I'm not saying we should ban 4000 sq.ft. detached homes on large sprawling lots. They just shouldn't be the ONLY type of home being built. Give people options so they can choose.

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.

Exactly this. People act like it's a "big government takeover" trying to make multi-family housing against peoples wishes. The real fact is it's the exact opposite. "Big government" policies were created forcing people to only build single family homes on massive lots. Current proposals are to remove those regulations, and ironically people see it as the government coming for them.

When a large chunk of the middle-class is counting on their home value to facilitate retirement, they're rightfully concerned about urbanization of their neighborhood.

I personally believe they're mostly wrong - urbanization probably won't harm home values. And done well, might improve the values even more.

I agree. Nice cities are just attractive places to be. Even for people who live in the single family homes near them. An expensive city is expensive everywhere, regardless the type of housing,

> 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.

When our son moved out and we decided to right-size our home, we went looking for condos, but there was very little available in our area, at least nothing that was 3 bedroom + priced in our range + located near the subway. We found one condo that had size and location, and while the purchase price was less than a TH across the street, the monthly condo fees were somewhere near $1000/month. That ended up making the monthly expense >30% higher than the TH across the street (which is where we ended up).

Where do you live that 4k sqft homes are the only new construction? I live in a major metro area and sure in the outskirts and suburbs there’s plenty of McMansion developments, but there’s also a whole host of new townhomes and apartments. And the entire downtown is practically being rebuilt into massive multi story apartments. And this is hardly the center of YIMBY land.

I'm seeing this in my area too. But I wasn't seeing it ten or fifteen years ago when these debates first came onto my radar. What it looks like to me is a success story of identifying a problem and working toward improvement, but simultaneously far more slowly than the proponents of the solutions want and far more quickly than opponents want.

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 feel like this is what you'd expect to happen though right? Just from a base intuition on major societal shifts, you'd expect housing prices and availability to outstrip the local ability to afford them. You'd then expect mounting pressure to see more housing built to reduce the rate of price increase and raise the amount of supply. You'd then expect to see developers start making plans and getting the necessary approvals and permits. Finally after all of that happens you'd expect to see stuff start going up. And you'd expect this whole process to probably take something close to a decade to play out wouldn't you? My company just built a brand new HQ, in the middle of a big field. It was a 3+ year process from the moment it was announced, and I have to figure it was another year before that in the planning. I wouldn't really expect that building huge tracts of housing, whether in the middle of downtown, or out in the suburbs would be a much shorter timeline. You have all the permitting and planning to go through, land acquisition, infrastructure improvements / agreements to improve as part of the construction depending on your local setup, public hearings if any zoning changes are required, and then the inevitable delays that come with massive projects like that. And you'd expect all of this to happen in a slow ramp, starting with one project by one developer and expanding as demand continues to climb.

Yep! None of what I said was meant as a disagreement with any of this :)

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.

It's getting better now, but the OP could live in Seattle: [0]. Anywhere white on that map it was illegal through 2019 to build anything but a single-family home. Just an appalling waste of land.

[0]: https://i0.wp.com/publicola.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/S...

Interested to see how it shakes out in Portland, we put in infill laws a few years ago and I've seen a handful of multi-family additions on previously single-family land, and even a handful of trailer or tiny homes setup on driveways (this was approved in the infill laws). And it does seem like nobody is super happy because the neighborhoods are losing a lot of their classic aesthetic. But IMO we need to let go of that eventually, otherwise everyone just has to move out to suburbs and fill that space instead (which is also happening).

I feel like this is part of the problem every time these housing affordability conversations come up. The problems are hyper-local, but the proposed solutions are advanced as if they need to be state or even country wide. A lot of "we" statements that don't actually apply to the audience. And to people in areas like where I am, or in semi-rural areas that are dying and the housing prices are falling, it just seems ridiculous and hyperbolic. And that isn't to say we don't have problems here. I have plenty of younger co-workers who are facing down where and how to afford living in this area as housing costs have grown immensely over the years. But "stop only building 4k sqft homes" isn't even remotely the right solution here, because that isn't the problem here.

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.

Texas.

Reston, VA - for new construction, we see a mix of large SFHs (3000-6000sqft), large THs (2500-4000sqft), and mid-rise and high-rise apartments (vast majority of which are 1-2 bed).

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 just shouldn't be the ONLY type of home being built

They're not, as evidenced by the literally millions of apartments in existence.

By area, SFHs are generally what's allowable.

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 think the point is that these giant houses provide a lot more than a “modicum” of self sufficiency.

I live in an apartment and cook plenty, for example.

People turn to things like viewing world only in extremes, if it subconsiously validates their viewpoints or life choices. We all fall into this trap to certain extent.

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.

What a weird straw-man.

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.

It's impossible to explain this qualitative difference in life to somebody who hasn't experienced it.

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.

Yeah, that’s a great way to put it.

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)..

It's also hard to explain this difference in life to somebody who doesn't want to live that life.

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.

Haha, love the concern of your family and got you a granny cart!

While I agree with your general point I am really not sure it's as binary as you present it. I live in a apartment building and I cook all of my food and clean my dishes... in my kitchen. I also fix/do diy in my apartment. I can repair my bike in the basement area.

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.

Beer fridge? Is that supposed to be a fridge just for beers?

Yes. Generally kept in a garage or other place away from the kitchen. Beer is bought in bulk and kept cold for parties. It is just a cheap fridge without any bells and whistles. It is a real thing in much of the US.

Yes, very common in the US. Often an older fridge that was moved to the garage or basement when the kitchen was remodeled. Sometimes a dedicated smaller fridge somewhere in the kitchen or living space - often also has wine, cheese, etc alongside the beer, depending on owner's preferences.