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I find it odd that you almost never hear about the car's role in the housing crisis. And in the US it has been a massive factor since WWII. First, it allowed t

by jmyeet 5y ago

I find it odd that you almost never hear about the car's role in the housing crisis. And in the US it has been a massive factor since WWII. First, it allowed the building of suburbs, which just wasn't feasible before. This in turn led people to push zoning laws such that building anything other than a SFH became illegal. Second, it contributed to the dismantling of street cars and other forms of public transportation. Third, all these cars new housing developments needed roads and this typically led to the destruction of poorer and usually more ethnic neighbours. Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man. Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you because you can just drive around them in an airconditioned bubble. I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man. Fifth, voters routinely complain about the cost and taxes of public transportation but think nothing of all the subsidies governments provide for driving (eg building roads, having gas stations, building so much parking, having cheap or free street parking even in densely populated cities with good public transportation like NYC). Yes there are fuel taxes. No they don't pay all these costs. Lastly, we seem to be comoletely comfortable with the cost in death and crime of car ownership because of the personal convenience. Tens of thousands die in motor vehicle accidents every year. There are crimes like being a serial killer or kidnapping that almost require having a car. Do we really wonder why such things exploded post-WWII? The affordable housing crisis is depressing because it's another stark reminder of just how little a fuck people give to people who aren't in their tribe. The many barriers erected are simply aimed at making poor people go away. That's it. And the problems are at every level of government.

pas 5y ago
Not to mention that cities subsidize suburbs in many ways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/qrn9i7/in_what_ways_do_cities_subsidize_suburbs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/qrn9i7/in_wh...
nomaxx117 5y ago
I've also noticed that attitudes towards the homeless are completely different between those who walk and those who drive. I'm personally willing to pay whatever it takes in extra taxes to get them shelter and deal with the current crisis in my city, but I've noticed that people who drive are often far less willing to support action here.
- nxm 5y ago
  You are. I’m not ok with more wasteful spending. California spends most on the homeless and still has a massive homeless problem.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
kortilla 5y ago
> I find it odd that you almost never hear about the car's role in the housing crisis. This trope is repeated on HN almost every time any article resembling city planning comes up. It’s discussed here ad nauseam. Anyway, let’s do it again. First, if you think cars are the problem, why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago? Second, this is not a US-specific issue. Rent is just as bad in Europe and people just get by on much less space there that would be unacceptable to most people in the US who aren’t accustomed to paying $2k for an old 1-2br apartment in a transit friendly location in a city. Finally, the reason car usage exploded was because it enabled people to have cheap housing and work in the city. All of the cheapest housing in the US is in small towns and exurbs where you can have a 3 bedroom house to yourself for $1300/mo. Houses with access to good public transit (not an hourly bus) cost significantly more. On a square footage basis, the US has some of the cheapest housing for a developed nation.
- jxramos 5y ago
  That’s an interesting metric, price per sqft. Where’d you come across that in light of this context? I always heard of price per sqft on the context of building and as one of the metrics on Trulia and the like but as a high level metric to compare countries with and what that number rolls up to I find it fascinating and am curious how it would render as a heat map overlaid over counties and cities etc across the globe. Do you know of any such visualization/analysis? Even a table would be a good start.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Price per square foot is the metric to compare and classify like property in region. It’s usually the best quick way to determine home valuation or reasonableness of price. Typically the scale will vary by metro area. To visualize it, you’d need to control for different income tiers and local taxes. In my small city, a good condition average quality existing house is about $150/ft. The same house in a nearby suburb with fancy school district, etc is about $200/ft. That home in Queens, NY would be about $400-500/ft. In most places, you need to build higher density as 3 decades of subsidized mortgage rates built out all of the usable space. Usually condos cost around 25% less per unit to build than a single/duplex home.
compiler-guy 5y ago
Great. Cars are a significant contributor to the housing crisis. Would have been much better if that hadn’t happened. Unfortunately, we need to build affordable housing in the cities we have, not in the cities in some magical world where the car didn’t take over. Unless, of course, you want to wait a couple of decades for good public transportation to show up before housing the underserved. Talking about how society should have done something different and casting blame moves the ball forward exactly zero steps, and talking about it in this article is an utter waste of time. The public transpiration problem needs to be solved, but won’t be solved in the even the medium term and is a distraction from solving other problems we have today.
- notatoad 5y ago
  There's plenty of easy and cheap options that can be taken to shift cities away from car dependence without tearing them down and rebuilding them. step one would be to abolish mandatory parking minimums. if a developer wants to use their entire lot size for housing and not provide any parking, they should be able to. if the market demands parking, the market can build market-rate parking. it's ridiculous that we have legal requirements for how much housing there is for cars, but not how much housing there is for people.
lil_dispaches 5y ago
6. Today, automobiles are housing a lot more people than any "homeless" numbers give. 7. While there is enough room on every street to build a row of houses.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rootsudo 5y ago
This, really, after growing up in NYC, then suburban Florida and then living abroad in Cities such as Tokyo, Manila and Jakarta, owning a car in those places, motorcycle and just walking around is really night and day in terms of disconnect and comfort. Cars are a comfortable bubble and 100% in many high dense cities, useless or worthless, but necessary to get out of the cities sometimes (Tokyo is a large exception of course, but a car is def a nice option to experience while in Japan) The thing is, outside of USA, zoning and such do not exist to the same extent so you do have much more owner consideration w/ whatever they want with their land which is good and bad, cheap housing across asia, but parking or getting around even outside your place to the main road is def tricky, open sewers, poorly closed sewers, no car parking (which is acceptable) no/minor motorcycle parking, no bike parking, the right of way of the road and the property ingress can be really close, and it's pretty amazing. I agree 100% with your post, I just think many Americans do not know how things used to be, and never had the experience of going to places abroad which do not have many american problems. .
WindyLakeReturn 5y ago
>Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man. Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you because you can just drive around them in an airconditioned bubble. I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man. I'm not sure the car is to blame for this one. When I'm driving a long drive with the same cars around me for an extended period of time, I think how in the past travelers would be able to chit chat and get to know each other. Cars prevent that. So why do I say it isn't the car's fault? Because even in public transport, people isolate themselves from each other. Even when packed together so you are physically touching, you don't interact with others. People walk down sidewalks don't chat with each other unless they already know one another. If cars were the problem, we wouldn't expect to see this behavior where there aren't cars, including in countries that don't have anything like the car culture the US does. But we do. Something else is at play. I'm not sure what it is, but it doesn't seem fair to blame cars without some stronger evidence.
paulcole 5y ago
You’re basically tilting at windmills talking to Americans about even slightly reducing their car use. Many people simply can’t imagine a life without a car. Many people gush about how they would love to drive less but suggest they walk anywhere or ride a bicycle and you’ll get a million excuses about why it won’t work for them. Very few people are willing to put their money where their mouth is and choose to live a low or no-car life. Personally, I have. I grew up in the country, never learned to drive, managed with my feet and a bicycle, then rode the bus during college, and finally I moved to a city as an adult. Yes, I gave up a lot to do it, but it’s worth it to me.
DoneWithAllThat 5y ago
Cars have been at the center of western urban planning for many decades. This crisis is a recent development. And it happened in partbecause we’ve STOPPED building freeways, suburbs, and in general neighborhoods people want. Instead we build giant fortress style apartments and crowded “condos” that no one wants to live on if they can avoid it, driving the existing single family home prices through the roof. It’s not car culture that’s killing is, it’s mythical thinking about what actual influence climate doomerism and squealing about NIMBYs has on the electorate.
scythe 5y ago
>First, it allowed the building of suburbs, which just wasn't feasible before. This in turn led people to push zoning laws such that building anything other than a SFH became illegal. Possibly, because blaming the car by taking a detour through a motivated political movement doesn't make sense to people? Suburbs would be impossible without cars, true, and airstrikes would be impossible without airplanes, but that seems like a poor case for blaming government policy on an inanimate object. >Third, all these cars new housing developments needed roads All economic activity needs roads. Those roads get wider because of cars, but their existence is felt most strongly in the wider economy because of trucks. Being able to transport goods anywhere with low latency makes a huge difference to the operation of thousands if not millions of businesses. >Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man. Just earlier tonight I was driving and nearly got hit by some other driver who ran a red light. >Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you Liberals really need to work on not sounding like they want people to get robbed. >I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man. Someone in Utah honestly believes that the reason Californians won't deal with the homeless problem is because they don't go to church. But neither of you gave me any evidence.
asdff 5y ago
Actually many suburbs do predate the car: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
downrightmike 5y ago
There are people that talk about the effect the car has. This is probably the best explanation of what we've become because of it: Not just bikes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

by jmyeet 5y ago

pas 5y ago

Not to mention that cities subsidize suburbs in many ways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/qrn9i7/in_what_ways_do_cities_subsidize_suburbs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/qrn9i7/in_wh...

nomaxx117 5y ago

I've also noticed that attitudes towards the homeless are completely different between those who walk and those who drive. I'm personally willing to pay whatever it takes in extra taxes to get them shelter and deal with the current crisis in my city, but I've noticed that people who drive are often far less willing to support action here.

nxm 5y ago
You are. I’m not ok with more wasteful spending. California spends most on the homeless and still has a massive homeless problem.
rufus_foreman 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

kortilla 5y ago

> I find it odd that you almost never hear about the car's role in the housing crisis. This trope is repeated on HN almost every time any article resembling city planning comes up. It’s discussed here ad nauseam. Anyway, let’s do it again. First, if you think cars are the problem, why is the housing crisis still persistent in NYC and Chicago? Second, this is not a US-specific issue. Rent is just as bad in Europe and people just get by on much less space there that would be unacceptable to most people in the US who aren’t accustomed to paying $2k for an old 1-2br apartment in a transit friendly location in a city. Finally, the reason car usage exploded was because it enabled people to have cheap housing and work in the city. All of the cheapest housing in the US is in small towns and exurbs where you can have a 3 bedroom house to yourself for $1300/mo. Houses with access to good public transit (not an hourly bus) cost significantly more. On a square footage basis, the US has some of the cheapest housing for a developed nation.

jxramos 5y ago
That’s an interesting metric, price per sqft. Where’d you come across that in light of this context? I always heard of price per sqft on the context of building and as one of the metrics on Trulia and the like but as a high level metric to compare countries with and what that number rolls up to I find it fascinating and am curious how it would render as a heat map overlaid over counties and cities etc across the globe. Do you know of any such visualization/analysis? Even a table would be a good start.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Price per square foot is the metric to compare and classify like property in region. It’s usually the best quick way to determine home valuation or reasonableness of price. Typically the scale will vary by metro area. To visualize it, you’d need to control for different income tiers and local taxes. In my small city, a good condition average quality existing house is about $150/ft. The same house in a nearby suburb with fancy school district, etc is about $200/ft. That home in Queens, NY would be about $400-500/ft. In most places, you need to build higher density as 3 decades of subsidized mortgage rates built out all of the usable space. Usually condos cost around 25% less per unit to build than a single/duplex home.

compiler-guy 5y ago

Great. Cars are a significant contributor to the housing crisis. Would have been much better if that hadn’t happened. Unfortunately, we need to build affordable housing in the cities we have, not in the cities in some magical world where the car didn’t take over. Unless, of course, you want to wait a couple of decades for good public transportation to show up before housing the underserved. Talking about how society should have done something different and casting blame moves the ball forward exactly zero steps, and talking about it in this article is an utter waste of time. The public transpiration problem needs to be solved, but won’t be solved in the even the medium term and is a distraction from solving other problems we have today.

notatoad 5y ago
There's plenty of easy and cheap options that can be taken to shift cities away from car dependence without tearing them down and rebuilding them. step one would be to abolish mandatory parking minimums. if a developer wants to use their entire lot size for housing and not provide any parking, they should be able to. if the market demands parking, the market can build market-rate parking. it's ridiculous that we have legal requirements for how much housing there is for cars, but not how much housing there is for people.

lil_dispaches 5y ago

6. Today, automobiles are housing a lot more people than any "homeless" numbers give. 7. While there is enough room on every street to build a row of houses.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rootsudo 5y ago

This, really, after growing up in NYC, then suburban Florida and then living abroad in Cities such as Tokyo, Manila and Jakarta, owning a car in those places, motorcycle and just walking around is really night and day in terms of disconnect and comfort. Cars are a comfortable bubble and 100% in many high dense cities, useless or worthless, but necessary to get out of the cities sometimes (Tokyo is a large exception of course, but a car is def a nice option to experience while in Japan) The thing is, outside of USA, zoning and such do not exist to the same extent so you do have much more owner consideration w/ whatever they want with their land which is good and bad, cheap housing across asia, but parking or getting around even outside your place to the main road is def tricky, open sewers, poorly closed sewers, no car parking (which is acceptable) no/minor motorcycle parking, no bike parking, the right of way of the road and the property ingress can be really close, and it's pretty amazing. I agree 100% with your post, I just think many Americans do not know how things used to be, and never had the experience of going to places abroad which do not have many american problems. .

WindyLakeReturn 5y ago

>Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man. Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you because you can just drive around them in an airconditioned bubble. I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man. I'm not sure the car is to blame for this one. When I'm driving a long drive with the same cars around me for an extended period of time, I think how in the past travelers would be able to chit chat and get to know each other. Cars prevent that. So why do I say it isn't the car's fault? Because even in public transport, people isolate themselves from each other. Even when packed together so you are physically touching, you don't interact with others. People walk down sidewalks don't chat with each other unless they already know one another. If cars were the problem, we wouldn't expect to see this behavior where there aren't cars, including in countries that don't have anything like the car culture the US does. But we do. Something else is at play. I'm not sure what it is, but it doesn't seem fair to blame cars without some stronger evidence.

paulcole 5y ago

You’re basically tilting at windmills talking to Americans about even slightly reducing their car use. Many people simply can’t imagine a life without a car. Many people gush about how they would love to drive less but suggest they walk anywhere or ride a bicycle and you’ll get a million excuses about why it won’t work for them. Very few people are willing to put their money where their mouth is and choose to live a low or no-car life. Personally, I have. I grew up in the country, never learned to drive, managed with my feet and a bicycle, then rode the bus during college, and finally I moved to a city as an adult. Yes, I gave up a lot to do it, but it’s worth it to me.

DoneWithAllThat 5y ago

Cars have been at the center of western urban planning for many decades. This crisis is a recent development. And it happened in partbecause we’ve STOPPED building freeways, suburbs, and in general neighborhoods people want. Instead we build giant fortress style apartments and crowded “condos” that no one wants to live on if they can avoid it, driving the existing single family home prices through the roof. It’s not car culture that’s killing is, it’s mythical thinking about what actual influence climate doomerism and squealing about NIMBYs has on the electorate.

scythe 5y ago

>First, it allowed the building of suburbs, which just wasn't feasible before. This in turn led people to push zoning laws such that building anything other than a SFH became illegal. Possibly, because blaming the car by taking a detour through a motivated political movement doesn't make sense to people? Suburbs would be impossible without cars, true, and airstrikes would be impossible without airplanes, but that seems like a poor case for blaming government policy on an inanimate object. >Third, all these cars new housing developments needed roads All economic activity needs roads. Those roads get wider because of cars, but their existence is felt most strongly in the wider economy because of trucks. Being able to transport goods anywhere with low latency makes a huge difference to the operation of thousands if not millions of businesses. >Fourth, driving everywhere is like living in an insulated bubble. You don't have to deal with your fellow man. Just earlier tonight I was driving and nearly got hit by some other driver who ran a red light. >Things like Skid Row (LA) or the Tenderloin (SF) don't touch you Liberals really need to work on not sounding like they want people to get robbed. >I honestly think this contributed to making people care less about the plight of their fellow man. Someone in Utah honestly believes that the reason Californians won't deal with the homeless problem is because they don't go to church. But neither of you gave me any evidence.

asdff 5y ago

Actually many suburbs do predate the car: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

downrightmike 5y ago

There are people that talk about the effect the car has. This is probably the best explanation of what we've become because of it: Not just bikes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI