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Cities like Seattle are under-built to the point that the vast majority of the land is still single-family zoned, meaning you can only build one home on a plot that may be 2500 sq ft or more. 65% of Seattle's land is still Single-Family. [0] This map will showcase the problem. [1]

There is much to be done to make cities like Seattle more livable and affordable before we come anywhere near the density cap you refer to.

[0] http://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2015/7/16/white-single-fa... [1] http://res.cloudinary.com/sagacity/image/upload/v1437089045/...

> Any given neighborhood has limited space to build things.

That's fine. A neighborhood full of high rises that no one wants to pay to knock down to build taller is naturally full. The government hasn't declared it to be full the way we do today.

> Of course, without government-imposed zoning laws, you will also have residential units competing with commercial and industrial ones, too...

Zoning isn't terrible. Density restrictions are terrible. They are explicit exclusion. They are the direct cause of our increasing economic segregation.

> Oh, and who will take care of the extra infrastructure that is required for more people?

Urban infrastructure is cheaper than suburban infrastructure. We're spending more money on infrastructure today than we would if we stopped excluding people.

> It would also be pretty effective at inducing more rich flight from urban areas into the suburbs

This just isn't true. Tons of wealthy people want to live in dense urban neighborhoods. That's why they're so expensive. What we should change is allowing people with different amounts of wealth to live in the same neighborhood. Density restrictions make mixed-income neighborhoods illegal: only the highest bidders get scarce homes, so families are forcibly sorted by income into separate neighborhoods.

If rich people truly don't want to live in mixed-income neighborhoods, they are the ones who should leave. We shouldn't force others out for their benefit. We used to do that. Now we're doing it to even more families. We aren't repeating the mistakes of our forefathers, we're outdoing them.

everybody needs YOU to tell them where they can live and what they can live in!

I am saying the exact opposite. Our governments are segregating people by law. We should stop doing that.

>> Tons of wealthy people want to live in dense urban neighborhoods.

Yes, but usually they prefer those neighborhoods to be exclusive. So, when you

>> change is allowing people with different amounts of wealth to live in the same neighborhood

what will happen is that a lot of those rich people will find that their love for dense urban neighborhoods wasn't as strong as they thought it would have been, and so

>> If rich people truly don't want to live in mixed-income neighborhoods, they are the ones who should leave.

is exactly what they will do. In fact, we've seen it before - that's a significant part of what drove suburban sprawl. And as those people leave, the tax base shrinks. Now, do you expect those super-dense working class neighborhoods of yours to be self-sustaining, infrastructure-wise? I don't think it will realistically work out that way; I mean, look at Detroit.

My point is that your solution amounts to changing one relatively small thing in a very large framework, that will place that entire framework off-balance. As described, your solution would 1) not actually result in less segregated neighborhoods, and 2) will cause more economic suffering to people in poor neighborhoods.

Before you can realistically make that change and make it work, you need to make a lot of other changes elsewhere, such as e.g. funding schools from the general state fund, rather than from property taxes in the area.

>> Urban infrastructure is cheaper than suburban infrastructure. We're spending more money on infrastructure today than we would if we stopped excluding people

Replacing suburban infrastructure with something that can handle urban density is absurdly expensive. The usual solution is to force the developer to pay for improvements but subterranean improvements like wastewater must be upgraded all the way downstream to the treatment area

Depending on the area this can create quite a pickle because the areas people want to live are prohibitively expensive to put large buildings on.

Meanwhile demand for those areas with cheaply upgraded infrastructure fails to draw mixed income demographics

It's really a cluster to upgrade developed areas in a way they were never planned for. The traditional approaches in the US for paying the big costs need to change or the developers behaviour will not

> Can you, though?

I think so, or at least, Seattle is a long way from the point of diminishing returns: A lot of Seattle housing is single-family homes.

I like how London does it: Houses have to stay houses, but can be carved up into smaller flats, and (in some cases) rebuilt higher to accommodate more tenants.

> Of course, without government-imposed zoning laws, you will also have residential units competing with commercial and industrial ones, too...

So what? I like living between a high street and a park, and I think Americans would adapt to it. There are other ways to curtail the problems living next to manufacturers than to force people to spend four hours behind the wheel of a car.

> It would also be pretty effective at inducing more rich flight from urban areas into the suburbs, which is likely to hurt the cities even more (by reducing their tax base).

New York has a number of "city" taxes that they apply to commuters who work in Manhattan, but want more green. I suspect that would work well.

> I don't think this is all that simple.

I don't think it has to be simple, but it isn't the unknown either: The answers have already been found by other cities.

Can you, though? Any given neighborhood has limited space to build things. At some point, you have to start building high-rises all over to pack more people in. This also has a limit, so beyond that you'd have to start building over parks etc.

This argument is overblown to the point of absurdity. Hong Kong, a city known for its high rises, has 1/2 the density of Brooklyn, a place which is hardly known at all for its high rises, and 1/3 as dense as Paris, which has limited height city-wide by statute. Neither has a lack of parks or public spaces.

You don't need high rises to build more homes. Seattle, at Brooklyn's level of density characterized by mid rises and townhomes, could house 4x as many people as it does today. And it doesn't mean infrastructure and public services would suffer any more than it does for New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, or any other dense first world city. In fact, it might even get better.

Has density solved Hong Kong's housing affordability problem? How about Paris or Tokyo?

Why is a significantly less dense city such as Jacksonville, FL so much less expensive?

The simple answer is that no one wants to live there.

Tokyo is one of the most affordable cities in the first world. They also allow pretty much any development that passes through their very liberal zoning code.

Hong Kong and Paris have significant restrictions on development (Hong Kong on where you can build, Paris on how high), and would likely be much more affordable if they were lifted.

I'm not opposed to high rises in principle. But understand that for a lot of people, it's not an environment where they want to live. So if you start building up (and in - increasing density by other means), you _will_ see some amount of flight, and it'll likely be by rich people. Given that OP's goal was to promote more mixed neighborhoods, this seems like an undesirable outcome.

Midtown Manhattan is a pretty solid refutation of the idea that rich people will flee from density.

OP doesn't just want density. He wants dense _mixed-income_ neighborhoods. That's what the rich people would be fleeing from.

I live in Brooklyn. It's twice as dense as San Francisco. It doesn't have very many high-rises. It is getting ever-more packed with rich people.

How mixed is the population, class- and income-wise?