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Comment by baron816 | Hacker News Reader

Why are people so adamantly opposed to density? Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes, but if you think about places like New York, London, and Paris, that argument doesn't exactly hold. Those cities are incredibly dense and expensive, but people love living there enough to pay the high prices. People who can live anywhere choose to live there. I'm willing to bet that SV could triple its population, and property values would hold or increase. Supply will create it's own demand.

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FWIW that is the wrong question. People are opposed to change.

So Sunnyvale has been building a number of apartment buildings and condos around. There has been tremendous back pressure for existing residents (not me but I'm a rarity it seems). The root of their concern is that they don't want the neighborhood experience to change from what they know (or knew) to something they don't know. I talked to some folks who had moved into the apartments near downtown Murphy street. They loved them, easy access to Caltrain, lots of things to do and places to go, they are excited about future growth.

The issue in Sunnyvale at least is that people don't seem to internalize that things change. They won't acknowledge that their cute little bungalow house used to be an orchard (where only birds and perhaps squirrels lived, had we given them a say at City Council there would be no houses anywhere!). They will argue strongly for their values and their memories and opinions of what is "right" and what is "wrong." Meanwhile we have people in their 20's and 30's who don't want to own a car, they want tight walkable spaces with an easy way to get to San Francisco or the airport. Now maybe 20 years from now those same people will be resisting even denser housing or something I don't know.

We could easily build 200,000 market rate dwellings on existing, unused, parcels in Sunnyvale and house close to half a million people in them. But for folks remember empty streets and quiet drives, those people are going to be really really unhappy.

Well as an actual Sunnyvale resident the fears are slightly more rational: cars on roads, kids in schools and no increase in infrastructure to go along with the thousands of new residents.

Some of the buildings have less than one parking spot per apartment which in theory is supposed to help encourage people to use transit, in practice people fear it will lead to more street parking in adjacent residential neighbourhoods which already have pretty full streets.

200,000 dwellings in Sunnyvale would be a DoS attack on the city's infrastructure, not some new urban dreamland.

Broadly, there's enough space in the Peninsula to build whole high-density self-contained cities - Facebook wants to build housing at their office park and if the only condition was shops in walking distance too, I'm sure they could satisfy that requirement also.

Maybe these possibilities haven't been explained well but I sort of think there are other interests that would prefer things stay approximately as they are.

Edit: one aspect that occurs to me is that developers probably wouldn't want a process that solves the housing crisis immediately either. It seems to me that satisfying the pent-up demand for housing gradually, project by project, would allow a developer to scoop up a lot of the excess, monopoly home-value now enjoyed by homeowners whereas if a huge stock of apartments appeared in one big bang, developers could wind-up selling them at costs plus a small profit level.

Not sure why I'm being downvoted - my personal opinion is that densification of Sunnyvale and the area in general is fine, but the opposition to it isn't completely irrational. Short of a nuclear bomb going off Sunnyvale is never going to turn into Manhattan or even Staten Island.

I don't know why you're getting down voted either. will the down voters please address the following concerns?

1. Considering that some of the apartment dwellers will become homeowners and their place will be taken by new apartment dwellers, how will the overcrowded schools support the influx?

2. Considering people will take public transit to go to work, they still would use cars to move around locally in the area on evenings and weekends. How will the current streets support the greater density of cars? e.g. Central Expressway used to be an expressway now it is a parking lot.

3. Overburdened police and firemen will be exposed to further strain.

4. Parking is a nightmare not just on residential streets but even at local establishments. Space needed for parking is used to build more housing.

Unless you live here and face these issues it's easy to downvote rather than come up with solutions that are at pace with the housing construction boom.

If I paid over a million dollars to buy a house in a school district that has a good score what would you suggest I do when suddenly the student to teacher ratio is so skewed that the education of my children suffers?

For police, I honestly don't get the sense that they're really overburdened. Sunnyvale rates as one of the safest cities in the US.

For parking, Sunnyvale is indeed surprisingly bad. For a sleepy town with nothing to do you often can't get parking downtown.

There are a couple of things at play of course. Apartment ownership pays parcel taxes just like single family home owners. However 1/3 of the budget is tax revenue. Of the taxes, the two big heavy hitters are property tax (16%) and sales tax (9%) of the total revenue[1]. More people, more business transacted, more revenue.

As revenue increases, city services can be expanded. Schools on the other hands are basically crooks as far as I can tell. The reason being that I have yet to get the Fremont Union Highschool District to offer up actual budget numbers and actual spend. They will argue all sorts of things about "confidentiality of teacher salaries" or "we're not a government so we don't have to give you that information." but generally I have not been impressed with the way they operate. [2]

Traffic and parking is a legitimate concern. Traffic has gotten worse again (after getting better after the dot com crash). But many programs are targeted at making the city more bike accessible for easier access.

[1] Page 12 -- http://sunnyvale.ca.gov/Portals/0/Sunnyvale/FIN/FY%2015-16%2...

[2] I had an administrator at the district tell me that it was "illegal" to be home schooling my children.

Fremont isn't the only town/city in SV and not all school districts in SV are crooked. Also, you didn't really address one of the big concerns the parent commented pointed out, that is new dwellings would be a DoS on current infrastructure for most places. It's not like you can get that infrastructure in time for it.

Oddly enough the "Fremont Union High School District"[1] is only high schools in the Sunnyvale/Cupertino area. The town of Fremont has a different school district. That said, I realize that new housing would impact schools, especially if people have kids. So far the number of new families who actually have kids that have been moving in seems to be a relatively small ratio (lots of couples who are both working and don't have kids). Its a good question to ask the city manager though. They probably have a handle on what the numbers look like.

[1] http://www.fuhsd.org/

Well the increased tax base will help pay for expanded services. Yes there will be a lag time of a few years (if you had a real proactive city council you could be hiring as early as the following year each be property comes online with increased parcel tax revenue), but the schools should have some room to breathe as most of the people moving to these new high density downtown apartments will be empty nesters (freeing up current single family housing) and young mostly childless professionals.

Yes, but do the good people of Sunnyvale vote for infrastructure projects? Do they allocate enough funds for building that infrastructure, and/or do they have rational expectations for where those funds will come from?

Even if you fear putting the cart before the horse, it simply begs the question of why you don't already have the horse. And the answer to that, I think, is back to what was stated above: fear of change, of urbanization, of government, of government spending, of property value declines, of loss of "heritage" – whatever that means to a farming town that replaced its (AFAIK) last orchard with a strip mall called the "Cherry Orchard" in 1999...

(BTW, I don't really mean to pick too much on Sunnyvale in particular here. The increased demand on housing and infrastructure can't be solved by Sunnyvale alone. It's a massive regional problem, if not a state problem, and the entire region is falling way short of meeting its needs.)

I don't take it personally and you are very correct. I'm just resigned that urban planning decisions made in 1960 are effectively irreversible.

There is a new school being built but it's in an area that's already underserved and bussing kids pretty far. SCUSD (much of Sunnyvale is in the Santa Clara Unified School District - why school district boundaries are disjoint with municipal boundaries around here I can't explain) passed a $419M bond measure in 2014 (Measure H) which includes classroom expansions.

Sadly it's not quite so easy to increase road capacity as unlike a real city where you can add residents without adding vehicles, it's simply not possible to add residents in the 'burbs without adding an equal number of cars on the road. I'd love for it to be otherwise, but the sprawl can't be fixed just by rezoning lots for higher density.

I think it's more an issue of poor planning than fear of change (although yes, some residents want the city to be a 1966-themed amusement park). Hanlon's Razor and all. Personally I have no attachment to the sentimental issues around Sunnyvale but my proposed solution of levelling half the city and rebuilding it like central Toronto seems like a non-starter.

Schools district boundaries are distinct from municipal boundaries in California because school districts are separate from municipalities. A school district need not fall within a single county either. Often, you'll hear mayoral candidates campaigning in a platform of fixing schools; they are either misinformed or disingenuous, mayors in California have no official influence on schools.

All of those new buildings and people will result in a far higher property tax revenue base since they are new units not starting from a 1980s prop 13 tax base. From that you can build new schools, hire more teachers and police and develop more transit.

But that revenue will have to be saved for a few years before there's enough to build new schools with, hire teachers with, etc. Moreover there might be other budgetary needs that might want that money unless the money is tied to improving schools, streets, etc.

That is a mismanagement problem there. Why would new permanent income flows not get allocated to support the new flows?

Municipal bonds backed by future property tax flows in the one of the wealthiest cities in the USA is pretty secure, so you wouldn't have to save for a few years.

Even if you diagnose the problem it doesn't help with the symptoms. Infrastructure (i.e. transit, public institutions, etc) will not be able to support it in the short-term.

The thing is there is intense opposition to projects like highrises near caltrain as well.

And a project like that seems like it could result in both keeping single-family housing in many areas and solving the broad housing crisis. These directly hit against zoning limits but I suspect there's more going than inertia.

What confuses me the most is that, for these "change-hating" residents, this "undesirable neighborhood transition" comes right alongside a standing offer of millions of dollars to move a little further away, due to increased home value.

Maybe I haven't passed that critical milestone, but I can't think of a scenario where I'd complain if my neighborhood decay came with such a surge in net worth? (not trying to be sarcastic, could be an issue of be never having been that attached to a specific neighborhood)

(Naturally, this wouldn't apply to those who are without rent control, and suffer the double-whammy of more outsiders + higher rent.)

> 2) ROI isn't the most important thing about a home.

This is what someone replied earlier. For some ROI is the most important thing. For someone who lives in the suburbs I can say that for me it isn't the most important thing.

> Why are people so adamantly opposed to density?

Because they don't just like it. They want a neighborhood that's completely detached single-family homes and where driving is hyper-dominant, and if that means they have to support policies that hurt middle- and working-class newcomers, so be it. Of course, many of the people 'opposed to density' are okay with density somewhere in the bay area, just not where they live, hence the term NIMBY.

> Well, I know the reason is to prop up the value of their homes

Yes, but not in the way you expect, which is why your comparison fails.

In many cases, its not to prop up the market value of their homes, but the features of the community which supports the personal value they place in their homes: its "I live here, and I'd like to keep it the kind of place it is that led me to choose to live here".

The desire to keep a city looking the same as it was decades ago does seem to be a powerful motivator for a lot of anti-housing people.

It's always seemed a little perverse to me. Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Trying to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change.

Most people simply don't like change. Some changes can't be avoided, such as a kid growing up. Other changes can be avoided, such as by passing zoning laws that make it illegal to substantially change the physical appearance of the town you live in. When it's possible, people seek that out.

It's also hypocritical: for the city to have reached the state which they originally bought into, it had to have changed. If SV was still zoned exclusively for farms or something, then the neighborhood they like so much wouldn't have existed in the first place.

> Cities are dynamic, constantly changing organisms. Try to keep a city from changing over decades is like forcing a 9-year-old kid to wear diapers and sleep in a crib because you liked the way it was as a baby and you never want it to change.

Well, except that cities, even if viewed as "organisms", aren't people, they serve people, and its quite natural for people to want them kept in the state that they feel best serves their interests.

I think this metaphor might actually be able to be stretched a little more. Even as an organism purposed only to serve us, the fact that us humans change means that we're likely to be better served by something that can change with us. Just because you liked it as a baby and think it is best able to suit your needs as it was, doesn't mean that it won't be better suited to serve your needs as a functional adult.

I think people are afraid of change, not because they know it is not in their best interest, but mostly because they aren't sure, so the status quo seems to be the safer option. It's why humans are averse to change in a lot of scenarios, we sometimes have a little bit of trouble with the long term perspectives.

> the fact that us humans change means that we're likely to be better served by something that can change with us.

Sure, and even people that oppose change on one axis (like density) often support other changes in their city.

People, of course, disagree on what changes are desired and which are disliked, but that's the nature of subjective preferences.

> its quite natural for people to want them kept in the state that they feel best serves their interests.

Eh, it's possible to take this kind of self-interest too far. Like by the same token, you could say, "well, it's only natural for non-poor people to shoot down programs that will help the poor, because it's not in their interest".

Like, expecting people to give up a little for the benefit of wider society is not unreasonable. We're not talking about forcibly seizing people's homes here, just about allowing their neighbors to sell to developers who will build more housing. That's not exactly a huge sacrifice.

This many times over. Rewind a few decades and the same basic human desire for such preservation was mobilized towards racial motivations.

For more recent buyers I'll bet the market value piece is pretty high on the list. If you bought in the last couple of years while things have been increasing, you want to see that trend increase. If suddenly prices drop because there's a ton more dense housing (which also impacts the other desirability factors of the neighborhood), you could easily be underwater on your $1M+ mortgage.

Given the amount of money at stake for said buyers, I can't say I entirely blame them for voting in their financial interests when the alternative might be a very bleak financial outlook, a decent chance of increased crime, traffic, etc.

It simply isn't a black and white issue.

I’ve owned several houses. The more recently I bought, the LESS I care about the value of the house. It’s just numbers on paper. Money isn’t at stake until I’m trying to sell, which I’m certainly not looking to to do if I just recently bought.

Depends on where you are in life financially, the market you're in, and whether this is your first purchase.

If you bought recently, you probably had some sense that the market was a bit out of whack, but may have decided it was the right decision for other reasons. That doesn't make most people any less concerned about the future value of their house, particularly if they know they are not buying into their "Forever Home" and will one day need to sell and move elsewhere.

It seems you are an unusual case [http://www.pewresearch.org/2009/02/19/oneinfive-homeowners-f...].

The bay area is also an unusual case. Somehow I don't think anyone's worried about CURRENTLY being underwater on their mortgage here, and I don't think anyone worries about housing growth happening so fast that it drives their values DOWN.

I would expect it to be the other way around -- the more recently you bought (especially in the over-inflated Bay Area market), the more you need to worry about ending up underwater in your home value.

If you bought 20 years ago, even if a fire burnt down your house, it's likely that the land alone would give you a healthy profit. If you bought 2 years ago, a significant downturn in the market could leave you underwater.

Few people plan to sell their home shortly after buying it, but a market downturn could leave you without a job and you can't afford to move elsewhere for a job if you can't afford to take a loss by selling your house for less than your mortgage.

I bought in the last couple of years while things have been increasing. You're right, I'd rather not be underwater, but I can stomach it or I wouldn't have bought.

But you're making a huge logical jump to say that building housing could magically slaughter my house value and that I'd be underwater because of it.

I'm worried about being underwater because of a recession or cyclical trends or tech jobs wholesale abandoning the area, or any number of things.

The LAST thing I worry about is housing being built so fast that it'll tank the value of my house. It simply won't. If there's enough continued demand for housing, by all means, build, build, build. It means neighborhoods will get more vibrant. I see no scenario where building will tank my house value (short of building and THEN a recession).

I don't think people worry about growth hurting their home value. I agree with others here that they worry about the impact on what THEY value in their neighborhood, but most people aren't looking to sell their primary residence so a temporary slowdown in the growth rate of the equity is simply not on their radar as an important matter.

Mind if I ask if this is your "forever home" or close to it? I'll bet there's a hefty divide in whether or not people are worried about it going underwater based on their outlook for how long they intend to live there.

I think it's because they are so attached to their cars, and more density brings more traffic.

Especially when starting with a low-density neighborhood that's poorly served by transit and everyone that lives there is tied to their car.

Places like NYC, London, and Paris have great public transit systems, it's easy to live there without a car, but much harder to do that in spread out Silicon Valley, even if you live next to a VTA light rail station, be prepared for a very long trip if you want to go across town.

I live in mid-density housing in a mostly low density area, and many of my neighbors fought hard against a new high density apartment building being built nearby -- 2 of the most common concerns raised were traffic and street parking (oh, and crime was also raised -- apparently they thought that criminals were going to move in to those $3000 apartments).

It's been nearly 2 years, and those concerns are mostly unfounded -- I haven't seen any significant increase in commute time car traffic (though I bike to work, so maybe I just don't see it), there's usually still street parking available in the neighborhood, and afaik, there's been no uptick in burglary.

Regarding the crime issue, high density of people paying $3000/mo for an apartment attracts crime from outside the immediate vicinity. You've basically put a good amount of wealth in one place, and added more people. That makes crime more likely to be lucrative, identification harder, and escape easier.

Also, I know construction in my area has significantly impacted traffic. I leave for work before 7 AM, so I don't see it as badly, but when I leave at 8 AM, my typically 15 minute ride to the BART station can take over an hour. Most of the traffic is spillover from parents dropping kids off at school. I shudder to think of what it'll be like next week after school is out.

no, i'm not attached to my car, i just want some privacy and a quite area. i used to leave in 3 countries, changed a number of cities (from 50K to 10M) lived in all types of appartments and i finally have had enough of noisy neigbours in the middle of night.

I live in a townhouse with neighbors on both sides and never hear any of the neighbors (except for when their kids are playing in the back patio). Quality construction can go a long way toward giving you the privacy you desire. no need to separate houses by 30 feet of grass.

Separate houses and grass don't provide any meaningful sound protection. They may get you down from "100 offensive sounds per day" to 10, but that's far less effective than just building proper insulation.

townhouse is almost a house in that regard, now try a highrise where you can't choose quality construction. once when i rented appartments on the sixth floor i had to call the police to stop an argument happening on the 4th floor in the middle of the night. and i'm not even talking about some kids showing off theirs 'sporty' bikes/cars at 2am.

When I lived in a high-rise, I chose one that had quality construction with decent soundproofing between units. I rarely hear neighbors in any direction (above, below or to either side).

Unless you're a prisoner (or someone else is paying for your housing because you can't afford it), you can always choose quality of construction -- it may not be where you want to live, or might be more than you want to pay, but it's still your choice.

You've just chosen to make a tradeoff and accepted the noisy building (and you've rewarded those that built the thin walled, noisy building by paying to live there).

I yet to see in the US/Canada something built differently from this https://imgur.com/usO1i9r

and if we're talking about a real highrise then good luck trying to change a door or window frames there to soundproof ones.

Anyways i'm not trying to convince anyone, but after more than 30 years spent in different types of appartments i'm pretty happy in my own house.

I live in a relatively new apartment building in SF; and it's fairly well isolated (against sound). I've heard people from above my floor once, and just barely; it sounded like they were moving heavy furniture, i.e. not something you do regularly. If I play music in my apartment I can barely hear it standing directly in front of my apartment's door. They're constructing a bunch more additional buildings nearby, and some of them are the wood style you reference, and others look more solid.

FWIW, even with a mostly wood based construction, you can still insulate well. It just takes the desire to do so.

The obvious solution here is to have zoning that mandates high-quality soundproofing. I don't think the pro-development crowd would object in the least if this was bundled with substantially higher density limits. That's the kind of regulation that's relatively unobjectionable.

That's a call for thick walls (including/especially party walls, floors and ceilings) and triple-pane windows, not restrictions on density. Unfortunately, due to the real estate industry's fixation on square footage and granite countertops to the exclusion of any other measure of quality, that's not likely to happen in most places.

it might be hard due to HOA/condo rules; and if you rent the place than good luck trying to change anything there.

and given the way condos built in the US/canada it's just impossible, i was pretty surprised when i saw a six floors condo built with wooden frame, something like that: https://imgur.com/usO1i9r

The most effective soundproofing is designed in at construction time, it's difficult to impossible to add it in later, unless you're willing to build an entire noise-isolated shell within your walls.

I have a hard time imagining HOA/condo rules working against soundproofing--if anything they'd be thrilled about it if you were willing to put in the money, since it improves the value of the property and community. Yeah, renters are out of luck, but too many landowners are too short-sighted to improve their properties and increase rent to capture the additional value.

BTW, wooden frames can be very soundproof, as long as you pack every wall and ceiling with heavy (i.e. rock wool or cellulose) insulation and ceiling and mount drywall on standoffs instead of directly on studs.

i mentioned it because i have an anecdotical evidence right now - a friend of mine is fighting with his HOA trying to replace windows in his appartments. The only solution he came up by today is to become a part of HOA committee and then change the rules they have. i have another solution in mind - to stay away from HOA in the first place.

i bet they can be soundproof but what i see here is that the builders are trying to cut every corner they can, trying to build as much as possible houses/condos which are sold even before the construction begins (http://www.seattletimes.com/business/home-prices-soar-again-...).

I suspect that they aren't objecting to the sound proofing itself, but an architectural change of using a different style of windows than the rest of the units.

That's my suspicion too--the most airtight and thus soundproof windows are casements, which are common in continental Europe but less so in Anglophone countries where sash windows dominate, and HOAs (as well as historical preservation committees--the bane of energy efficient retrofits everywhere) often take a dim view of replacing the latter with the former.

We live in a flat that is in ~1800 townhouse that was converted to flats about ~1900. Have never heard a single noise from neighbours (external walls are 1m sandstone!). We also have original shutters on most windows which do a lot to overcome the weaknesses of old sash windows.

Once you move in, you can always save up for a year or two, rip out the drywall, put in some insulation and remount the drywall on resilient channels. Windows generally aren't a problem since even the crappiest code-minimum windows are pretty good these days. Floors are a challenge though, unless you can convince downstairs neighbors to put in some insulation or just straight up pay for it yourself.

That's surely one aspect in this case, as accommodating traffic is an important part of city planning. However, there's way more resistance to building high-density housing in San Francisco, which has an even worse housing crisis than the South Bay but all of the public transit infrastructure required for a car-free life. NIMBYism and dogmatic recreational activists can be powerful forces everywhere. :(

There are even high levels of NIMBYism in downtown Manhattan neighborhoods like the East Village.

My understanding of the problem is some people really dislike change, and those same people disproportionately vote in local elections and attend city planning meetings. Because planning decisions are hyper-local in America, there's no "regional growth" advocate at these meetings, and nobody is going to attend planning meetings to fight for some developer to build their high-rise, so the opposition wins.

As a Canadian who now lives in one of the US tech hubs, the reason I see at least is that Americans can't respect each other if their lives depend on it.

So density WILL make your life miserable. HoA rules, municipal laws, etc, are virtually not enforced. So you find a spot you consider tolerable, and you hope to god it stays that way. If someone decides to build a rental building near by, then it's basically over. You either learn to sleep through idiot screaming and people keeping a pair of saint bernards barking in a studio apartment near by, and frat parties that the cop will never do anything about or you move out.

Contrast that with up north, where I totally could call the cops on someone walking too loud at night and they'd do something about it (which virtually never needed to happen, since people were much more considerate. And I lived in quite a few places).

Now, I know what you'd say. In Canada/Europe/Whatever, it's just as bad! I had <insert exactly the situation I talked about above> happened a ton of times!.

No no, these situations don't "just happen". It's a constant, multiple times a day thing. And it's a constant struggle between those who don't care and can't understand those who do.

I actually consider it one of the biggest reasons of the divide between the rich and the poor. You have the people with enough money to live on the 40th+ floor of a nice building in NYC, and those dealing with the stress, noise and neighbors at the bottom, thinking they're fine with it (but it probably drastically affect their sleep patterns, productivity, happiness, etc...they just don't realize it). The rich just "run away", because we can't agree on rules and respect them so we can live together.

Also, don't forget how terrible public transportation is. NYC has one of the best systems in NA, and it's not exactly fantastic compared to what you can see in many densely populated cities on other continents. Nevermind other North American cities (Hello Boston?)

You're presuming people like living in big cities. In reality it could be they are only there because of the jobs and the reasonable commute. Lose a job? Can find another one without moving. And of course, there's the night life, the concentration of museums, art galleries, performance arts, etc.

But most people I know still go (or at least try to) for their vacation to some tropical paradise. They would live there if they could. But most people can't.

As elsewhere in the bay area, many residents of SV want the physical structure of their neighborhood to be forever frozen in amber as it was circa 1960, and they've enacted robust zoning laws to that effect.

Silicon Valley was a quaint, sleepy semi-rural suburb in 1960, and that's how they want it to stay, at least in terms of physical appearance.

The problem is that, despite these zoning laws, they can't actually stop people from moving in from other regions, which causes property values to skyrocket. You can easily pay 2m there for an ordinary 3 bedroom ranch house that would be 70k in most of the US.

There's gotta be a way to economically make a lack of density untenable. Urban sprawl is a threat to the environment, we talk about charging a tax on Carbon, what about on Urban Sprawl?

P.S: Not saying a carbon tax is the best idea, but urban sprawl (like carbon emissions) have a negative impact on the environment but zero impact on maximizing capital gains. They two must be tied somehow.

> There's gotta be a way to economically make a lack of density untenable.

A revenue-neutral switch to land value taxes?

There are lots of ways. Extremely high gasoline taxes seem to be popular in Europe. When driving costs $10 or $12 a gallon instead of $2 or 3, people want to drive a lot less.

High property values also work, as in Europe. In a relatively small European country, there is just a lot less land supply, so it costs a lot and people tend to build much more densely. By contrast the US is huge and has an enormous amount of vacant land, so land is (relatively) extremely cheap in the US, encouraging low density development.

Finally, the main reason low density is tenable is that zoning laws in the US are in most places specifically set up to discourage high density construction and make it unprofitable.

In the early 20th century, zoning laws were first enacted in the US by the so called "Progressive Movement". They observed that the rich enjoyed spacious country estates while the poor lived in crowded, dense slums, so they decided to "help" the poor live in what they deemed better conditions by making it illegal or difficult to build new high density neighborhoods at all.

More on this topic in the book "Living Downtown," by Paul Groth: http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6j49p...

Bit of a mischaracterization there comparing turn of the century tenements to high rise apartment buildings.

I wasn't comparing them. I was describing the historical circumstances that led to the zoning laws that still make it difficult to do profitable high density residential development in most of the US, and specifically how the paucity of non-tenement high density apartment buildings is an ongoing side effect of these laws.

> Urban sprawl is a threat to the environment, we talk about charging a tax on Carbon, what about on Urban Sprawl?

A carbon tax (as long as cars use energy derived from sources covered by a carbon tax, whether that's fossil fuels directly or electricity produced in some share by burning fossil fuels) is a tax on urban sprawl, since urban sprawl forces longer trips and less-fuel-efficient transportation.

Although it's only a major tax on the commuters, those that live in the area that needs more housing don't have any reason to change their behaviour.

Also because they were there "first". That goes for suburbanites as well as gentrifying creatives, as well as the poor people creatives displaced and the subsequent hipsters and then the professional types who flood the streets with thousand dollar strollers.

I don’t care what the value of my home is until I am ready to sell, and I don’t plan to do that for a long time. I do care if the qualities that lead me to choose to live where I do change. Additional density can drastically change those qualities.

I’ll admit that this motivation is no less selfish than the financial one, but I do think it’s different.

Why are people so fervently pro-density?

Maybe the smart move is to find a sustainable way to maintain current levels, tell newcomers that maybe a different city is right for them, and focus on improving conditions for the people already living there. There's can be more to city's goals than neverending growth, right?

Why are people so fervently pro-density?

Assuming this is a serious question and not a troll, see Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, and/or my own essay, "Do millennials have a future in Seattle? Do millennials have a future in any superstar cities?" (https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...).

As a home owner in this area, the majority likely already have double or triple unrealized gains on their home value. The potential to lift that to 'quadruple', for the cost of increased noise, traffic, people, etc is probably not worth the the incremental gain (in theory).

In the previously underdeveloped and less desirable neighborhoods of Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and even Mountain View, home prices have more than quintupled since the early 90's. In the first two, prices have roughly doubled since 2010.

They pay high prices, but then they also vote for anti-building laws in those places too. (At least in NY and London, I don't know about about Paris).

In all cases, the restrictions are good for the people who are already there.

I think it's a question of local optimization. New housing units increase supply and lower the clearing price. Once people move in, new amenities such as more and better cultural institutions, restaurants, hobbyist clubs, retail establishments, public transit systems, etc. become feasible. So in the long run, the city becomes more civilized and desirable. Clearing price goes up relative to regions that are less-developed. But generally speaking people tend to make short-term and selfish decisions rather than thinking about what could be if many people behave altruistically, forgoing short-term gains and temporary inconveniences in order to reap long-term benefits (global optimization).

Even with increased density, the bay area's freeways and transit systems are already jammed up. All those people would have a hard time getting anywhere.

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