17 ms·

It takes significantly less materials to build a multi-dwelling apartment/condo/townhouse structure than a single family home. In addition, the required square

• nightski 3y ago
  I know it's hard to believe that many people are simply happier living in their own single family home and have little desire for the urban lifestyle.
  • shortsunblack 3y ago
    which is fine, if they are willing to pay the full cost of it. suburbia is massively subsidized.
    • stronglikedan 3y ago
      > suburbia is massively subsidized That's a common argument that no one has been able to sufficiently prove.
      • foxyv 3y ago
        The results of multiple studies have validated this claim: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53dd6676e4b0fedfbc26ea91/t/64a5d3d95a23d464c647013c/1688589273552/Town+of+Nolensville+Road+Infrastructure+-+Sprawl+and+Fiscal+Solvency_080221_Dustin+Shane.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53dd6676e4b0fedfbc26e...
        • bitcurious 3y ago
          I’ll admit that I merely skimmed the study, but as I read it states that local/municipal property taxes in many cases don’t cover the road infrastructure required to support those homes. To make the argument that they are subsidized you’d also have to factor in municipal and state income taxes.
          • comte7092 3y ago
            Subsidies are about relative costs. Tax collection is an interesting thing to look at in addition, but ultimately if we are to determine whether the suburbs are subsidized, it would require analyzing cost to deliver city services per capita.
          • throwway120385 3y ago
            They don't cover them to the tune of many tens of percentage points where I live. It's to the degree that the state basically has to redistribute wealth from the cities to the counties where the roads are built. If the communities served by a road had to pay the full price of the road you'd see a lot of little 8-10 house hamlets with 10 million dollar bridges pack up and leave.
            • throwaway14356 3y ago
              long ago in the netherlands the road in front of your house was your responsibility. You could agree with your neighbors to a crappy road but with loss of status and probably the value of the home. (The last remnant was the requirement to remove weeds. That was how I found out.)
          • bluGill 3y ago
            I keep reading that claim. Then I look at old streetcar suburbs which have successfully a repaired thier roads over decades (including removing the old tracks). They have also added water, sewer, electric, phone, catv since being built. which is to say it doesn't pass the smell test. I don't know where the studies go wrong but something isn'c adding up.
      • mdorazio 3y ago
        The mortgage interest tax deduction by itself is enough to refute you.
        • nightski 3y ago
          I'd imagine practically no one actually takes that because the standard deduction is more lucrative. Unless you live in a far above average priced home with a jumbo loan.
          • kleinsch 3y ago
            Mortgage interest deduction is capped at $750K of debt, conforming loan limits are $760K+, so doesn't apply to jumbo loans.
      • walthamstow 3y ago
        US suburbia's externalities are not properly priced in. Gasoline tax is 18c a gallon and hasn't changed since 1993.
        • tzs 3y ago
          That's federal gasoline tax. In most states there is also state gasoline tax on top of that which is usually quite a bit higher.
      • comte7092 3y ago
        It’s a fairly intuitive thing to understand, the suburbs require significantly more infrastructure per capita. More roads, power lines, sewer/water lines, etc. Just look at something as simple as trash pickup. In the burbs you have to travel a significantly greater distance per household.
        • bluGill 3y ago
          But most of the cost isn't distance it is time to empty the cans once there.
      • namdnay 3y ago
        easy: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ how much did you pay for emitting all that Co2?
    • gadflyinyoureye 3y ago
      Is it? Those same people work and pay taxes. If they couldn’t live in a city due to cost that city would have less revenue as a result of fewer employed people buying goods and services.
      • NullPrefix 3y ago
        >work and pay taxes Implying that particular city job isn't subsidized. Bullshit jobs are mostly city jobs
      • KerrAvon 3y ago
        Are you seriously suggesting that everyone in the USA should be forced to live in apartment blocks, or am I misreading you?
        • gadflyinyoureye 3y ago
          You’re misreading me. I replied to the idea that suburbs are subsidized. The view was that people should be taxed to off set their supposed subsidies. I don’t think the suburbs are really subsidized.
    • compiler-devel 3y ago
      It’s not though, this is one of those “we take less taxes if you pay mortgage interest” type arguments. That isn’t subsidizing.
      • denimnerd42 3y ago
        hardly a factor for most nowadays with the increase in standard deduction
      • ska 3y ago
        Although it's not really that much of a factor these days, it effectively is equivalent to a subsidy. So is government backing of mortgages for that matter.
    • someguydave 3y ago
      that's a strong statement to make across hundreds of thousands of different tax/cost situations in localities spread over all 50 states.
      • 0xcde4c3db 3y ago
        I'm not an expert on municipal expenses, but I'd wager that it takes a pretty unusual cost situation to render it cheaper to pave/trench/replace more miles of road/pipe/wire and maintain more service entries to serve fewer people.
        • bluGill 3y ago
          This is compex. Rural gravel roads are likely cheaper per capite than paved roads, but they don't scale to the triffic of a suburb. A city street needs to be more expensive yet.
      • shortsunblack 3y ago
        It's not a 'strong statement'. It's a statement supported both by rationality (more inputs spread out across less users) and empiricism -- there's countless case studies arriving at same conclusions. Here's some from Strong Towns: i) https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/3/cobb-county-addicted-to-growth https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/3/cobb-county-add... ii) https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/27/a-texas-sized-pavement-problem https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/27/a-texas-sized-...
  • Jomus 3y ago
    I know it's hard to believe that many people just want affordable housing
    • nradov 3y ago
      I would like for all of the things I buy to be cheaper, including housing. No one finds that hard to believe. But reducing housing costs will require making tough decisions and some special interest groups will end up as net losers, so it's just hard to build political consensus for any major changes.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    Oh, I believe it. That's great! I don't mind that people who want to live like that CAN live like that if they can afford it. But it should not be the ONLY way people can live. Right now our laws prevent us from building affordable and livable homes like I mentioned above. Only the richest get to live in such communities.
    • akira2501 3y ago
      > Right now our laws prevent us from building affordable and livable homes Which laws are those?
      • foxyv 3y ago
        To Start: Zoning laws, land use restrictions, parking minimums, property covenants and restrictions, traffic flow requirements, and minimum offsets.
        • akira2501 3y ago
          Do these laws serve no other purpose other than to prevent building? Which of these laws can be discarded to 'solve' the housing problem? Which should we keep?
          • eikenberry 3y ago
            The obvious one is residential only zoning. How are you supposed to be able to walk to local businesses if there are no local businesses as zoning prohibits them?
            • ejb999 3y ago
              zoning laws are usually locally voted on and approved - if the locals in any given area want to allow business, they can - but lots of people don't want to live close to businesses - so they vote accordingly. People that want to live near businesses and don't, should move to places that have it - there are lots of places in the country like that. People that want to live in an entirely residential area, but don't, should move to those places that are. Why do we need a single solution for everyone, in all areas?
  • nico_h 3y ago
    It’s also possible it’s like that because the city and apartments they are familiar with suck. I used to live in a small, admittedly rich, city, and had all amenities within 7 minutes walk, park within 3 minute walk. The city policy is that there is a primary school within kids walking distance. We had 4 apartments in the city with these characteristics, and didn’t hear the neighbors (much) except for the above neighbors heels in one of them.
• stronglikedan 3y ago
  Not everyone likes to share a wall. I'm glad there are options, since I'm one of them. I can walk from my single family home to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars in 15 minutes. Not everyone likes to be that close to that stuff, and that's okay. I'm glad we have options, since I'm not one of them. There's plenty of space to build new homes of all types. It's an entitlement crisis.
  • akira2501 3y ago
    Every time I see a giant timber framed apartment building being constructed I'm exceptionally glad that I don't have to consider living inside of it. It's fine for your early 30s, but if you hope to be part of the "professional class" then that form of living takes it's toll exceptionally quickly.
    • foxyv 3y ago
      American multi-family dwellings are constructed so poorly compared to other countries. You should not be able to hear your neighbors in a modern apartment building or hotel. Unfortunately since building permits and zoning restrictions are so tight, many MFD owning/renting Americans are living in buildings that are over 50 years old.
      • akira2501 3y ago
        The only apartment that I lived in and would consider moving back to was a 1940s constructed "solid" concrete apartment building in northern Minnesota. That thing was built to a standard that is rarely used anymore. The only thing you heard was people walking past your door.
    • wolverine876 3y ago
      In major cities filled with the professional class - the wealthiest communities in the US, such NY, LA, and the Bay Area, lots of them live in apartments.
      • 3y ago
• tpmoney 3y ago
  I would argue more than that the housing crisis is an “urban crisis” and a “fraying of the social fabric” crisis. By the first I mean the continued destruction of smaller towns and semi-rural areas. Even if single family homes are more expensive to build than multi family apartments, the fact is we have ridiculous amounts of space in this country. But most people for various reasons don’t want to live where the space and “affordable” housing is or can be built. The more our population drifts to major metro areas for economic reasons and the more jobs go to where the people are, the worse housing affordability will be, even if we build huge sky rises and cram everyone into Tokyo size apartments. By the second I mean that people want their own bars, theaters and restaurants at home because in a lot of cases going out to the shared versions of these sucks, sometimes a lot. There’s an overall lack of respect for being in public that just seems to permeates the American culture right now. In my own experience just this past week someone was completely oblivious to the fact that I was leaving a parking space and their doors were open and they were flitting about making leaving unsafe. It only broke through to them when a gust of wind caught their door and slammed it into my car, to which they hurriedly apologized and swore it would “buff out” and then ran away. Or the taxi driver who parked in the middle of the lot lane waiting for their fare blocking the whole exit. There was the restaurant patron loudly having an argument on their cell phone. The cashier who was so stoned or distracted they needed 3 tries to get the order right. Or the waiter who got into a literal shouting match with their co-worker to which management did nothing but watch. The theater floor is stickier than a fly trap and the seats aren’t much better. The food is awful, and over priced. The cost of just a few games of pool at the bar is crazy, even before factoring in your drink will cost you 4-6x what you could get it for at home and be lukewarm. Why would people want to go to these shared places or live where they can’t have the space for their own version when this is more and more the norm.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    A huge reason these shared spaces are so miserable is because the communities around them cannot support them. Parking minimums and low density means that not only are these commercial properties insanely expensive, but also that not enough people can access them. A huge upside to increasing density is that the theatre goes from having 100 people within 4 miles of it to 10,000. In addition, instead of having a 400 car parking lot surrounding it like a moat, people just walk right in off the sidewalk. This means the theatre makes more money and pays less in rent. This means they can hire more people to keep it clean and safe. You start to get theaters like this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Path%C3%A9+Rembrandt+Utrecht/@52.0938844,5.1164051,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1sAF1QipOzLRX9RE8FCOwjY1iLPbQgkVmiEjQpmrgtK4H3!2e10!3e12!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOzLRX9RE8FCOwjY1iLPbQgkVmiEjQpmrgtK4H3%3Dw129-h86-k-no!7i8688!8i5792!4m7!3m6!1s0x47c66f438382ffd3:0x4ef0a811f23182d4!8m2!3d52.0938375!4d5.116303!10e5!16s%2Fg%2F12dpwpt6b?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/Path%C3%A9+Rembrandt+Utrec...
• sandworm101 3y ago
  >> Everyone has their own bar, restaurant, theatre, and community center. As opposed to all the "urban lifestyle" people who readily offload their basic needs onto others. Some people are happy cooking their own basic foods. Others want them to be prepared, and their dished cleaned, by a team. Some people are happy with a beer fridge. Others want to go to a bar and pay a young person to smile and flirt while concocting a fancy drink in a silly glass. To each their own. But having a basic kitchen in an apartment is not a luxury any more than having a cupboard for cleaning supplies, a service that can also be outsourced by those too lazy to clean up after themselves. A desire for a modicum of self-sufficiency is not a vice.
  • comte7092 3y ago
    I think the point is that these giant houses provide a lot more than a “modicum” of self sufficiency. I live in an apartment and cook plenty, for example.
    • jajko 3y ago
      People turn to things like viewing world only in extremes, if it subconsiously validates their viewpoints or life choices. We all fall into this trap to certain extent. Another case point - lived my whole life in apartments (thats how much of Europe runs), and preferred to buy another one instead of almost similarly-sized house. And I like cooking a lot and currently getting a maybe bit too much into various cuisines via youtube. Once you grok few basic concepts and rules its amazing how much one can achieve with little and some skills. Plus its creativity to the max, which everybody appreciates too. Also improves your health (better ingredients, you can make stuff with less sugar/fat). Bad thing is, your average restaurant wont feel that fancy anymore.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    I'm not saying we should ban 4000 sq.ft. detached homes on large sprawling lots. They just shouldn't be the ONLY type of home being built. Give people options so they can choose. In fact, if you want to have that beautiful home surrounded by nature and not suburban cookie cutter houses, then it's also in your interest to see that cities stay in the cities. Too many orchards and farms have been demolished to build miserable tracts of poorly constructed wood frame houses.
• majormajor 3y ago
  > We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are not met by their community. You assume it's a necessity thing instead of a desire+wealth thing. Yet the history of the wealthy and powerful "escaping" to large estates goes back centuries (millenia!). Additionally, the housing affordability crisis is also happening in European cities with 4+ story buildings everywhere and shops and restaurants on every corner. If you misunderstand what exactly the problem is and what exactly is being desired and what is being purchased then any sort of "build it and they come" attempts to provide alternatives will be limited by the misconceptions, and any sort of enforce-through-policy change will by stymied by lack of popular support.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    If I can walk less than a mile to a theatre and pay $10 to watch a movie on a giant screen, I won't want to pay $10k to create a home theatre. If I can get food from around the world by walking 10 minutes to 20+ restaurants, I won't want to pay $20k to have an 800 sq.ft. kitchen. If I can entertain my guests at a community center or beer garden, I won't need to have a $15k patio and outdoor bar area. People pay absurd amounts for these things because they can't get them in their own community.
    • majormajor 3y ago
      > If I can walk less than a mile to a theatre and pay $10 to watch a movie on a giant screen, I won't want to pay $10k to create a home theatre. What theater are you used to that lets you pick what's shown for $10, vs just a dozen or two movies at once? > If I can get food from around the world by walking 10 minutes to 20+ restaurants, I won't want to pay $20k to have an 800 sq.ft. kitchen. What restaurants are you going to where it's cost-effective to eat every meal out instead of doing some of your cooking at home? > If I can entertain my guests at a community center or beer garden, I won't need to have a $15k patio and outdoor bar area. What community center are you going to where there's never scheduling conflicts or events? Where you can choose your own landscaping and plants to grow, and do whatever hobbies you want? Where your pet can bask in the sun all day? Get a bigger imagination about why people want personal space! (You might also be suprised by how many people in the US can already drive <=10minutes to all the things on your list - and wouldn't see that as a big hindrance compared to walking - and STILL get versions of them in their own home too, to point at some existing evidence to the contrary.)
• qwertyuiop_ 3y ago
  I live in a multi housing building and its a NIGHTMARE. A drug dealer moved in next door and he smokes all kinds of synthetic drugs 24/7 the shared walls and gaps are so thin the drugs leak in to my home. The person above me has some sort of mental condition, he wakes up at 12:45 am and starts drumming the floor with his hands, runs around and moves the furniture all night everyday. There isnt a damn thing i can do about this other than pack and move. the hoa is an exercise in futility. I am now literally nauseously averse to “muti-unit” housing.
  • etblg 3y ago
    How do you know they are synthetic drugs? What kind of synthetic drugs are these?
  • foxyv 3y ago
    I agree, I've lived in such apartments and hated them. However, you will notice that such buildings are usually 50+ years old and barely maintained. The reason for this is the cost to create new ones is absurdly high due to planning restrictions at the city level. Any attempts to make modern and more livable structures are thwarted by local opposition. Also, the lack of competition in the MFD housing market means that landlords can barely maintain them and people will not have other options. This is why it often costs $2k+/month to live in apartments that look like they may collapse at any moment. However, if you can afford to live in a single family house I would say "Wonderful! Please do!"
  • trgn 3y ago
    Nothing kills the vibe of apartment living like trash neighbors. Same with houses, but it's just so much more pronounced in a multi-unit house. Construction plays a large part. Apartment buildings in the US are flimsy (usually). In other cities, they're often built like vaults.
    • foxyv 3y ago
      I have had problems with bad neighbors in my old apartment as well as out on county land. It's just a universal problem honestly. You are definitely right about American apartments sucking. But they have to get the money for parking from somewhere and it's usually building quality that suffers.
• WheatMillington 3y ago
  What a dystopic vision, living in 50sqm pods and having our basic needs attended to by market participants, eschewing all self-reliance.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    I do not know how you arrived at these odd conclusions, but I would recommend reading a few books on urbanism to understand exactly what I'm proposing. The High Cost of Free Parking - https://a.co/d/7NIZHp9 https://a.co/d/7NIZHp9 Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity - https://a.co/d/19DDeTU https://a.co/d/19DDeTU Walkable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places - https://a.co/d/8F0cWzl https://a.co/d/8F0cWzl
  • namdnay 3y ago
    > eschewing all self-reliance that's the thing though, the suburban/rural individual house lifestyle is a a bit of a cosplay self-reliance - it's completely dependent on someone else providing you with staggering quantities of fossil fuels
    • foxyv 3y ago
      No one is more reliant on other people than someone living on a farm or out in the middle of nowhere. This is why rural neighbors are often so friendly. When something goes wrong you only have each other. Suburbia relies almost entirely on urban centers or something like a military base or university to survive. I remember when Bill Clinton closed March Air Force Base in California and the city surrounding it died like a plant that was watered using bleach.
• scoofy 3y ago
  I find it amusing that many folks here are ready to clap back at this comment about how "but people want single family homes" as if that weren't why we are in a housing crisis. Yes... people want single family homes, it's just not feasible to put 3M people into single family homes in a metro area without absorbing an unsustainable amount of costs. Here we are talking literally the cost of construction, but there is also the cost of infrastructure, and the cost of transport. The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable. If everyone were to live in a single family home, then after the transportation infrastructure reaches capacity, there is a cascade of issues that leads a region becoming totally unaffordable and ultimately unsustainable. I would recommend the Strong Towns organization for anyone more interested in the interaction between long-term affordability issues and surburban infrastructure problems: https://www.strongtowns.org https://www.strongtowns.org
  • majormajor 3y ago
    You can easily get housing affordability crises even without single family homes, as is plainly evident right now in non-North-American cities. It's a bit of a red herring. You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute, and other knock-on differences like that, which can be debated for various other reasons like ecological impact, but you still end up running into the same issues around ability to do new, denser constrution, desire of new, denser construction, and political issues and resistance to change regardless of if your urban area is full of SFH or 5-story buildings. Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?
    • novok 3y ago
      You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Ex: The bus & light rail is bad and slow, so therefore it will always be bad everywhere. Americans haven't lived or even travelled to places in europe and asia with functional transit systems and do not realize what they are missing. Another common american assumption is: apartments are only for the poor, so they will always be made shitty with bad soundproofing when you can make them with good soundproofing as a standard and a good amount of square feet. Or metros are always dirty, dangerous and the gross homeless live there, while that is also a pure policy choice of america. I grew up in north america, lived in places with good metros and good apartments, and then moved to America. America doesn't know how bad they have it.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• nradov 3y ago
  Denser housing sounds good in theory; I support it myself and vote accordingly. The problem is that it comes with other people. The more immediate neighbors you have, the greater the risk that one of them will be an antisocial asshole who makes life hell for everyone else. You're going to occasionally get drug dealers (or other habitual criminals), aggressive dog owners, serious mental illness cases, couples that have screaming arguments every night, motorcyclists who rev their engines at 5:00 AM, etc. And the police/code enforcement/apartment manager usually won't do anything to fix the problem. It only takes one bad neighbor experience to send a family fleeing to a single-family house in the exurbs regardless of costs or environmental impacts. So far I haven't seen the YIMBYs propose serious solutions to the antisocial behavior problem, or even acknowledge that it's an obstacle to their goals.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    American apartments are horrible. However, that isn't a problem with dense housing itself so much as how our cities are built.
    • nradov 3y ago
      I don't understand your comment. Changing how cities are built won't prevent antisocial people from moving in next door. That's more of a social policy and law enforcement issue than an urban planning issue.
      • fragmede 3y ago
        > You're going to occasionally get drug dealers (or other habitual criminals), aggressive dog owners, serious mental illness cases, couples that have screaming arguments every night, motorcyclists who rev their engines at 5:00 AM, etc. I'm not downplaying how much those suck. but half of those problems go away if you don't have to hear them. The couple that argues at all hours of the day? How do you know they're arguing if you can't hear them? If there's a dog that barks all day long but you can't hear it, how is that a problem? Not all of the problems go away, yes, but some of them go away if apartments are built better.
• bombcar 3y ago
  Outside of literal college dorms, where can you find apartments without kitchens?
  • RandallBrown 3y ago
    Look up Micro studio apartments. They often are just small private rooms with a shared kitchen. These seem to be somewhat popular in Seattle. https://www.apodment.com https://www.apodment.com
  • foxyv 3y ago
    Not saying without kitchens so much as smaller kitchens. When you look at new home construction in the past 10 years, they have MASSIVE kitchens. A lot of them are bigger than my first apartment. https://www.homes.com/property/kestrel-at-waterston-north-granite-plan-3505-gilbert-az/pq3j2gsc8dzlc/?tab=2&dk=qhfkbvgw1nf4r https://www.homes.com/property/kestrel-at-waterston-north-gr...
    • huytersd 3y ago
      This is honestly the wrong angle to take. I’m a raging environmentalist and your decrementalist comment is making my blood boil. Advocating for a reduction in standard of living is not the way to go about environmentalism. Using science and technology to make Manhattan project tier changes to energy generation and transportation are. There is a way to reduce your impact almost completely while still maintaining the existing standard of living.
      • krapp 3y ago
        The existing standard of living requires exponential growth and unbounded resource consumption. It isn't possible to maintain that while reducing energy consumption "almost completely." This isn't Star Trek where you can just outsmart the laws of thermodynamics and run everything on free energy and vibes. A "raging environmentalist" should understand that, particularly given that climate change and the collapse of the ecosystem is already underway. The window for "Manhattan project" scale solutions passed decades ago, the only solutions available now are damage mitigation. The future is going to be about maintaining our survival and civilization, not a reasonable standard of comfort.
• sonicanatidae 3y ago
  The housing crisis remains about human greed. That's all it is.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    Don't forget pig headed stupidity!
  • dnissley 3y ago
    It's actually not. I'm as yimby as they get but you need to understand that the value of people's property has almost nothing to do with nimbyism. They want things to stay the same, they want their "neighborhood character". Listen to them when they say this, it's not a sleight of hand. If more dense housing was built in their area the value of their house would go up even further than without it, but the point is they don't want to live near more people!
• pojzon 3y ago
  There is no crisis. Its all artifical to keep ppl poor. Infrastructure is centralized, if it was more spread out everyone could afford a nice house with own big garden and vegetables field. Stop making it sound like its the ppl issue they want to live near nature and have own land. Too high density of ppl per square meter has huge disadventages in well being of those ppl and their overall health. There is so much unused land in the world - trying to say we dont have it is silly. Our leaders just FORCE us to flock to cities cpz its cheaper on infrastructure.
  • currydove 3y ago
    I don't even know where to begin here. Of course we have the land to spread people out, but it's insanely expensive on everyone (especially those who are spread out) over time to sustain it. [1] If you don't have time to read - here's a video I could quickly find about the same topic from the same source - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tI3kkk2JdoI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tI3kkk2JdoI You have a lot of straw man arguments that but the one that I'll focus on the most is "Our leaders just FORCE us to flock to cities cpz it's cheaper on infrastructure" - prove it. 1. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
    • pojzon 3y ago
      > prove it Infrastructure work is supervised and licensed by the goverment. You cant start building a city in the middle of nowhere even if its your own land. You have to follow standards and regulations enforced on you. Last time I checked it looks similar in every 1st world country. Ppl are slowly losing means of production and being moved to subscription plan to even live. "You wont own anything and be happy"
  • foxyv 3y ago
    Anyone who has lived in a rural area that hasn't been subsidized can tell you why spreading out kinda sucks. The power company charges you $100k to run a line to your house. The phone company charges you $20k to run a copper line to give you 100kb DSL. Water has to be pumped from a well which costs $30-50k to drill. We don't really need to cram people in elbow to elbow like New York City though. We just need walkable downtowns where you can pop on down the street from your apartments to the market to get ingredients for dinner. Even just building our houses closer together and putting in dedicated pedestrian paths is enough honestly.
• tschellenbach 3y ago
  The crisis is not related to the cost of building housing. It's due to regulatory hurdles preventing houses from being built.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    Also, the absurd level of car ownership is dragging us down a lot. The fact that old people who should absolutely not be driving HAVE to drive is absurd. If we could make it so only 50% of people NEED a car it would be a huge step in the right direction. Right now there are 0.9 cars per person in the United States. Those cars take up tons of valuable space and resources.
• lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  > We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four [...] Everyone has their own bar, restaurant, theatre, and community center. [...] the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars. Most families don't live in 3-4k sq homes. The average newly built house today is a little over 2k sqft, and most houses are not newly built. Unless you are seriously stretching their definitions, most do not have their own "bar", "restaurant", "theater", and "community center". A house or apartment should follow a kind of "fractal" pattern that mirrors private and public spaces that encircle it or that it contains. A town should have a town center. This is the public square. For towns large enough, you'll have neighborhoods with squares or parks that are the public meeting place for the neighborhood, but more "private" in relation to the town. Each neighborhood is divided into housing units. An apartment building should have a public space for the apartment buildings, like a courtyard, that is proper to the building, but private in relation to the neighborhood. Within each apartment building, there should be a living room + dining area that function as the public space of the apartment, but which is private in relation to the apartment building (the same principle holds if we replace "apartment building + apartment unit" with "individual house"). The ultimate private space is the bedroom. Of course, this is idealized, but this is a principle we see in traditional architecture and one that makes sense and respects human nature and supports human flourishing instead of trying to impose some weird, inhuman, Procrustean invention on people to check off some boxes. The things you mention, like bars, restaurants, theaters, and community centers, would appear chiefly in town and neighborhood centers. But they don't replace the living room, the kitchen, and the dining room. EDIT: Ah, and I would define "neighborhood" in terms of walkability. I should be able to get to the town square by walking in a reasonable about of time.
• huytersd 3y ago
  No one wants to live in a condo. Shitty coops where your neighbors are a wall away, no land/backyard, no hobbies, no place for your kids to run around etc. No ones cares about a community center/shitty shared space. If you’re outside a medium sized city in the US, you’re less than 10 mins from restaurants and bars from your multiple acre sized property.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    A LOT of people want to live in such places. However, most of the problems you mention are a result of car dependency and not dense housing itself. Kids have nowhere to play because cars make it unsafe for them to roam. You have no hobbies because you have no places to go to do them. You have no backyard because the roads prevent you from going to the park. Instead we have to build our houses into huge compounds to do things that we would normally do at community centers, pubs and other public buildings.
    • huytersd 3y ago
      Shared spaces and parks are not a replacement for your own land. I’ve done that while I lived in Manhattan and never enjoyed it.
      • foxyv 3y ago
        That's great! But we need places for people to live too. Not everyone wants to own acreage. Some people just want a place to lay their head that's close to where they work and a nice school for their kids. It also doesn't have to be Manhattan density either. It can even just be as simple as building houses closer together and allowing for corner markets in residential areas.
        • huytersd 3y ago
          I get that but I dislike when this is spoken about like it’s a panacea that applies to everyone. Atleast qualify those comments.
• 0xB31B1B 3y ago
  Those amenities are rarely used in North America. The problem is zoning, fire, and building codes make it impractical to build a bunch of 2.2k square foot units instead of the current mix of 500, 700 and 900 square foot units. Double stairway requirements are a big onerous regulation, especially when we already mandate sprinklers. What we need for families are more developments like the interwar upper west side in NYC, 4 bedrooms, natural light, bigger than 1.5k square feet, single stairway.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    Double stairways and building code requirements don't seem terribly onerous to me. However, the parking minimums and traffic flow requirements do. In Dallas, each 500 square feet of a unit is required to have a parking space... A parking space takes up 300 square feet on average. This means your apartments are at LEAST 3/5 parking. This means you get complexes like this one where it's more parking lot than housing and that land is VERY expensive. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bridgeport+Apartments/@32.7896153,-96.7004681,370m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m9!1m2!2m1!1sdallas+apartments!3m5!1s0x864ea3c9a280fd87:0x98b7e1a0258ef968!8m2!3d32.7896032!4d-96.6996187!16s%2Fg%2F1td9qyj4?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bridgeport+Apartments/@32....
    • bluGill 3y ago
      The double stair means there is no practical way to make a four bedroom. try doing a layout and you discover you have a lot of space that isn't useful. (bedrooms require a window)
• ip26 3y ago
  I don’t think sfh have been foisted on us by stupid or conniving urban planners. It’s more interesting to ask why people don’t want to live in multi family dwellings. For example, if hearing your neighbors is a big part of the problem, would building code requiring sound baffling in every multi family start tipping the scales? Or if crazy neighbors was the issue, what about legal structures that let residents approve of new owners? (Yes, risky territory, but humor me for a second) Multi family is generally seen as less appealing. So if you want people to live in multi family, how do we make it appealing? You can see small attempts at dealing with the problems in e.g. the elimination of shared metering, which invited freeloader problems that simply don’t exist with individual metering.
  • photonbucket 3y ago
    If I could get a really well sound-insulated 3 or 4 bedroom apartment, awesome, but it's either just too hard to find, or too hard to verify that it'll actually be quiet without some certification/guarantee. With a SFH you can control your own destiny to some extent.
  • nradov 3y ago
    Some multi-family housing operates as co-ops where existing owners vote on who is allowed to buy a unit. That can help to an extent. But some boards abuse their authority to discriminate against protected classes. And a board can't necessarily prevent an existing owner from allowing a crazy relative to move in. https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/law-and-ethics/co-op-transactions-unmasking-hidden-discrimination https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/law-and-et...
  • foxyv 3y ago
    > I don’t think sfh have been foisted on us by stupid or conniving urban planners. No, it's been foisted on us by corrupt local city officials and massive suburban developers. They have systemically destroyed our city centers turning them into freeways while banning any other construction.
• paulddraper 3y ago
  > because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are not met by their community An existing trend that was accelerated by years of lockdown.
• theendisney 3y ago
  It was facinating to see a pub ran by a landlord at the bottom floor of an 11 floor student dwelling with 16 rooms, 4 toilets, 4 shower a shared area with giant kitchen per floor. Each had something like 3 bar shifts usually taken up by someone else, the thing was "open" all night and beer on the tap was much cheaper than the store. It paid no rent, needed no licenses and didn't have any tax obligations. As no one knew what to do with the pinball profit it was frequently not allowed to pay for beer.
• samirillian 3y ago
  Partially, yes, but you have to mix in the whole idea of treating your house or houses as your retirement plan, which is a screwy, self-perpetuating economic system. It takes a lot of capital to construct an apartment building, and greed seems the only way capital is directed towards housing in the US.
• Sophistifunk 3y ago
  This idea that the problem with western society is that we allow people to live in detached houses with yards instead of inner-city apartment buildings is bollocks. People need privacy, something to work on, freedom to move about, and agency over their environment to thrive psychologically. That's why prison is the opposite of this. "Something to work on" is partially being met by video games, and it's not going well for us. The rest are much harder to fake out. It's possible to have those things in the city, but only if you are extremely wealthy. For everybody else, it's a life of being tolerated by the people who own and control your world, so long as you keep paying out most of what you earn, don't make any noise or waves, and aren't interested in doing anything that doesn't already have the required space or vendor already within your designated, walkable, or public transport-safe area.
  • oceanplexian 3y ago
    I agree with this. The vast majority of the world is not "choosing" to live in small apartments, outside of a small minority of young urban professionals under the age of 35. There is simply not enough wealth, land, or resources to support detached housing in most of the world. No one wants to live in a tenement with their 12 closest relatives. It's not romantic, or some kind of culturally enlightened way of living. It sucks, and 99% of the world doesn't get the option to live in a house.
  • screye 3y ago
    This would be a compelling complaint if the rest of the world didn't exist. Every complaint about apartments stems from American inner city dilapidation. My first culture shock when arriving in the US was the sorry state of American apartments. We know how to build apartments that are insulated to sound. Common building courtyards give kids safe play-areas within walking distance while supervised. Balconies can be built large and large common areas give people all the space they need. Back in India, urban army cantonments used to be one of the best places to live. Funnily enough, they were simply gated colonies with large apartment complexes, and the recovered space was used for community activities and sports. That's all we're talking about. Take the same surface area. You can choose to build in 2d (SFH) or in 3d (buildings). No where does this imply stuffing people like sardines. All they're saying is that if you optimize for your priorities in 3d it is unlikely that the 2d edge case will be most effective outcome.
• deadbabe 3y ago
  Stop trying to imply we should be in these 600 sqft shoeboxes where the only escape is to go outside in a dirty urban city and walk around. I want a large home I can decorate, with lots of light to keep me happy, and space to invite friends and host a variety of activities, a garden I can tend to and see animals, or just be at peace enjoying the quiet tranquility of not being attached to a neighbor. If I had no choice but to live stuck in a tiny apartment all my life – I’d just kill myself.
  • foxyv 3y ago
    I'm not saying we should bulldoze all the single family homes and make everyone live in filing cabinets. What I'm saying is people should be free to choose. We want the people who enjoy living in cities to have a place to live IN the city. This makes it so they don't have to spread out across the country side ruining farms, natural areas, and stuff that is better out in the country. In fact, this would make it easier for you to afford a single family home and make your experience much more pleasant. You wouldn't have 10 neighbors complaining about the sounds and smells of your animals or report you to code enforcement for your plants growing too tall. You also wouldn't have thousands of cars going by with broken exhausts as people commute to work. In addition, you could live much closer to cities to go see sporting events and concerts because the availability of single family housing would be much better. Also, your race tracks, animal rescues, nature parks, hunting areas, and other rural features wouldn't be regulated to death by massive suburban developments taking over.
• vivekd 3y ago
  I used to believe this. And I still prefer density and think that urban sprawl is bad for mental health, finances and the environment. However I no longer believe it's the cause of the housing crisis. Perhaps it contributes in Europe but here in North America there is space to build and building materials only make up a small portion of the cost of housing. So I don't believe we can point to single family homes as a cause for the housing crisis or price inflation. However that said, although it is not behind housing inflation, it does still have negative impacts on quality of life and the environment and I do hope we move towards samer urban planning models incorporating density, public transportation and walkability.