10 ms·

There is no such thing as a city that has run out of room

74 points by luu 11y ago

SixSigma 11y ago
I've recently been to Delft. What struck me was that much of the housing was multiple dwellings on one plot divided by floor. e.g. three apartments atop each other. Wow, no real surprise there, people crowd together like that everywhere. But take a look around : https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0099691,4.3485485,3a,75y,76.17h,75.36t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqeLcwDQO0xy9wXFwgPcA7w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0099691,4.3485485,3a,75y,76.... That street is a few minutes walk from the city centre. The Google Street car can't even get to many house fronts and yet the place is immediately somewhere you'd want to live.
- noir_lord 11y ago
  Yeah this is what annoys me so much here in the UK when the topic of high density comes up, historically high density housing was used as cheap social housing where very little thought or art was put into aesthetics/services or providing for tenants then when the inevitable maintenance cost cutting makes it slum-like everyone recoils at the idea of living there. And yet The Barbican Estate in London is one example of just how beautiful high density housing can be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLgkDCoH14g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLgkDCoH14g of course now (and been central London) what was once affordable high density housing is the preserve of the wealthy.
  - mrec 11y ago
    > The Barbican Estate in London is one example of just how beautiful high density housing can be. Really? De gustibus non est disputandum and all that, but I've lived in London for 15 years, and I can't remember hearing anyone describe the Barbican as anything other than a Brutalist eyesore.
    - noir_lord 11y ago
      Indeed, taste is subjective but I'm a fan of brutalism when it's done well and The Barbican (is ime) done well, it's better then the cheap 60's towerblocks they threw up in the 60's in terms of actually creating a please space to be at any rate.
  - pjc50 11y ago
    The best way to do 'high' density IMO is 4-6 stories across most of the city, like Edinburgh or Barcelona. If everyone lives in an apartment there's no stigma.
    - lmm 11y ago
      To my mind as a Londoner the coolest places to live here are towers. But that's because the modern ones are being built as luxury accommodation. The '60s tower blocks were built to be cheap - and it showed, and coloured the reputation of anything built in that shape.
rayiner 11y ago
Using Dhaka as the reference point is hilarious. Has the author ever been to Dhaka? It was full a long time ago.
- suyash 11y ago
  Exactly, just because you can stuff millions of people in a city doesn't mean you should. Dhaka has one of the worst pollution, sanitation, traffic that no other city wants.
  - xixi77 11y ago
    Is that more of a function of poverty, rather than density though? HK has a lot of density, yet if not for the shitty climate, would IMO have been the most desirable place to live on earth (yeah I know this is subjective, but there is no shortage of people who would agree with me here).
    - joe5150 11y ago
      I think that poverty will tend to amplify and accelerate a lot of the negative effects of high-density living without conveying much of the benefit, so it's both.
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      It's a function of both. Pack enough people into a small enough area and the support + infrastructure gets really, really expensive. There are many stupidities in the original piece, but one significant one is the apparent lack of understanding that cities have to be supported by political, financial and physical infrastructures which extend far outside the geographic boundaries. The effective footprints of London, NY, and HK stretch across the world. So you can make an argument for effective economic and ecological density being very much lower than the density you get from a naive division of population by immediate area. When the effective density is much more constrained, you don't just get financial poverty, you get somewhere that's a shitty place to live in many different ways. And when there's no political understanding of what an effective footprint is, you get disasters like the California drought - which is largely the result of to appreciate that water is a limited resource that comes from elsewhere, and has to flow into an area before anyone can use it.
kqr2 11y ago
Another interesting data point was the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. It no longer exists, however, at one point it was considered the most densely populated place on earth with an estimated population density of 3,250,000/sq mi. [1] The Wall Street Journal also made an interactive portrait of it recently: http://projects.wsj.com/kwc/#chapter=intro http://projects.wsj.com/kwc/#chapter=intro 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
- facepalm 11y ago
  It's a fine example for "yeah, but I REALLY don't want to live like that".
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  KWC was an utterly dreadful place to live, but I suspect that has more to do with its lawlessness than its density.
  - hugh4 11y ago
    But if you're going to live somewhere lawless you'd prefer low density.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > KWC was an utterly dreadful place to live, but I suspect that has more to do with its lawlessness than its density. But I don't think those two things were unrelated.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
      It being lawless made it a popular place to go. That made it dense. It being lawless also meant there was no requirement to make it a nice place. So I suppose lawlessness is the thread linking everything. (Of course, yes, density does make it awful in some ways. A lack of natural light, for example. Though I do wonder if proper planning could have improved that.)
Someone1234 11y ago
> "Economists reject absolutes like 'full' and 'need,'" says Joe Cortright Economists might. Humans (of which I can only assume economists are not) definitely do accept the concepts of full and "too crowded." > Everything we know about cities suggests that, in fact, quality of life doesn't go down as more people crowd in — the opposite happens. [Citation Needed]
- Kenji 11y ago
  The economist also rejects the 'need' in 'citation needed' :)
- protomyth 11y ago
  I'm not sure what the current thinking on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun but his research would seem to indicate you're correct as opposed to the article.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ricksplat 11y ago
  Seriously, has the world not copped on to these cod merchants yet? Why are journalists still deferring to "Economists" as experts on what's going on? They have no more idea than Punxsutawney Phil. Priests of a failed religion, mumbling the rote-learned catechisms of a banal faith - no existence but that granted by cynics cloistered in vaults of pure iron pyrite.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Is this a contribution to the discussion, or the lyrics of a Laibach song?
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  Everything we know about cities suggests that, in fact, quality of life doesn't go down as more people crowd in — the opposite happens. Written, no doubt, from a cozy brownstone in a high-rent district of New York City.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mjevans 11y ago
Greed is the problem.
- ricksplat 11y ago
  Coupled with Debt. A very nasty mix indeed.
abruzzi 11y ago
Some of the comments in the article seems a bit disingenuous. The Dhaka vs DC graph was kind of funny, because the quality of life in Dhaka is probably much lower in large part due to that density. But more to the point, I agree that no one has a right to the density they've become accustomed to, but that doesn't mean that an increase in density won't amount to a drop in the quality of life to them. Take for instance the comment where someone sad something to the effect that without going all Hong Kong, SF could increase density by 30 or 40% by utilizing unused/undeveloped parcels, and adding a few floors to existing buildings. Thats probably true, but that has no effect on the public spaces. So you now have 30-40% more people on the sidewalks. 30-40% more cars on the road. 30-40% higher density. For some people that is a positive thing, but for those that think it is a negative thing, no amount of hand waving is change that. By hand waving, I mean assertion without argument. You may convince them that more and better restaurants will open, and that may genuinely change their mind, but many people I've talked to that prefer the high density lifestyle have a hard time grasping that there are those of us that genuinely do not. I live in a city of 120k in one of the least densely populated states in the US. It was 50k when I first came here. It has been genuinely intolerable for me, and I spend all my free time getting away to significantly less dense areas, and I am actively looking for jobs in areas lower than 50k (hard to do in technical fields). Of course I'm an extreme example, but the point being that trying to portray the quality of life concerns of people that prefer lower density as irrelevant is not an honest comeback. Disregard those concerns as being counter to the larger good, but don't pretend that people that hold those concerns will be happy about all the things they will gain at higher densities.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cousin_it 11y ago
  Yeah. Not everyone wants to live like this: http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1510808/original.jpg http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1510808/original.jpg
  - ceras 11y ago
    I wonder if we should find a word other than "dense" to describe dense urban living. Images like those are exactly what non-urban people picture when they hear "dense," but it doesn't have to be anything like that. For example, I live in one of the densest residential neighorhoods in New York[1], pushing 80k-100k people per square mile, and the buildings largely range from 5-7 stories. I have close access to parks, tree-lined sidewalks, and no skyscrapers blocking sunlight. The buildings and storefronts are varied, colorful, and interesting to walk past: no concrete jungle slabs of grey here. [1] Typical block: http://gettingpurlywithit.com/sites/gettingpurlywithit.com/files/imagecache/slide/images/EastVillageNYC9.jpg http://gettingpurlywithit.com/sites/gettingpurlywithit.com/f...
VLM 11y ago
On one hand they propose dramatically increasing economic spending because if only one thing is certain and in no dispute, its that denser design is more expensive to construct AND maintain. On the other hand they dismiss property rights and representative government as obsolete concepts to be scoffed at because they stand in the way of "progress" where progress is curiously defined as lowering standards of living due to higher density. The only rational conclusion is they must be proposing socialized government owned and operated and maintained ultra high density housing. AKA "the projects". And nobody wanted to live there when we tried it. Usually the WP has better written articles. The individual lines and paragraphs are well organized written. It only fails are the higher organizational writing levels where its wrong, and poorly organized. One exception is the conclusion is completely wrong. Detroit never stopped evolving. It just evolved in a direction most people hated, so everyone who could, left. FUD along the lines of turn this place into the projects or else it'll turn into the projects isn't very logical.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  > denser design is more expensive to construct AND maintain Really? Surely economies of scale would mean that building 10 flats is cheaper than building 10 individual houses?
  - makomk 11y ago
    Really. It's important to remember that every floor in a building has to support all of the floors above it - not just physically, but all the services and access for the floors above too. Above three floors or so, you also need extra infrastructure like pumps to get drinking water to the upper floors, tanks to store it, and elevators so people near the top don't have to carry their shopping and furniture up all the flights of stairs. At the same time, you're losing economies of scale because rather than building the same house 10 times, you're building a one-off, with every floor having to be designed and analysed separately because it's under different loading. And of course that one building has the same transportation, power, water and sewerage needs and generates the same amount of garbage as all 10 houses, but now you have much less space at ground level to satisfy those needs with. And this just gets worse as the building gets taller. Eventually, the infrastructure required to add more floors removes so much usable space from all the floors below that it's not ever economically viable to do so, which is why all the tallest skyscrapers are built for bragging rights these days.
alricb 11y ago
The most densely populated part of Montréal is Côte-des-Neiges, at around 7500 people/sq. km. (edit: to be comparable to the examples in the article, that's around 19500 people/sq. mi.) Typical street: https://www.google.ca/maps/place/C%C3%B4te-Des-Neiges%E2%80%94Notre-Dame-De-Gr%C3%A2ce,+Montreal,+QC/@45.494832,-73.629338,3a,66.8y,80.35h,90.25t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s2UD0C3Z6pOwmsA81vvaBSw!2e0!4m2!3m1!1s0x4cc91759130c26a3:0x3b11a28996f34e10 https://www.google.ca/maps/place/C%C3%B4te-Des-Neiges%E2%80%... I must admit that at rush hour, the walking traffic on Côte-des-Neiges road can be a bit overwhelming, but it's mostly fine the rest of the day.
Jacqued 11y ago
As a counterpoint to the comments about how very dense cities are unlivable, I'd like to offer the example of Paris. I think many people will agree that it's a really nice first-world city, with great culture, transportation, no sanitation troubles, etc (as opposed to Dhaka, which many take issue with). Well, that's a city with 55000 per square mile inside city limits. Some of the suburbs (the richer ones, mind you) even have up to 65-69000 per sqmi. Dhaka has about 50000. Of course, a lot of suburbs are less dense than this, but those tend to be the impoverished & forsaken ones you definitely don't want to live in. High density does not necessarily mean Manhattan or Hong Kong, in fact, closely built, dual use 7-story buildings with offices & shops & restaurants on the ground floor are a more balanced and less costly way to achieve it. And it offers a real opportunity to finally get rid of the cars, something that will be impossible to achieve in low-density cities because those could not support decent public transportation.
- erispoe 11y ago
  Paris is slightly smaller in area than San Francisco, yet has three times the population. As you said, Paris is a very livable city. Yet, a lot of people would describe San Francisco as "full". It is nowhere near "full" if the city updates its infrastructure to accomodate the incoming population, and it puts the housing crisis into perspective: there is room for a lot of housing in San Francisco.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    I don't live in SF and haven't for a long time, but this seems essentially correct to me. My experience of SF is of a lot of small, low-slung buildings; the Mission seems like it consists almost entirely of wood-frame 2-flats.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Paris is slightly smaller in area than San Francisco Its either much smaller (if you count the city proper: less than 1/4 the size of the City and County of San Francisco; given your 3:1 population ratio, this seems most likely to be the comparison you were making) or much bigger (if you count the continuous stretch of urbanized land area within any given radius of the city center) or slightly bigger (if you count by a larger region -- the Ile-de-France is slightly larger than the 9-county Bay Area and has similar population density.) I can't find any kind of like-for-like comparison by which Paris is "slightly smaller" than SF. > It is nowhere near "full" if the city updates its infrastructure to accomodate the incoming population Which isn't an argument that SF isn't "full" (at its current limit of support), but that it wouldn't be full in a hypothetical situation which doesn't exist and which doesn't show any prospects of existing, since the money to change would have to come from somewhere, and even those proposing more aggressive development don't usually propose concrete major infrastructure improvements to support the increased population (and even when they wave their hands in the direction of the idea of such improvements, don't propose a concrete funding mechanisms.)
koenigdavidmj 11y ago
Reddit's Seattle thread on this article pointed out that Istanbul has the kind of density talked about in this article, at least in some neighborhoods. This picture[1] was linked as a representative example, not too different from Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood (that Amazon has essentially remodeled in the past few years). 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3nqu2s/there_is_no_such_thing_as_a_city_that_has_run_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3nqu2s/there_is_no... 1: http://imgur.com/uCM6iiZ http://imgur.com/uCM6iiZ
rmason 11y ago
Just like there are people in Boulder who wish startups would leave and never come back, there are also people in Detroit who wish Dan Gilbert had never moved Quicken Loans downtown and started buying buildings. Most of it is pure jealousy, because at the time no one wanted to bid against him. Engineers have caused downtown rents to soar and pushed the poor completely out. Sound familiar? Even Gilbert's fabled security grid which has made a night and day difference on crime in downtown has its enemies, one merchant got upset when his landlord let Gilbert post cameras and demanded they be removed. There's even a protest t-shirt: https://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/1986/3481/original.jpg https://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/1986/3481/... Just for reference Detroit in 2014 had 2010 people per square mile and more are welcome.
tptacek 11y ago
The numbers in this article are somewhat lazily assembled, which confuses the analysis. The density numbers everyone's immediately going to fixate on are those of SF and NYC. But they're using the numbers for the combined statistical areas for SF-SJ and the NY metro area. SF population density is something like 18k/sqmi. NYC's is 27k across all the boroughs, ranging from ~10k in Brooklyn to ~20k in Queens to 66k(!) in Manhattan. The analysis is trickier in the midwest. Chicago has a citywide population density of 12k, seemingly lower than that of SF. But Chicago dwarfs San Francisco, and the average is brought way down by places like South Chicago and Ashburn. Lakeview, for instance, has a density around 30k. You'd presumably have even worse problems making comparisons to a place like Detroit, which has large areas that are virtually depopulated within it's city limits. Communities like Lakeview and Lincoln Park in Chicago do not seem to have taken a major quality of life hit despite being far more dense than San Francisco. They consist of tree-lined streets and relatively capacious 2-flats and 2-3-4bdr apartments. I would 1000x rather live in a vintage stone Lakeview apartment, with an alley and a parking garage, than share a rickety wooden apartment in the Mission. You think of people with a fixation for low-density living as those wanting lots of living space, a yard, plenty of parking, low crime, that sort of thing. But the median San Francisco resident gets none of that. It really seems like a worst-of-all-worlds situation, unless you've been grandfathered in to a huge house that you bought in the 90s, or have struck it rich and decided to plow all your winnings into real estate. They certainly didn't do themselves any favors by comparing every city to Dhaka.
- sAuronas 11y ago
  I thought the point of the analysis was to think of a city as a whole (I.e., MSA) and not just a downtown with surrounding neighborhoods... Chicago, for example, is very low density compared to CA cities despite having a downtown that could swallow all of CA cities' downtowns. And yet, it has miles of single-story homes, empty lots and abandoned factories. Comparing a city like Chicago using only the city and not the entire MSA to any CA city like SF and it still loses (if the game is density). I really appreciated the analysis because th baby boomer generation and their "I got mine..." attitude is keeping most urban places down: literally. Thank you prop 13, if you live in CA, for destroying affordability.
6d0debc071 11y ago
While some may not share this feeling, to me there's a constant sensation of pressure from not having enough space; from being too closed in with too many people. You go somewhere where there's a single building you own, in the middle of a nice bit of land, and you can go to town and not have to ram your way through the people, or go for a drive and not be sitting in traffic. That's relaxing to me. That's a pressure coming off... it feels almost like physically coming up from being at the bottom of a swimming pool. I've even noticed I think worse in that sort of environment. Like I'll look at things I wrote in a high-density area and they look like insane ramblings. That doesn't seem to be a 'well, you just need to find a nice high-density area' problem. I've lived in some very well-appointed flats in very nice areas before, and didn't care for the experience in the slightest. I don't care whether the flat's fantastically appointed with real oak furniture and good lighting[1]. And what are we offered in return for that unpleasant sensation? I don't care how many coffee shops or restaurants or whatever there are. I don't go to town unless there's something I can't buy on the internet or I need to go to work. There's little I'd value there. Rampant consumerism is not a society, nor is it a community. The ability to shop in a hundred stores is not the same as a high quality of life. Ultimately, that is why I don't live in a high-density area despite being offered several multiples of my current wage to do so. I make enough to be comfortable here, it would be almost impossible for me to make enough to be comfortable there. --- 1. Which, by the way, is very difficult in a high-density area. Good lighting means light from multiple directions in at least some of the rooms. Quite how you're supposed to do that when there's another building in the way I'm not clear on - the general answer seems to be that one doesn't. If you've lived in a property with good lighting angles some practices, such as an open-plan setup seem rather like bad hacks.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  > I've even noticed I think worse in that sort of environment. There have been many posts on HN in the past little while about interruptions killing concentration. Well, in that environment, there's always a siren going off outside, or a car alarm, or a car horn, or... You can't just think there unless you get a place that insulates you from all that. Even then, it takes time for all the mental jarring that happened to you on your way to that place to die away, so that you can think.
nicholas_sailer 11y ago
This is a fascinating article, thanks for posting. It's unfortunate that so many U.S. cities (and some abroad) were designed and built in a way that results in them being unwalkable. I'm really interested in seeing how cities respond to this, and whether or not these cities will start to become more dense in order to possibly improve efficiency, or whether they'll just continue to sprawl because it's the easiest way to grow.

74 points by luu 11y ago

I've recently been to Delft. What struck me was that much of the housing was multiple dwellings on one plot divided by floor. e.g. three apartments atop each other. Wow, no real surprise there, people crowd together like that everywhere. But take a look around : https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0099691,4.3485485,3a,75y,76.17h,75.36t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqeLcwDQO0xy9wXFwgPcA7w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0099691,4.3485485,3a,75y,76.... That street is a few minutes walk from the city centre. The Google Street car can't even get to many house fronts and yet the place is immediately somewhere you'd want to live.

noir_lord 11y ago
Yeah this is what annoys me so much here in the UK when the topic of high density comes up, historically high density housing was used as cheap social housing where very little thought or art was put into aesthetics/services or providing for tenants then when the inevitable maintenance cost cutting makes it slum-like everyone recoils at the idea of living there. And yet The Barbican Estate in London is one example of just how beautiful high density housing can be. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLgkDCoH14g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLgkDCoH14g of course now (and been central London) what was once affordable high density housing is the preserve of the wealthy.
- mrec 11y ago
  > The Barbican Estate in London is one example of just how beautiful high density housing can be. Really? De gustibus non est disputandum and all that, but I've lived in London for 15 years, and I can't remember hearing anyone describe the Barbican as anything other than a Brutalist eyesore.
  - noir_lord 11y ago
    Indeed, taste is subjective but I'm a fan of brutalism when it's done well and The Barbican (is ime) done well, it's better then the cheap 60's towerblocks they threw up in the 60's in terms of actually creating a please space to be at any rate.
- pjc50 11y ago
  The best way to do 'high' density IMO is 4-6 stories across most of the city, like Edinburgh or Barcelona. If everyone lives in an apartment there's no stigma.
  - lmm 11y ago
    To my mind as a Londoner the coolest places to live here are towers. But that's because the modern ones are being built as luxury accommodation. The '60s tower blocks were built to be cheap - and it showed, and coloured the reputation of anything built in that shape.

rayiner 11y ago

Using Dhaka as the reference point is hilarious. Has the author ever been to Dhaka? It was full a long time ago.

suyash 11y ago
Exactly, just because you can stuff millions of people in a city doesn't mean you should. Dhaka has one of the worst pollution, sanitation, traffic that no other city wants.
- xixi77 11y ago
  Is that more of a function of poverty, rather than density though? HK has a lot of density, yet if not for the shitty climate, would IMO have been the most desirable place to live on earth (yeah I know this is subjective, but there is no shortage of people who would agree with me here).
  - joe5150 11y ago
    I think that poverty will tend to amplify and accelerate a lot of the negative effects of high-density living without conveying much of the benefit, so it's both.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    It's a function of both. Pack enough people into a small enough area and the support + infrastructure gets really, really expensive. There are many stupidities in the original piece, but one significant one is the apparent lack of understanding that cities have to be supported by political, financial and physical infrastructures which extend far outside the geographic boundaries. The effective footprints of London, NY, and HK stretch across the world. So you can make an argument for effective economic and ecological density being very much lower than the density you get from a naive division of population by immediate area. When the effective density is much more constrained, you don't just get financial poverty, you get somewhere that's a shitty place to live in many different ways. And when there's no political understanding of what an effective footprint is, you get disasters like the California drought - which is largely the result of to appreciate that water is a limited resource that comes from elsewhere, and has to flow into an area before anyone can use it.

kqr2 11y ago

Another interesting data point was the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. It no longer exists, however, at one point it was considered the most densely populated place on earth with an estimated population density of 3,250,000/sq mi. [1] The Wall Street Journal also made an interactive portrait of it recently: http://projects.wsj.com/kwc/#chapter=intro http://projects.wsj.com/kwc/#chapter=intro 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

facepalm 11y ago
It's a fine example for "yeah, but I REALLY don't want to live like that".
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
KWC was an utterly dreadful place to live, but I suspect that has more to do with its lawlessness than its density.
- hugh4 11y ago
  But if you're going to live somewhere lawless you'd prefer low density.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > KWC was an utterly dreadful place to live, but I suspect that has more to do with its lawlessness than its density. But I don't think those two things were unrelated.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
    It being lawless made it a popular place to go. That made it dense. It being lawless also meant there was no requirement to make it a nice place. So I suppose lawlessness is the thread linking everything. (Of course, yes, density does make it awful in some ways. A lack of natural light, for example. Though I do wonder if proper planning could have improved that.)

Someone1234 11y ago

> "Economists reject absolutes like 'full' and 'need,'" says Joe Cortright Economists might. Humans (of which I can only assume economists are not) definitely do accept the concepts of full and "too crowded." > Everything we know about cities suggests that, in fact, quality of life doesn't go down as more people crowd in — the opposite happens. [Citation Needed]

Kenji 11y ago
The economist also rejects the 'need' in 'citation needed' :)
protomyth 11y ago
I'm not sure what the current thinking on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun but his research would seem to indicate you're correct as opposed to the article.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ricksplat 11y ago
Seriously, has the world not copped on to these cod merchants yet? Why are journalists still deferring to "Economists" as experts on what's going on? They have no more idea than Punxsutawney Phil. Priests of a failed religion, mumbling the rote-learned catechisms of a banal faith - no existence but that granted by cynics cloistered in vaults of pure iron pyrite.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Is this a contribution to the discussion, or the lyrics of a Laibach song?
CamperBob2 11y ago
Everything we know about cities suggests that, in fact, quality of life doesn't go down as more people crowd in — the opposite happens. Written, no doubt, from a cozy brownstone in a high-rent district of New York City.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mjevans 11y ago

Greed is the problem.

ricksplat 11y ago
Coupled with Debt. A very nasty mix indeed.

abruzzi 11y ago

Some of the comments in the article seems a bit disingenuous. The Dhaka vs DC graph was kind of funny, because the quality of life in Dhaka is probably much lower in large part due to that density. But more to the point, I agree that no one has a right to the density they've become accustomed to, but that doesn't mean that an increase in density won't amount to a drop in the quality of life to them. Take for instance the comment where someone sad something to the effect that without going all Hong Kong, SF could increase density by 30 or 40% by utilizing unused/undeveloped parcels, and adding a few floors to existing buildings. Thats probably true, but that has no effect on the public spaces. So you now have 30-40% more people on the sidewalks. 30-40% more cars on the road. 30-40% higher density. For some people that is a positive thing, but for those that think it is a negative thing, no amount of hand waving is change that. By hand waving, I mean assertion without argument. You may convince them that more and better restaurants will open, and that may genuinely change their mind, but many people I've talked to that prefer the high density lifestyle have a hard time grasping that there are those of us that genuinely do not. I live in a city of 120k in one of the least densely populated states in the US. It was 50k when I first came here. It has been genuinely intolerable for me, and I spend all my free time getting away to significantly less dense areas, and I am actively looking for jobs in areas lower than 50k (hard to do in technical fields). Of course I'm an extreme example, but the point being that trying to portray the quality of life concerns of people that prefer lower density as irrelevant is not an honest comeback. Disregard those concerns as being counter to the larger good, but don't pretend that people that hold those concerns will be happy about all the things they will gain at higher densities.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
cousin_it 11y ago
Yeah. Not everyone wants to live like this: http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1510808/original.jpg http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1510808/original.jpg
- ceras 11y ago
  I wonder if we should find a word other than "dense" to describe dense urban living. Images like those are exactly what non-urban people picture when they hear "dense," but it doesn't have to be anything like that. For example, I live in one of the densest residential neighorhoods in New York[1], pushing 80k-100k people per square mile, and the buildings largely range from 5-7 stories. I have close access to parks, tree-lined sidewalks, and no skyscrapers blocking sunlight. The buildings and storefronts are varied, colorful, and interesting to walk past: no concrete jungle slabs of grey here. [1] Typical block: http://gettingpurlywithit.com/sites/gettingpurlywithit.com/files/imagecache/slide/images/EastVillageNYC9.jpg http://gettingpurlywithit.com/sites/gettingpurlywithit.com/f...

VLM 11y ago

On one hand they propose dramatically increasing economic spending because if only one thing is certain and in no dispute, its that denser design is more expensive to construct AND maintain. On the other hand they dismiss property rights and representative government as obsolete concepts to be scoffed at because they stand in the way of "progress" where progress is curiously defined as lowering standards of living due to higher density. The only rational conclusion is they must be proposing socialized government owned and operated and maintained ultra high density housing. AKA "the projects". And nobody wanted to live there when we tried it. Usually the WP has better written articles. The individual lines and paragraphs are well organized written. It only fails are the higher organizational writing levels where its wrong, and poorly organized. One exception is the conclusion is completely wrong. Detroit never stopped evolving. It just evolved in a direction most people hated, so everyone who could, left. FUD along the lines of turn this place into the projects or else it'll turn into the projects isn't very logical.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> denser design is more expensive to construct AND maintain Really? Surely economies of scale would mean that building 10 flats is cheaper than building 10 individual houses?
- makomk 11y ago
  Really. It's important to remember that every floor in a building has to support all of the floors above it - not just physically, but all the services and access for the floors above too. Above three floors or so, you also need extra infrastructure like pumps to get drinking water to the upper floors, tanks to store it, and elevators so people near the top don't have to carry their shopping and furniture up all the flights of stairs. At the same time, you're losing economies of scale because rather than building the same house 10 times, you're building a one-off, with every floor having to be designed and analysed separately because it's under different loading. And of course that one building has the same transportation, power, water and sewerage needs and generates the same amount of garbage as all 10 houses, but now you have much less space at ground level to satisfy those needs with. And this just gets worse as the building gets taller. Eventually, the infrastructure required to add more floors removes so much usable space from all the floors below that it's not ever economically viable to do so, which is why all the tallest skyscrapers are built for bragging rights these days.

alricb 11y ago

The most densely populated part of Montréal is Côte-des-Neiges, at around 7500 people/sq. km. (edit: to be comparable to the examples in the article, that's around 19500 people/sq. mi.) Typical street: https://www.google.ca/maps/place/C%C3%B4te-Des-Neiges%E2%80%94Notre-Dame-De-Gr%C3%A2ce,+Montreal,+QC/@45.494832,-73.629338,3a,66.8y,80.35h,90.25t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s2UD0C3Z6pOwmsA81vvaBSw!2e0!4m2!3m1!1s0x4cc91759130c26a3:0x3b11a28996f34e10 https://www.google.ca/maps/place/C%C3%B4te-Des-Neiges%E2%80%... I must admit that at rush hour, the walking traffic on Côte-des-Neiges road can be a bit overwhelming, but it's mostly fine the rest of the day.

Jacqued 11y ago

As a counterpoint to the comments about how very dense cities are unlivable, I'd like to offer the example of Paris. I think many people will agree that it's a really nice first-world city, with great culture, transportation, no sanitation troubles, etc (as opposed to Dhaka, which many take issue with). Well, that's a city with 55000 per square mile inside city limits. Some of the suburbs (the richer ones, mind you) even have up to 65-69000 per sqmi. Dhaka has about 50000. Of course, a lot of suburbs are less dense than this, but those tend to be the impoverished & forsaken ones you definitely don't want to live in. High density does not necessarily mean Manhattan or Hong Kong, in fact, closely built, dual use 7-story buildings with offices & shops & restaurants on the ground floor are a more balanced and less costly way to achieve it. And it offers a real opportunity to finally get rid of the cars, something that will be impossible to achieve in low-density cities because those could not support decent public transportation.

erispoe 11y ago
Paris is slightly smaller in area than San Francisco, yet has three times the population. As you said, Paris is a very livable city. Yet, a lot of people would describe San Francisco as "full". It is nowhere near "full" if the city updates its infrastructure to accomodate the incoming population, and it puts the housing crisis into perspective: there is room for a lot of housing in San Francisco.
- tptacek 11y ago
  I don't live in SF and haven't for a long time, but this seems essentially correct to me. My experience of SF is of a lot of small, low-slung buildings; the Mission seems like it consists almost entirely of wood-frame 2-flats.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Paris is slightly smaller in area than San Francisco Its either much smaller (if you count the city proper: less than 1/4 the size of the City and County of San Francisco; given your 3:1 population ratio, this seems most likely to be the comparison you were making) or much bigger (if you count the continuous stretch of urbanized land area within any given radius of the city center) or slightly bigger (if you count by a larger region -- the Ile-de-France is slightly larger than the 9-county Bay Area and has similar population density.) I can't find any kind of like-for-like comparison by which Paris is "slightly smaller" than SF. > It is nowhere near "full" if the city updates its infrastructure to accomodate the incoming population Which isn't an argument that SF isn't "full" (at its current limit of support), but that it wouldn't be full in a hypothetical situation which doesn't exist and which doesn't show any prospects of existing, since the money to change would have to come from somewhere, and even those proposing more aggressive development don't usually propose concrete major infrastructure improvements to support the increased population (and even when they wave their hands in the direction of the idea of such improvements, don't propose a concrete funding mechanisms.)

koenigdavidmj 11y ago

Reddit's Seattle thread on this article pointed out that Istanbul has the kind of density talked about in this article, at least in some neighborhoods. This picture[1] was linked as a representative example, not too different from Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood (that Amazon has essentially remodeled in the past few years). 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3nqu2s/there_is_no_such_thing_as_a_city_that_has_run_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3nqu2s/there_is_no... 1: http://imgur.com/uCM6iiZ http://imgur.com/uCM6iiZ

rmason 11y ago

Just like there are people in Boulder who wish startups would leave and never come back, there are also people in Detroit who wish Dan Gilbert had never moved Quicken Loans downtown and started buying buildings. Most of it is pure jealousy, because at the time no one wanted to bid against him. Engineers have caused downtown rents to soar and pushed the poor completely out. Sound familiar? Even Gilbert's fabled security grid which has made a night and day difference on crime in downtown has its enemies, one merchant got upset when his landlord let Gilbert post cameras and demanded they be removed. There's even a protest t-shirt: https://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/1986/3481/original.jpg https://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/1986/3481/... Just for reference Detroit in 2014 had 2010 people per square mile and more are welcome.

tptacek 11y ago

The numbers in this article are somewhat lazily assembled, which confuses the analysis. The density numbers everyone's immediately going to fixate on are those of SF and NYC. But they're using the numbers for the combined statistical areas for SF-SJ and the NY metro area. SF population density is something like 18k/sqmi. NYC's is 27k across all the boroughs, ranging from ~10k in Brooklyn to ~20k in Queens to 66k(!) in Manhattan. The analysis is trickier in the midwest. Chicago has a citywide population density of 12k, seemingly lower than that of SF. But Chicago dwarfs San Francisco, and the average is brought way down by places like South Chicago and Ashburn. Lakeview, for instance, has a density around 30k. You'd presumably have even worse problems making comparisons to a place like Detroit, which has large areas that are virtually depopulated within it's city limits. Communities like Lakeview and Lincoln Park in Chicago do not seem to have taken a major quality of life hit despite being far more dense than San Francisco. They consist of tree-lined streets and relatively capacious 2-flats and 2-3-4bdr apartments. I would 1000x rather live in a vintage stone Lakeview apartment, with an alley and a parking garage, than share a rickety wooden apartment in the Mission. You think of people with a fixation for low-density living as those wanting lots of living space, a yard, plenty of parking, low crime, that sort of thing. But the median San Francisco resident gets none of that. It really seems like a worst-of-all-worlds situation, unless you've been grandfathered in to a huge house that you bought in the 90s, or have struck it rich and decided to plow all your winnings into real estate. They certainly didn't do themselves any favors by comparing every city to Dhaka.

sAuronas 11y ago
I thought the point of the analysis was to think of a city as a whole (I.e., MSA) and not just a downtown with surrounding neighborhoods... Chicago, for example, is very low density compared to CA cities despite having a downtown that could swallow all of CA cities' downtowns. And yet, it has miles of single-story homes, empty lots and abandoned factories. Comparing a city like Chicago using only the city and not the entire MSA to any CA city like SF and it still loses (if the game is density). I really appreciated the analysis because th baby boomer generation and their "I got mine..." attitude is keeping most urban places down: literally. Thank you prop 13, if you live in CA, for destroying affordability.

6d0debc071 11y ago

While some may not share this feeling, to me there's a constant sensation of pressure from not having enough space; from being too closed in with too many people. You go somewhere where there's a single building you own, in the middle of a nice bit of land, and you can go to town and not have to ram your way through the people, or go for a drive and not be sitting in traffic. That's relaxing to me. That's a pressure coming off... it feels almost like physically coming up from being at the bottom of a swimming pool. I've even noticed I think worse in that sort of environment. Like I'll look at things I wrote in a high-density area and they look like insane ramblings. That doesn't seem to be a 'well, you just need to find a nice high-density area' problem. I've lived in some very well-appointed flats in very nice areas before, and didn't care for the experience in the slightest. I don't care whether the flat's fantastically appointed with real oak furniture and good lighting[1]. And what are we offered in return for that unpleasant sensation? I don't care how many coffee shops or restaurants or whatever there are. I don't go to town unless there's something I can't buy on the internet or I need to go to work. There's little I'd value there. Rampant consumerism is not a society, nor is it a community. The ability to shop in a hundred stores is not the same as a high quality of life. Ultimately, that is why I don't live in a high-density area despite being offered several multiples of my current wage to do so. I make enough to be comfortable here, it would be almost impossible for me to make enough to be comfortable there. --- 1. Which, by the way, is very difficult in a high-density area. Good lighting means light from multiple directions in at least some of the rooms. Quite how you're supposed to do that when there's another building in the way I'm not clear on - the general answer seems to be that one doesn't. If you've lived in a property with good lighting angles some practices, such as an open-plan setup seem rather like bad hacks.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
> I've even noticed I think worse in that sort of environment. There have been many posts on HN in the past little while about interruptions killing concentration. Well, in that environment, there's always a siren going off outside, or a car alarm, or a car horn, or... You can't just think there unless you get a place that insulates you from all that. Even then, it takes time for all the mental jarring that happened to you on your way to that place to die away, so that you can think.

nicholas_sailer 11y ago

This is a fascinating article, thanks for posting. It's unfortunate that so many U.S. cities (and some abroad) were designed and built in a way that results in them being unwalkable. I'm really interested in seeing how cities respond to this, and whether or not these cities will start to become more dense in order to possibly improve efficiency, or whether they'll just continue to sprawl because it's the easiest way to grow.