13 ms·

The valid point is that skyscrapers are often architectural grandstanding, and make so many other compromises at the ground level, that they rarely deliver much

The valid point is that skyscrapers are often architectural grandstanding, and make so many other compromises at the ground level, that they rarely deliver much higher density. What's strange is that most people seem to agree that the best cities are made up of mid rise 5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards. Basically how we did the best architecture from before the 1920s. Yet when it comes to it, barely anywhere is building enough of that kind of building.

ethanbond 3y ago
Yeah I think some NIMBY resistance to new development would be diminished if new buildings weren't so consistently and intensely offensive to human senses. There's no real reason we can't build beautiful buildings like exist all over older parts of the US and Europe (and presumably many other parts of the world). An interesting deep dive on one component of hideous new development: https://marker.medium.com/why-everywhere-looks-the-same-248940f12c4 https://marker.medium.com/why-everywhere-looks-the-same-2489... It doesn't help that architecture (and most other artistic fields) is currently dominated by the belief that beauty is almost completely subjective. Under that philosophy, why not just design the thing that's going to at least win some awards for being "innovative" or "striking?" (These are almost always euphemisms for "offensive" but for people who think offense is a purely subjective experience)
- kevinmchugh 3y ago
  Chicago has many pleasant old courtyard buildings (mostly 3-4 stories) and our NIMBYs would protest them for not providing parking if they were being built today.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    I think some (potentially even most) would, yes, but they'd have a lot less tacit support from the less militant folks around them.
- germinalphrase 3y ago
  Based entirely conversations with a few architects and interior designers, the incentives are almost always far more aligned with “cost-effective”/“inoffensive” than “innovative”/“striking”.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    Today supply is so constrained that not filling out the zoning ‘box’ entirely is leaving money on the table. If the supply of buildable zoning was more lax, people would have more latitude for fripperies.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Architecture has always been strongly bifurcated with the (much larger) low end being dominated by cost/market considerations. But these architects do take design cues from the top of their field. Low-end Italianate and Gothic Revival yielded the gorgeous Brooklyn brownstones. Low-end Corbusier yields the hideous, cultureless 5-over-1s perfectly prepared for a Chipotle logo.
- davidw 3y ago
  NIMBYs are always going to NIMBY. You can concede all kinds of things, but it seems to be 'change' that bothers many of them. It's never beautiful enough and if it is then, well, it's not "affordable", or it doesn't have enough parking, or or or... Source: I show up at things like city council meetings to support housing as a YIMBY.
  - nemo44x 3y ago
    People have a lot of reasons for resisting development. One of them is that it will increase traffic in the area and there's a good chance traffic is already bad enough. Secondly no one wants to have a 3+ year large scale construction project going on in their neighborhood and all the headaches that come with that. People want peace and quiet and the only one benefiting from it is the developer so why not resist that. Additionally, people bought into a certain place because of its characteristics and often those are not respected by developers who just want to maximize their profit by building the most profitable thing they can get away with. Lastly, often "new development" means rentals in an area that is dominated by single family homes. Not to come off wrong but people want to live next to people of a similar class and standing as their own. Renters (and landlords) don't have the same skin in the game as home owners. Saying that I agree that some people will just find any excuse possible to resist. But their opinions are just as valid as the next guys and this is why we need to find compromise. I support thoughtful development and in making the dense part of town more dense.
    - Arainach 3y ago
      There is no right to buy a piece of property and expect the surrounding area to stay static. If you want the town to stay small and quaint, buy the entire town. Towns that do not grow wilt away and die. There are absolutely towns that didn't grow across America. You can recognize them by their landmarks like the closed factory, the "fod lease" signs along Main Street, and so on. >Not to come off wrong but people want to live next to people of a similar class and standing as their own. Renters (and landlords) don't have the same skin in the game as home owners. This and your reference to "the dense part of town" tend to point to a different meaning of "don't have the same skin" than the initial read suggests. Even if that was not your intention, it's absolutely the practical effect of reinforcing old injustices by claiming the rich white areas should remain that way while the denser, inevitably more diverse areas have to absorb all change.
- mattpallissard 3y ago
  > Yeah I think some NIMBY resistance to new development would be diminished if new buildings weren't so consistently and intensely offensive to human senses. This. Being upset that your entire neighborhood has been boxed in by ticky-tack five overs is a pretty natural response IMO. People like to hate on NIMBY's here but for many cases (not all) I think it's reasonable to care about your neighborhood and to want to prevent outside interests from fucking it up.
  - ryder9 3y ago
    [dead]
  - watwut 3y ago
    Yeah, no. This is simply not true. It is simply not true that NIMBYs would opposed only especially ugly building. The complain and actual reality is that they oppose pretty much everything.
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      If you oppose building in general you are not a NIMBY though. I guess the slide has been big but isn't the term mostly about, like, prisons, pubs, waste collection centres etc. that they want, but just not near them?
      - Arainach 3y ago
        It applies to housing too. "Sure, the Seattle area needs more housing, but not in our quaint little suburb, that's already gone downhill since whenever I moved in" is a standard NIMBY line.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      > some NIMBYs > not all
  - f1yght 3y ago
    It's funny, brownstones originally had similar resistance for being bland and uninteresting yet we find them beautiful now. I think cost effective new housing just isn't going to be that visually interesting, but we need it anyway unless it's going to be expensive.
- chongli 3y ago
  There's no real reason we can't build beautiful buildings There is a real reason: lack of skilled trades. Those old, beautiful buildings are the work of skilled tradespeople such as masons (skilled in stonework), master carpenters (skilled in joinery), glaziers, plasterers, painters, sculptors, blacksmiths, ironworkers... Modern buildings use so much metal and glass because these materials don't require skilled trades to mould and shape them on site, they are delivered whole and assembled according to plan. To build an old-style building today would cost a fortune because the few surviving practitioners of those traditional trades are considered highly specialized experts and historians of construction techniques.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    This is a component for sure, but you can absolutely get CNC’d millwork to add ornamentation if you cared to. We can develop technologies to make buildings both beautiful and easy-to-construct if we cared to. Also we need to be training up skilled tradespeople in general, even for the basic basic stuff.
  - yonaguska 3y ago
    Even simple brick masonry work seems like it's dying. My father was informally trained by old school Chicago bricklayers. I'll see brickwork done by him 20 years later still looking new, and lined up well, while a lot of newer stuff just looks terrible. Same thing here in Chicago, so much nicer old brickwork compared to newer construction.
    - chongli 3y ago
      Yeah. Construction is in a race to the bottom, cost-wise. In my city (university town) there are a bunch of off-campus high rise residence buildings. They put these things up so cheaply that a lot of them are falling apart not even 5 years on! Their whole m.o. is to put up a new building, sign as many incoming students as they can to leases, then mysteriously fall behind schedule for the opening of the building. This leaves hundreds of students stranded without a place to stay at the start of school term. They then offer these students a “free” lease transfer to the old building, thereby renting out a bunch of crappy rooms no one wanted in the first place.
thecopy 3y ago
>compromises at the ground level What do you mean?
throwaway1777 3y ago
There are a TON of midrise apartment buildings under construction in the US, look at the stats on multifamily construction or just drive around. They don’t look like Paris but they exist. The problem is more that people don’t want neighbors because people are assholes.
staringback 3y ago
> Yet when it comes to it, barely anywhere is building enough of that kind of building. Pretty much every single building I see being constructed around the Seattle area is a 5-over-2
- rco8786 3y ago
  We’re getting tons of that in Atlanta also, I imagine it’s a similar story in most US cities right now. I think it’s great
  - muro 3y ago
    It's a monstrosity, a tribute to blandness. All cities look exactly the same. It's possible it will look better when the trees grow (if they plant any), though who knows whether the buildings will still be around.
    - rco8786 3y ago
      Atlanta is great about trees. Any that are removed have to have a replacement planted. Not sure where you're referring to, but at least around here in the actual city the architecture and landscaping is varied enough to not be bland. And we're seeing genuine increases in density and walkability/bikability and "urbanism" in general. I put 10x more miles on my electric scooter than I do my car now. > who knows whether the buildings will still be around. Not sure what this means.
      - muro 3y ago
        Thanks, good to know Atlanta is doing this well! >> who knows whether the buildings will still be around. >Not sure what this means. Just that I've seen buildings demolished within a timeframe, where the trees wouldn't have time to fully grow :)
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      The sameness is what makes it affordable.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Do you have evidence that this is what “most people” want?
- joshe 3y ago
  The prices in for flats in areas like this are higher per square foot.
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Isn't that mostly coz of other factors like those usually being located in places close to both shops and potential workplace ?
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    That might just be because there are less areas like this though.
hibikir 3y ago
Skyscrapers are the natural result of extremely high permitting costs, which don't scale well with building size. Your average real estate developer is just trying to get a return of investment, and a 7 story building is set up to be less profitable than the skyscraper or a subdivision. A non-trivial part of the problem is the requirement of having access to two stairwells for each apartment. This is theoretically helping with fire safety, back in a world without sprinklers, but it also leads to far more space dedicated to hallways. Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US, and adding that second staircase, in a different fire-proof structure, would have cut the number of units by 25%. The two stairwells only start becoming cost effective when your building has a very large floor plan, at which point, you might as well have skyscraper. Way too many things that people consider just the natural way of doing things just come down to regulatory regimes that don't quite ban alternatives, but make them uneconomical. Even when we assume every bit of regulation was added for good reasons, ultimately we shouldn't judge said regulation by what it intended to do, but by what it causes. Make building the 8 story block less difficult and more profitable than the alternatives, and it'll get built without having to actually force anyone into building them.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US I'm curious if this bears out in how much property and casualty damage is there from multifamily dwelling fires between Spain and the US? In any case, it's a good example of why we should keep in mind that every safety regulation is necessarily a tradeoff against cost and efficiency.
jcranmer 3y ago
The Skyscraper Museum has [1] an exhibit on the history of density in NYC: https://skyscraper.org/housing-density/history/ https://skyscraper.org/housing-density/history/. Density was maximized in the slum tenement era at ~1000 people/acre, achieved with merely 5 story buildings (and somehow packing 10 people per apartment which just... how). The closest you've come since that era in NYC is London Terraces, which is essentially a block of residental rowhome high-rises. If you look immediately around it, you can see that most high-rises instead opt for the towers-in-the-park model. Density tends to come not so much from height but lot coverage, and for various reasons, people insist on really low lot coverage from tall and supertall buildings, which puts extra constraints on density you don't get in mid-rise buildings. [1] Or rather had, as they apparently swapped the exhibit out a few years ago, though much of the material remains online.
jasode 3y ago
>What's strange is that most people seem to agree that the best cities are made up of mid rise 5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards. I used to believe that but I don't think it's actually true. I can't speak for Europe but as far as the USA, the evidence seems to show the _silent_ majority actually prefer the suburbs instead of 5-story buildings. The above claim will be hard for readers to accept if they are well-versed in the constant negative news articles in New York Times, etc and Youtube channels like NotJustBikes, StrongtownsOrg, CityBeautiful, ClimateTown ... all disparaging the "soulless" suburbs. What happens is the proponents of "walkable cities" have inadvertently created a "filter bubble" and now mistakenly think most families don't want to live in suburbs. But what about all those surveys where people preferred "walkable" cities to go to businesses like grocery stores, theaters, and museums without a car?!? That's true but the surveys' methodology and framing are flawed because they don't structure the questions as a set of tradeoffs so the respondents can see if they prioritize other things above walkability such as bigger house sq footage, yard and pool to play in, garage for hobbies, not sharing apartment/townhouse walls with noisy neighbors playing music too loud, etc. So the _silent_ majority in America do like walkability... but they also prioritize other aspects of residential living that ends up sacrificing the walkability. It's the unstated tradeoffs that explains the paradox of people supposedly wanting "walkability" but yet we still all end up with car-centric suburban sprawl.
- SECProto 3y ago
  > I can't speak for Europe but as far as the USA, the evidence seems to show the _silent_ majority actually prefer the suburbs instead of 5-story buildings. Where in the US is made of "5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards" that the op referenced? I don't know anywhere that that's an option on the table. People live in suburbs because it's what is available, full stop. If there were dense 5-10 storey areas sitting empty while the surrounding suburbs were full, then you'd have a point
- TheCoelacanth 3y ago
  A majority possibly do prefer suburbs, however, a large minority don't and we have made their preferences flat out illegal to build. No one is asking for suburbs to be made illegal, simply that other development patterns be allowed.
sheepybloke 3y ago
I think it's starting to come back. A lot of the new more affordable houses in the Bay and in larger cities are blocks of town homes. I think we are going to see a lot more development there, as developers realize they can build them more efficiently and people realize that they are the right ratio of space (e.g. garage, space for a family, small backyard) and density.

ethanbond 3y ago

Yeah I think some NIMBY resistance to new development would be diminished if new buildings weren't so consistently and intensely offensive to human senses. There's no real reason we can't build beautiful buildings like exist all over older parts of the US and Europe (and presumably many other parts of the world). An interesting deep dive on one component of hideous new development: https://marker.medium.com/why-everywhere-looks-the-same-248940f12c4 https://marker.medium.com/why-everywhere-looks-the-same-2489... It doesn't help that architecture (and most other artistic fields) is currently dominated by the belief that beauty is almost completely subjective. Under that philosophy, why not just design the thing that's going to at least win some awards for being "innovative" or "striking?" (These are almost always euphemisms for "offensive" but for people who think offense is a purely subjective experience)

kevinmchugh 3y ago
Chicago has many pleasant old courtyard buildings (mostly 3-4 stories) and our NIMBYs would protest them for not providing parking if they were being built today.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  I think some (potentially even most) would, yes, but they'd have a lot less tacit support from the less militant folks around them.
germinalphrase 3y ago
Based entirely conversations with a few architects and interior designers, the incentives are almost always far more aligned with “cost-effective”/“inoffensive” than “innovative”/“striking”.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  Today supply is so constrained that not filling out the zoning ‘box’ entirely is leaving money on the table. If the supply of buildable zoning was more lax, people would have more latitude for fripperies.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Architecture has always been strongly bifurcated with the (much larger) low end being dominated by cost/market considerations. But these architects do take design cues from the top of their field. Low-end Italianate and Gothic Revival yielded the gorgeous Brooklyn brownstones. Low-end Corbusier yields the hideous, cultureless 5-over-1s perfectly prepared for a Chipotle logo.
davidw 3y ago
NIMBYs are always going to NIMBY. You can concede all kinds of things, but it seems to be 'change' that bothers many of them. It's never beautiful enough and if it is then, well, it's not "affordable", or it doesn't have enough parking, or or or... Source: I show up at things like city council meetings to support housing as a YIMBY.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  People have a lot of reasons for resisting development. One of them is that it will increase traffic in the area and there's a good chance traffic is already bad enough. Secondly no one wants to have a 3+ year large scale construction project going on in their neighborhood and all the headaches that come with that. People want peace and quiet and the only one benefiting from it is the developer so why not resist that. Additionally, people bought into a certain place because of its characteristics and often those are not respected by developers who just want to maximize their profit by building the most profitable thing they can get away with. Lastly, often "new development" means rentals in an area that is dominated by single family homes. Not to come off wrong but people want to live next to people of a similar class and standing as their own. Renters (and landlords) don't have the same skin in the game as home owners. Saying that I agree that some people will just find any excuse possible to resist. But their opinions are just as valid as the next guys and this is why we need to find compromise. I support thoughtful development and in making the dense part of town more dense.
  - Arainach 3y ago
    There is no right to buy a piece of property and expect the surrounding area to stay static. If you want the town to stay small and quaint, buy the entire town. Towns that do not grow wilt away and die. There are absolutely towns that didn't grow across America. You can recognize them by their landmarks like the closed factory, the "fod lease" signs along Main Street, and so on. >Not to come off wrong but people want to live next to people of a similar class and standing as their own. Renters (and landlords) don't have the same skin in the game as home owners. This and your reference to "the dense part of town" tend to point to a different meaning of "don't have the same skin" than the initial read suggests. Even if that was not your intention, it's absolutely the practical effect of reinforcing old injustices by claiming the rich white areas should remain that way while the denser, inevitably more diverse areas have to absorb all change.
mattpallissard 3y ago
> Yeah I think some NIMBY resistance to new development would be diminished if new buildings weren't so consistently and intensely offensive to human senses. This. Being upset that your entire neighborhood has been boxed in by ticky-tack five overs is a pretty natural response IMO. People like to hate on NIMBY's here but for many cases (not all) I think it's reasonable to care about your neighborhood and to want to prevent outside interests from fucking it up.
- ryder9 3y ago
  [dead]
- watwut 3y ago
  Yeah, no. This is simply not true. It is simply not true that NIMBYs would opposed only especially ugly building. The complain and actual reality is that they oppose pretty much everything.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    If you oppose building in general you are not a NIMBY though. I guess the slide has been big but isn't the term mostly about, like, prisons, pubs, waste collection centres etc. that they want, but just not near them?
    - Arainach 3y ago
      It applies to housing too. "Sure, the Seattle area needs more housing, but not in our quaint little suburb, that's already gone downhill since whenever I moved in" is a standard NIMBY line.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    > some NIMBYs > not all
- f1yght 3y ago
  It's funny, brownstones originally had similar resistance for being bland and uninteresting yet we find them beautiful now. I think cost effective new housing just isn't going to be that visually interesting, but we need it anyway unless it's going to be expensive.
chongli 3y ago
There's no real reason we can't build beautiful buildings There is a real reason: lack of skilled trades. Those old, beautiful buildings are the work of skilled tradespeople such as masons (skilled in stonework), master carpenters (skilled in joinery), glaziers, plasterers, painters, sculptors, blacksmiths, ironworkers... Modern buildings use so much metal and glass because these materials don't require skilled trades to mould and shape them on site, they are delivered whole and assembled according to plan. To build an old-style building today would cost a fortune because the few surviving practitioners of those traditional trades are considered highly specialized experts and historians of construction techniques.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  This is a component for sure, but you can absolutely get CNC’d millwork to add ornamentation if you cared to. We can develop technologies to make buildings both beautiful and easy-to-construct if we cared to. Also we need to be training up skilled tradespeople in general, even for the basic basic stuff.
- yonaguska 3y ago
  Even simple brick masonry work seems like it's dying. My father was informally trained by old school Chicago bricklayers. I'll see brickwork done by him 20 years later still looking new, and lined up well, while a lot of newer stuff just looks terrible. Same thing here in Chicago, so much nicer old brickwork compared to newer construction.
  - chongli 3y ago
    Yeah. Construction is in a race to the bottom, cost-wise. In my city (university town) there are a bunch of off-campus high rise residence buildings. They put these things up so cheaply that a lot of them are falling apart not even 5 years on! Their whole m.o. is to put up a new building, sign as many incoming students as they can to leases, then mysteriously fall behind schedule for the opening of the building. This leaves hundreds of students stranded without a place to stay at the start of school term. They then offer these students a “free” lease transfer to the old building, thereby renting out a bunch of crappy rooms no one wanted in the first place.

thecopy 3y ago

>compromises at the ground level What do you mean?

throwaway1777 3y ago

There are a TON of midrise apartment buildings under construction in the US, look at the stats on multifamily construction or just drive around. They don’t look like Paris but they exist. The problem is more that people don’t want neighbors because people are assholes.

staringback 3y ago

> Yet when it comes to it, barely anywhere is building enough of that kind of building. Pretty much every single building I see being constructed around the Seattle area is a 5-over-2

rco8786 3y ago
We’re getting tons of that in Atlanta also, I imagine it’s a similar story in most US cities right now. I think it’s great
- muro 3y ago
  It's a monstrosity, a tribute to blandness. All cities look exactly the same. It's possible it will look better when the trees grow (if they plant any), though who knows whether the buildings will still be around.
  - rco8786 3y ago
    Atlanta is great about trees. Any that are removed have to have a replacement planted. Not sure where you're referring to, but at least around here in the actual city the architecture and landscaping is varied enough to not be bland. And we're seeing genuine increases in density and walkability/bikability and "urbanism" in general. I put 10x more miles on my electric scooter than I do my car now. > who knows whether the buildings will still be around. Not sure what this means.
    - muro 3y ago
      Thanks, good to know Atlanta is doing this well! >> who knows whether the buildings will still be around. >Not sure what this means. Just that I've seen buildings demolished within a timeframe, where the trees wouldn't have time to fully grow :)
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    The sameness is what makes it affordable.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

Do you have evidence that this is what “most people” want?

joshe 3y ago
The prices in for flats in areas like this are higher per square foot.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Isn't that mostly coz of other factors like those usually being located in places close to both shops and potential workplace ?
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  That might just be because there are less areas like this though.

hibikir 3y ago

Skyscrapers are the natural result of extremely high permitting costs, which don't scale well with building size. Your average real estate developer is just trying to get a return of investment, and a 7 story building is set up to be less profitable than the skyscraper or a subdivision. A non-trivial part of the problem is the requirement of having access to two stairwells for each apartment. This is theoretically helping with fire safety, back in a world without sprinklers, but it also leads to far more space dedicated to hallways. Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US, and adding that second staircase, in a different fire-proof structure, would have cut the number of units by 25%. The two stairwells only start becoming cost effective when your building has a very large floor plan, at which point, you might as well have skyscraper. Way too many things that people consider just the natural way of doing things just come down to regulatory regimes that don't quite ban alternatives, but make them uneconomical. Even when we assume every bit of regulation was added for good reasons, ultimately we shouldn't judge said regulation by what it intended to do, but by what it causes. Make building the 8 story block less difficult and more profitable than the alternatives, and it'll get built without having to actually force anyone into building them.

gottorf 3y ago
> Basically every apartment building I lived in while in Spain would be illegal to build in most of the US I'm curious if this bears out in how much property and casualty damage is there from multifamily dwelling fires between Spain and the US? In any case, it's a good example of why we should keep in mind that every safety regulation is necessarily a tradeoff against cost and efficiency.

jcranmer 3y ago

The Skyscraper Museum has [1] an exhibit on the history of density in NYC: https://skyscraper.org/housing-density/history/ https://skyscraper.org/housing-density/history/. Density was maximized in the slum tenement era at ~1000 people/acre, achieved with merely 5 story buildings (and somehow packing 10 people per apartment which just... how). The closest you've come since that era in NYC is London Terraces, which is essentially a block of residental rowhome high-rises. If you look immediately around it, you can see that most high-rises instead opt for the towers-in-the-park model. Density tends to come not so much from height but lot coverage, and for various reasons, people insist on really low lot coverage from tall and supertall buildings, which puts extra constraints on density you don't get in mid-rise buildings. [1] Or rather had, as they apparently swapped the exhibit out a few years ago, though much of the material remains online.

jasode 3y ago

>What's strange is that most people seem to agree that the best cities are made up of mid rise 5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards. I used to believe that but I don't think it's actually true. I can't speak for Europe but as far as the USA, the evidence seems to show the _silent_ majority actually prefer the suburbs instead of 5-story buildings. The above claim will be hard for readers to accept if they are well-versed in the constant negative news articles in New York Times, etc and Youtube channels like NotJustBikes, StrongtownsOrg, CityBeautiful, ClimateTown ... all disparaging the "soulless" suburbs. What happens is the proponents of "walkable cities" have inadvertently created a "filter bubble" and now mistakenly think most families don't want to live in suburbs. But what about all those surveys where people preferred "walkable" cities to go to businesses like grocery stores, theaters, and museums without a car?!? That's true but the surveys' methodology and framing are flawed because they don't structure the questions as a set of tradeoffs so the respondents can see if they prioritize other things above walkability such as bigger house sq footage, yard and pool to play in, garage for hobbies, not sharing apartment/townhouse walls with noisy neighbors playing music too loud, etc. So the _silent_ majority in America do like walkability... but they also prioritize other aspects of residential living that ends up sacrificing the walkability. It's the unstated tradeoffs that explains the paradox of people supposedly wanting "walkability" but yet we still all end up with car-centric suburban sprawl.

SECProto 3y ago
> I can't speak for Europe but as far as the USA, the evidence seems to show the _silent_ majority actually prefer the suburbs instead of 5-story buildings. Where in the US is made of "5-10 storey blocks with internal courtyards" that the op referenced? I don't know anywhere that that's an option on the table. People live in suburbs because it's what is available, full stop. If there were dense 5-10 storey areas sitting empty while the surrounding suburbs were full, then you'd have a point
TheCoelacanth 3y ago
A majority possibly do prefer suburbs, however, a large minority don't and we have made their preferences flat out illegal to build. No one is asking for suburbs to be made illegal, simply that other development patterns be allowed.

sheepybloke 3y ago

I think it's starting to come back. A lot of the new more affordable houses in the Bay and in larger cities are blocks of town homes. I think we are going to see a lot more development there, as developers realize they can build them more efficiently and people realize that they are the right ratio of space (e.g. garage, space for a family, small backyard) and density.