6 ms·

Everybody wants walkable cities, but nobody wants to live in tiny-ass flats. I'm a European and if you look at the size of housing here (perhaps excluding the

• hattori31 5y ago
  I love tiny apartments. In Tokyo houses are tiny but enough. You have to be clever when there is no space. Also, we should be more careful with the space we use for living. Smaller living spaces equals more space for park, forests etc
• crooked-v 5y ago
  NYC apartments are tiny because NYC just doesn't have enough housing in general, so everything that's allowed to be subdivided gets subdivided (and some things that aren't allowed get subdivided too).
  • somnic 5y ago
    Partly, but also smaller living space is in fact part of the tradeoff that you make when building stuff close together. It's a worthwhile tradeoff in my opinion, but I'm also not saying that single-family car-centric suburbs should be illegal for people who prefer it, unlike how building denser housing is illegal in many expensive cities.
    • crooked-v 5y ago
      While that's true, there's a significant difference between "you can't give everybody a McMansion" and "everybody must live in spaces objectively describable as 'tiny'". My objection is to the latter.
      • nitrogen 5y ago
        When I first played Sim City I imagined a future of towering soundproofed arcologies where everyone still had a private yard on a giant balcony, so you could increase density without overly decreasing living space per household. Is anyone trying to build like that?
• lmm 5y ago
  I get the impression Americans buy these huge houses that they then barely use any of most of the time. And a dense neighbourhood can substitute for many rooms - I have a community hall around the corner if I want to host a party, I don't have a home gym/cinema/pool/sauna but I have those things a ten minute bike ride away....
  • stackedinserter 5y ago
    Sure, 1bdrm apartment is more than enough when you live alone and don't have any hobbies aside of hosting parties.
    • ryeights 5y ago
      Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of hobbies necessitate having a giant house to engage in them?
      • stackedinserter 5y ago
        Sure! In our family: - bicycles: in my case it's five bicycles plus trailer for the youngest - motorcycle - woodworking: tools, worktables, storage etc - tinkering/DIY: separate table + shelf - mountain ski gear for three people (soon four) - hockey gear - piano Plus car (and her stuff), storage for seasonal clothes and such, separate rooms for kids, ideally a room for guests, IT den, deck and backyard (and garden stuff) just because I love it, so it adds up to ~1500sqft pretty quickly. I wish I had bigger house, so I wouldn't have to share my garage between {1..3}
        • ryeights 5y ago
          Fair! However, keep in mind that you're nearly 2 standard deviations above the average household size in the US [1], and probably above 2σ in physical activity as well... ;) [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242189/disitribution-of-households-in-the-us-by-household-size/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/242189/disitribution-of-...
      • 5y ago
• rekado 5y ago
  I love living in a walkable city and a tiny-ass apartment (3 people, 75 square meters). When the neighborhood is attractive it becomes part of "your space". I don't need my whole world to be within the confines of these walls.
  • JeremyNT 5y ago
    This is a key, I think. If you live somewhere that has no common space and nowhere to walk (which is most of US housing) you "need" the larger space of your own because you have nothing of any value available to you (unless you are willing to get in a car and navigate the hellscape of suburban sprawl that isolates these types of housing developments from each other and from any amenities). It's a "tragedy of the commons" kind of scenario, since the more of this kind of living there is the worse the traffic gets and the more isolated everything gets from each other by stroads and walls of traffic. Despite the article's suggestion that there's money to be made here I am doubtful that developers are going to be taking the risk. They have a formula that works and they are glad to keep running it. I guess at some point commutes get so bad that something has to give somewhere, but if anything the "remote first" revolution seems to just encourage more sprawl, since you don't need to live near where you work.
    • sokoloff 5y ago
      Removing the artificial restriction that you need to be close enough to the steel and concrete temple to go worship there 5 days a week means that people can now make more free choices about how to live. That will result in some people choosing higher density areas and some people choosing lower density areas, but it should improve freedom of choice significantly, which is great for people.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • yardie 5y ago
      > the "remote first" revolution seems to just encourage more sprawl, since you don't need to live near where you work. It might be my impression, but lots of traditional tech companies have offices out in the suburbs. Because land is cheaper there for a sprawling single-story office park. Remote work has done the opposite and allowed me to live in the city. And because I'm at a central site choosing where to commute I have more opportunities. Rather than living in one suburb and commuting to another suburb.
• rglullis 5y ago
  Berlin rents have risen a lot, but still is an exception to your rule. I pay less (with utilities) for a 3bedroom, 95sqm apartment in a super central location than what I paid for a (tiny) 1bedroom in Boston or for my room with 4 flatmates in NYC.
• pja 5y ago
  This is kind of a weird response to an article which is explicitly talking about high density family housing. The streets depicted are a lot like the one I live in - in our case a terrace of three bed houses (many extended into the roofspace to make a fourth room) in a residential area that has every amenity you could wish for within a ten minutes walk. The housing values are high because many people want to live here - they’re very happy to trade off the small gardens & relatively smaller houses against the obvious advantages (for them) of living in this area. The choices are not between “tiny-ass flats” & “exurbia” - there’s a whole range of housing density in between those extremes.
• Sharlin 5y ago
  The US is not a good comparison because the house sizes are just ridiculous – and those huge houses are just as out of reach for most "common" people and are rapidly getting even more out of reach because they never were sustainable at all! But there’s a spectrum between 40m2 highrise flats and 800m2 single-family McMansions.
  • refurb 5y ago
    Not at all. Get outside the big cities and houses are very affordable. We’re talking 120m^2 homes for under $200k.
    • thex10 5y ago
      Yeah, but then I'd have to buy a car and drive it to get simple basic tasks done.
      • nitrogen 5y ago
        That's kind of the whole point. People want that.
        • halostatue 5y ago
          Do they? Or are the places that people can afford constrained to offer that, making them think that what they can afford and what they _want_ are the same thing? I live in a reasonably walkable section of Toronto, but I still need a car for some of what I do (if I got a bike trailer, I could reduce that need to a larger degree than I already have, but public transit where I live is suboptimal for short trips and doesn’t go everywhere we want). I could not now afford the house I bought twelve years ago because the market has gone crazy (we estimate we could get 3–4x what we paid for the house—but then we’d have to find a place to live), especially for the more walkable sections of the city. I _want_ more walkable, transit-able, and bikeable parts of the city. I also want it to be more affordable to more people in the city, because I don’t particularly want to force people to have 2 hour commutes into the city because they think they want more space, but in order to have more space they have to move where nothing is as reachable as it is here.
• oftenwrong 5y ago
  The available housing options govern our housing choices. I cannot afford a large flat in a very desirable and expensive neighbourhood, but I could possibly afford a very tiny flat there. If I want more space, I can live in a larger flat in a less desirable neighbourhood. If I want to own a car and have a car-centric lifestyle, I can live in a more distant suburb and live large. I can freely trade space, location, and cost as needed if the options exist. To the article's point, breaking the artificial scarcity on walkable neighbourhoods, and increasing the diversity of housing types, will allow more people to make these types of trade-offs.
• bluedino 5y ago
  >> would you want to live in a city like NYC? Would you like to raise a family in those conditions? A good example of this is San Francisco. Only 13% of the population is under 18. NYC is 21.
• refurb 5y ago
  Yup. I’ve lived in a few dense cities in Asia and when I told people I owned a house in the US with its own yard that cost less than their 50 m^2 apartment in a block of 150 units they were shocked. Plus most of bought cars if they could, especially families. Most of the compromises on size of housing were due to affordability, not choice.
• UncleMeat 5y ago
  Yes, but you can make the US far more walkable without crushing home size by changing setback rules for homes and businesses and having mixed zoning. A major problem now is just the amount of space between things. Want to walk from one store to the other? Better cross two massive parking lots. Want to walk past six houses? Better cross some huge lawns. Want to walk between residential and business zoned locations? Fat chance. Yes, a city constructed this way won't be as walkable as a European city. But it'd be a hell of a lot more walkable than existing suburban sprawl.
• jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
  I think there's a happy medium. Perhaps closely spaced SFHs or row-houses near a small downtown with rail access to a larger city.
• bigthymer 5y ago
  How big are the homes that most people raise families in?
  • ghaff 5y ago
    For houses? Probably about 2000 to 2500 sq. ft.
• dionidium 5y ago
  There's a whole world of difference between Manhattan and 2500-sqft single-family homes with large setbacks, street-facing garages, loads of surface parking, and vast backyards, set on culs-de-sac in exurban environments reachable only by car. And it's not hypothetical. Every pre-war U.S. city has districts full of duplexes, tri-plexes, and other kinds of modest density -- with limited setbacks, small yards, spaced fairly close together, mixed in with commercial uses. Historically, many of these buildings would be owner-occupied. These are medium-density neighborhoods. They look nothing like NYC, but they look nothing like the typical U.S. exurban development, either.
  • panzagl 5y ago
    In my city these neighborhoods have all been taken over by lawyer's offices, therapists, accountants, etc., or turned into multiple unit housing for single people.
• belligeront 5y ago
  The problem in the United States is there is almost no choice. If I want to live in walkable/bikable area, I might be fine with living in a tiny flat at a reasonable price. But because of zoning, parking minimums, discretionary review, setbacks, roads designed for traffic throughput etc. there is a huge shortage of these areas so they are not only small, but expensive. We need to allow these types of communities for people to have choice.