One would then think that dense cities would build more housing, but that doesn’t seem to happen. NYC, SF, and Boston are the densest cities in the country and build barely any housing compared to areas like Houston and Austin.
I also just think it isn’t true that everyone who wants to live in a dense city does. My experience is that a lot of people would absolutely love to live in NYC but can’t afford it, and I think this is primarily because there is not enough housing.
Sure, many people would love to move to NYC, but how many people would chose to move to a tiny apartment over a giant penthouse in there, if given such a choice. Say the employer pays for housing with no cost to the individual and no limit, how many people would go for the smallest place in their preferred location and how many would go for the largest? If the former group is in minority this would explain how the cities, ruled by a democratic process, do not strive to pump density.
The main noise in most places is traffic, and traffic is usually caused caused by sprawl, low density and car oriented building.
What you’re objecting to is fixed by more density
It's a bold theory but not one I want to try out in practice.
Because instead of infill density in cities, the sprawl will keep up its creep. Low density building makes that certain.
With how it goes with new development in American suburbs, it’s going to be car oriented and increase loud traffic and make walking unpleasant. (Although it’s probably already not very walkable)
Someone on the new edge will repeat your gripe, rinse and repeat.
As a bonus having more neighbors means things like grocery stores within walking distance become good businesses, so you need a car dramatically less and less space needs to be taken up by parking lots.
I assure you that neither of those are a good outcome as far as I'm concerned.
There's no way you're going to make public transit work in the American suburbs: you're better off hiring taxis and letting people use those for free, because at least the taxis won't create so much pollution and use so much fuel. Running buses every 10 minutes in the subways with 0-2 riders will never be practical.
Maybe western countries should learn a lesson from this, instead of somehow expecting public transit to always operate at a loss. The transit itself makes land valuable, so why not use that as an opportunity for profit? Here, even inside the stations, they rent out space to convenience stores, vending machines, cafes, etc., so they make direct profit just from that, but over in the US they seem to be allergic to doing that (nor do they even have bathrooms in the stations!).
Aside from lawn equipment, the noise pollution I suffer from in my streetcar suburb in a major metro is almost completely from cars and other fossil fuel motorized vehicles.
I was out in a fairly high earning suburb recently and the backyard was constantly inundated by the roar of a not so nearby highway.
Like, what exactly do you think people do to make noise?
Counter example: Europe, Japan. It's perfectly possible for a city to grow denser of people without growing denser of cars.
My inner city neighborhood is quite calm and quiet, because the city has decent public transit with three different modes within 3 minutes walk (besides decent biking infra).
When you build the city densely and don't give away free parking anywhere, it makes people not bother with driving very much. There's no place to park here, except for a few very expensive private lots that probably aren't close to where you want to go. There's no street parking. Renting a parking space at your apartment is very, very expensive (because they could be using that for something else that makes more profit instead, like more apartments or a convenience or grocery store). And you're not even allowed to own a car here unless you can prove to the police that you have a place to park it: they'll even come with a measuring tape to be sure that particular model of car will fit.
Closer to your home, maybe you should visit Amsterdam, because you've obviously never been there. There's lots of people living there without a car, and the amount of car traffic in the city center is quite low.
But living in these car-free zones is at least double as expensive as outside (and the more central, the easier it is to live car-free, the more expensive it is). It is also totally unrealistic to live there with a family, and if you want a job in center of Brussels and live in Mechelen (for example), you need a car. Train is barely doable and only if your employer is dead center brussels (e.g. Diegem, where "the internet lives", is not realistically reachable)
Build rail and deploy bussing like you fucking want it. Make it so good Japanese and European civil engineers ask you for help.
Noise?
That’s an engineering problem.
Teacher ratios?
Your property taxes too low for the services your community needs. Notice how I said need - it’s necessary. 20-1 is high, 30+ plus and your local governance is criminally incompetent.
You’re distracted by change and upset that you need to adapt to a world that’s moved past you. Tale older than the dirt we walk on.
These are all solvable problems but no one has the will because the people empowered are too fucking comfortable watching the planet get destroyed while people die deaths of exposure and despair by the millions.
If you don’t, the problem isn’t the density.
It's not that easy. If you doubled the density, maybe there is nowhere left to go for the school to expand, or the land is now so expensive there is no way for the town to afford expanding the school.
My town is an example. The middle school had two quite large empty lots on two sides.
Those lots have now multi-story apartment buildings in construction. Presumably those apartments will attract younger families who might have kids going to middle school. But if that school ever needs to expand, it is now boxed in by housing on all sides. Time will tell how it goes.
People rather have higher paying jobs, or quit because the job disappoints. I belong to the latter group. I quit teaching at secondary school (ages 15-18). After three different schools in three different areas, and having spoken with many colleagues and their experiences, I sadly had to conclude that broadly the work culture in secondary education (in this country, at least) is dramatically lacking professionalism. To a point where I think if my goal is to teach the next generation well enough, my time and energy is better spent elsewhere.
Only in medium density cities. Once you get to very high cost of living areas, finding and keeping teachers becomes extremely difficult because there's just not enough money to pay them enough for the cost of living. Many teachers either move to cheaper areas or change careers to high paying jobs.
A second problem is kids found out they can get everyone fired for claiming sexual harassment. Especially male teachers are scared. A brat utters a single sentence and you'll never work again as a teacher, and all your neighbours hate you.
Teaching today is a bad job.
A school was knocked down in my neighborhood to build a pricey apartment complex. The district and the developers made a bunch of promises about how current schools would be expanded and more resources would be available. Those were all lies, of course. Apartment complexes make money, public schools do not. Guess which one wins.
For some reason, some people outside a community believe they should have a voice on what the actual community wants. As if a community should be expected to want to ruin what makes their space attractive so interlopers can infest it?
Some development where it makes sense - sure. But no, we aren't converting our homes and properties into multi-family dwellings.
Both my wife’s and I home were “out in the country” when we were kids. Now they’re surrounded by houses. The same pattern is basically everywhere. If you want the community of 20 years ago, move to a new one that looks like it.
It’s simply part of the constant change of life. Being bitter over it isn’t helpful or anyone.
My town was a bucolic paradise at one time and then in the late 19th century a few of the regional villages merged and the community of land owners began to subdivide and develop the land and establish a new town. And now it’s highly desired. This was their choice to transform their holiday community into the bedroom community it is today. And now us, as the land owning community, get to decide how further development goes. Not interlopers with no skin in the game. And we do develop new things but they’re rightfully contested and very carefully decided upon because this is our home.
Ok. So hoefully you can see why people who like their homes and their town will rationally do everything possible to oppose a person who is an outsider and comes in saying they don't care about anything the residents enjoy and just wants to change it all (destroy it)?
There are plenty of already-urban areas that have poorly-used lots that could benefit from building more urban housing. Why not start there? Keep like housing styles together: If you're the one single family house in the middle of a city surrounded by dozens of apartments, then yea, that lot should probably be re-developed into an apartment. The single family home is out of place and the neighborhood is already set up for dense living.
But if you're in a small town that's all single family houses, it doesn't make sense to re-develop a random sampling of them into apartment buildings. 1. They'd look out of place and 2. These small towns don't have the infrastructure to suddenly 3X-10X their populations. They'd need more schools, transportation, electric capacity, water/sewer capacity, trash collection, retail, industry, everything.
This mentality is the same one that’s leading California and New York to ruin, by the way. :D
Can you understand why a community would want to exclude you? That antisocial attitudes like this are shunned accordingly and projects that would attract them are avoided. We actively select to avoid these kinds of antagonistic attitudes getting a foothold because we know what makes our community attractive. Certainly it isn't people that "don't care" about what the community values. You'll need to find somewhere lower rent for that.
> The community you love wasn't always that way - it changed to become what you enjoy, likely to the similar anger/detriment of the previous residents who like the "old" community.
How do you know this? Likely even? Communities do change, of course. But there's a reason why the most highly sought after places continue to be the most highly sought after places and it isn't because they gleefully rip down the very things that make them sough after. Especially so "don't cares" can move in and not care about the place.
> I imagine racial segregationists and apartheid advocates used disconcertingly similar arguments.
What does that have to do with a community wanting to limit and select what they consider appropriate development in the modern age?
I don't find them antisocial whatsoever. Especially since, to my reading, the wider society is _ better_ because of the change. New communities take root and a better place arises.
Regardless, the community will change wether you want it or not. I find it rare that people wanting to stop something from happening get what they want. It's rather the people that want to build something that actually get stuff done.
I don't understand the notion that that community exists in a vacuum where they're entitled to be insulated from the world changing around them.
I don't live there; I shouldn't have any say on their policies (except via federal law-making, limited by the 10th Amendment delegation of powers).
I have a hard time believe that people aren’t aware of that. Especially since we tried it for decades and the obvious happened - it has gone horribly.
Of course the average current home owners in Palo Alto doesn’t want it to change. But Palo Alto doesn’t exist on an island or something. Why would the nearby towns have different views? Mountain View doesn’t want to change! San Mateo doesn’t want to change!
Wowza! How about that, now the entire bay won’t change if left to each town.
And you know what, for decades that’s what we did and we can see what happened. All we got for it was a massive housing shortage.
We tried letting towns set their policy. It went horribly, as it obviously would.
It’s like Kant, would the outcome be acceptable if all the similar actors took this action? No? Well why shouldn’t they if this town does it.
General zoning policy should be decided at a state level (or federal) - like in Japan. Otherwise, no individual community wants more development (of course), but it's a bitter pill that they have to swallow together if we want to solve the housing problem.
And the guy who bought 10 years before you hates you, the newcomer, changing their neighborhood and ruining its character.
In essence I found a neighborhood I liked and I’ve made sure I fit in rather than an interloper that is trying to make a quick buck at the towns long term expense.
I don't want more noise.
I don't want more traffic.
I don't want more students at my kid's schools, which are already at a 35/1 kid to teacher ratio.
That's it for me. I think that's it for a lot of people, whether they live in cities or suburbs or far out in the country. Very few people want more crowding. The people who like living in dense cities already live there.
Blaming greed and property values is just a distraction.