21 ms·

Your own reference seems to confirm OP's point that sprawl, not density, is what increased. Relatively few places in the greater LA area have properly dense hou

Your own reference seems to confirm OP's point that sprawl, not density, is what increased. Relatively few places in the greater LA area have properly dense housing projects, and you just have to look across LA from vantage points along either Mulholland drive or Rancho Palos Verdes to see for yourself. Plenty of opportunity for high-rise and even more mid-rise projects, but nearly everything is low-rise. Thankfully it looks like recent zoning changes will throw nimbyism to the wolves, but op is entirely right in describing how LA is essentially the epitome of sprawl.

twblalock 4y ago
That’s because people want to live in low rise buildings. The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own. It is not wrong to want that. However, it is definitely wrong to assume that high-rise apartments are “proper” density and that LA is doing it wrong. LA is the way the people live there want it to be. If you want high density and high-rise living, there are other cities that offer that.
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  The average person has no choice but to live in single-family homes. That doesn't mean they want that. Your solution of 'move somewhere else' is completely tone-deaf. Furthermore, you completely ignored mid-rise housing, and the fact that it can be seamlessly mixed in with SFH without significantly changing the feel or character of the neighbourhood. Oh The Urbanity made a great YouTube video about this recently where they made a neutral comparison of different densities, from 0 to ultra-dense NYC skyscrapers. https://youtu.be/y3XoUBzfXps https://youtu.be/y3XoUBzfXps
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Any solution that involves shared walls with neighbors is not desirable to the vast majority of Americans. Anyone who wants to live in apartments can do so. Nobody is forced to live in single-family homes -- on the contrary, we work long and hard to afford the money to get into them because they are better than listening to our neighbors all the time.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      That's a big claim with nothing backing it up.
      - kortilla 4y ago
        https://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-americans-prefer-single-family-homeownership_o https://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-...
        mixmastamyk 4y ago
        And I prefer Ferraris. Too bad I can’t afford.
        frosted-flakes 4y ago
        Absent anything else, of course most people prefer to live in single-family homes (SFH). But that's not the question most people have to face in reality, because SFH have other trade-offs that that survey completely ignored, including: - significantly higher cost (absent widespread R1 zoning, which drives the cost of apartments up), - locations in the middle of desolate suburbia, - dead neighbourhoods because almost no one lives there, - very few nearby stores and restaurants, - no or limited public transit because it costs far too much to run in sprawling suburbia, - utter dependence on personal automobiles, and the complete lack of independence for children, young adults, and other non-driving members of society, - the necessity of maintaining the grounds of your own personal park, - poorly maintained or missing public infrastructure because everything is so spread out, - having to endure endless traffic because of your 1hr commute to work, and I could go on. Given the above, if apartment living wasn't so heavily restricted by law, so many more people would choose to live in them rather than SFH. You only need to look at cities like Montreal or entire countries like the Netherlands to see that this is true. In Montreal, housing is still cheap and most people live in multiplexes (walk-up two-to-four storey buildings with private front doors and small back yards) and live very close to where they work, but there are still a lot of different styles of SFH that people can choose to live in if they want, and many do. Again, look at the video I linked above for examples.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If those mid-rise buildings have their own parking and residents there are not able to get resident street parking permits, I’d be quite prone to support it. If the first of those is falsified, the mid-rise has a negative effect on the nearby properties. If the second is falsified, that negative effect is significantly amplified. Our part of the city of Cambridge has slightly less street sparking space than cars for the houses here. That’s made up for by about 2/3 of the houses having private driveways (which take one street spot for the curb cut, but often add 2-4 parking spots). Place even a 6-story mid-rise with no parking and 40 cars for its 8 cars worth of frontage and it creates chaos in a way that a triplex or SFR doesn’t.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      If we built our cities in such a way that everyone didn't need a car, this wouldn't be a problem. Nonetheless, and quite ironically, off-street parking mandates are one of the main reasons that everyone does need a car. Eliminate those mandates, and you eliminate vast swathes of empty nothingland that are a huge hindrance to car-free living. Furthermore, if there is no off-street parking and cities price on-street parking appropriately such that there are always a few empty spots, no one would move into the area with the expectation that they can park their car for free, and it wouldn't be a problem. Off-street parking mandates sound like a good idea, but they're actually horrible for cities, and they're part of why most American cities are as sprawling and car-dependent as they are. City-planners of the 20th century thought the same as you and didn't consider the consequences, and now the trend is reversing: many cities and states are beginning to eliminate those mandates, but it's going to take quite a long time before the effects are felt.
- rtpg 4y ago
  There's a false choice presented here, about choosing to live in high rise/high density. Even NYC basically peters out to low rises just out of brooklyn! The overall problem, though, is that these density restrictions cause a nasty spiral. People looking for work are asked to move to one of these cities where their bosses own these wonderful homes. They mostly have to rent. Rent is high. Supply is low, so it's hard to even find a place! Every single service that you might use, also has to pay rent. Not only do you have to put a significant portion of your paycheck to rent, but basically every restaurant has to charge a very heavy amount to this. Every corner store. Parking. Every minor service. Public spaces might barely exist, but forget having community spaces run by individuals, because commercial real estate got super expensive from this same cycle. It's hard to overstate how real estate pressure makes _everything_ more costly. People have to work to live. If they want a good job, they _have_ to buy into the urban real estate tradeoff. There are ~no good rural jobs. It's pervasive. If every part of living wasn't so financialised, if it was possible for public spaces to survive, if teachers could actually afford to live close to schools, this is a different story. And some cities manage this better, of course. But at one point decisions around parking minimums, height restrictions, endless ability of localities to object to building development, and other whining from people who would rather have their yard than replace that with a larger public park... it just makes it harder and harder to sustain urban living at all
  - twblalock 4y ago
    It sounds like your problem is not really about housing at all. This is a rant against the entire society. I used to think the NIMBYs were full of it -- they say their opponents wanted to force everyone into high-density living arrangements, everyone must live in a communist tower block dystopia, people's yards and green spaces would be taken from them, huge buildings would tower over neighborhoods and block out all the light, etc. I thought that was a pretty bad strawman representation of their opponents. Now I realize that some people really do want those things, after seeing quite a lot of unreasonable people on HN and a few other places, who really do seem to believe the insane ideas the NIMBYs ascribe to them. You wrote "But at one point decisions around parking minimums, height restrictions, endless ability of localities to object to building development, and other whining from people who would rather have their yard than replace that with a larger public park.." Do you really think it's ok to build a public park right in someone's yard? Do you really, truly believe that our society should operate that way? Because if you do, the NIMBYs are right!
- jltsiren 4y ago
  What the average person wants is not the point. Roughly speaking, 25% of people prefer urban living, 50% prefer suburban living, and 25% prefer rural living. Urban living is currently expensive, because there is a massive shortage of urban housing. People didn't build enough of it in the 20th century for a number of reasons. All other things being equal, urban living should be cheaper than suburban living, because urban areas need less infrastructure for each resident. Every city where urban living continues to be expensive should build high-density mid-rise areas until that's no longer the case. High-rises rarely make sense outside central locations, as they are expensive to build.
- asdff 4y ago
  If this were the case, we'd see it in the zoning with a lot of parcels being underbuilt for what they are zoned for, since low density is preferred over high density. Instead, the city is developed to upwards of 90% of its zoned capacity. Its gotten to the point where no more units can be built, the zoning has to change in order to make it possible to permit more units. The high prices are all because the job growth in the area has outpaced new housing unit construction, which cannot accelerate to meet demand for housing by labor due to present day zoning. https://la.curbed.com/2015/4/8/9972362/everything-wrong-with-los-angeles-housing-in-one-graph https://la.curbed.com/2015/4/8/9972362/everything-wrong-with...
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Depends on where you are. I know of places near Sacramento where new suburban subdivisions are being built every year.
    - asdff 4y ago
      How are they zoned? Probably for suburban subdivisions and not for highrises. You can find new suburban subdivisions in LA too if you go all the way out into san bernardino or riverside county, and in those cases too its because these areas recently changed zoning from agriculture to low density residential development, and builders are building to the limits of what the land is zoned for. Apartments are so popular that developers often try to get variances to zoning for their projects, to add even more units than what the lot is zoned for. If there wasn't demand for that a developer would not bother.
- MarkSweep 4y ago
  If everyone wants to live in low rise buildings, why does the government ban building higher density buildings using zoning? If it’s so undesirable, nobody would move in so developers would have no incentive to build. It’s not wrong to want your neighborhood to never change. However I would argue that it is wrong to assume that every city currently has the “proper” density. Why was it ok for your house to be built but not for your neighbor to, say, redevelop their SFH into 3 town homes?
- OJFord 4y ago
  > The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own. And then you put them inches away from one another, lined up in perfect rows! I don't get it, looking on (mainly through TV/film) from the UK, what makes detached houses desirable is almost entirely lacking from North American streets, they frequently seem to look like a terrace that's been chopped up. Is it perhaps because timber framing makes noise more of a problem in terraces/semis; so that becomes the prime motivator for detached?
  - brenns10 4y ago
    Nope, it's not a technical reason. Zoning laws typically prevent you from building structures near the edge of your lot in the suburbs. They also mandate excessive amounts of space to store automobiles, and absurd setbacks from the street.
    - OJFord 4y ago
      (From what you've said alone) you could still space them out more, have more variety/less uniformity? ('Little boxes all the same')
      - brenns10 4y ago
        I think it comes down to development cost. A lot of suburbs are developed by a single housing developer, and they essentially have a "theme" with similar styles and just a few floor plans to choose from. So some suburbs end up looking very cookie cutter. They also do things like clear all the old trees out prior to developing the land, which is cheaper and easier, but can create a very desolate environment to live in. There are plenty of suburbs that aren't this way though, especially older ones.
- mikebenfield 4y ago
  > That’s because people want to live in low rise buildings. > The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own. Then why is it necessary for LA and other localities to make it literally illegal to build denser housing? After all, if detached single family homes are what people want, then surely simple supply and demand will lead to that being what's predominantly built, right? (Spoiler: Single family homes aren't what everyone wants. Plenty of people want other types of housing. People pushing these zoning rules aren't doing it because _they_ want single family homes - they're doing it because they want control over what type of home is available to others.)
sologoub 4y ago
NYC density: 26,403 people per square mile (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City#Profile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_Cit...) Hollywood density: 22,193 people per square mile Koreatown density: 42,611 people per square mile Source: https://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/population/density/neighborhood/list/ https://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/population/density/ne... Yes, greater LA area also has a lot of what people like to call “sprawl”, but it’s a big place and has many different neighborhoods. You also don’t need high rises for density - Paris is not all that tall, but at 53k people per square mile, it’s denser on average than NYC…
- hnav 4y ago
  NYC is a whole city of five boroughs with different densities, Hollywood and K-town are neighborhoods. Manhattan which is what most think of as NYC is 70k+/sqmi
  - thrdbndndn 4y ago
    Even with five boroughs, I'm still surprised NYC is this low. In addition to the obvious Staten Island, apparently Queens "only" has 22,125! I always thought it would be close to Brooklyn etc.
    - vikingerik 4y ago
      Well, Queens is about 75% cemeteries by land use. (Population figures don't include dead people, I assume.) Kidding, but there is more land for industrial and commercial use in Queens that isn't residential. Including two airports and three sizable sports facilities. Brooklyn by contrast has almost no interruptions to the edge-to-edge residential street grid.
      - etblg 4y ago
        And then even after all the non-residential space being eaten up, more than half of Queens (the parts after the subway ends) is single family suburban homes akin to Long Island or Staten Island. Really throws the population density off for the city, throws the density off even for Queens itself -- the western part near manhattan is dense, especially compared to most of LA.

twblalock 4y ago

That’s because people want to live in low rise buildings. The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own. It is not wrong to want that. However, it is definitely wrong to assume that high-rise apartments are “proper” density and that LA is doing it wrong. LA is the way the people live there want it to be. If you want high density and high-rise living, there are other cities that offer that.

frosted-flakes 4y ago
The average person has no choice but to live in single-family homes. That doesn't mean they want that. Your solution of 'move somewhere else' is completely tone-deaf. Furthermore, you completely ignored mid-rise housing, and the fact that it can be seamlessly mixed in with SFH without significantly changing the feel or character of the neighbourhood. Oh The Urbanity made a great YouTube video about this recently where they made a neutral comparison of different densities, from 0 to ultra-dense NYC skyscrapers. https://youtu.be/y3XoUBzfXps https://youtu.be/y3XoUBzfXps
- twblalock 4y ago
  Any solution that involves shared walls with neighbors is not desirable to the vast majority of Americans. Anyone who wants to live in apartments can do so. Nobody is forced to live in single-family homes -- on the contrary, we work long and hard to afford the money to get into them because they are better than listening to our neighbors all the time.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    That's a big claim with nothing backing it up.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      https://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-americans-prefer-single-family-homeownership_o https://www.builderonline.com/money/economics/80-percent-of-...
      - mixmastamyk 4y ago
        And I prefer Ferraris. Too bad I can’t afford.
      - frosted-flakes 4y ago
        Absent anything else, of course most people prefer to live in single-family homes (SFH). But that's not the question most people have to face in reality, because SFH have other trade-offs that that survey completely ignored, including: - significantly higher cost (absent widespread R1 zoning, which drives the cost of apartments up), - locations in the middle of desolate suburbia, - dead neighbourhoods because almost no one lives there, - very few nearby stores and restaurants, - no or limited public transit because it costs far too much to run in sprawling suburbia, - utter dependence on personal automobiles, and the complete lack of independence for children, young adults, and other non-driving members of society, - the necessity of maintaining the grounds of your own personal park, - poorly maintained or missing public infrastructure because everything is so spread out, - having to endure endless traffic because of your 1hr commute to work, and I could go on. Given the above, if apartment living wasn't so heavily restricted by law, so many more people would choose to live in them rather than SFH. You only need to look at cities like Montreal or entire countries like the Netherlands to see that this is true. In Montreal, housing is still cheap and most people live in multiplexes (walk-up two-to-four storey buildings with private front doors and small back yards) and live very close to where they work, but there are still a lot of different styles of SFH that people can choose to live in if they want, and many do. Again, look at the video I linked above for examples.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  If those mid-rise buildings have their own parking and residents there are not able to get resident street parking permits, I’d be quite prone to support it. If the first of those is falsified, the mid-rise has a negative effect on the nearby properties. If the second is falsified, that negative effect is significantly amplified. Our part of the city of Cambridge has slightly less street sparking space than cars for the houses here. That’s made up for by about 2/3 of the houses having private driveways (which take one street spot for the curb cut, but often add 2-4 parking spots). Place even a 6-story mid-rise with no parking and 40 cars for its 8 cars worth of frontage and it creates chaos in a way that a triplex or SFR doesn’t.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    If we built our cities in such a way that everyone didn't need a car, this wouldn't be a problem. Nonetheless, and quite ironically, off-street parking mandates are one of the main reasons that everyone does need a car. Eliminate those mandates, and you eliminate vast swathes of empty nothingland that are a huge hindrance to car-free living. Furthermore, if there is no off-street parking and cities price on-street parking appropriately such that there are always a few empty spots, no one would move into the area with the expectation that they can park their car for free, and it wouldn't be a problem. Off-street parking mandates sound like a good idea, but they're actually horrible for cities, and they're part of why most American cities are as sprawling and car-dependent as they are. City-planners of the 20th century thought the same as you and didn't consider the consequences, and now the trend is reversing: many cities and states are beginning to eliminate those mandates, but it's going to take quite a long time before the effects are felt.
rtpg 4y ago
There's a false choice presented here, about choosing to live in high rise/high density. Even NYC basically peters out to low rises just out of brooklyn! The overall problem, though, is that these density restrictions cause a nasty spiral. People looking for work are asked to move to one of these cities where their bosses own these wonderful homes. They mostly have to rent. Rent is high. Supply is low, so it's hard to even find a place! Every single service that you might use, also has to pay rent. Not only do you have to put a significant portion of your paycheck to rent, but basically every restaurant has to charge a very heavy amount to this. Every corner store. Parking. Every minor service. Public spaces might barely exist, but forget having community spaces run by individuals, because commercial real estate got super expensive from this same cycle. It's hard to overstate how real estate pressure makes _everything_ more costly. People have to work to live. If they want a good job, they _have_ to buy into the urban real estate tradeoff. There are ~no good rural jobs. It's pervasive. If every part of living wasn't so financialised, if it was possible for public spaces to survive, if teachers could actually afford to live close to schools, this is a different story. And some cities manage this better, of course. But at one point decisions around parking minimums, height restrictions, endless ability of localities to object to building development, and other whining from people who would rather have their yard than replace that with a larger public park... it just makes it harder and harder to sustain urban living at all
- twblalock 4y ago
  It sounds like your problem is not really about housing at all. This is a rant against the entire society. I used to think the NIMBYs were full of it -- they say their opponents wanted to force everyone into high-density living arrangements, everyone must live in a communist tower block dystopia, people's yards and green spaces would be taken from them, huge buildings would tower over neighborhoods and block out all the light, etc. I thought that was a pretty bad strawman representation of their opponents. Now I realize that some people really do want those things, after seeing quite a lot of unreasonable people on HN and a few other places, who really do seem to believe the insane ideas the NIMBYs ascribe to them. You wrote "But at one point decisions around parking minimums, height restrictions, endless ability of localities to object to building development, and other whining from people who would rather have their yard than replace that with a larger public park.." Do you really think it's ok to build a public park right in someone's yard? Do you really, truly believe that our society should operate that way? Because if you do, the NIMBYs are right!
jltsiren 4y ago
What the average person wants is not the point. Roughly speaking, 25% of people prefer urban living, 50% prefer suburban living, and 25% prefer rural living. Urban living is currently expensive, because there is a massive shortage of urban housing. People didn't build enough of it in the 20th century for a number of reasons. All other things being equal, urban living should be cheaper than suburban living, because urban areas need less infrastructure for each resident. Every city where urban living continues to be expensive should build high-density mid-rise areas until that's no longer the case. High-rises rarely make sense outside central locations, as they are expensive to build.
asdff 4y ago
If this were the case, we'd see it in the zoning with a lot of parcels being underbuilt for what they are zoned for, since low density is preferred over high density. Instead, the city is developed to upwards of 90% of its zoned capacity. Its gotten to the point where no more units can be built, the zoning has to change in order to make it possible to permit more units. The high prices are all because the job growth in the area has outpaced new housing unit construction, which cannot accelerate to meet demand for housing by labor due to present day zoning. https://la.curbed.com/2015/4/8/9972362/everything-wrong-with-los-angeles-housing-in-one-graph https://la.curbed.com/2015/4/8/9972362/everything-wrong-with...
- twblalock 4y ago
  Depends on where you are. I know of places near Sacramento where new suburban subdivisions are being built every year.
  - asdff 4y ago
    How are they zoned? Probably for suburban subdivisions and not for highrises. You can find new suburban subdivisions in LA too if you go all the way out into san bernardino or riverside county, and in those cases too its because these areas recently changed zoning from agriculture to low density residential development, and builders are building to the limits of what the land is zoned for. Apartments are so popular that developers often try to get variances to zoning for their projects, to add even more units than what the lot is zoned for. If there wasn't demand for that a developer would not bother.
MarkSweep 4y ago
If everyone wants to live in low rise buildings, why does the government ban building higher density buildings using zoning? If it’s so undesirable, nobody would move in so developers would have no incentive to build. It’s not wrong to want your neighborhood to never change. However I would argue that it is wrong to assume that every city currently has the “proper” density. Why was it ok for your house to be built but not for your neighbor to, say, redevelop their SFH into 3 town homes?
OJFord 4y ago
> The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own. And then you put them inches away from one another, lined up in perfect rows! I don't get it, looking on (mainly through TV/film) from the UK, what makes detached houses desirable is almost entirely lacking from North American streets, they frequently seem to look like a terrace that's been chopped up. Is it perhaps because timber framing makes noise more of a problem in terraces/semis; so that becomes the prime motivator for detached?
- brenns10 4y ago
  Nope, it's not a technical reason. Zoning laws typically prevent you from building structures near the edge of your lot in the suburbs. They also mandate excessive amounts of space to store automobiles, and absurd setbacks from the street.
  - OJFord 4y ago
    (From what you've said alone) you could still space them out more, have more variety/less uniformity? ('Little boxes all the same')
    - brenns10 4y ago
      I think it comes down to development cost. A lot of suburbs are developed by a single housing developer, and they essentially have a "theme" with similar styles and just a few floor plans to choose from. So some suburbs end up looking very cookie cutter. They also do things like clear all the old trees out prior to developing the land, which is cheaper and easier, but can create a very desolate environment to live in. There are plenty of suburbs that aren't this way though, especially older ones.
mikebenfield 4y ago
> That’s because people want to live in low rise buildings. > The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own. Then why is it necessary for LA and other localities to make it literally illegal to build denser housing? After all, if detached single family homes are what people want, then surely simple supply and demand will lead to that being what's predominantly built, right? (Spoiler: Single family homes aren't what everyone wants. Plenty of people want other types of housing. People pushing these zoning rules aren't doing it because _they_ want single family homes - they're doing it because they want control over what type of home is available to others.)

sologoub 4y ago

NYC density: 26,403 people per square mile (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City#Profile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_Cit...) Hollywood density: 22,193 people per square mile Koreatown density: 42,611 people per square mile Source: https://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/population/density/neighborhood/list/ https://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/population/density/ne... Yes, greater LA area also has a lot of what people like to call “sprawl”, but it’s a big place and has many different neighborhoods. You also don’t need high rises for density - Paris is not all that tall, but at 53k people per square mile, it’s denser on average than NYC…

hnav 4y ago
NYC is a whole city of five boroughs with different densities, Hollywood and K-town are neighborhoods. Manhattan which is what most think of as NYC is 70k+/sqmi
- thrdbndndn 4y ago
  Even with five boroughs, I'm still surprised NYC is this low. In addition to the obvious Staten Island, apparently Queens "only" has 22,125! I always thought it would be close to Brooklyn etc.
  - vikingerik 4y ago
    Well, Queens is about 75% cemeteries by land use. (Population figures don't include dead people, I assume.) Kidding, but there is more land for industrial and commercial use in Queens that isn't residential. Including two airports and three sizable sports facilities. Brooklyn by contrast has almost no interruptions to the edge-to-edge residential street grid.
    - etblg 4y ago
      And then even after all the non-residential space being eaten up, more than half of Queens (the parts after the subway ends) is single family suburban homes akin to Long Island or Staten Island. Really throws the population density off for the city, throws the density off even for Queens itself -- the western part near manhattan is dense, especially compared to most of LA.