5 ms·
This is a very unpopular point here (and I suppose lots of places) but there are really just too many people. There's no more frontier, and nowhere to retreat t
by everdrive 3y ago
This is a very unpopular point here (and I suppose lots of places) but there are really just too many people. There's no more frontier, and nowhere to retreat to if you need to escape the crowds. Yes, we could build spaces even tighter than we currently are. But this is a new problem for humanity, and we're not dealing with it well.
- yed 3y agoIn the United States at least there's plenty of land far away from crowds, and inexpensive too. People just don't want to live there.
- idontpost 3y ago[dead]
- ororo7 3y ago[flagged]
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoJust build dense housing. People actually like dense mixed use living.
- tayo42 3y agoThere is no way that is true. Idk anyone that enjoys living in an apartment. Where are you getting that idea from? Density is horrible for qol in my experience.
- notaustinpowers 3y agoApartments aren't the only dense housing solution. Townhomes, repurposed warehouses, etc are excellent solutions. My favorite place I lived every was a townhome in a community of about 100 homes. It was a special 50/50 community where 50% were tax credit and the other 50% were privately-owned (I rented a privately owned townhome). They all looked the same so there was no stigma as to who had section 8 and who didn't, and the community was kept up very well. $1,200/month for 3bd/2.5ba, 1,200sqft with hardwood flooring and free off-street assigned parking 15 minutes from the city. Lived there 3 years and moved out in 2018, loved it. Now I pay $1,200/month to live a 600sqft studio apartment behind a Costco an hour from the city. To this day I don't understand why this style of housing isn't more popular.
- trgn 3y ago> I don't understand why this style of housing isn't more popular You answered your own question. > They all looked the same so there was no stigma as to who had section 8 and who didn't Part of the point of segregating by income is precisely to distinguish the haves from the have-nots.
- tayo42 3y agoLiving with poverty brings a whole bunch of new problems. I live in a community like this. Its noisy, filled with people with their own issues. I have alcoholics getting drunk in the parking lots making noise along with regular drunk driving. The police make regular visits to my complex. Noise, traffic, safety these are realities of dense living that effect quality of life. More people mean more chances to have babies next door, crying through your shared walls, more anti social behavior from people.
- matteotom 3y agoThere's a ton of extra space in the United States. Germany's population density is >600/sq mile. That's more than all but five states. It's not a new problem - it's one that's been solved by many other countries.
- wharvle 3y agoThere are tons of awesome 3k sqft houses for under $300k—plus smaller, cheaper ones—all over the US. They’re in shrinking rural towns and small cities. The schools are bad and there’s no economy to speak of. … but they’re better than some imagined frontier. Yet nobody’s moving there. Which suggests a lack of places to escape to cheaply may not be the problem.
- dbrueck 3y agoDo you by chance live in a city?
- tptacek 3y agoOne reason it's unpopular is that people have been saying it for hundreds of years, with varying (and generally increasing) levels of stridency, and have been consistently depantsed by advancing quality of life. You'd need either to be extraordinarily ignorant (of history) or extraordinarily irrational to prefer life in 1950 to 2023.
- antognini 3y agoThis is not a new problem. At almost every point in history there have been more people than ever before. Historically we have built more homes and cities for the new people to live in.
- verisimi 3y agoHow do you establish that there are too many? Do you have a metric for that? Also - I think this is a popular point as most people would agree with this Malthusian outlook. (And by the way, Malthus was always wrong in his predictions, but that didn't impact his credibility or the longevity of this idea.) Everyone, it seems, promotes this outlook - Bill Gates, David Attenborough, most politicians - I never hear the opposite idea that we should increase the population (except via immigration).
- booleandilemma 3y agoI agree. It's funny, I live in NYC, where the population has declined by over 5% since 2020 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38698353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38698353) and supposedly everyone is working from home, and yet I'm still sitting in traffic every day. The buses are still crowded. The subways are still crowded.
- hedgehog 3y agoWar, plague, famine, etc have been around since the population was 1000x smaller and before. Cities too.