9 ms·

Why are people so adamantly opposed to density? Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes, but if you think about places like New York, Lon

Why are people so adamantly opposed to density? Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes, but if you think about places like New York, London, and Paris, that argument doesn't exactly hold. Those cities are incredibly dense and expensive, but people love living there enough to pay the high prices. People who can live anywhere choose to live there. I'm willing to bet that SV could triple its population, and property values would hold or increase. Supply will create it's own demand.

adrianratnapala 10y ago
They pay high prices, but then they also vote for anti-building laws in those places too. (At least in NY and London, I don't know about about Paris). In all cases, the restrictions are good for the people who are already there.
epa 10y ago
As a home owner in this area, the majority likely already have double or triple unrealized gains on their home value. The potential to lift that to 'quadruple', for the cost of increased noise, traffic, people, etc is probably not worth the the incremental gain (in theory).
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  In the previously underdeveloped and less desirable neighborhoods of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and even Mountain View, home prices have more than quintupled since the early 90's. In the first two, prices have roughly doubled since 2010.
Johnny555 10y ago
I think it's because they are so attached to their cars, and more density brings more traffic. Especially when starting with a low-density neighborhood that's poorly served by transit and everyone that lives there is tied to their car. Places like NYC, London, and Paris have great public transit systems, it's easy to live there without a car, but much harder to do that in spread out Silicon Valley, even if you live next to a VTA light rail station, be prepared for a very long trip if you want to go across town. I live in mid-density housing in a mostly low density area, and many of my neighbors fought hard against a new high density apartment building being built nearby -- 2 of the most common concerns raised were traffic and street parking (oh, and crime was also raised -- apparently they thought that criminals were going to move in to those $3000 apartments). It's been nearly 2 years, and those concerns are mostly unfounded -- I haven't seen any significant increase in commute time car traffic (though I bike to work, so maybe I just don't see it), there's usually still street parking available in the neighborhood, and afaik, there's been no uptick in burglary.
- shaftway 10y ago
  Regarding the crime issue, high density of people paying $3000/mo for an apartment attracts crime from outside the immediate vicinity. You've basically put a good amount of wealth in one place, and added more people. That makes crime more likely to be lucrative, identification harder, and escape easier. Also, I know construction in my area has significantly impacted traffic. I leave for work before 7 AM, so I don't see it as badly, but when I leave at 8 AM, my typically 15 minute ride to the BART station can take over an hour. Most of the traffic is spillover from parents dropping kids off at school. I shudder to think of what it'll be like next week after school is out.
- ryfm 10y ago
  no, i'm not attached to my car, i just want some privacy and a quite area. i used to leave in 3 countries, changed a number of cities (from 50K to 10M) lived in all types of appartments and i finally have had enough of noisy neigbours in the middle of night.
  - Johnny555 10y ago
    I live in a townhouse with neighbors on both sides and never hear any of the neighbors (except for when their kids are playing in the back patio). Quality construction can go a long way toward giving you the privacy you desire. no need to separate houses by 30 feet of grass.
    - gohrt 10y ago
      Separate houses and grass don't provide any meaningful sound protection. They may get you down from "100 offensive sounds per day" to 10, but that's far less effective than just building proper insulation.
    - ryfm 10y ago
      townhouse is almost a house in that regard, now try a highrise where you can't choose quality construction. once when i rented appartments on the sixth floor i had to call the police to stop an argument happening on the 4th floor in the middle of the night. and i'm not even talking about some kids showing off theirs 'sporty' bikes/cars at 2am.
pjlegato 10y ago
As elsewhere in the bay area, many residents of SV want the physical structure of their neighborhood to be forever frozen in amber as it was circa 1960, and they've enacted robust zoning laws to that effect. Silicon Valley was a quaint, sleepy semi-rural suburb in 1960, and that's how they want it to stay, at least in terms of physical appearance. The problem is that, despite these zoning laws, they can't actually stop people from moving in from other regions, which causes property values to skyrocket. You can easily pay 2m there for an ordinary 3 bedroom ranch house that would be 70k in most of the US.
TulliusCicero 10y ago
> Why are people so adamantly opposed to density? Because they don't just like it. They want a neighborhood that's completely detached single-family homes and where driving is hyper-dominant, and if that means they have to support policies that hurt middle- and working-class newcomers, so be it. Of course, many of the people 'opposed to density' are okay with density somewhere in the bay area, just not where they live, hence the term NIMBY.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes Yes, but not in the way you expect, which is why your comparison fails. In many cases, its not to prop up the market value of their homes, but the features of the community which supports the personal value they place in their homes: its "I live here, and I'd like to keep it the kind of place it is that led me to choose to live here".
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  This many times over. Rewind a few decades and the same basic human desire for such preservation was mobilized towards racial motivations.
- skewart 10y ago
  The desire to keep a city looking the same as it was decades ago does seem to be a powerful motivator for a lot of anti-housing people. It's always seemed a little perverse to me. Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Trying to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change.
  - pjlegato 10y ago
    Most people simply don't like change. Some changes can't be avoided, such as a kid growing up. Other changes can be avoided, such as by passing zoning laws that make it illegal to substantially change the physical appearance of the town you live in. When it's possible, people seek that out.
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    It's also hypocritical: for the city to have reached the state which they originally bought into, it had to have changed. If SV was still zoned exclusively for farms or something, then the neighborhood they like so much wouldn't have existed in the first place.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Try to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change. Well, except that cities, even if viewed as "organisms", aren't people, they serve people, and its quite natural for people to want them kept in the state that they feel best serves their interests.
arebop 10y ago
I think it's a question of local optimization. New housing units increase supply and lower the clearing price. Once people move in, new amenities such as more and better cultural institutions, restaurants, hobbyist clubs, retail establishments, public transit systems, etc. become feasible. So in the long run, the city becomes more civilized and desirable. Clearing price goes up relative to regions that are less-developed. But generally speaking people tend to make short-term and selfish decisions rather than thinking about what could be if many people behave altruistically, forgoing short-term gains and temporary inconveniences in order to reap long-term benefits (global optimization).
pj_mukh 10y ago
There's gotta be a way to economically make a lack of density untenable. Urban sprawl is a threat to the environment, we talk about charging a tax on Carbon, what about on Urban Sprawl? P.S: Not saying a carbon tax is the best idea, but urban sprawl (like carbon emissions) have a negative impact on the environment but zero impact on maximizing capital gains. They two must be tied somehow.
- hx87 10y ago
  > There's gotta be a way to economically make a lack of density untenable. A revenue-neutral switch to land value taxes?
- pjlegato 10y ago
  There are lots of ways. Extremely high gasoline taxes seem to be popular in Europe. When driving costs $10 or $12 a gallon instead of $2 or 3, people want to drive a lot less. High property values also work, as in Europe. In a relatively small European country, there is just a lot less land supply, so it costs a lot and people tend to build much more densely. By contrast the US is huge and has an enormous amount of vacant land, so land is (relatively) extremely cheap in the US, encouraging low density development. Finally, the main reason low density is tenable is that zoning laws in the US are in most places specifically set up to discourage high density construction and make it unprofitable. In the early 20th century, zoning laws were first enacted in the US by the so called "Progressive Movement". They observed that the rich enjoyed spacious country estates while the poor lived in crowded, dense slums, so they decided to "help" the poor live in what they deemed better conditions by making it illegal or difficult to build new high density neighborhoods at all. More on this topic in the book "Living Downtown," by Paul Groth: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49p0wf&brand=ucpress http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49p...
  - jbooth 10y ago
    Bit of a mischaracterization there comparing turn of the century tenements to high rise apartment buildings.
gnashville 10y ago
Even with increased density, the bay area's freeways and transit systems are already jammed up. All those people would have a hard time getting anywhere.
mc32 10y ago
Also because they were there "first". That goes for suburbanites as well as gentrifying creatives, as well as the poor people creatives displaced and the subsequent hipsters and then the professional types who flood the streets with thousand dollar strollers.
zippergz 10y ago
I don’t care what the value of my home is until I am ready to sell, and I don’t plan to do that for a long time. I do care if the qualities that lead me to choose to live where I do change. Additional density can drastically change those qualities. I’ll admit that this motivation is no less selfish than the financial one, but I do think it’s different.
imaginenore 10y ago
You're presuming people like living in big cities. In reality it could be they are only there because of the jobs and the reasonable commute. Lose a job? Can find another one without moving. And of course, there's the night life, the concentration of museums, art galleries, performance arts, etc. But most people I know still go (or at least try to) for their vacation to some tropical paradise. They would live there if they could. But most people can't.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
FWIW that is the wrong question. People are opposed to change. So Sunnyvale has been building a number of apartment buildings and condos around. There has been tremendous back pressure for existing residents (not me but I'm a rarity it seems). The root of their concern is that they don't want the neighborhood experience to change from what they know (or knew) to something they don't know. I talked to some folks who had moved into the apartments near downtown Murphy street. They loved them, easy access to Caltrain, lots of things to do and places to go, they are excited about future growth. The issue in Sunnyvale at least is that people don't seem to internalize that things change. They won't acknowledge that their cute little bungalow house used to be an orchard (where only birds and perhaps squirrels lived, had we given them a say at City Council there would be no houses anywhere!). They will argue strongly for their values and their memories and opinions of what is "right" and what is "wrong." Meanwhile we have people in their 20's and 30's who don't want to own a car, they want tight walkable spaces with an easy way to get to San Francisco or the airport. Now maybe 20 years from now those same people will be resisting even denser housing or something I don't know. We could easily build 200,000 market rate dwellings on existing, unused, parcels in Sunnyvale and house close to half a million people in them. But for folks remember empty streets and quiet drives, those people are going to be really really unhappy.
- guyzero 10y ago
  Well as an actual Sunnyvale resident the fears are slightly more rational: cars on roads, kids in schools and no increase in infrastructure to go along with the thousands of new residents. Some of the buildings have less than one parking spot per apartment which in theory is supposed to help encourage people to use transit, in practice people fear it will lead to more street parking in adjacent residential neighbourhoods which already have pretty full streets. 200,000 dwellings in Sunnyvale would be a DoS attack on the city's infrastructure, not some new urban dreamland.
  - joe_the_user 10y ago
    Broadly, there's enough space in the Peninsula to build whole high-density self-contained cities - Facebook wants to build housing at their office park and if the only condition was shops in walking distance too, I'm sure they could satisfy that requirement also. Maybe these possibilities haven't been explained well but I sort of think there are other interests that would prefer things stay approximately as they are. Edit: one aspect that occurs to me is that developers probably wouldn't want a process that solves the housing crisis immediately either. It seems to me that satisfying the pent-up demand for housing gradually, project by project, would allow a developer to scoop up a lot of the excess, monopoly home-value now enjoyed by homeowners whereas if a huge stock of apartments appeared in one big bang, developers could wind-up selling them at costs plus a small profit level.
forgottenpass 10y ago
Why are people so fervently pro-density? Maybe the smart move is to find a sustainable way to maintain current levels, tell newcomers that maybe a different city is right for them, and focus on improving conditions for the people already living there. There's can be more to city's goals than neverending growth, right?
- jseliger 10y ago
  Why are people so fervently pro-density? Assuming this is a serious question and not a troll, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, and/or my own essay, "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" (https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-future-in-seattle-do-millennials-have-a-future-in-any-superstar-cities/ https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...).
shados 10y ago
As a Canadian who now lives in one of the US tech hubs, the reason I see at least is that Americans can't respect each other if their lives depend on it. So density WILL make your life miserable. HoA rules, municipal laws, etc, are virtually not enforced. So you find a spot you consider tolerable, and you hope to god it stays that way. If someone decides to build a rental building near by, then it's basically over. You either learn to sleep through idiot screaming and people keeping a pair of saint bernards barking in a studio apartment near by, and frat parties that the cop will never do anything about or you move out. Contrast that with up north, where I totally could call the cops on someone walking too loud at night and they'd do something about it (which virtually never needed to happen, since people were much more considerate. And I lived in quite a few places). Now, I know what you'd say. In Canada/Europe/Whatever, it's just as bad! I had <insert exactly the situation I talked about above> happened a ton of times!. No no, these situations don't "just happen". It's a constant, multiple times a day thing. And it's a constant struggle between those who don't care and can't understand those who do. I actually consider it one of the biggest reasons of the divide between the rich and the poor. You have the people with enough money to live on the 40th+ floor of a nice building in NYC, and those dealing with the stress, noise and neighbors at the bottom, thinking they're fine with it (but it probably drastically affect their sleep patterns, productivity, happiness, etc...they just don't realize it). The rich just "run away", because we can't agree on rules and respect them so we can live together. Also, don't forget how terrible public transportation is. NYC has one of the best systems in NA, and it's not exactly fantastic compared to what you can see in many densely populated cities on other continents. Nevermind other North American cities (Hello Boston?)

adrianratnapala 10y ago

They pay high prices, but then they also vote for anti-building laws in those places too. (At least in NY and London, I don't know about about Paris). In all cases, the restrictions are good for the people who are already there.

epa 10y ago

As a home owner in this area, the majority likely already have double or triple unrealized gains on their home value. The potential to lift that to 'quadruple', for the cost of increased noise, traffic, people, etc is probably not worth the the incremental gain (in theory).

hkmurakami 10y ago
In the previously underdeveloped and less desirable neighborhoods of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and even Mountain View, home prices have more than quintupled since the early 90's. In the first two, prices have roughly doubled since 2010.

Johnny555 10y ago

I think it's because they are so attached to their cars, and more density brings more traffic. Especially when starting with a low-density neighborhood that's poorly served by transit and everyone that lives there is tied to their car. Places like NYC, London, and Paris have great public transit systems, it's easy to live there without a car, but much harder to do that in spread out Silicon Valley, even if you live next to a VTA light rail station, be prepared for a very long trip if you want to go across town. I live in mid-density housing in a mostly low density area, and many of my neighbors fought hard against a new high density apartment building being built nearby -- 2 of the most common concerns raised were traffic and street parking (oh, and crime was also raised -- apparently they thought that criminals were going to move in to those $3000 apartments). It's been nearly 2 years, and those concerns are mostly unfounded -- I haven't seen any significant increase in commute time car traffic (though I bike to work, so maybe I just don't see it), there's usually still street parking available in the neighborhood, and afaik, there's been no uptick in burglary.

shaftway 10y ago
Regarding the crime issue, high density of people paying $3000/mo for an apartment attracts crime from outside the immediate vicinity. You've basically put a good amount of wealth in one place, and added more people. That makes crime more likely to be lucrative, identification harder, and escape easier. Also, I know construction in my area has significantly impacted traffic. I leave for work before 7 AM, so I don't see it as badly, but when I leave at 8 AM, my typically 15 minute ride to the BART station can take over an hour. Most of the traffic is spillover from parents dropping kids off at school. I shudder to think of what it'll be like next week after school is out.
ryfm 10y ago
no, i'm not attached to my car, i just want some privacy and a quite area. i used to leave in 3 countries, changed a number of cities (from 50K to 10M) lived in all types of appartments and i finally have had enough of noisy neigbours in the middle of night.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  I live in a townhouse with neighbors on both sides and never hear any of the neighbors (except for when their kids are playing in the back patio). Quality construction can go a long way toward giving you the privacy you desire. no need to separate houses by 30 feet of grass.
  - gohrt 10y ago
    Separate houses and grass don't provide any meaningful sound protection. They may get you down from "100 offensive sounds per day" to 10, but that's far less effective than just building proper insulation.
  - ryfm 10y ago
    townhouse is almost a house in that regard, now try a highrise where you can't choose quality construction. once when i rented appartments on the sixth floor i had to call the police to stop an argument happening on the 4th floor in the middle of the night. and i'm not even talking about some kids showing off theirs 'sporty' bikes/cars at 2am.

pjlegato 10y ago

As elsewhere in the bay area, many residents of SV want the physical structure of their neighborhood to be forever frozen in amber as it was circa 1960, and they've enacted robust zoning laws to that effect. Silicon Valley was a quaint, sleepy semi-rural suburb in 1960, and that's how they want it to stay, at least in terms of physical appearance. The problem is that, despite these zoning laws, they can't actually stop people from moving in from other regions, which causes property values to skyrocket. You can easily pay 2m there for an ordinary 3 bedroom ranch house that would be 70k in most of the US.

TulliusCicero 10y ago

> Why are people so adamantly opposed to density? Because they don't just like it. They want a neighborhood that's completely detached single-family homes and where driving is hyper-dominant, and if that means they have to support policies that hurt middle- and working-class newcomers, so be it. Of course, many of the people 'opposed to density' are okay with density somewhere in the bay area, just not where they live, hence the term NIMBY.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes Yes, but not in the way you expect, which is why your comparison fails. In many cases, its not to prop up the market value of their homes, but the features of the community which supports the personal value they place in their homes: its "I live here, and I'd like to keep it the kind of place it is that led me to choose to live here".

hkmurakami 10y ago
This many times over. Rewind a few decades and the same basic human desire for such preservation was mobilized towards racial motivations.
skewart 10y ago
The desire to keep a city looking the same as it was decades ago does seem to be a powerful motivator for a lot of anti-housing people. It's always seemed a little perverse to me. Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Trying to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change.
- pjlegato 10y ago
  Most people simply don't like change. Some changes can't be avoided, such as a kid growing up. Other changes can be avoided, such as by passing zoning laws that make it illegal to substantially change the physical appearance of the town you live in. When it's possible, people seek that out.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  It's also hypocritical: for the city to have reached the state which they originally bought into, it had to have changed. If SV was still zoned exclusively for farms or something, then the neighborhood they like so much wouldn't have existed in the first place.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Try to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change. Well, except that cities, even if viewed as "organisms", aren't people, they serve people, and its quite natural for people to want them kept in the state that they feel best serves their interests.

arebop 10y ago

I think it's a question of local optimization. New housing units increase supply and lower the clearing price. Once people move in, new amenities such as more and better cultural institutions, restaurants, hobbyist clubs, retail establishments, public transit systems, etc. become feasible. So in the long run, the city becomes more civilized and desirable. Clearing price goes up relative to regions that are less-developed. But generally speaking people tend to make short-term and selfish decisions rather than thinking about what could be if many people behave altruistically, forgoing short-term gains and temporary inconveniences in order to reap long-term benefits (global optimization).

pj_mukh 10y ago

There's gotta be a way to economically make a lack of density untenable. Urban sprawl is a threat to the environment, we talk about charging a tax on Carbon, what about on Urban Sprawl? P.S: Not saying a carbon tax is the best idea, but urban sprawl (like carbon emissions) have a negative impact on the environment but zero impact on maximizing capital gains. They two must be tied somehow.

hx87 10y ago
> There's gotta be a way to economically make a lack of density untenable. A revenue-neutral switch to land value taxes?
pjlegato 10y ago
There are lots of ways. Extremely high gasoline taxes seem to be popular in Europe. When driving costs $10 or $12 a gallon instead of $2 or 3, people want to drive a lot less. High property values also work, as in Europe. In a relatively small European country, there is just a lot less land supply, so it costs a lot and people tend to build much more densely. By contrast the US is huge and has an enormous amount of vacant land, so land is (relatively) extremely cheap in the US, encouraging low density development. Finally, the main reason low density is tenable is that zoning laws in the US are in most places specifically set up to discourage high density construction and make it unprofitable. In the early 20th century, zoning laws were first enacted in the US by the so called "Progressive Movement". They observed that the rich enjoyed spacious country estates while the poor lived in crowded, dense slums, so they decided to "help" the poor live in what they deemed better conditions by making it illegal or difficult to build new high density neighborhoods at all. More on this topic in the book "Living Downtown," by Paul Groth: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49p0wf&brand=ucpress http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49p...
- jbooth 10y ago
  Bit of a mischaracterization there comparing turn of the century tenements to high rise apartment buildings.

gnashville 10y ago

Even with increased density, the bay area's freeways and transit systems are already jammed up. All those people would have a hard time getting anywhere.

mc32 10y ago

Also because they were there "first". That goes for suburbanites as well as gentrifying creatives, as well as the poor people creatives displaced and the subsequent hipsters and then the professional types who flood the streets with thousand dollar strollers.

zippergz 10y ago

I don’t care what the value of my home is until I am ready to sell, and I don’t plan to do that for a long time. I do care if the qualities that lead me to choose to live where I do change. Additional density can drastically change those qualities. I’ll admit that this motivation is no less selfish than the financial one, but I do think it’s different.

imaginenore 10y ago

You're presuming people like living in big cities. In reality it could be they are only there because of the jobs and the reasonable commute. Lose a job? Can find another one without moving. And of course, there's the night life, the concentration of museums, art galleries, performance arts, etc. But most people I know still go (or at least try to) for their vacation to some tropical paradise. They would live there if they could. But most people can't.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

FWIW that is the wrong question. People are opposed to change. So Sunnyvale has been building a number of apartment buildings and condos around. There has been tremendous back pressure for existing residents (not me but I'm a rarity it seems). The root of their concern is that they don't want the neighborhood experience to change from what they know (or knew) to something they don't know. I talked to some folks who had moved into the apartments near downtown Murphy street. They loved them, easy access to Caltrain, lots of things to do and places to go, they are excited about future growth. The issue in Sunnyvale at least is that people don't seem to internalize that things change. They won't acknowledge that their cute little bungalow house used to be an orchard (where only birds and perhaps squirrels lived, had we given them a say at City Council there would be no houses anywhere!). They will argue strongly for their values and their memories and opinions of what is "right" and what is "wrong." Meanwhile we have people in their 20's and 30's who don't want to own a car, they want tight walkable spaces with an easy way to get to San Francisco or the airport. Now maybe 20 years from now those same people will be resisting even denser housing or something I don't know. We could easily build 200,000 market rate dwellings on existing, unused, parcels in Sunnyvale and house close to half a million people in them. But for folks remember empty streets and quiet drives, those people are going to be really really unhappy.

guyzero 10y ago
Well as an actual Sunnyvale resident the fears are slightly more rational: cars on roads, kids in schools and no increase in infrastructure to go along with the thousands of new residents. Some of the buildings have less than one parking spot per apartment which in theory is supposed to help encourage people to use transit, in practice people fear it will lead to more street parking in adjacent residential neighbourhoods which already have pretty full streets. 200,000 dwellings in Sunnyvale would be a DoS attack on the city's infrastructure, not some new urban dreamland.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  Broadly, there's enough space in the Peninsula to build whole high-density self-contained cities - Facebook wants to build housing at their office park and if the only condition was shops in walking distance too, I'm sure they could satisfy that requirement also. Maybe these possibilities haven't been explained well but I sort of think there are other interests that would prefer things stay approximately as they are. Edit: one aspect that occurs to me is that developers probably wouldn't want a process that solves the housing crisis immediately either. It seems to me that satisfying the pent-up demand for housing gradually, project by project, would allow a developer to scoop up a lot of the excess, monopoly home-value now enjoyed by homeowners whereas if a huge stock of apartments appeared in one big bang, developers could wind-up selling them at costs plus a small profit level.

forgottenpass 10y ago

Why are people so fervently pro-density? Maybe the smart move is to find a sustainable way to maintain current levels, tell newcomers that maybe a different city is right for them, and focus on improving conditions for the people already living there. There's can be more to city's goals than neverending growth, right?

jseliger 10y ago
Why are people so fervently pro-density? Assuming this is a serious question and not a troll, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, and/or my own essay, "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" (https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-future-in-seattle-do-millennials-have-a-future-in-any-superstar-cities/ https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...).

shados 10y ago

As a Canadian who now lives in one of the US tech hubs, the reason I see at least is that Americans can't respect each other if their lives depend on it. So density WILL make your life miserable. HoA rules, municipal laws, etc, are virtually not enforced. So you find a spot you consider tolerable, and you hope to god it stays that way. If someone decides to build a rental building near by, then it's basically over. You either learn to sleep through idiot screaming and people keeping a pair of saint bernards barking in a studio apartment near by, and frat parties that the cop will never do anything about or you move out. Contrast that with up north, where I totally could call the cops on someone walking too loud at night and they'd do something about it (which virtually never needed to happen, since people were much more considerate. And I lived in quite a few places). Now, I know what you'd say. In Canada/Europe/Whatever, it's just as bad! I had <insert exactly the situation I talked about above> happened a ton of times!. No no, these situations don't "just happen". It's a constant, multiple times a day thing. And it's a constant struggle between those who don't care and can't understand those who do. I actually consider it one of the biggest reasons of the divide between the rich and the poor. You have the people with enough money to live on the 40th+ floor of a nice building in NYC, and those dealing with the stress, noise and neighbors at the bottom, thinking they're fine with it (but it probably drastically affect their sleep patterns, productivity, happiness, etc...they just don't realize it). The rich just "run away", because we can't agree on rules and respect them so we can live together. Also, don't forget how terrible public transportation is. NYC has one of the best systems in NA, and it's not exactly fantastic compared to what you can see in many densely populated cities on other continents. Nevermind other North American cities (Hello Boston?)