transit, but to my kids schools, groceries, or any other workplace outside of the core, I am screwed. The extra density makes providing these transit options possible (along with reasonable regulation on other areas leading to reasonable density)
But in the US, at least, the underlying argument is about class, and race. If you haven't already, it might be worth reading about redlining, the historical practice of outlining which neighborhoods were "safe" to issue mortgage loans in because they were white and not at risk of non-whites moving in. This was about race, primarily.
Redlining became illegal starting in the '70s in many places, and its replacement was exclusionary zoning---a practice that continues to this day that relies instead on race's strong correlate, wealth. Apartments and other similar higher-density arrangements are much more affordable--and as a result, accessible to racial minorities (and the crime, etc. that racial minorities were "associated" with).
All the modern arguments around traffic jams, neighborhood character, transit, etc.---these are all modern-day variants of the same old arguments, because again, who can afford a 1:1 ratio of cars to people-in-household to get around the low-density suburbs?
So when you hear people say "I can't park! It'll be loud!" consider if they're really saying "I don't want those other people who rely on transit in my neighborhood", but using the words "there won't be room for me to park!"
Building subways is impossible for no good reason nowadays. But it's quite easy to put light rail, bike lanes, and BRT in. People find a way to get around.
You don't need to take cars by force; you just need to let market forces do it. That starts with getting rid of parking, setbacks, and exclusionary zoning requirements for new development in areas of town that are underdeveloped (it's not hard to find these areas in even medium sized American cities). If people really do want cars in those built-up areas, they will rent a monthly space. It's a funny thing though, people seem to re-evaluate how valuable a car is once they have to pay $400/mo for a parking space.
If what you say is true, and everyone truly must have a car, rents will fall in those areas to compensate (developers, not having to deal with onerous parking and setback requirements, still turn a profit). In practice, this does not happen, because places without cars are nice places to live. They appreciate and attract investment, which puts money in the city coffer to improve transit options.
It does not take much land to do this. An area the size of 10,000 single family homes -- often a single neighborhood. In San Diego that's Midway, in SF it's Berkeley and the Sunset, in NYC it's Staten Island. These places all have developers who will break ground in months on collectively hundreds of thousands of new housing units if they are allowed to do it and earn a profit.
It is not fundamentally hard to do this, at all, if you can picture in your mind a human being not owning a car.
The fear was real :(
I love taking the Tokyo subways whenever I visit. I make it a point to avoid the NYC subway if at all possible.
It's always the same answer.
Another option would be to set policies that encourage greater economic development and job growth in Stockton so that residents aren't forced to commute long distances. There's nothing special about the SF Bay Area: it's just another place.
It is not really that people living in Stockton already are commuting into the Bay, but Bay Area workers are being displaced into Stockton. The Bay Area has added more jobs than housing for a while now.
# Service accurate enough to set a clock by.
# Service mesh that provides walk-able freedom.
# Safety and cleanliness (both a culture and enforcement issue)
My main point is that “move the jobs” in a sufficiently large city is not generally a working way to reduce commute times.
The Bay Area is extremely special. It's the only place to go to get a good job! There are probably 500,000 people who would move in next week if we had the apartments to house them. That is absolutely not true of Stockton.
Someone who commutes to SF from Stockton isn't a resident of Stockton. They're a resident of SF who is priced out!
Personally I wouldn't want to live in SF proper even if it was cheap. Most of the city is kind of a shithole and the governance is atrocious in a way that goes far beyond just failed housing policies.
> you don't SIT on the train
> at all in rush hour!
Tokyo (I heard)
Mumbai
Also can be done in today s time:
About 10 years ago I had a project and stayed in an apartment in haugong, a residential area about 6 miles from my office. Uber was the only realistic commute - about 15-20 minutes. Public transport was about an hour to do the journey.
This may be changing. You see a growing awareness of the shabbiness of certain American norms in parts of so-called "populist" circles (left and right).
What’s a properly designed city? Even in Tokyo a car usually beats the train unless it’s an inter-regional trip. Im a huge Japan nerd and love their train system. But I just got back from carting three kids around Tokyo and daily life is just far easier in my American exurb.
Do Americans have it bad? The median Parisian spends 69 minutes per day commuting: https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and.... The median commute time in Dallas is under an hour round trip: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 (28 minutes one way). And the folks in Dallas live in huge houses compared to those in Paris.
and if you're not? Not all bad health is a character failure, you know. Some people just have diseases like multiple sclerosis
in the public vs private transit discussion, all I know is that I've never been harassed by someone else in my car on the way to work, but the subway was a different story, and I've spent a lot more time commuting by car than train
Priority seating
It isn't.
It's about changing incentive structures over the long-term, so more people choose options which have a better set of societal externalities.
I think that shared ride self driving cars have a lot of potential in both types of cities. They give you a lot of what's good about private cars (door to door, good average speed, comfort, some privacy), and a lot of what's good about metros (higher density on the road than private cars due to sharing and less need for parking)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_sp...
1. Shared ride AVs can deliver multiple people per trip to their jobs, and they can also make multiple trips in the morning, and multiple trips in the evening. Private cars generally take one person, have to sit in a parking spot all day, and then go home.
2. AVs can park relatively far from their destination. After they drop off their passenger, they can go somewhere else to park.
3. AVs, if they can coordinate or be remotely controlled by a parking lot, can park way more densely than normal cars. In a normal parking lot, maybe half of the space is aisles for cars to drive to and from the parking space. If cars could dynamically get out of the way, you would only need a small portion of the space empty. A very simple strategy would be for there to be only room for one aisle for a big parking lot, and all of the cars would just move forward or back to make the single aisle appear wherever it was needed.
In all, this probably reduces the need for parking by maybe 6x relative to human driven cars.
So instead of, say, having rush hour start at 4pm, with people leaving work, you have a new, free, bonus rush hour at 2, of empty cars driving near the places where they'll need to be picked up. Same thing near any other rush hour: Every added mile kills. It's not even just cars that have this problem: You'll find that in American cities with transit, which often are built with very few key destinations, there are large depots for trains downtown! Bart has no need to use most of their trains most of their day, so you'll find trains that just go downtown and stay there, parked.
What drives efficiency, always, is fewer miles traveled, and having the need for transport be as even as possible. Something like car-centric stadium is terrible: You need major infra to support a game, with many lanes, and many parking places, just to support game days. But then there might be as few as 10 game days a year, so all that extra infrastructure is wasted the other 355 days.
Self driving, rented cars probably make the first worse, and don't really make huge differences in the second. I think that they have advantages: fewer people dying from drunk driving, or someone doing 80mph in a city street running people over, like we had last week in St Louis. Younger people and older people retaining some independence in areas where now they are wholly dependent of others to go anywhere. But the efficiency gains story is a pipe dream. We will see more miles driven, and therefore more total congestion.
First, there's traffic, and there's parking. The claim you're making is that the lack of need for parking in dense areas creates traffic while the SDCs go to park. That may be true, but if the SDCs are delivering say, 5-9 people to work every day between shared rides and multiple trips, the fact that one SDC then has to make an extra drive out of the business district, at the end of the morning rush hour is not that significant.
The hope is also that SDC driving behavior is also a lot more consistent and predictable, leading to more smoothly flowing traffic. Sometimes a few crazy drivers, or worse, drivers that cause accidents, can foul up traffic massively. I'd expect that this would be reduced in a mostly SDC world.
Whether this is true or not, what matters to me - a person living in the US - is that public transit in the US is a relatively poor experience compared with driving. Until that changes, I will keep driving and I will resist efforts that would force me to use public transit. I don't care if it's better elsewhere because I don't live there nor do I want to move there.
I want our public transit to be good, but that simply isn't the case right now. Walkable cities with quality public transit and good community infrastructure sound great, but until they are a reality here I will have no interest in living in a dense urban location.
Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.
The solution is policy. Use public money to make that 2 hour transit shorter and everyone wins, not just those of us with cash
If it’s not any of these it’s owned and thus controlled by someone.
^this is the real issue.
But we dont want to tackle the real issue of few ppl wanting to own the whole world :)
If we cut out that cancer ppl everyone on Earth could have a lot better living standards than we do now.
Yes the issue are ultra rich and yes they will propaganda everything to hide it keep it safe.
Almost the entirety of coastal California (and Oregon and WA as well.) It's insane. It's the best climate on the planet and the most protected from climate change.
We should be aiming for some degree of density. I would hazard a guess that size is largely dependent upon what a person wants out of life.
Infrastructure is very expensive to build and maintain, and everyone demands it in multiple forms (roads, water, sewage, and power at a minimum). Containing the costs by reducing either extent or capacity would allow us to allocate those resources to other things, things that could improve the collective quality of life.
As for decentralization, it depends upon how it is done. I've lived in or visited towns with a few thousand people. Nearly everything one needed was within walking distance, though people often left town for things they wanted. I've also lived in similarly sized urban communities where virtually nothing one needed was within a reasonable walking distance. Suburban communities often take the latter to the extreme. What was the difference? Everything in the small town was centralized, yet businesses and services in those urban communities were effectively decentralized.
Let's say you build a bunch of small towns to decentralize the population and get away from feeding money back into the hands of those who own and control cities. You now have another major consideration: are people going to live most of their daily lives in those towns, or are they going to live in one town and work in another? A big part of the reason why people spend so much of their life commuting, whether it is by car or train, is because opportunities (may it be home ownership or careers) don't necessarily fall in the same place.
Not to say, in a vacuum, multi-family housing won't provide more housing units per unit of land area than single-family. Clearly, it will. But unless you build every city from scratch to house 20 million people, whether you started with single-family or multi-family, the most desirable cities will end up in a future state whereby more people want to live there than housing exists for, and even if regulations and zoning allow you to build higher and denser than is currently done, to do it where people want to live, you'll have to tear down existing buildings, including existing housing, and many of the owners and occupants of that housing won't want that. You'll also need to run more utility lines, build new pipes, run them under existing roads, which means shutting down those roads, and even if they're perfect utopian European roads that have zero cars on them and only have pedestrians and bicycles, the user of those roads are still going to get annoyed and inconvenienced, and it's going to cost more to do this than building new housing where nobody currently lives, pretty much no matter what.
Unless forced to due to scarcity, dense development does not really clump up together all at once for good reason, since clumping up will drive up costs in a hyper local area. Tokyo for example, has a lot of detached housing, even in the central wards. The density there is more pockmarked and random, and notably never really concentrates all that highly; there is not a single Japanese building in the top 100 skyscrapers, because skyscraper concentration is an artifact of how we force dense developments only in certain places.
Tokyo Metro handles 6m+ riders a day with a population of 40m. So, yes, at least until you surpass 40m people.
> Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?
“Disperse and decentralize” is exactly how every city I have ever been to is built.
The pandemic showed that millions of us can work from home. My office was closed for about 2 years. Our stock price shot way up.
There were lots of stories about the environmental benefits. Air pollution in big cities decreased dramatically. Wildlife started returning in places.
We keep building commercial real estate and most people I know have little desire to commute to the office and sit in a cubicle disturbed by other people constantly.
I would severely limit commercial real estate building permits, encourage companies to have employees work at home via tax breaks or whatever. This will help with the housing issues, greenhouse gas emissions, decrease the need for new roads because of less traffic.
Everyone wins except dumb control freak managers and restaurants that do lunch in the business areas.
This would imply that a company's stock price is directly influenced by its productive output; in reality, it's only very tangentially so. Especially for low-profit, high-growth tech companies, I'd wager the federal funds rate's effect on the stock price is way higher.
I joke in meetings that we just need to go back home and we will make more money.
I work for a fabless semiconductor company that makes chips for data centers and other applications, not a software company.
> 2020-21 and then we went back to the office in 2022 and our profits and stock price dropped
The broad stock index rallied like crazy 2020-21 with ZIRP, then all of 2022 was a bear market that followed rate hikes. The S&P 500 rose almost 50% from January 2020 to December 2021, then lost about 20% in 2022. So it's not unreasonable that your company's stock price followed that trajectory.
Biden Calls for Federal Workers to Return to the Office
August 2023
https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/bi...
The government wants people in the office because it helps boost the economy.
I suggest the exact opposite.
Are we serious about climate change? Which is a more effective strategy? Encourage people to switch to electric cars or just have them drive their existing gas car less? My monthly gasoline bills dropped from $250 to $70 during the pandemic.
How much are we spending on health care? How many people don't have the time to exercise? I had an extra 60 minutes a day to take a walk instead of commuting.
Everyone complains about the city’s endless verticalização (verticalizication) because they like the idea of old houses, but I say keep it coming.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2019/12/18/how-houston-is-b...
I'm also really happy with how they have handled their homeless.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
Multifamily housing is valuable against car-dependence in the context of a city street grid with mixed use zones or at least somewhat proximate neighborhood commercial zones. Then the people living there actually have destinations they can walk to, and routes they can bike or take transit on that aren't "snake around to the subdivison's one interface to the 6-lane arterial, and try not to die on it."
https://abc13.com/floodplain-housing-building-houston-flood/...
Houston is just second-to-last in line in Texas to face the affordability crisis (followed by San Antonio) because they have the highest capacity automobile infrastructure, but it's already regularly ranked with the worst traffic in the United States.
While I agree that Houston does a lot of things right, especially just literally allowing density, I do not think they would survive an influx of folks while maintaining affordability any better than Austin has.
The policy of building out is a law of nature, simply because it is impractical and unaffordable to upgrade the transportation infrastructure. The only real development you're getting in Austin is vertical construction downtown (which is net good for affordability), and then you're filling in the remaining wilderness east of Austin (Manor, Webberville, and the area out to Bastrop).
That's the last remaining unconsumed land that is viable for commuting, as the highways are already overcapacity out to Leander, Georgetown, Buda, and nearly Dripping Springs along the Mopac and 35 corridors.
If Austin starts building multi-family homes in existing SFH neighborhoods, then more power to them.
If you really think their hypothesis is totally wrong, we're currently living in a real time experiment of the thesis in the Phoenix metro area. Due to water concerns, the suburban development model is no longer feasible. It's unlikely that Phoenix will suddenly become density mecca (as it's not feasible with automobile transportation), so we should expect to see a massive hole in the metro cities' budgets sooner rather than later. If Phoenix turns out to be fine a in 15 years, I'll happily concede the point and will have learned a lot.
The Detroit metro area would be a mess even if it had higher density housing and better public transit. The problems there are more due to federal trade policies, toxic labor relations, and failed progressive social policies. It isn't valid evidence to either support or refute the Strong Towns hypothesis: too many confounding variables.
The good news is that, again, this is falsifiable, and I'm an empiricist. If Phoenix doesn't can weather their future lack of growth without adding density, then I'll wave the white flag.
California is far from the most densely populated state! It is the most highly populated, but it's also one of the largest.
The most densely populated states are on the Eastern seaboard: NJ (1263 ppl/mi² or 488 ppl/km²), then RI, MA, CT, MD, DE, FL, NY, PA, and OH. CA is 11th, at 250ppl/mi² or 97 ppl/km², approximately 20% of the NJ density.
Yea, it's actually pretty easy. Just get in a time machine and go back to 1956 when the Federal Highway Act made all that development possible, and just tell them to build sixteen-lane highways through every major city instead of two-lane highways. Explain that in 70 years, those highways will be operating overcapacity, so that a commute in and out of the city will not be able to operate at optimal speed of a vehicle, so that traveling 30 miles will not take 30 minutes, rather it will often take 60 minutes or longer, thus making central real estate more valuable. Which, in turn, creates a feedback loop that makes the viable transportation range of the urban center smaller and smaller. And, thus, makes the real estate in that smaller area more and more valuable. However, if you can get those highways doubled or tripled in size it should stop that feedback loop for now.
Once you convince them to do that, feel free to come back to 2024, and all our development concerns will go away for another 70 years, at which point, someone will have to get in the time machine to make it 38 lane highways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
Those poor souls living in cities. I read somewhere that Austin (or another place in Texas), despite being the dominant settlement in its metro area, had much lower representation than the rich and less populated suburbs.
Main city in the metro area, let's say 2 million people: 2 representatives.
Every other settlement in the metro area, let's say 3 million people: 20 representatives.
Guess why they kept building highways which cut through city neighborhoods?
Edit: found it:
https://www.fairforhouston.com/
Gerrymandering, starting to be undone 60+ decades later.
Right, this kind of talk is completely disingenuous from the "single family homes only" crowd.
Upzoning almost always means you can build more densely, not that you absolutely have to. People can still build single family homes if they want.
Single family home zoning is really mandatory single family home zoning. You aren't allowed to make anything else on that land, no matter how much of a housing crisis there is. But that doesn't mean upzoning somehow bans single family homes.
In the US, which has lots of land area, single family homes are the norm:
The majority of the housing stock in the United States is single-family detached houses. Of the total 128.5 million housing units in 2021, about 81.7 million were detached homes and 8.2 million were attached single-family homes. In comparison, roughly 31.8 million units were in multifamily buildings.[1]
The US only has a housing space crisis in over-urbanized areas.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1042111/single-family-vs...
FTFY, but fully agree.
In urbanized areas (where most people live), we have hit the capacity of the automobile transportation infrastructure. This causes a cascade of real estate prices in urban cores, making the vast majority of these areas unaffordable for normal folks. This is leading to myriad crises, like a massive teacher shortage in California, simply because lower-income people cannot build normal/desirable lives for themselves.
The issue is that automobile-centric infrastructure makes this cascade inevitable in areas where cities grow to the point of infrastructure failure, but the cost of maintaining the infrastructure creates financial problems in areas that do not grow to this point.
None of this would be an issue if jobs were not clustered in big cities, but they are.
The advantages of having more people living in your metro are are massive even if one is a remote worker. The advantages might not be needed for one's special case, and you might prefer to, say, live near a beach with great surfing opportunities in Portugal, but you'll still be accepting significant tradeoffs for not living near more people.
Imagine banning every android device from the US, while also proclaiming that no one would've purchased android anyway, because Apple is so popular. Apple is good because they compete and then win.
If SFH demand is so high, surely legalizing vertical development would be no big deal, just like android still struggles to gain adoption in the US.
Infrastructure is centralized, if it was more spread out everyone could afford a nice house with own big garden and vegetables field.
Stop making it sound like its the ppl issue they want to live near nature and have own land.
Too high density of ppl per square meter has huge disadventages in well being of those ppl and their overall health.
There is so much unused land in the world - trying to say we dont have it is silly.
Our leaders just FORCE us to flock to cities cpz its cheaper on infrastructure.
If you don't have time to read - here's a video I could quickly find about the same topic from the same source - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tI3kkk2JdoI
You have a lot of straw man arguments that but the one that I'll focus on the most is "Our leaders just FORCE us to flock to cities cpz it's cheaper on infrastructure" - prove it.
1. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
Infrastructure work is supervised and licensed by the goverment. You cant start building a city in the middle of nowhere even if its your own land. You have to follow standards and regulations enforced on you.
Last time I checked it looks similar in every 1st world country. Ppl are slowly losing means of production and being moved to subscription plan to even live.
"You wont own anything and be happy"
We don't really need to cram people in elbow to elbow like New York City though. We just need walkable downtowns where you can pop on down the street from your apartments to the market to get ingredients for dinner. Even just building our houses closer together and putting in dedicated pedestrian paths is enough honestly.
As opposed to all the "urban lifestyle" people who readily offload their basic needs onto others. Some people are happy cooking their own basic foods. Others want them to be prepared, and their dished cleaned, by a team. Some people are happy with a beer fridge. Others want to go to a bar and pay a young person to smile and flirt while concocting a fancy drink in a silly glass. To each their own. But having a basic kitchen in an apartment is not a luxury any more than having a cupboard for cleaning supplies, a service that can also be outsourced by those too lazy to clean up after themselves. A desire for a modicum of self-sufficiency is not a vice.
In fact, if you want to have that beautiful home surrounded by nature and not suburban cookie cutter houses, then it's also in your interest to see that cities stay in the cities. Too many orchards and farms have been demolished to build miserable tracts of poorly constructed wood frame houses.
I personally believe they're mostly wrong - urbanization probably won't harm home values. And done well, might improve the values even more.
> they're rightfully concerned
Yeah for sure. A lot of the pushback against development is a gut feel concern, the fear of losing something, it's not rational. The "rightfully" part I guess is because institutions groom people in borrowing for single family homes, and specifically that e.g. Try financing a multi-family on the same favorable terms. Few people enjoy pensions at an old age, so you're kind of thrown for the wolves if you don't own a home. The system really is maladjusted.
A decade ago, YIMBY-leaning people and groups were mad but mostly obscure and NIMBY-leaning people and groups were powerful. Now both sides are mad, the YIMBY side because it is still taking a long time to build enough to see affordability improve (especially with the interest rate shock), and the NIMBY side because they can see all those new townhomes and apartments going up in suburbs and smaller towns and densification projects in the city center, and dislike that.
I remember I used to complain that housing was so expensive and you never saw anything getting built despite there being plenty of great places to build things. And then one day I realized that a lot of construction was happening in a lot of those places I was thinking of, and I should stop complaining, since what I wanted to see happen was actually happening!
It's hard to feel like it's "better" for both sides to be mad while affordability is still bad, but I do think it's better than what seemed more like an insurmountable problem to me a decade ago.
I mean, I might wish that going from "wait a minute, nobody can afford to live here because lots of people have moved here and we haven't been building any housing" to seeing the first improvements in affordability would require less than like 20 years, but in reality, yeah, things take time.
[0]: https://i0.wp.com/publicola.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/S...
Imagine if we suddenly got a bunch of articles on HN about the "website affordability crisis" and it was a bunch of FAANG engineers and ex FAANG employees and want-to-be FAANG employees talking about how you can't build a reliable website for less than a few million in cloud services and monitoring and logging from Datadog and the like. Sure from their perspective of trying to build a FAANG scale service that might be true, but it would also seem insane to the rest of us who are wondering what's wrong with throwing up a few boxes in a colo center or even a few basic EC2 instances and a cloudflare proxy if you just want some affordable website hosting.
Not every IT problem or company needs Google scale solutions, and not every community (or even community suffering from a housing affordability problem) needs Seattle scale solutions either.
What's missing is smaller apartment blocks (4-8 units), small THs or SFHs (<3000sqft), or duplex/triplex/etc.
That is beginning to change, largely as a result of rezoning around the Metro corridor. More mixed use, more low-rise condos. But, this is limited to areas that are suitable for complete redevelopment (mostly old low-rise offices within 1/2 mile of a Metro station).
Nuking the SFH zoning to allow market forces to drive development outside the immediate Metro-adjacent plots would help. Allows ADUs and "granny flats". Allow a SFH to be split into a duplex or rebuilt as 3-4 THs. Etc.
They're not, as evidenced by the literally millions of apartments in existence.
Here's Fairfax CO VA. Everything in yellow or green is largely zoned for SFHs (with differing # units/acre). https://fairfaxcountygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/i...
I live in an apartment and cook plenty, for example.
Another case point - lived my whole life in apartments (thats how much of Europe runs), and preferred to buy another one instead of almost similarly-sized house. And I like cooking a lot and currently getting a maybe bit too much into various cuisines via youtube.
Once you grok few basic concepts and rules its amazing how much one can achieve with little and some skills. Plus its creativity to the max, which everybody appreciates too. Also improves your health (better ingredients, you can make stuff with less sugar/fat).
Bad thing is, your average restaurant wont feel that fancy anymore.
I live in a 600sq ft 2-bedroom apartment with my wife, and we cook nearly every meal at home, we rarely go out to bars, or spend much money in the city.
But we have 6-7 cute cafes within a 5 minute walk, so we stop in for a coffee now and then. We have a big park that we can picnic in, three blocks away. There are a ton of fun things to do for cheap or free nearby.
We don’t need a ton of space at home because our city provides us a lot of happiness.
If you can walk to handle all of your basic needs, then you don’t need to have so much at home, is the point that the GP was making.
For example, we keep much less food at home in Europe than we used to in the US, because I can just drop by the veggie stand or mini-grocery on my walk/bike home from work and get a fresh version of whatever I want to cook that night.
We don’t need a beer fridge because there is a beer store selling cold beer cans within a block of us, and with way more selection.
When the outside environment is attractive, apartment living is glorious. When the outside is gnarly (e.g. no amenities, bad neighbors, ...), apartment living is hell.
There's a weird tipping point, where all the negatives of living in an apartment evaporate. But it's hard to put it into numbers. You just "know", experience it.
Similar for houses, there's a weird tipping point where all the negatives of a home just congeal, and it's a drag and anchor, and the house starts to own you more than the other way around.
I have also had great experiences in a detached home (living with my wife’s family for a short while). They’re kind of out in the beyond-suburbs, but we were able to do lots of trail running and hiking nearby, and they had a bigger house so we could all spread out and do different activities without disrupting each other.
(Though, honestly, the extra maintenance and upkeep that they had would’ve been exhausting, if it were actually my home and I had to do it long-term)
Neither is better, exactly, but there are a ton of hidden benefits to living in an apartment in a great part of a city (Amsterdam in my case)..
When I tell people I hate driving so much that I'd rather sit on public transit (or even walk!) for 1 hour if the alternative was a 20 minute drive they are flabbergasted.
I go to the grocery store 3-5 times a week and that amazes people because the default assumption is a grocery trip involves getting in your car and buying a cart full of groceries for a week. People find it so hard to believe that I actually enjoy my 30 minute outings to the grocery store and carrying my groceries home. I got a granny cart for Christmas one year because my family thought "oh hey we can save him time if he can bring a bigger load of groceries home" but it doesn't occur to them that I don't even want that.
If I were hunting/growing my own food, sure I'd want to live in a house with terrain around but that's a level of self-sufficiency that's quite rare in suburbia last time I checked.
Which laws are those?
it sounds ironic, but much of the shift to suburban development patterns in the USA was indeed driven by the Great Migration into cities – specifically, the migration of formerly-enslaved Black Americans out of the rural south and into cities. US public policy was very explicit about disinvesting in cities and destroying vibrant urban neighborhoods, replacing them with freeways and parking lots.
today, large portions of US cities are zoned for exclusively single-family homes, and other zoning requirements like parking minimums, and minimum setback and lot sizes continue to slow urban, transit-oriented redevelopment.
My understanding is this is where it started but the mass migration of everyone off of the farm really started to happen when gasoline engines became standard equipment and replaced beasts of burden.
> and lot sizes continue to slow urban, transit-oriented redevelopment.
I'm not convinced this is the entirety of the problem, fortunately US policy is not a monolith, and several cities are experimenting with different configurations. It will be interesting to see if "developers" start opting for the multiplex configurations that are now being allowed in traditional single family zones.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/06/17/...
Some of the housing regulations were legitimately put in place for safety reasons to protect people. Others were put in place to keep black and Asian people out. Especially after government initiatives to prevent discrimination in housing like the 1968 Fair Housing Act, efforts to keep out minorities became cloaked in the garb of "public safety", and minority-excluding regulations were sanitized into affordability-excluding regulations.
It's more so a generation issue than a red-blue issue. Urbanism is bipartisan.
In Washington, certain cities put restrictions on SRO units. The state is passing legislation to make that easier. [1][2]
These are just cities I've lived in. I would imagine other cities are facing similar zoning questions.
Some of us think that more housing is a good thing, and laws preventing units like ADUs or SROs are prima facie misguided.
[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/hg/2021/09/put-a-spare-home-or-tw...
[1] https://www.seattle.gov/sdci/vault/micro-housing
[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/once-curbe...
Specifically:
- Huge min lot sizes
- Offsets
- Covenants*
We can start by removing/revising those.
(*Certain covenants are no longer enforceable today)
People that want to live near businesses and don't, should move to places that have it - there are lots of places in the country like that.
People that want to live in an entirely residential area, but don't, should move to those places that are.
Why do we need a single solution for everyone, in all areas?
A really prominent case in Moreno Valley, CA exposes how this often works:
https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/losangeles/news...
And LA: https://www.dailynews.com/2024/01/26/13-years-in-federal-pri...
And Dallas: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndtx/pr/dallas-city-council-mem...
The flaw in democracy, manifest.
You simply can't say "We literally do not need anyone. Things are fine. If there's an emergency we can convene something, but outside of that, I don't actually want a body convened with the responsibility of changing things randomly. I'm busy and I don't have the time to keep an eye on these goofs."
It should be that if voter turnout is less than 25%, the election is canceled and either held again, or the seat just left vacant until the next election. Or you are elected, but without power until an emergency is declared, then you have the standard powers but only for that temporary period.
maybe it's a cultural thing? i'm australian and it's mandatory here so that may be affecting my views?
Then you get Brazil. Literal clowns and jokes for candidates.
> i dont understand why people seem to refuse to participate in democracy
Participating in democracy means actually going to meetings, trying to get on the agenda, watching and reporting on the business of the government. Voting is literally the smallest form of participation available.
Further, even if it wasn't, I'm a free person. I didn't ask to be born in your democracy, I don't feel required to participate in it, and even your system of participation explicitly denies me the right to say "no."
> and it's mandatory here
My view is all this does is give politicians a false mandate. They're forcing you to pick from a slate they've likely manipulated and introduce the majority mode of "least worst of."
Is that what my forced participation is to boil down to? Giving full authority to the least worst person that got sent up that year? What about this makes you feel that you have participated in anything?
It does not seem wise to solicit (much less demand) opinions from those who would choose to withhold them. These would be the least-informed opinions available.
We have enough trouble with the people who insist on sharing when their opinion is unwelcome. (These are often a close second on the least-informed scale!) :)
The limitations are largely NIMBYism. There's a block of six units in my short one-block street of otherwise detached single-family dwellings, and the elderly neighbours here talk about how they wished they'd objected to its building decades ago because it changed the character of the street.
It's all tension between "what is best for me and the street as it was when I bought into it" and "what is best for us all collectively". Building here is slightly outpacing population, but it is too financially attractive to buy second and third properties as investments, and it is politically risky to tackle that.
By this logic, it would seem impossible to critique really anything that any democratically elected government does.
That doesn't make them just or a good idea.
>Why do we need a single solution for everyone, in all areas?
Because we have a severe housing shortage. Because why should a crank three blocks over get any input at all into me wanting to put a multiplex on my private property. This isn't advocating for a single solution, it is advocating for a revisiting of a set of rules that are increasingly being found to be the cause of very serious social problems that benefit very few people.
If you want to live in a place that is only SFH with no businesses, that necessarily places a restriction on a historically allowable use of someone else's private property. Zoning is a VERY recent invention.
That's a common argument that no one has been able to sufficiently prove.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53dd6676e4b0fedfbc26e...
If the communities served by a road had to pay the full price of the road you'd see a lot of little 8-10 house hamlets with 10 million dollar bridges pack up and leave.
which is to say it doesn't pass the smell test. I don't know where the studies go wrong but something isn'c adding up.
Just look at something as simple as trash pickup. In the burbs you have to travel a significantly greater distance per household.
how much did you pay for emitting all that Co2?
Implying that particular city job isn't subsidized. Bullshit jobs are mostly city jobs
By the first I mean the continued destruction of smaller towns and semi-rural areas. Even if single family homes are more expensive to build than multi family apartments, the fact is we have ridiculous amounts of space in this country. But most people for various reasons don’t want to live where the space and “affordable” housing is or can be built. The more our population drifts to major metro areas for economic reasons and the more jobs go to where the people are, the worse housing affordability will be, even if we build huge sky rises and cram everyone into Tokyo size apartments.
By the second I mean that people want their own bars, theaters and restaurants at home because in a lot of cases going out to the shared versions of these sucks, sometimes a lot. There’s an overall lack of respect for being in public that just seems to permeates the American culture right now.
In my own experience just this past week someone was completely oblivious to the fact that I was leaving a parking space and their doors were open and they were flitting about making leaving unsafe. It only broke through to them when a gust of wind caught their door and slammed it into my car, to which they hurriedly apologized and swore it would “buff out” and then ran away.
Or the taxi driver who parked in the middle of the lot lane waiting for their fare blocking the whole exit.
There was the restaurant patron loudly having an argument on their cell phone. The cashier who was so stoned or distracted they needed 3 tries to get the order right. Or the waiter who got into a literal shouting match with their co-worker to which management did nothing but watch.
The theater floor is stickier than a fly trap and the seats aren’t much better. The food is awful, and over priced. The cost of just a few games of pool at the bar is crazy, even before factoring in your drink will cost you 4-6x what you could get it for at home and be lukewarm.
Why would people want to go to these shared places or live where they can’t have the space for their own version when this is more and more the norm.
A huge upside to increasing density is that the theatre goes from having 100 people within 4 miles of it to 10,000. In addition, instead of having a 400 car parking lot surrounding it like a moat, people just walk right in off the sidewalk. This means the theatre makes more money and pays less in rent. This means they can hire more people to keep it clean and safe.
You start to get theaters like this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Path%C3%A9+Rembrandt+Utrec...
That might be a small part of it, but some of the places I'm talking about have been there for 30+ years. And they were better before, when the population was even less dense than it is now. Culture plays a HUGE part in this stuff, and I think much bigger than any parking minimums or housing densities. Compare NYC at the various decades over the year to see an obvious example. There are decades where NYC would be a nice place to live if you're a urbanite, and others where it would have been absolutely miserable no matter how much you like high rise tenements.
And my personal feeling is right now the US as a whole is going through a down turn with respect to public behavior and pride, and as a result people want their own versions of these things. I think one place where density does have a factor is in being able to support multiple versions of something. You don't want your local theater servicing 10,000 people. You want the scales to be tilted more towards 100 theaters servicing 100 people each. Both for variety but also because each can serve the specific desires of a specific clientele. Part of the problem with shared spaces is you can only be so much to so many people before either you're not what they want when they want it, or you're so diluted that you're not what anyone wants.
Cue a bunch of online warriors on their high horses implying I'm a bad person for not prioritizing their need over my negative experience.
I'm still going to second-guess going out to eat a little bit, though. I want to create my own beautiful bubble, and that might be home.
Everyone on Earth should curate their own bubble--should live the life they want. This is not at all contradictory with efficient aid to help the unfortunate.
FWIW, it might be alien at first but there's nothing to be afraid of from people who want some food, any more than from anyone else. That is based on long experience with zero problems in many places. Those are the vulnerable people; it's the powerful ones you need to watch out for.
> Cue a bunch of online warriors on their high horses
You violated HN guidelines before anyone even replied!
not OP but FWIW my roommate was followed into an ATM vestibule while depositing his (5 figure) casino winnings, begged at aggressively, and then the destitute person kicked his suitcase, I'd say that's definitely something to be afraid of. now I don't use ATMs with people sleeping in the vestibule.
Yeah, I don't do that either. It's possible I don't have problems because I don't do stupid sh-t, but that goes for most things in life. When I cross the street, I watch the cars to see if they're stopping and don't just assume they will obey the lights (and that I read the lights correctly). When Covid struck, I kept my distance from people whether or not someone required me to.
I don't know what happened with your roommmate - that would be pretty alarming. There's no way someone is following me into an isolated ATM vestibule; I just keep walking if there's a question. And I'm not pulling out that kind of money anywhere but a bank teller window.
You are not a bad person for wanting to live in a mansion or even just a bungalow far away from the city center. That's honestly pretty great! In fact, it's my hope that building walkable, affordable communities will make it even easier for you to afford and live in such a place.
I assume--no, hope--people misread me, and thought I meant 'on the way to/back'. If not, I'm horrified: it is not normal, and should not be normalized.
Self-destruction. They are not victims.
There are examples of small towns with good urbanism - a lot of college towns fit this bill - but they are so rare that they just replicate big-city level prices, without the high-productivity jobs to pay them.
https://www.homes.com/property/kestrel-at-waterston-north-gr...
A "raging environmentalist" should understand that, particularly given that climate change and the collapse of the ecosystem is already underway. The window for "Manhattan project" scale solutions passed decades ago, the only solutions now are damage mitigation. The future is going to be about maintaining our survival and civilization, not a reasonable standard of comfort.
These seem to be somewhat popular in Seattle. https://www.apodment.com
You assume it's a necessity thing instead of a desire+wealth thing. Yet the history of the wealthy and powerful "escaping" to large estates goes back centuries (millenia!).
Additionally, the housing affordability crisis is also happening in European cities with 4+ story buildings everywhere and shops and restaurants on every corner.
If you misunderstand what exactly the problem is and what exactly is being desired and what is being purchased then any sort of "build it and they come" attempts to provide alternatives will be limited by the misconceptions, and any sort of enforce-through-policy change will by stymied by lack of popular support.
People pay absurd amounts for these things because they can't get them in their own community.
What theater are you used to that lets you pick what's shown for $10, vs just a dozen or two movies at once?
> If I can get food from around the world by walking 10 minutes to 20+ restaurants, I won't want to pay $20k to have an 800 sq.ft. kitchen.
What restaurants are you going to where it's cost-effective to eat every meal out instead of doing some of your cooking at home?
> If I can entertain my guests at a community center or beer garden, I won't need to have a $15k patio and outdoor bar area.
What community center are you going to where there's never scheduling conflicts or events? Where you can choose your own landscaping and plants to grow, and do whatever hobbies you want? Where your pet can bask in the sun all day?
Get a bigger imagination about why people want personal space!
(You might also be suprised by how many people in the US can already drive <=10minutes to all the things on your list - and wouldn't see that as a big hindrance compared to walking - and STILL get versions of them in their own home too, to point at some existing evidence to the contrary.)
People pay for the better experience, there are very few places where the apartment experience is desirable, only some where it's a bit less shit.
That said though, I do agree that community options are missing in many American towns/cities today, and I wish people at least had the choice.
Unfortunately this is not the case in North America. Very little land is zoned to allow such communities. Those areas that are have become so insanely expensive only the extremely wealthy can afford to live in them.
So if we had 100x more of the land that matches that criteria:
- ppl could pay a lot less to build houses there
- ppl would pay more ?
Ps. Its just an infrastructure issue our moron leaders failed to account for. Any 3rd grade RTS player understands that.
The communities,, space, and zoning are out there, but often many facing the housing issues just aren't willing to move. There's more to it than this obviously, but for every person slamming their lifestyle and expenses against the wall in a trendy area, there are others picking up and moving to Philly, St. Louis, Lexington, etc.
The problem is it's de facto illegal to actually build anything in city centres in North America, because of postwar zoning laws (it only takes 1 NIMBY to block any development, so it's not literally illegal but it might as well be). So even if you start your own new city in the middle of the empty desert, as soon as a hundred people move there you can't build anything anymore. That's why the only cities in NA are the ones that were built pre-1940, and as demand grows while supply stays fixed, they just get more and more expensive.
These mass timber buildings are SO much better.
Why it doesn't take a toll on members of other classes?
Also, the lack of competition in the MFD housing market means that landlords can barely maintain them and people will not have other options. This is why it often costs $2k+/month to live in apartments that look like they may collapse at any moment.
However, if you can afford to live in a single family house I would say "Wonderful! Please do!"
Construction plays a large part. Apartment buildings in the US are flimsy (usually). In other cities, they're often built like vaults.
I'm not downplaying how much those suck. but half of those problems go away if you don't have to hear them. The couple that argues at all hours of the day? How do you know they're arguing if you can't hear them? If there's a dog that barks all day long but you can't hear it, how is that a problem? Not all of the problems go away, yes, but some of them go away if apartments are built better.
The High Cost of Free Parking - https://a.co/d/7NIZHp9
Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity - https://a.co/d/19DDeTU
Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places - https://a.co/d/8F0cWzl
that's the thing though, the suburban/rural individual house lifestyle is a a bit of a cosplay self-reliance - it's completely dependent on someone else providing you with staggering quantities of fossil fuels
Suburbia relies almost entirely on urban centers or something like a military base or university to survive. I remember when Bill Clinton closed March Air Force Base in California and the city surrounding it died like a plant that was watered using bleach.
Most families don't live in 3-4k sq homes. The average newly built house today is a little over 2k sqft, and most houses are not newly built. Unless you are seriously stretching their definitions, most do not have their own "bar", "restaurant", "theater", and "community center".
A house or apartment should follow a kind of "fractal" pattern that mirrors private and public spaces that encircle it or that it contains. A town should have a town center. This is the public square. For towns large enough, you'll have neighborhoods with squares or parks that are the public meeting place for the neighborhood, but more "private" in relation to the town. Each neighborhood is divided into housing units. An apartment building should have a public space for the apartment buildings, like a courtyard, that is proper to the building, but private in relation to the neighborhood. Within each apartment building, there should be a living room + dining area that function as the public space of the apartment, but which is private in relation to the apartment building (the same principle holds if we replace "apartment building + apartment unit" with "individual house"). The ultimate private space is the bedroom.
Of course, this is idealized, but this is a principle we see in traditional architecture and one that makes sense and respects human nature and supports human flourishing instead of trying to impose some weird, inhuman, Procrustean invention on people to check off some boxes. The things you mention, like bars, restaurants, theaters, and community centers, would appear chiefly in town and neighborhood centers. But they don't replace the living room, the kitchen, and the dining room.
EDIT: Ah, and I would define "neighborhood" in terms of walkability. I should be able to get to the town square by walking in a reasonable about of time.
Instead we have to build our houses into huge compounds to do things that we would normally do at community centers, pubs and other public buildings.
This means you get complexes like this one where it's more parking lot than housing and that land is VERY expensive.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bridgeport+Apartments/@32....
It’s more interesting to ask why people don’t want to live in multi family dwellings. For example, if hearing your neighbors is a big part of the problem, would building code requiring sound baffling in every multi family start tipping the scales? Or if crazy neighbors was the issue, what about legal structures that let residents approve of new owners? (Yes, risky territory, but humor me for a second)
Multi family is generally seen as less appealing. So if you want people to live in multi family, how do we make it appealing?
You can see small attempts at dealing with the problems in e.g. the elimination of shared metering, which invited freeloader problems that simply don’t exist with individual metering.
With a SFH you can control your own destiny to some extent.
https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/law-and-et...
No, it's been foisted on us by corrupt local city officials and massive suburban developers. They have systemically destroyed our city centers turning them into freeways while banning any other construction.
An existing trend that was accelerated by years of lockdown.
Every complaint about apartments stems from American inner city dilapidation. My first culture shock when arriving in the US was the sorry state of American apartments.
We know how to build apartments that are insulated to sound. Common building courtyards give kids safe play-areas within walking distance while supervised. Balconies can be built large and large common areas give people all the space they need.
Back in India, urban army cantonments used to be one of the best places to live. Funnily enough, they were simply gated colonies with large apartment complexes, and the recovered space was used for community activities and sports. That's all we're talking about.
Take the same surface area. You can choose to build in 2d (SFH) or in 3d (buildings). No where does this imply stuffing people like sardines. All they're saying is that if you optimize for your priorities in 3d it is unlikely that the 2d edge case will be most effective outcome.
These colonies you refer to are built on literal and figurative sand with shoddy regulations.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/bengaluru...
> Bengaluru water crisis: Plush society asks residents to use disposable cutlery and wet wipes
https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/floodwaters-cau...
Traditional Indian houses are SFH like US homes.
The problem isn't that people are allowed to live in detached houses with yards, it's that they're not allowed to live anywhere else. Plenty of people evidently want to live in apartment buildings - it wouldn't be necessary to make them illegal otherwise.
Honestly it's weird that people decide they know how other people want to live, both ways. Obv it stems from folks assuming that their values and wants are universal therefore anything derived from those is obvious, but some folks have some pretty extreme confidence in knowing other people's preferences.
The desire for privacy is a reflection of a society failing to provide.
I wrote this about if the situation was reversed: https://gist.github.com/numtel/28ffb7181ad1a296a077db76c474b...
I want a large home I can decorate, with lots of light to keep me happy, and space to invite friends and host a variety of activities, a garden I can tend to and see animals, or just be at peace enjoying the quiet tranquility of not being attached to a neighbor.
If I had no choice but to live stuck in a tiny apartment all my life – I’d just kill myself.
In fact, this would make it easier for you to afford a single family home and make your experience much more pleasant. You wouldn't have 10 neighbors complaining about the sounds and smells of your animals or report you to code enforcement for your plants growing too tall. You also wouldn't have thousands of cars going by with broken exhausts as people commute to work.
In addition, you could live much closer to cities to go see sporting events and concerts because the availability of single family housing would be much better. Also, your race tracks, animal rescues, nature parks, hunting areas, and other rural features wouldn't be regulated to death by massive suburban developments taking over.
However I no longer believe it's the cause of the housing crisis. Perhaps it contributes in Europe but here in North America there is space to build and building materials only make up a small portion of the cost of housing. So I don't believe we can point to single family homes as a cause for the housing crisis or price inflation.
However that said, although it is not behind housing inflation, it does still have negative impacts on quality of life and the environment and I do hope we move towards samer urban planning models incorporating density, public transportation and walkability.
We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are not met by their community. Everyone has their own bar, restaurant, theatre, and community center. There are 8 unit apartment buildings that are smaller than some of these houses.
The housing crisis is an urban planning crisis.