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The Anglosphere is more car dependent and more prone to NIMBY policies and housing shortages than continental Europe, because continental Europeans are more com

The Anglosphere is more car dependent and more prone to NIMBY policies and housing shortages than continental Europe, because continental Europeans are more comfortable with density. Density is the solution to many land management problems.

galangalalgol 3y ago
I would love to read more on that. It would also be interesting to look at the places in former english colonies that do have higher residential buildings to see if continental immigration there might have been involved. It sounds like spain had a brief love affair with sprawl as well. Perhaps some of it is just that when the population boom arrived for the US sprawl was in style and we had the room?
dotcoma 3y ago
Yes, but they got many things right in the Netherlands even with an incredibly low percentage of people living in flats. Bikes, not cars, please.
- VancouverMan 3y ago
  The feasibility of widespread bike usage doesn't just depend on density. It depends a lot on a region's weather, too. Amsterdam, for example, happens to have weather that's relatively compatible with biking, all throughout the year. On the other hand, for four to six months of the year, most areas of Canada, and even a good portion of the US, definitely don't. While a very small handful of people can handle biking when it's consistently -10 °C (14 °F) or colder out, possibly through 10 cm (4") or more of uncleared snow/slush, and possibly on ice, the vast majority of people can't and won't. The summer isn't necessarily any better. The cities in southern Ontario, for example, where many Canadians live, can become surprisingly hot and humid for weeks at a time, and biking isn't pleasant then. Given those conditions, people will definitely try to drive instead of biking.
  - bluefirebrand 3y ago
    Even in perfect conditions there's a lot of reasons not to bike. Distances are more difficult, you can't bring someone with you, your carrying capacity is much smaller for shopping trips. It also just plain takes longer to get anywhere and people just don't like spending more time than they have to on errands.
    - Mawr 3y ago
      - Ebikes let you cover great distances with little effort. - You can have someone ride on the backseat or in the cargo space of a cargo bike. [1] - You'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike. [1] Then there's the cost vs a car [2], which will likely make up for any inconvenience. Of course, you do need at least decent bike infrastructure for this to be realistic. [1]: https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=470 https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=470 [2]: https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=321 https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=321
      - bluGill 3y ago
        My car is a lot less effort that my ebike. And the car is faster as well. I ride my ebike for the trips too long for the acoustic bike, but there are still a lot of trips not in reasonable ebike range that I make.
        Mawr 3y ago
        Sounds great, that's pretty much the goal - limiting car trips to the ones that actually require a car.
        bumby 3y ago
        Hell, my motorcycle was enough of a hassle compared to my car to forgo riding it often. Wearing gear, packing my lunch and everything else for a days work into saddlebags, and dealing with the weather was a pain compared to just hopping in my car. It would be worse on a bicycle. At least in a car I can listen to a podcast without feeling like I'm making a tradeoff with safety.
- jorvi 3y ago
  Except our distaste for flats has plummeted us into one of the worst housing crises of the entire world. Literally grinding our entire society to a halt, from students to young couples to prisoners to elders to cured long-term patients, everyone is trapped.
  - rangestransform 3y ago
    I don't actually think americans have a distaste for flats in general, but that some of them felt the need to impose their distaste for flats beyond the borders of their own land
    - jorvi 3y ago
      I’m talking about The Netherlands haha
bluescrn 3y ago
It's not about being 'comfortable with density', it's about having a society where neighbours respect each other, behave decently, and keep noise/mess under control, don't keep setting the fire alarm off, etc. The noise problem isn't limited to loud music and parties, just the noise of kids playing loudly and running around in communal areas can become infuriating to neighbours. Even if you've got good neighbours, there's other downsides with flats - a lack of parking/EV charging, often nowhere to safely store a bicycle even. No space to install personal 'green tech' such as solar or a heat pump. No garage/shed to store tools/bikes/hobby equipment.
- huytersd 3y ago
  It isn’t. If all my neighbors were angels I still wouldn’t want to live densely.
- t-3 3y ago
  Ah, yes, Americans are uncivilized barbarians who fight and are raucous at all times. Great to see that European colonialist spirit alive!
  - rangestransform 3y ago
    compared to japanese, yes, definitely, 100% how much piss and shit and trash and grafitti do they have in their public transit system
    - t-3 3y ago
      How about compared to Europeans? Japanese have a totally different nearly pseudo-feudal culture that enforces submission and conformity ("the nail that sticks out gets hammered down"). Among western states which share a more individualist culture with the US, I don't think there's all that much difference in behavior.
jeffbee 3y ago
I suggest that the cause of the anglosphere housing crisis is a shared legal system, which sucks, and which is not practiced by anyone else.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Singapore and HK had or have close relatives of it, and don't have similar issues with density.
  - pif 3y ago
    Well, do they have any alternative to high density?
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  I think it's more about the political system, first past the post is looking archaic now. Not that proportional representation solves every problem but it would be a giant leap in the right direction.
schnitzelstoat 3y ago
Spain also has a housing crisis though.
jbellis 3y ago
OTOH continental Europe seems to be more prone to try to solve housing affordability with rent control, which basically results in NIMBY through the perverse incentives it imposes.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
  IIRC Spain's rent control is just 5 years, which means that building newly required density is delayed by 5 years at most. It's a nice stabilizing mechanism because nobody wants to move every year just to get the best rent, but most people can handle a move every 5 years.
alphanullmeric 3y ago
Nice way of saying your proposed transportation system doesn’t work without forcing people to live in cities.
- estebank 3y ago
  It doesn't seem like cities need to coerce anyone to live in them. But when visiting cities it is better for the city, it's inhabitants and their visitors if they don't bring their negative externalities along from elsewhere.
  - alphanullmeric 3y ago
    They do need to coerce people for funding, which might as well be the same thing. That’s like saying “people aren’t forced to attend public schools” - well yeah, but by forcing them to pay for it anyways you leave many with little other option. Meanwhile a quarter of American roads are private. Private transportation would exist with or without force. And in anything other than a big city, private transportation continues to be superior than even the most well funded public transport.
    - caskstrength 3y ago
      Care to provide link proving your assumptions? Every time I checked stats for that for some particular country it was always cities subsidizing countryside/suburbs, not vice versa.
      - travisb 3y ago
        Care must be taken when evaluating those statistics because all the ones I've seen are done only in dollar terms and entirely discount the economic beneficiaries of the movement of people and goods. For example, consider a paved rural road into farmland. In dollar terms paving that road is a subsidy from the nearest city to the people living in that rural area. However, in part the road is paved rather than gravel only to support heavier trucks to more efficiently transport agricultural products destined for the city. It is also paved in part to support larger, faster, heavier agricultural equipment which brings economies of scale to agriculture and reduces the per-unit price of the result -- again destined mostly for the city. Residents themselves don't need the more expensive paved and it isn't their relatively light private vehicles causing most of the wear on the road in the first place. Considered this way, a not insubstantial fraction of the cost of non-city areas is the city indirectly subsidizing itself. The full costs could be incorporated directly into the goods sourced from the supposedly subsidized areas, but that would be less efficient overall. For example, good roads reduces the cost of agricultural products for, say, three months a year. Instead of directly paying capital costs to pave the rural road the city could pay operational costs in higher food prices while missing the other cost advantages of the paved road the rest of the year in reduced recreational costs, policing costs, education costs, etc. If those other costs were higher there would be less of them and people would be less willing to live in those areas, increasing wage and commuting costs.
mardifoufs 3y ago
No, we just hear more about the anglosphere's problems because... we sadly live in an anglosphere obsessed world :). English being the dominant language means that we all hear about their problems but it's harder to internationally hear about say, France's problems.

galangalalgol 3y ago

I would love to read more on that. It would also be interesting to look at the places in former english colonies that do have higher residential buildings to see if continental immigration there might have been involved. It sounds like spain had a brief love affair with sprawl as well. Perhaps some of it is just that when the population boom arrived for the US sprawl was in style and we had the room?

dotcoma 3y ago

Yes, but they got many things right in the Netherlands even with an incredibly low percentage of people living in flats. Bikes, not cars, please.

VancouverMan 3y ago
The feasibility of widespread bike usage doesn't just depend on density. It depends a lot on a region's weather, too. Amsterdam, for example, happens to have weather that's relatively compatible with biking, all throughout the year. On the other hand, for four to six months of the year, most areas of Canada, and even a good portion of the US, definitely don't. While a very small handful of people can handle biking when it's consistently -10 °C (14 °F) or colder out, possibly through 10 cm (4") or more of uncleared snow/slush, and possibly on ice, the vast majority of people can't and won't. The summer isn't necessarily any better. The cities in southern Ontario, for example, where many Canadians live, can become surprisingly hot and humid for weeks at a time, and biking isn't pleasant then. Given those conditions, people will definitely try to drive instead of biking.
- bluefirebrand 3y ago
  Even in perfect conditions there's a lot of reasons not to bike. Distances are more difficult, you can't bring someone with you, your carrying capacity is much smaller for shopping trips. It also just plain takes longer to get anywhere and people just don't like spending more time than they have to on errands.
  - Mawr 3y ago
    - Ebikes let you cover great distances with little effort. - You can have someone ride on the backseat or in the cargo space of a cargo bike. [1] - You'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike. [1] Then there's the cost vs a car [2], which will likely make up for any inconvenience. Of course, you do need at least decent bike infrastructure for this to be realistic. [1]: https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=470 https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=470 [2]: https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=321 https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=321
    - bluGill 3y ago
      My car is a lot less effort that my ebike. And the car is faster as well. I ride my ebike for the trips too long for the acoustic bike, but there are still a lot of trips not in reasonable ebike range that I make.
      - Mawr 3y ago
        Sounds great, that's pretty much the goal - limiting car trips to the ones that actually require a car.
      - bumby 3y ago
        Hell, my motorcycle was enough of a hassle compared to my car to forgo riding it often. Wearing gear, packing my lunch and everything else for a days work into saddlebags, and dealing with the weather was a pain compared to just hopping in my car. It would be worse on a bicycle. At least in a car I can listen to a podcast without feeling like I'm making a tradeoff with safety.
jorvi 3y ago
Except our distaste for flats has plummeted us into one of the worst housing crises of the entire world. Literally grinding our entire society to a halt, from students to young couples to prisoners to elders to cured long-term patients, everyone is trapped.
- rangestransform 3y ago
  I don't actually think americans have a distaste for flats in general, but that some of them felt the need to impose their distaste for flats beyond the borders of their own land
  - jorvi 3y ago
    I’m talking about The Netherlands haha

bluescrn 3y ago

It's not about being 'comfortable with density', it's about having a society where neighbours respect each other, behave decently, and keep noise/mess under control, don't keep setting the fire alarm off, etc. The noise problem isn't limited to loud music and parties, just the noise of kids playing loudly and running around in communal areas can become infuriating to neighbours. Even if you've got good neighbours, there's other downsides with flats - a lack of parking/EV charging, often nowhere to safely store a bicycle even. No space to install personal 'green tech' such as solar or a heat pump. No garage/shed to store tools/bikes/hobby equipment.

huytersd 3y ago
It isn’t. If all my neighbors were angels I still wouldn’t want to live densely.
t-3 3y ago
Ah, yes, Americans are uncivilized barbarians who fight and are raucous at all times. Great to see that European colonialist spirit alive!
- rangestransform 3y ago
  compared to japanese, yes, definitely, 100% how much piss and shit and trash and grafitti do they have in their public transit system
  - t-3 3y ago
    How about compared to Europeans? Japanese have a totally different nearly pseudo-feudal culture that enforces submission and conformity ("the nail that sticks out gets hammered down"). Among western states which share a more individualist culture with the US, I don't think there's all that much difference in behavior.

jeffbee 3y ago

I suggest that the cause of the anglosphere housing crisis is a shared legal system, which sucks, and which is not practiced by anyone else.

rsynnott 3y ago
Singapore and HK had or have close relatives of it, and don't have similar issues with density.
- pif 3y ago
  Well, do they have any alternative to high density?
tonyedgecombe 3y ago
I think it's more about the political system, first past the post is looking archaic now. Not that proportional representation solves every problem but it would be a giant leap in the right direction.

schnitzelstoat 3y ago

Spain also has a housing crisis though.

jbellis 3y ago

OTOH continental Europe seems to be more prone to try to solve housing affordability with rent control, which basically results in NIMBY through the perverse incentives it imposes.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
IIRC Spain's rent control is just 5 years, which means that building newly required density is delayed by 5 years at most. It's a nice stabilizing mechanism because nobody wants to move every year just to get the best rent, but most people can handle a move every 5 years.

alphanullmeric 3y ago

Nice way of saying your proposed transportation system doesn’t work without forcing people to live in cities.

estebank 3y ago
It doesn't seem like cities need to coerce anyone to live in them. But when visiting cities it is better for the city, it's inhabitants and their visitors if they don't bring their negative externalities along from elsewhere.
- alphanullmeric 3y ago
  They do need to coerce people for funding, which might as well be the same thing. That’s like saying “people aren’t forced to attend public schools” - well yeah, but by forcing them to pay for it anyways you leave many with little other option. Meanwhile a quarter of American roads are private. Private transportation would exist with or without force. And in anything other than a big city, private transportation continues to be superior than even the most well funded public transport.
  - caskstrength 3y ago
    Care to provide link proving your assumptions? Every time I checked stats for that for some particular country it was always cities subsidizing countryside/suburbs, not vice versa.
    - travisb 3y ago
      Care must be taken when evaluating those statistics because all the ones I've seen are done only in dollar terms and entirely discount the economic beneficiaries of the movement of people and goods. For example, consider a paved rural road into farmland. In dollar terms paving that road is a subsidy from the nearest city to the people living in that rural area. However, in part the road is paved rather than gravel only to support heavier trucks to more efficiently transport agricultural products destined for the city. It is also paved in part to support larger, faster, heavier agricultural equipment which brings economies of scale to agriculture and reduces the per-unit price of the result -- again destined mostly for the city. Residents themselves don't need the more expensive paved and it isn't their relatively light private vehicles causing most of the wear on the road in the first place. Considered this way, a not insubstantial fraction of the cost of non-city areas is the city indirectly subsidizing itself. The full costs could be incorporated directly into the goods sourced from the supposedly subsidized areas, but that would be less efficient overall. For example, good roads reduces the cost of agricultural products for, say, three months a year. Instead of directly paying capital costs to pave the rural road the city could pay operational costs in higher food prices while missing the other cost advantages of the paved road the rest of the year in reduced recreational costs, policing costs, education costs, etc. If those other costs were higher there would be less of them and people would be less willing to live in those areas, increasing wage and commuting costs.

mardifoufs 3y ago

No, we just hear more about the anglosphere's problems because... we sadly live in an anglosphere obsessed world :). English being the dominant language means that we all hear about their problems but it's harder to internationally hear about say, France's problems.