scottious
74% of people live in SFH right now in the US. How many of those have actually never experienced living in multi-family homes? Probably most of them. How can you prefer something you've never even tried?
Also, keep in mind that in many places SFH is literally the only choice right now.
Given real estate prices in places like Boston and NYC I think multi-family housing is doing just fine
Just build more of the thing that people want!
People move to a place and then expect it to never change again. After all, they bought a house there because they liked it as it is now.
All that does is create places that are encased in amber and unable to adapt. Homeowners have a disproportionate say. aspiring homeowners don't show up to local city council meetings
The top-down approach surely has problems too, I'm not denying that. I just think we need people in charge who can look at the problem holistically and say "hey maybe that inner suburb next to transit shouldn't force you to have a 1/2 acre lot".
This is a complicated issue. What if those people in charge decide your town would be better as a highway? I don't know... it's complicated.
increased density and transit increases demand for that area. high demand != shortage.
What are you suggesting exactly? low density and car-dependency is the solution to our housing problems?
when you're in a car, the possibility for a positive social interaction is nearly 0. I don't know about you but I've never been happier after driving my car
when you're not in a car, there's just more opportunities for small social interactions. You can choose to take those opportunities or not, but they're there. There's just something different about being eye-to-eye with people and not separated by a sound proof metal and glass cage
Cities have shared parks. I don't have any yard. But I have wonderful parks within short walking distance. There are far more amenities and so much more to offer at public parks than private yards. It's a shared backyard
In the suburbs, everybody has their own play structure in their back yard. In cities, we have bigger, better play structures that more kids can use simultaneously which encourages more social interaction.
It's funny that as a child in the suburbs I had maybe 10 neighbors within a half mile and we only knew 2 of them. I never saw them. There were no sidewalks and people didn't walk around.
In fact, in our typical suburban boredom, sometimes we'd sneak around our neighbor's properties to see if we could learn who they were. We were pretending to be spies. One time we discovered that our closest neighbors had goats and we were blown away. I never did meet the people living in those suburban houses in the 10 years we lived in that house.
I grew up in the suburbs and it was a miserable experience. If I wanted to go anywhere I had to ask an adult to drive me. There were no sidewalks. Nearest friend's house was a mile away, and my parents were understandably afraid of letting us go there alone. It was a 100% car-dependent suburb. Everything was so spread out. Nobody wanted to live on a main road with cars, so there were endless dead-ends and culs-de-sac so everybody can have their own little traffic-free neighborhood
One time I literally WALKED SIX MILES to the mall because I was just so bored. I literally spent about half a day just walking on streets with cars going 40+ miles per hour with no shoulder. What's worse is that I had to go behind my parents back to do it because who wants their kid walking next to F-150s going 40 miles an hour?
I thought things would get better once I could drive. Things improved a little bit, but it's hard to afford a car + insurance + gas at 17 years old. The car was a huge drain on my limited resources. I was so eager to get rid of it
Once I discovered the "rat cages" you're deriding, life became a whole lot better for me. I refuse to raise my kids in the suburbs. Kids deserve better than that.
This stands in stark contrast to my car-free life. Every time I go out of the house to travel somewhere, I run into people I know. I say hi to strangers. I nod to pedestrians crossing the street. I have a brief conversation with somebody on the bus. I didn't expect that traveling by transit or bike would have such a positive impact on my well-being.
Knowing what I know now, it's not possible for me to go back to a suburban car-dependent life. It would be a major step backwards
I've seen people completely change their attitudes about things once they own a home. I know a self-proclaimed liberal who claims to care about people suddenly go all NIMBY because they are buying a $2M house and now they don't want duplexes in their neighborhood and don't like the idea of more housing being built ("we're full"). They feel entitled to a high (and increasing) property value in a desirable area.
I hate it so much
D major: D E F♯ G A B C♯
D minor: D E F G A B♭ C
Db major: D♭ E♭ F G♭ A♭ B♭ C
Db minor: D♭ E♭ F♭ G♭ A♭ B♭♭ C♭
Well, nice to meet you, I'm a city dweller who works from home and can technically live where ever I want. I choose the city because I like it and I want my family to have nice things. I like walking to the kid's school and not owning a car and being close to amenities.
Just look at real estate prices in New York, SF, Boston, etc. Yes, people REALLY like cities. Even the wealthiest people who can afford anything still choose cities
Umm what? Humans are social animals and many people LIKE living in cities in close proximity to other people and close to amenities. I do not see a future where we decentralize and spread out because of AI.
Imagine if a tobacco executive said "you remove cigarettes and people will just replace it with alcohol or other drugs or another vice altogether". It may be true for some people but overall we've reduced harm by fighting back against cigarettes
Modern social media is choosing from a vast pool of content and the algorithm's entire goal is to maximize engagement for monetary gain (at whatever cost to society). There's only so much "engagement maxing" you can do with an email sorting algorithm especially if the premise for an email inbox is that you'll always only ever see your emails and nothing else.
Of course, every person is different. Anecdotally, my knees and hips are so much stronger now than they were 15 years ago after running over 20k miles.
I'm saying that we could enact policies that encourage better habits by default. For example, we don't have to build car-dependent suburbia. Car-dependency is a choice we made. We've largely outlawed the building of walkable cities through zoning codes. There are literally millions upon millions of people who are forced into car-dependent suburbia and stuck with 9-5 jobs where they have to spend 1.5 hours commuting. It's no wonder people find it difficult to exercise. Add kids into the mix and it becomes almost impossible to find the time to drive to a gym to exercise 5 days a week. Many of these suburban cities are openly hostile to people not in cars.
That whole thing I just described is a series of policy choices. We can't save people from themselves but we can encourage better lifestyle choices. People would walk more if there were more stuff to walk to. People would bike to work if it were made possible.
Also, honestly, a world with fewer cars would be a much better place.
My body has been completely transformed from 15 years of running. I'm 5'7" and 135 pounds at age 41. My face looks thin, I have a better body than most 20 year olds. I gave myself the best gift that I could possibly give myself.
If they could distill 15 years of running (5x per week) and put it in pill form, I truly believe it would be the most valuable thing medicine has ever created.
All it takes is 45 minutes per day for 5 days per week. And you can actually have fun while doing it! It takes a long time to get to that point but it's so worth it.
I went to the mall recently (big mistake) and I had to get lunch at the food court. I don't think there was a single gram of fiber across the 10 or so restaurants. So much of America is drive-thru garbage. Yup -- you don't even have to stand up to get your Big Mac. You can endanger other people by eating it while you drive.
We tell people to get exercise and then force them to have 9-5 desk jobs that have a 45 minute car-commute each way. And what's so much worse is that people are paying a ton of money for that car that's slowly killing them. It's not entirely their fault though -- that's just the way our society is set up. Walkability is a luxury only the rich can afford.
Then, 20 years later you show up to the doctor and the standard course of action is to prescribe a bunch of medications. The doctor says "you should exercise more and eat better" and many people just don't.
So much is broken.
If only doctors could prescribe it and have people adhere to the prescription.
If only American culture weren't so car-centric and our daily lives involved some natural amount of exercising. We've built a society where only the privileged few can walk or bike to work. It's just too easy these days to barely move in our normal life. Drive to work, drive to the store, drive the kids places... you literally have to specifically schedule exercise (and ironically, many people will drive to the gym to walk on a treadmill).
Your mortgage is the lowest amount you'll pay. On top of that you have to manage the upkeep of the house, which costs both time and money. Lots of people go through phases in their lives where they move around and owning just doesn't make sense for a few 1 to 2 year stretches.
On the other hand, rent is the highest amount you'll pay. You generally don't have to worry about upkeep, and you're free to move. The commitment is lower and that has real value for certain people at certain stages of their lives.
I rented for 6 years in different areas until I figured out what I liked, and then I bought a house. Those 6 years weren't just wasted years. Those were very valuable years where renting really made the most sense.
As for your point about A->B being a larger interval than B->C. There are two half-steps in the white keys (B->C and E->F) because there are two half steps in the major scale! This way, you can play C to C with all white keys and get a major scale.
A major scale is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks in western music theory and it's encoded right onto the keyboard layout itself.
The oddities of music theory are no more strange than all of the strange things in the English language that we just shrug about and move on once we learn it.