11 ms·

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

by 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.
  - majormajor 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. You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!) In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.
    - novok 3y ago
      In China right? You know they are the equivalent of people in LA who live so far away from their job and have 2 hour car commutes right?
      - majormajor 3y ago
        Not just in China. China is maybe the most interesting point of comparison with big cities in the US, though, since its cities are both much denser than most AND more sprawling than most. And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transit, what does that tell us about fundamental assumptions about "city should grow forever, number must always go up!"?
        oceanplexian 3y ago
        China isn't even remotely comparable to the USA. The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s. The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.
- nico_h 3y ago
  Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason: - it’s protected - it’s undesirable (too hot/ dry/wet/far/steep/close to a pollution source) - it’s agricultural land If it’s not any of these it’s owned and thus controlled by someone.
  - pojzon 3y ago
    Its owned and controlled by ppl who have millions of square meters for themselves. ^this is the real issue. But we dont want to tackle the real issue of few ppl wanting to own the whole world :) If we cut out that cancer ppl everyone on Earth could have a lot better living standards than we do now. Yes the issue are ultra rich and yes they will propaganda everything to hide it keep it safe.
  - falserum 3y ago
    Some of those reason might be change by government policy.
  - J_Shelby_J 3y ago
    > Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason: - it’s protected Almost the entirety of coastal California (and Oregon and WA as well.) It's insane. It's the best climate on the planet and the most protected from climate change.
- scoofy 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. Yes, you can get an affordability crisis anywhere you make it illegal to build housing. Nobody is arguing that. The point is that you also get an affordability crisis simply by pushing the transportation infrastructure to the point of failure, and then reject density. >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? This is literally what's happening in every tech satellite city, the point is that many-if-not-most of our urban centers are already at their transportation capacities, simply because that is the suburban development model: it's extremely cheap until suddenly it's no longer functional. The suburban model has no equilibrium, it's a cascade, once the planned automobile infrastructure reaches capacity, you cannot increase it at a rate that is sustainable. Thus, once that capacity is gone, suddenly the real estate in the core becomes extremely valuable -> which incentivizes density -> which further strains peak infrastructure -> which increases the value of core real estate -> which further incentivizes density -> etc. -> etc. -> etc. We can't wish this away, beyond wishing other people just didn't exist. It's like wishing that other people would take the bus, but not wanting to take it yourself. Nobody in the bay area wants to move to affordable Red Bluff, CA, without a reason, much less the CEO of a major corporation moving their entire company there out of the kindness of his heart we he or she already has a house and friends in Atherton.
- NewJazz 3y ago
  You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute Why are you acting like driving a vehicle and being a passenger in a vehicle are the same experience? One is clearly more demanding and inhibiting than the other. On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat... Lots of things you can't do while in a car. Unless your job is driving. Which, if you commute for work, it kinda is.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular. I commuted for awhile between Baltimore and DC on Amtrak and apart from being hellaciously unreliable it was great for working. But my commute from the upper west side to east midtown when I lived in NYC was completely different—being crammed into the 1/2/3 and then fighting through the masses to take the S across town.
    - NewJazz 3y ago
      You can listen to music or a podcast while standing. I just plugged in upper west side and midtown Manhattan into google maps... It said 18 minutes via transit. Maybe your commute had more complications, last mile and so on.
      - GauntletWizard 3y ago
        You can listen to music or a podcast while driving. You can even hear it over the din of your car engine, which is much less loud than being shoved into a box with a hundred other people.
    - sofixa 3y ago
      > You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular. I see lots of people watching movies/series or reading books (physical or ebooks) while standing up in various Paris transit during rush hour.
- II2II 3y ago
  > 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? We should be aiming for some degree of density. I would hazard a guess that size is largely dependent upon what a person wants out of life. Infrastructure is very expensive to build and maintain, and everyone demands it in multiple forms (roads, water, sewage, and power at a minimum). Containing the costs by reducing either extent or capacity would allow us to allocate those resources to other things, things that could improve the collective quality of life. As for decentralization, it depends upon how it is done. I've lived in or visited towns with a few thousand people. Nearly everything one needed was within walking distance, though people often left town for things they wanted. I've also lived in similarly sized urban communities where virtually nothing one needed was within a reasonable walking distance. Suburban communities often take the latter to the extreme. What was the difference? Everything in the small town was centralized, yet businesses and services in those urban communities were effectively decentralized. Let's say you build a bunch of small towns to decentralize the population and get away from feeding money back into the hands of those who own and control cities. You now have another major consideration: are people going to live most of their daily lives in those towns, or are they going to live in one town and work in another? A big part of the reason why people spend so much of their life commuting, whether it is by car or train, is because opportunities (may it be home ownership or careers) don't necessarily fall in the same place.
- nonameiguess 3y ago
  All I can say is thanks, but yes, every thread of this variety gets a bit tiresome hearing the same things over and over that tend to be some variation of "my peeve local issue with the US is the reason the US experiences a problem experienced by hundreds of other countries with wildly different policies." Not to say, in a vacuum, multi-family housing won't provide more housing units per unit of land area than single-family. Clearly, it will. But unless you build every city from scratch to house 20 million people, whether you started with single-family or multi-family, the most desirable cities will end up in a future state whereby more people want to live there than housing exists for, and even if regulations and zoning allow you to build higher and denser than is currently done, to do it where people want to live, you'll have to tear down existing buildings, including existing housing, and many of the owners and occupants of that housing won't want that. You'll also need to run more utility lines, build new pipes, run them under existing roads, which means shutting down those roads, and even if they're perfect utopian European roads that have zero cars on them and only have pedestrians and bicycles, the user of those roads are still going to get annoyed and inconvenienced, and it's going to cost more to do this than building new housing where nobody currently lives, pretty much no matter what.
- bobthepanda 3y ago
  The solution to dispersal, and density, is to simply allow that type of building everywhere, and then they just kind of randomly pop up whenever/wherever works out. Unless forced to due to scarcity, dense development does not really clump up together all at once for good reason, since clumping up will drive up costs in a hyper local area. Tokyo for example, has a lot of detached housing, even in the central wards. The density there is more pockmarked and random, and notably never really concentrates all that highly; there is not a single Japanese building in the top 100 skyscrapers, because skyscraper concentration is an artifact of how we force dense developments only in certain places.
- mulmen 3y ago
  > Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Tokyo Metro handles 6m+ riders a day with a population of 40m. So, yes, at least until you surpass 40m people. > 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? “Disperse and decentralize” is exactly how every city I have ever been to is built.
- closeparen 3y ago
  We are decentralizing things. That's what the housing crisis is: people being forced to accept less central locations than they would like. It turns that being the one who gets decentralized sucks, people it happens to generally resent it, and others are willing to make serious tradeoffs to their household budgets or else the dignity of their living conditions, in order to remain central.
- lizknope 3y ago
  People are attacking single family homes and commuter culture. Okay, but my solution is different. The pandemic showed that millions of us can work from home. My office was closed for about 2 years. Our stock price shot way up. There were lots of stories about the environmental benefits. Air pollution in big cities decreased dramatically. Wildlife started returning in places. We keep building commercial real estate and most people I know have little desire to commute to the office and sit in a cubicle disturbed by other people constantly. I would severely limit commercial real estate building permits, encourage companies to have employees work at home via tax breaks or whatever. This will help with the housing issues, greenhouse gas emissions, decrease the need for new roads because of less traffic. Everyone wins except dumb control freak managers and restaurants that do lunch in the business areas.
  - decafninja 3y ago
    The dumb control freak managers are often the same people holding the levers of power to make these decisions.
    - lizknope 3y ago
      Of course, that is why there needs to be some incentive to get them to change their minds. Biden Calls for Federal Workers to Return to the Office August 2023 https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/biden-calls-federal-workers-to-return-to-office https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/bi... The government wants people in the office because it helps boost the economy. I suggest the exact opposite. Are we serious about climate change? Which is a more effective strategy? Encourage people to switch to electric cars or just have them drive their existing gas car less? My monthly gasoline bills dropped from $250 to $70 during the pandemic. How much are we spending on health care? How many people don't have the time to exercise? I had an extra 60 minutes a day to take a walk instead of commuting.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > Our stock price shot way up. This would imply that a company's stock price is directly influenced by its productive output; in reality, it's only very tangentially so. Especially for low-profit, high-growth tech companies, I'd wager the federal funds rate's effect on the stock price is way higher.
- JoeJonathan 3y ago
  I spend a lot of time in São Paulo, and no matter how you slice it, housing is cheaper there. Adjunct professors and freelancers can afford houses there. Maids can afford houses, albeit far from the center. Everyone complains about the city’s endless verticalização (verticalizication) because they like the idea of old houses, but I say keep it coming.
nradov 3y ago
Strong Towns is not a reliable or neutral source. They aren't necessarily wrong, but they do cherry pick data to suit the urbanist narrative that they're trying to promote. It can be a useful source for understanding the issue but don't take anything you read there at face value.
- scoofy 3y ago
  What on earth do you mean "neutral" as if there are two sides to caring about long term infrastructure sustainability. If by "cherry-pick" you mean, explain a falsifiable hypothesis and then point to example of the hypothesis playing out exactly as predicted (Detroit, Jackson, etc.). If you really think their hypothesis is totally wrong, we're currently living in a real time experiment of the thesis in the Phoenix metro area. Due to water concerns, the suburban development model is no longer feasible. It's unlikely that Phoenix will suddenly become density mecca (as it's not feasible with automobile transportation), so we should expect to see a massive hole in the metro cities' budgets sooner rather than later. If Phoenix turns out to be fine a in 15 years, I'll happily concede the point and will have learned a lot.
  - nradov 3y ago
    That is exactly the cherry picking that I mean. You can point out a few examples that appear to fit the Strong Towns hypothesis (although causality isn't clear) but there are many other suburban cities which are quietly doing fine and have sustainable budgets. The Detroit metro area would be a mess even if it had higher density housing and better public transit. The problems there are more due to federal trade policies, toxic labor relations, and failed progressive social policies. It isn't valid evidence to either support or refute the Strong Towns hypothesis: too many confounding variables.
    - scoofy 3y ago
      Their thesis is clear and falsifiable, it's just that the timelines are very large. If you are going to criticize the thesis, it would make sense to address the actual arguments of ongoing cost-per-resident of various pieces of infrastructure, rather than just calling the organization 'biased'.
philwelch 3y ago
That’s not the reason we have a housing crisis. If you look at cities like Houston, where housing is relatively affordable, the vast majority of people still have single family homes. The reason we have a housing crisis is because regulations make it too hard to build housing.
- foxyv 3y ago
  Despite their reputation for car centric design in the suburbs, Houston is actually building a LOT of multi-family dwellings. This is helping with affordability. https://catalyst.independent.org/2019/12/18/how-houston-is-becoming-americas-next-dense-city/ https://catalyst.independent.org/2019/12/18/how-houston-is-b... I'm also really happy with how they have handled their homeless. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
  - closeparen 3y ago
    These things are not in conflict. It's very easy to build 100% car-dependent high-density residential. Just cut a subdivision off an arterial and chuck a 5-over-1 or some townhouses in there. That's the vast majority of multifamily development by volume. Multifamily housing is valuable against car-dependence in the context of a city street grid with mixed use zones or at least somewhat proximate neighborhood commercial zones. Then the people living there actually have destinations they can walk to, and routes they can bike or take transit on that aren't "snake around to the subdivison's one interface to the 6-lane arterial, and try not to die on it."
- scoofy 3y ago
  I grew up in Texas, people are have been building in literal floodplains because there is no more room to build. https://abc13.com/floodplain-housing-building-houston-flood/3079207/ https://abc13.com/floodplain-housing-building-houston-flood/... Houston is just second-to-last in line in Texas to face the affordability crisis (followed by San Antonio) because they have the highest capacity automobile infrastructure, but it's already regularly ranked with the worst traffic in the United States. While I agree that Houston does a lot of things right, especially just literally allowing density, I do not think they would survive an influx of folks while maintaining affordability any better than Austin has.
lo_zamoyski 3y ago
While suburbs certainly are financial sinkholes, there are other factors. Housing in cities like NYC is expensive in part because there is a housing crisis in NYC, because nothing is being built. And what is being built is preposterously expensive and beyond the teach of a typical New York family (not to mention cramped; you can barely fit a queen-sized bed into many of these bedrooms). Another issue is that developers have been snatching up real estate to cater to single yuppies who will accept living in a rathole-sized bedroom. An average bedroom is split in half to accommodate twice the occupants so that rent can be raised. This can make real estate hostile to anyone but such renters. And never mind pied-à-terre apartments, a controversial practice for which we can come up with pros and cons.
- scoofy 3y ago
  I'm not arguing that blocking housing doesn't also cause a housing crisis. I'm just saying, given the choice of living in Manhattan in a single family home, or a six-floor walkup, I'm taking the single family home. And if everyone in Manhattan made the same choice, Manhattan would be ridiculously more expensive. The best parallel is probably Beverly Hills, but for the entire island.
tomcar288 3y ago
we had no problem building houses for people in the 50s and 60s. Why all the sudden we can't do it in the last 20 years? There's plenty of land out there. Even in the CA, the most densley populated state, there are more acres in CA than people and yet somehow there's a huge land shortage and ridiculous amounts of regulation. Even 100 miles away from the city, you'll see houses squeezed together like some kind of concentration camp, with open land in every direction and a 5 lane highway to service the equally insane commuting distances created by these land use policies: talk about terrible for the environment.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I’m struggling to imagine how less densely packed housing could be better for the environment
  - tomcar288 3y ago
    the key is to balance the number of jobs in an area with the amount of housing and to have mixed use land policy so housing and commercial and industrial can be much closer.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      That sounds unrelated to housing density
- scoofy 3y ago
  >we had no problem building houses for people in the 50s and 60s. Why all the sudden we can't do it in the last 20 years? Yea, it's actually pretty easy. Just get in a time machine and go back to 1956 when the Federal Highway Act made all that development possible, and just tell them to build sixteen-lane highways through every major city instead of two-lane highways. Explain that in 70 years, those highways will be operating overcapacity, so that a commute in and out of the city will not be able to operate at optimal speed of a vehicle, so that traveling 30 miles will not take 30 minutes, rather it will often take 60 minutes or longer, thus making central real estate more valuable. Which, in turn, creates a feedback loop that makes the viable transportation range of the urban center smaller and smaller. And, thus, makes the real estate in that smaller area more and more valuable. However, if you can get those highways doubled or tripled in size it should stop that feedback loop for now. Once you convince them to do that, feel free to come back to 2024, and all our development concerns will go away for another 70 years, at which point, someone will have to get in the time machine to make it 38 lane highways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...
TulliusCicero 3y ago
> "but people want single family homes" Right, this kind of talk is completely disingenuous from the "single family homes only" crowd. Upzoning almost always means you can build more densely, not that you absolutely have to. People can still build single family homes if they want. Single family home zoning is really mandatory single family home zoning. You aren't allowed to make anything else on that land, no matter how much of a housing crisis there is. But that doesn't mean upzoning somehow bans single family homes.
jpgleeson 3y ago
Even giving people the single family housing they want, there’s ways to increase the density massively that aren’t being utilised right now. Bringing back terraced houses in the US would be a great first step, and is only an improvement over the insanity that is the Bay Area’s houses in every back and side garden while still enforcing setbacks.
failuser 3y ago
More like people who can afford houses want bigger houses. If selling more affordable smaller houses made more profit then they would be sold.
Animats 3y ago
> The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable. In the US, which has lots of land area, single family homes are the norm: The majority of the housing stock in the United States is single-family detached houses. Of the total 128.5 million housing units in 2021, about 81.7 million were detached homes and 8.2 million were attached single-family homes. In comparison, roughly 31.8 million units were in multifamily buildings.[1] The US only has a housing space crisis in over-urbanized areas. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1042111/single-family-vs-multifamily-homes-usa https://www.statista.com/statistics/1042111/single-family-vs...
- scoofy 3y ago
  >The US only has a single family home space crisis in over-urbanized areas. FTFY, but fully agree. In urbanized areas (where most people live), we have hit the capacity of the automobile transportation infrastructure. This causes a cascade of real estate prices in urban cores, making the vast majority of these areas unaffordable for normal folks. This is leading to myriad crises, like a massive teacher shortage in California, simply because lower-income people cannot build normal/desirable lives for themselves. The issue is that automobile-centric infrastructure makes this cascade inevitable in areas where cities grow to the point of infrastructure failure, but the cost of maintaining the infrastructure creates financial problems in areas that do not grow to this point. None of this would be an issue if jobs were not clustered in big cities, but they are.
  - hibikir 3y ago
    Ah, if it was just jobs. Imagine you have a very smart kid that goes faster than grade level. In a rural area, your option is home schooling. In a small metro, there might be enough kids to have some sort of gifted program that works. In a really large metro, there will be many specialized schools, where people that are used to not just random gifted children, but those that share very similar strengths and weaknesses. You'll also have more medical specialists, a far wider variety of quality entertainment options, and more people sharing whatever weird hobbies you have. The advantages of having more people living in your metro are are massive even if one is a remote worker. The advantages might not be needed for one's special case, and you might prefer to, say, live near a beach with great surfing opportunities in Portugal, but you'll still be accepting significant tradeoffs for not living near more people.
screye 3y ago
The hilarious bit is how confident they all are about people wanting SFH development, yet refuse to legalize everything else. Imagine banning every android device from the US, while also proclaiming that no one would've purchased android anyway, because Apple is so popular. Apple is good because they compete and then win. If SFH demand is so high, surely legalizing vertical development would be no big deal, just like android still struggles to gain adoption in the US.
- shiroiushi 3y ago
  Last I heard, Android has about 50% marketshare in the US. That's pretty far from "struggling to gain adoption". It's not winning, but it's not losing either, it's a tie.

by scoofy 3y ago

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.
- majormajor 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. You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!) In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.
  - novok 3y ago
    In China right? You know they are the equivalent of people in LA who live so far away from their job and have 2 hour car commutes right?
    - majormajor 3y ago
      Not just in China. China is maybe the most interesting point of comparison with big cities in the US, though, since its cities are both much denser than most AND more sprawling than most. And I don't follow your second question. If the trains OR freeways are full of people who can't afford to live closer to their jobs and have hours-long commutes, isn't that bad? And if it can happen even with extensive public transit, what does that tell us about fundamental assumptions about "city should grow forever, number must always go up!"?
      - oceanplexian 3y ago
        China isn't even remotely comparable to the USA. The urban mega cities are a prop that the CCP puts on display for the world. There's a reason that China's GDP-per-capita lands somewhere between Kazakhstan and Cuba.I would know because I've been there. If you go to a random exurban part of China you're going to find people living in makeshift tin structures, a lack of running water, oxcarts used as serious transportation, and a society that is functionally in the 1930s. The CCP are masters of propaganda though, and flood Youtube and social media with influencers riding around on maglev trains and showing off new airports and architecture. Even on American Social Media, if you look for videos of "The Real China", or "Chinese Poverty" you'll get carefully curated propaganda that does not line up with what I saw first hand.
nico_h 3y ago
Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason: - it’s protected - it’s undesirable (too hot/ dry/wet/far/steep/close to a pollution source) - it’s agricultural land If it’s not any of these it’s owned and thus controlled by someone.
- pojzon 3y ago
  Its owned and controlled by ppl who have millions of square meters for themselves. ^this is the real issue. But we dont want to tackle the real issue of few ppl wanting to own the whole world :) If we cut out that cancer ppl everyone on Earth could have a lot better living standards than we do now. Yes the issue are ultra rich and yes they will propaganda everything to hide it keep it safe.
- falserum 3y ago
  Some of those reason might be change by government policy.
- J_Shelby_J 3y ago
  > Uninhabited land is empty of people for a reason: - it’s protected Almost the entirety of coastal California (and Oregon and WA as well.) It's insane. It's the best climate on the planet and the most protected from climate change.
scoofy 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. Yes, you can get an affordability crisis anywhere you make it illegal to build housing. Nobody is arguing that. The point is that you also get an affordability crisis simply by pushing the transportation infrastructure to the point of failure, and then reject density. >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? This is literally what's happening in every tech satellite city, the point is that many-if-not-most of our urban centers are already at their transportation capacities, simply because that is the suburban development model: it's extremely cheap until suddenly it's no longer functional. The suburban model has no equilibrium, it's a cascade, once the planned automobile infrastructure reaches capacity, you cannot increase it at a rate that is sustainable. Thus, once that capacity is gone, suddenly the real estate in the core becomes extremely valuable -> which incentivizes density -> which further strains peak infrastructure -> which increases the value of core real estate -> which further incentivizes density -> etc. -> etc. -> etc. We can't wish this away, beyond wishing other people just didn't exist. It's like wishing that other people would take the bus, but not wanting to take it yourself. Nobody in the bay area wants to move to affordable Red Bluff, CA, without a reason, much less the CEO of a major corporation moving their entire company there out of the kindness of his heart we he or she already has a house and friends in Atherton.
NewJazz 3y ago
You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute Why are you acting like driving a vehicle and being a passenger in a vehicle are the same experience? One is clearly more demanding and inhibiting than the other. On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat... Lots of things you can't do while in a car. Unless your job is driving. Which, if you commute for work, it kinda is.
- rayiner 3y ago
  You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular. I commuted for awhile between Baltimore and DC on Amtrak and apart from being hellaciously unreliable it was great for working. But my commute from the upper west side to east midtown when I lived in NYC was completely different—being crammed into the 1/2/3 and then fighting through the masses to take the S across town.
  - NewJazz 3y ago
    You can listen to music or a podcast while standing. I just plugged in upper west side and midtown Manhattan into google maps... It said 18 minutes via transit. Maybe your commute had more complications, last mile and so on.
    - GauntletWizard 3y ago
      You can listen to music or a podcast while driving. You can even hear it over the din of your car engine, which is much less loud than being shoved into a box with a hundred other people.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    > You can do those things if you get a seat, which you generally cannot during commuting hours in any city where public transit is good enough to be popular. I see lots of people watching movies/series or reading books (physical or ebooks) while standing up in various Paris transit during rush hour.
II2II 3y ago
> 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? We should be aiming for some degree of density. I would hazard a guess that size is largely dependent upon what a person wants out of life. Infrastructure is very expensive to build and maintain, and everyone demands it in multiple forms (roads, water, sewage, and power at a minimum). Containing the costs by reducing either extent or capacity would allow us to allocate those resources to other things, things that could improve the collective quality of life. As for decentralization, it depends upon how it is done. I've lived in or visited towns with a few thousand people. Nearly everything one needed was within walking distance, though people often left town for things they wanted. I've also lived in similarly sized urban communities where virtually nothing one needed was within a reasonable walking distance. Suburban communities often take the latter to the extreme. What was the difference? Everything in the small town was centralized, yet businesses and services in those urban communities were effectively decentralized. Let's say you build a bunch of small towns to decentralize the population and get away from feeding money back into the hands of those who own and control cities. You now have another major consideration: are people going to live most of their daily lives in those towns, or are they going to live in one town and work in another? A big part of the reason why people spend so much of their life commuting, whether it is by car or train, is because opportunities (may it be home ownership or careers) don't necessarily fall in the same place.
nonameiguess 3y ago
All I can say is thanks, but yes, every thread of this variety gets a bit tiresome hearing the same things over and over that tend to be some variation of "my peeve local issue with the US is the reason the US experiences a problem experienced by hundreds of other countries with wildly different policies." Not to say, in a vacuum, multi-family housing won't provide more housing units per unit of land area than single-family. Clearly, it will. But unless you build every city from scratch to house 20 million people, whether you started with single-family or multi-family, the most desirable cities will end up in a future state whereby more people want to live there than housing exists for, and even if regulations and zoning allow you to build higher and denser than is currently done, to do it where people want to live, you'll have to tear down existing buildings, including existing housing, and many of the owners and occupants of that housing won't want that. You'll also need to run more utility lines, build new pipes, run them under existing roads, which means shutting down those roads, and even if they're perfect utopian European roads that have zero cars on them and only have pedestrians and bicycles, the user of those roads are still going to get annoyed and inconvenienced, and it's going to cost more to do this than building new housing where nobody currently lives, pretty much no matter what.
bobthepanda 3y ago
The solution to dispersal, and density, is to simply allow that type of building everywhere, and then they just kind of randomly pop up whenever/wherever works out. Unless forced to due to scarcity, dense development does not really clump up together all at once for good reason, since clumping up will drive up costs in a hyper local area. Tokyo for example, has a lot of detached housing, even in the central wards. The density there is more pockmarked and random, and notably never really concentrates all that highly; there is not a single Japanese building in the top 100 skyscrapers, because skyscraper concentration is an artifact of how we force dense developments only in certain places.
mulmen 3y ago
> Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Tokyo Metro handles 6m+ riders a day with a population of 40m. So, yes, at least until you surpass 40m people. > 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? “Disperse and decentralize” is exactly how every city I have ever been to is built.
closeparen 3y ago
We are decentralizing things. That's what the housing crisis is: people being forced to accept less central locations than they would like. It turns that being the one who gets decentralized sucks, people it happens to generally resent it, and others are willing to make serious tradeoffs to their household budgets or else the dignity of their living conditions, in order to remain central.
lizknope 3y ago
People are attacking single family homes and commuter culture. Okay, but my solution is different. The pandemic showed that millions of us can work from home. My office was closed for about 2 years. Our stock price shot way up. There were lots of stories about the environmental benefits. Air pollution in big cities decreased dramatically. Wildlife started returning in places. We keep building commercial real estate and most people I know have little desire to commute to the office and sit in a cubicle disturbed by other people constantly. I would severely limit commercial real estate building permits, encourage companies to have employees work at home via tax breaks or whatever. This will help with the housing issues, greenhouse gas emissions, decrease the need for new roads because of less traffic. Everyone wins except dumb control freak managers and restaurants that do lunch in the business areas.
- decafninja 3y ago
  The dumb control freak managers are often the same people holding the levers of power to make these decisions.
  - lizknope 3y ago
    Of course, that is why there needs to be some incentive to get them to change their minds. Biden Calls for Federal Workers to Return to the Office August 2023 https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/biden-calls-federal-workers-to-return-to-office https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/bi... The government wants people in the office because it helps boost the economy. I suggest the exact opposite. Are we serious about climate change? Which is a more effective strategy? Encourage people to switch to electric cars or just have them drive their existing gas car less? My monthly gasoline bills dropped from $250 to $70 during the pandemic. How much are we spending on health care? How many people don't have the time to exercise? I had an extra 60 minutes a day to take a walk instead of commuting.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > Our stock price shot way up. This would imply that a company's stock price is directly influenced by its productive output; in reality, it's only very tangentially so. Especially for low-profit, high-growth tech companies, I'd wager the federal funds rate's effect on the stock price is way higher.
JoeJonathan 3y ago
I spend a lot of time in São Paulo, and no matter how you slice it, housing is cheaper there. Adjunct professors and freelancers can afford houses there. Maids can afford houses, albeit far from the center. Everyone complains about the city’s endless verticalização (verticalizication) because they like the idea of old houses, but I say keep it coming.

nradov 3y ago

Strong Towns is not a reliable or neutral source. They aren't necessarily wrong, but they do cherry pick data to suit the urbanist narrative that they're trying to promote. It can be a useful source for understanding the issue but don't take anything you read there at face value.

scoofy 3y ago
What on earth do you mean "neutral" as if there are two sides to caring about long term infrastructure sustainability. If by "cherry-pick" you mean, explain a falsifiable hypothesis and then point to example of the hypothesis playing out exactly as predicted (Detroit, Jackson, etc.). If you really think their hypothesis is totally wrong, we're currently living in a real time experiment of the thesis in the Phoenix metro area. Due to water concerns, the suburban development model is no longer feasible. It's unlikely that Phoenix will suddenly become density mecca (as it's not feasible with automobile transportation), so we should expect to see a massive hole in the metro cities' budgets sooner rather than later. If Phoenix turns out to be fine a in 15 years, I'll happily concede the point and will have learned a lot.
- nradov 3y ago
  That is exactly the cherry picking that I mean. You can point out a few examples that appear to fit the Strong Towns hypothesis (although causality isn't clear) but there are many other suburban cities which are quietly doing fine and have sustainable budgets. The Detroit metro area would be a mess even if it had higher density housing and better public transit. The problems there are more due to federal trade policies, toxic labor relations, and failed progressive social policies. It isn't valid evidence to either support or refute the Strong Towns hypothesis: too many confounding variables.
  - scoofy 3y ago
    Their thesis is clear and falsifiable, it's just that the timelines are very large. If you are going to criticize the thesis, it would make sense to address the actual arguments of ongoing cost-per-resident of various pieces of infrastructure, rather than just calling the organization 'biased'.

philwelch 3y ago

That’s not the reason we have a housing crisis. If you look at cities like Houston, where housing is relatively affordable, the vast majority of people still have single family homes. The reason we have a housing crisis is because regulations make it too hard to build housing.

foxyv 3y ago
Despite their reputation for car centric design in the suburbs, Houston is actually building a LOT of multi-family dwellings. This is helping with affordability. https://catalyst.independent.org/2019/12/18/how-houston-is-becoming-americas-next-dense-city/ https://catalyst.independent.org/2019/12/18/how-houston-is-b... I'm also really happy with how they have handled their homeless. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
- closeparen 3y ago
  These things are not in conflict. It's very easy to build 100% car-dependent high-density residential. Just cut a subdivision off an arterial and chuck a 5-over-1 or some townhouses in there. That's the vast majority of multifamily development by volume. Multifamily housing is valuable against car-dependence in the context of a city street grid with mixed use zones or at least somewhat proximate neighborhood commercial zones. Then the people living there actually have destinations they can walk to, and routes they can bike or take transit on that aren't "snake around to the subdivison's one interface to the 6-lane arterial, and try not to die on it."
scoofy 3y ago
I grew up in Texas, people are have been building in literal floodplains because there is no more room to build. https://abc13.com/floodplain-housing-building-houston-flood/3079207/ https://abc13.com/floodplain-housing-building-houston-flood/... Houston is just second-to-last in line in Texas to face the affordability crisis (followed by San Antonio) because they have the highest capacity automobile infrastructure, but it's already regularly ranked with the worst traffic in the United States. While I agree that Houston does a lot of things right, especially just literally allowing density, I do not think they would survive an influx of folks while maintaining affordability any better than Austin has.

lo_zamoyski 3y ago

While suburbs certainly are financial sinkholes, there are other factors. Housing in cities like NYC is expensive in part because there is a housing crisis in NYC, because nothing is being built. And what is being built is preposterously expensive and beyond the teach of a typical New York family (not to mention cramped; you can barely fit a queen-sized bed into many of these bedrooms). Another issue is that developers have been snatching up real estate to cater to single yuppies who will accept living in a rathole-sized bedroom. An average bedroom is split in half to accommodate twice the occupants so that rent can be raised. This can make real estate hostile to anyone but such renters. And never mind pied-à-terre apartments, a controversial practice for which we can come up with pros and cons.

scoofy 3y ago
I'm not arguing that blocking housing doesn't also cause a housing crisis. I'm just saying, given the choice of living in Manhattan in a single family home, or a six-floor walkup, I'm taking the single family home. And if everyone in Manhattan made the same choice, Manhattan would be ridiculously more expensive. The best parallel is probably Beverly Hills, but for the entire island.

tomcar288 3y ago

we had no problem building houses for people in the 50s and 60s. Why all the sudden we can't do it in the last 20 years? There's plenty of land out there. Even in the CA, the most densley populated state, there are more acres in CA than people and yet somehow there's a huge land shortage and ridiculous amounts of regulation. Even 100 miles away from the city, you'll see houses squeezed together like some kind of concentration camp, with open land in every direction and a 5 lane highway to service the equally insane commuting distances created by these land use policies: talk about terrible for the environment.

jncfhnb 3y ago
I’m struggling to imagine how less densely packed housing could be better for the environment
- tomcar288 3y ago
  the key is to balance the number of jobs in an area with the amount of housing and to have mixed use land policy so housing and commercial and industrial can be much closer.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    That sounds unrelated to housing density
scoofy 3y ago
>we had no problem building houses for people in the 50s and 60s. Why all the sudden we can't do it in the last 20 years? Yea, it's actually pretty easy. Just get in a time machine and go back to 1956 when the Federal Highway Act made all that development possible, and just tell them to build sixteen-lane highways through every major city instead of two-lane highways. Explain that in 70 years, those highways will be operating overcapacity, so that a commute in and out of the city will not be able to operate at optimal speed of a vehicle, so that traveling 30 miles will not take 30 minutes, rather it will often take 60 minutes or longer, thus making central real estate more valuable. Which, in turn, creates a feedback loop that makes the viable transportation range of the urban center smaller and smaller. And, thus, makes the real estate in that smaller area more and more valuable. However, if you can get those highways doubled or tripled in size it should stop that feedback loop for now. Once you convince them to do that, feel free to come back to 2024, and all our development concerns will go away for another 70 years, at which point, someone will have to get in the time machine to make it 38 lane highways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_1956 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...

TulliusCicero 3y ago

> "but people want single family homes" Right, this kind of talk is completely disingenuous from the "single family homes only" crowd. Upzoning almost always means you can build more densely, not that you absolutely have to. People can still build single family homes if they want. Single family home zoning is really mandatory single family home zoning. You aren't allowed to make anything else on that land, no matter how much of a housing crisis there is. But that doesn't mean upzoning somehow bans single family homes.

jpgleeson 3y ago

Even giving people the single family housing they want, there’s ways to increase the density massively that aren’t being utilised right now. Bringing back terraced houses in the US would be a great first step, and is only an improvement over the insanity that is the Bay Area’s houses in every back and side garden while still enforcing setbacks.

failuser 3y ago

More like people who can afford houses want bigger houses. If selling more affordable smaller houses made more profit then they would be sold.

Animats 3y ago

> The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable. In the US, which has lots of land area, single family homes are the norm: The majority of the housing stock in the United States is single-family detached houses. Of the total 128.5 million housing units in 2021, about 81.7 million were detached homes and 8.2 million were attached single-family homes. In comparison, roughly 31.8 million units were in multifamily buildings.[1] The US only has a housing space crisis in over-urbanized areas. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1042111/single-family-vs-multifamily-homes-usa https://www.statista.com/statistics/1042111/single-family-vs...

scoofy 3y ago
>The US only has a single family home space crisis in over-urbanized areas. FTFY, but fully agree. In urbanized areas (where most people live), we have hit the capacity of the automobile transportation infrastructure. This causes a cascade of real estate prices in urban cores, making the vast majority of these areas unaffordable for normal folks. This is leading to myriad crises, like a massive teacher shortage in California, simply because lower-income people cannot build normal/desirable lives for themselves. The issue is that automobile-centric infrastructure makes this cascade inevitable in areas where cities grow to the point of infrastructure failure, but the cost of maintaining the infrastructure creates financial problems in areas that do not grow to this point. None of this would be an issue if jobs were not clustered in big cities, but they are.
- hibikir 3y ago
  Ah, if it was just jobs. Imagine you have a very smart kid that goes faster than grade level. In a rural area, your option is home schooling. In a small metro, there might be enough kids to have some sort of gifted program that works. In a really large metro, there will be many specialized schools, where people that are used to not just random gifted children, but those that share very similar strengths and weaknesses. You'll also have more medical specialists, a far wider variety of quality entertainment options, and more people sharing whatever weird hobbies you have. The advantages of having more people living in your metro are are massive even if one is a remote worker. The advantages might not be needed for one's special case, and you might prefer to, say, live near a beach with great surfing opportunities in Portugal, but you'll still be accepting significant tradeoffs for not living near more people.

screye 3y ago

The hilarious bit is how confident they all are about people wanting SFH development, yet refuse to legalize everything else. Imagine banning every android device from the US, while also proclaiming that no one would've purchased android anyway, because Apple is so popular. Apple is good because they compete and then win. If SFH demand is so high, surely legalizing vertical development would be no big deal, just like android still struggles to gain adoption in the US.

shiroiushi 3y ago
Last I heard, Android has about 50% marketshare in the US. That's pretty far from "struggling to gain adoption". It's not winning, but it's not losing either, it's a tie.