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Density. Most Americans and American cities refuse to increase density to the proper levels because there is a "suburbs" culture here. Everyone wants 2 car gara

Density. Most Americans and American cities refuse to increase density to the proper levels because there is a "suburbs" culture here. Everyone wants 2 car garage, large lawn etc. Living in an apartment for your entire life is looked down upon, especially if you have a family. We're still in the suburbs mindset as historically space has been extremely abundant.

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
I'm a young person, and to me it's more of an inequality problem than anything. Only poor people live in apartments, meaning apartment complexes are poverty- and crime-riddled. Either that, or they are so expensive, it would be cheaper to get a house. At least in the suburbs with a mortgage, I am able to build equity. My experience is in a city that has not been positively affected by globalization. I know the housing market is quite different in the tech hubs of the country.
- mjfl 9y ago
  I think if given the opportunity, most people would move to a place where they have a shorter commute, which is one of the most consistent indicators of life satisfaction, on par with having a happy marriage. The problem is that you can only afford to live in a city if you are poor enough to be subsidized or rich enough to afford to subsidize everyone else. The middle gets cut out.
  - brut 9y ago
    Maybe there's a way to get the best of both worlds? High density with space? I don't know much about civil engineering, architecture and urban planning but I'm absolutely certain the the current state is just a local minimum, not an optimal solution. I'm pretty sure we could optimize for higher density, shorter commute and larger living spaces if we wanted to.
    - mjfl 9y ago
      You just need family-size non-luxury apartments to buy (and not rent). The only apartments of that size in any city that I know cost in the millions per unit. That's simply out of reach for your local dentist or pizza shop owner with a wife and 3 kids.
      - crazy2be 9y ago
        Out of reach for your local dentist? Huh? Dentists make more than most people here, $159k/yr average[1]. Software developers make a little over half that on average, depending on which sub occupation they work in. [2]. [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/dentists.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/dentists.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/mobile/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
        VLM 9y ago
        Dentists already have a mortgage sized student loan payment to make. People also confuse revenue with profit. My coworker's OB/GYN has great revenue, but her insurance costs are amazing, almost as much as my salary. From memory of my kids birth the hospital direct bills expensive equipment, certainly my buddies wife did not personally fund the construction of the birthing center room, however if my dentist wants a new x-ray or new chair AFAIK its literally cash out of his checking account. Its comparing apples and oranges. Much like comparing U3 employment stats in an employee culture like the USA where as in Japan I understand they hire once a year for new grads and if you don't make it into a real job at a real company (and very many don't) its a lifetime of either NEET or temp work, so their concept of U3 means very little compared to our concept of U3. Their concept of U3 is kind of like our concept of U3 of military service academy recent officer graduates.
        mjfl 9y ago
        At best tangential to my point.
        jessaustin 9y ago
        In USA the dentists who are starting families and would theoretically be looking for this sort of apartment are all $300k in debt already.
  - ziikutv 9y ago
    That's likely. I on the other hand would never want to live downtown. I like the suburban feeling. Love it. I commute for an hour and third. Downtown areas just feel too busy for me; congested, noisy, claustrophobic. Edit: Addendum, Toronto native.
  - shados 9y ago
    Even if you can afford to live in the city, most richer people I know move to the suburb for quality of life reasons. Not just for space either. I live in an extremely gentrified neighborhood in one of the most densely populated city in the US. My condo is worth 1.2-1.5 million (I don't live in California nor NYC, so that's quite high here). Yet even with that, it took 3 police cars to get a dude with a ton of warrant who has been attacking local women to get off from my stairway...for the second time in 2 weeks. We keep having to call out to get drunk homeless people from my parking lot, and crack addicts hide by the door to our storage rooms. You can pay millions and still deal with that crap. Or you can move a 30 minute drive away and have a fancy house with a yard and instead of drunk people screaming you'll hear your neighbors kids screaming at each other while playing in a pool (which most people like better). I'm a city person, but it's not hard to figure out why people would not want to deal with the city, and why people in the city quickly become NIMBY. Now, I hear Japanese cities a somewhat more civilized. It might be a stereotype, but if its true and people can actually respect each other in close quarters, it changes the game completely.
    - taurath 9y ago
      And if there were enough density to cover both rich and poor there would be way less homeless. Many of the homeless even here in Seattle are because they had an apartment but got priced out or lost their jobs.
easilyBored 9y ago
Living in an apartment for your entire life is looked down upon, especially if you have a family. Not sure about others but personally the yard, larger home, parking etc are a huge quality of life boost. I can sacrifice for a while, but eventually need to enjoy life a bit.
mc32 9y ago
The effect is more like what we in the US see in Detroit. Depopulation or very slow growth can result in a cool housing market. There are many uninhabited houses in and around the greater Tokyo metro -that helps a lot.
sleepingeights 9y ago
Why is it as the US' population went up, the US' health and food services quality degraded? Observe that the US' own stand-in for government/communist style supplied food services through the fast-food chains of McDonalds, Burger King, etc... as well as the food stuffs supplied by their groceries, contributed immensely to the degradation of US health. The US "beef industry" irresponsibly used antibiotics to artificially fatten their cattle, causing everyone who ate their products to also consume those antibiotics. Also, the US' own companies push sugar saturated products to their youth without any disposition to responsibility, where sugar is known and has been known to cause serious health deficits. The US practices culling of their population to reduce density. edit: People have trouble viewing it in this light. A simpler way is to view it through its parallel in warfare. European and "civilized" warfare is the sudden loss of large portions of the population and able bodied men through massive violence organized by their "ruling parties". "Jungle" warfare is one where the losses on the participants isn't high per encounter, but is very high over the duration of their "war". Despite the West criticizing Mao and Stalin of killing off many of their citizens, the US can also be found to have killed off many of their own citizens through the use of subtler methods. For example, as the US' population became aware of the detrimental effects of tobacco (whose mortal danger to health was known in the West's "ruling class and educated" for centuries), the population loss related to tobacco induced health deficits dropped, while other issues began to surface and increase. The observable culling of the population is far more active in the US than it is in Russia or China for example (once one becomes aware that it is more subtle, and more like 'jungle/islander warfare')

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago

I'm a young person, and to me it's more of an inequality problem than anything. Only poor people live in apartments, meaning apartment complexes are poverty- and crime-riddled. Either that, or they are so expensive, it would be cheaper to get a house. At least in the suburbs with a mortgage, I am able to build equity. My experience is in a city that has not been positively affected by globalization. I know the housing market is quite different in the tech hubs of the country.

mjfl 9y ago
I think if given the opportunity, most people would move to a place where they have a shorter commute, which is one of the most consistent indicators of life satisfaction, on par with having a happy marriage. The problem is that you can only afford to live in a city if you are poor enough to be subsidized or rich enough to afford to subsidize everyone else. The middle gets cut out.
- brut 9y ago
  Maybe there's a way to get the best of both worlds? High density with space? I don't know much about civil engineering, architecture and urban planning but I'm absolutely certain the the current state is just a local minimum, not an optimal solution. I'm pretty sure we could optimize for higher density, shorter commute and larger living spaces if we wanted to.
  - mjfl 9y ago
    You just need family-size non-luxury apartments to buy (and not rent). The only apartments of that size in any city that I know cost in the millions per unit. That's simply out of reach for your local dentist or pizza shop owner with a wife and 3 kids.
    - crazy2be 9y ago
      Out of reach for your local dentist? Huh? Dentists make more than most people here, $159k/yr average[1]. Software developers make a little over half that on average, depending on which sub occupation they work in. [2]. [1] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/dentists.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/healthcare/dentists.htm [2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/mobile/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...
      - VLM 9y ago
        Dentists already have a mortgage sized student loan payment to make. People also confuse revenue with profit. My coworker's OB/GYN has great revenue, but her insurance costs are amazing, almost as much as my salary. From memory of my kids birth the hospital direct bills expensive equipment, certainly my buddies wife did not personally fund the construction of the birthing center room, however if my dentist wants a new x-ray or new chair AFAIK its literally cash out of his checking account. Its comparing apples and oranges. Much like comparing U3 employment stats in an employee culture like the USA where as in Japan I understand they hire once a year for new grads and if you don't make it into a real job at a real company (and very many don't) its a lifetime of either NEET or temp work, so their concept of U3 means very little compared to our concept of U3. Their concept of U3 is kind of like our concept of U3 of military service academy recent officer graduates.
      - mjfl 9y ago
        At best tangential to my point.
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        In USA the dentists who are starting families and would theoretically be looking for this sort of apartment are all $300k in debt already.
- ziikutv 9y ago
  That's likely. I on the other hand would never want to live downtown. I like the suburban feeling. Love it. I commute for an hour and third. Downtown areas just feel too busy for me; congested, noisy, claustrophobic. Edit: Addendum, Toronto native.
- shados 9y ago
  Even if you can afford to live in the city, most richer people I know move to the suburb for quality of life reasons. Not just for space either. I live in an extremely gentrified neighborhood in one of the most densely populated city in the US. My condo is worth 1.2-1.5 million (I don't live in California nor NYC, so that's quite high here). Yet even with that, it took 3 police cars to get a dude with a ton of warrant who has been attacking local women to get off from my stairway...for the second time in 2 weeks. We keep having to call out to get drunk homeless people from my parking lot, and crack addicts hide by the door to our storage rooms. You can pay millions and still deal with that crap. Or you can move a 30 minute drive away and have a fancy house with a yard and instead of drunk people screaming you'll hear your neighbors kids screaming at each other while playing in a pool (which most people like better). I'm a city person, but it's not hard to figure out why people would not want to deal with the city, and why people in the city quickly become NIMBY. Now, I hear Japanese cities a somewhat more civilized. It might be a stereotype, but if its true and people can actually respect each other in close quarters, it changes the game completely.
  - taurath 9y ago
    And if there were enough density to cover both rich and poor there would be way less homeless. Many of the homeless even here in Seattle are because they had an apartment but got priced out or lost their jobs.

easilyBored 9y ago

Living in an apartment for your entire life is looked down upon, especially if you have a family. Not sure about others but personally the yard, larger home, parking etc are a huge quality of life boost. I can sacrifice for a while, but eventually need to enjoy life a bit.

mc32 9y ago

The effect is more like what we in the US see in Detroit. Depopulation or very slow growth can result in a cool housing market. There are many uninhabited houses in and around the greater Tokyo metro -that helps a lot.

sleepingeights 9y ago

Why is it as the US' population went up, the US' health and food services quality degraded? Observe that the US' own stand-in for government/communist style supplied food services through the fast-food chains of McDonalds, Burger King, etc... as well as the food stuffs supplied by their groceries, contributed immensely to the degradation of US health. The US "beef industry" irresponsibly used antibiotics to artificially fatten their cattle, causing everyone who ate their products to also consume those antibiotics. Also, the US' own companies push sugar saturated products to their youth without any disposition to responsibility, where sugar is known and has been known to cause serious health deficits. The US practices culling of their population to reduce density. edit: People have trouble viewing it in this light. A simpler way is to view it through its parallel in warfare. European and "civilized" warfare is the sudden loss of large portions of the population and able bodied men through massive violence organized by their "ruling parties". "Jungle" warfare is one where the losses on the participants isn't high per encounter, but is very high over the duration of their "war". Despite the West criticizing Mao and Stalin of killing off many of their citizens, the US can also be found to have killed off many of their own citizens through the use of subtler methods. For example, as the US' population became aware of the detrimental effects of tobacco (whose mortal danger to health was known in the West's "ruling class and educated" for centuries), the population loss related to tobacco induced health deficits dropped, while other issues began to surface and increase. The observable culling of the population is far more active in the US than it is in Russia or China for example (once one becomes aware that it is more subtle, and more like 'jungle/islander warfare')