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Comment by vonnik | Hacker News Reader

This article and the study it cites miss the point.

Cities exist to make it easy for everyone in them to meet or work with anyone else as cheaply as possible. They are markets for jobs, goods and services. When cities make it difficult to meet and work with others, as they do when they sprawl, they have effectively failed. In a sense, they are not really cities, but just agglomerations of many towns without a center. This describes many so-called cities in America, with LA being one of the most egregious examples.

One of the reasons cities have sprawled is because their development has been entrusted to, well, developers. Those are the contractors that Buildzoom addresses as its audience, and the website is flattering their sensibilities. They like a supply chain that involves suburbs with lots of cookie-cutter mini-mansions. Easy to commodify and sell, and someone else can worry about the commuting headaches.

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> their development has been entrusted to, well, developers

Bullshit!

Look at the zoning codes for most cities. This is one of the most regulated markets in the US!

Minimum setbacks, heights, parking minimums, lot sizes, allowed uses - the list goes on and on, and is extremely prescriptive and detailed.

For instance, here in Bend Oregon, you can look through the city code for parking minimums:

"Beauty parlor and Barber shop: 3 spaces for each of the first 2 beauty or barber chairs, and 1½ spaces for each additional chair"

And this is pretty typical in the US.

Edit: I'll add that I am not a libertarian "markets solve all problems" kind of guy, but housing/land use is absolutely something where I think we could use more markets. I highly recommend these books:

The Rent is Too Damn High: http://amzn.to/2cxlP87

The Gated City: http://amzn.to/2cf7jBo

As well as this site: http://marketurbanism.com/ (some of those guys are pretty hard core libertarian, but I guess we can agree to disagree on many things and concentrate on markets and urbanism).

Don't forget 'The high cost of Free Parking'

I'll raise you Houston, TX.

Still has a lot of regulation:

http://marketurbanism.com/2016/06/02/houston-beautiful-yet-p...

But it is affordable, which is good.

> One of the reasons cities have sprawled is because their development has been entrusted to, well, developers

This is specifically the opposite of the case. Developers would happily build New York and San Francisco up into the stratosphere if it were legal. It's not, so they have to build out instead. This is 100% determined by the regulatory structure that legalizes sprawl and prohibits densification.

But most of the country doesn't live in New York or San Francisco. In somewhere like, say, Columbus it's much cheaper for a developer to build cookie-cutter mansions than to plop down a new sky scraper in the city.

Most of the country also doesn't have the problem of rampant housing cost inflation the way NYC or SF does.

Sure they do. There are gentrification problems happening in most small-to-midsize "rest of the country" cities. Places like Cincinnati / Minneapolis / Austin / etc just don't get as much attention for it because the scale is smaller, but the effect on residents is very similar.

In these "rest of the country" places, you can't have a meaningful conversation about housing problems, because the residents will point to the suburbs/exurbs and say "those are still affordable -- that's where the middle class should go". Which is a better situation than say San Francisco, but it's still bad -- it's generating even more sprawl and further kills public transit (as this article highlights).

New dense urban construction in small Midwest cities is close-to-identical (within 10-15%) to top ten market pricing, even though wages are still 20-40% lower on average, and construction costs + land costs are lower. Small and medium sized Midwest cities cut themselves off at their own feet, building lots of "urban" housing that's priced identically to places like Seattle / Portland / Denver. They then act really surprised/frustrated when working class people complain about housing costs and gentrification in their "low cost of living" cities.

A $300k housing unit in "the rest of the country" is often just as unaffordable as say, a $600k housing unit in Seattle, if you measure that cost in terms of percent of paycheck -- which is what working class people rent/purchase housing with.

Especially when said developer can use the exact same cookie-cutter, with little to no deviation, in Cleveland, Cincinatti, Louisville, Nashville, and so forth...

Developers aren't responsible for the construction of the municipal facilities and infrastructure necessary to support such a drastic increase in population density.

There are plenty of examples in NYC of forcing the developer to build infrastructure in order to get more building rights. In the suburbs developers are often required to build the underlying infrastructure for their subdivisions.

It's simple math. If the cost of building the development + required infrastructure is less than the price can sell it for then things will get built. It's the responsibility of the city to bundle the infrastructure requirements onto the building permit.

No, but they and their client certainly pay the property taxes and fees to make such things a possibility. More density = more property tax revenue = more facilities and infrastructure possible.

Cities have sprawled because of zoning regulations and poor transportation policies that force them to, because they can't build up, so they have to build out instead. You could easily get the reverse effect with an urban growth boundary and relaxed zoning.

At some point you likely also need eminent domain (with a fair-ish system for compensating people whom it affects). Somehow we are really good at eminent domain for building highways, but not skyscrapers or trains.

I don't think you really need eminent domain for skyscrapers. Economics + property taxes generally provide sufficient incentive.

We were completely awesome at eminent domain for trains. They just sort of went out of style. And the logistics revolution has made train freight more competitive than ever. The cost of air travel ( modulo whatever you suffer at the hands of the TSA ) is so low that trains almost have to be a custom travel experience to complete.

Eminent domain can only be used in cases of public use. Skyscrapers not being built by government functions are never a good idea. So, you cannot use eminent domain for developer acquisition.

Trains do not get a lot of eminent domain help, instead their is a lot of work to build within existing right of ways.

Cities with few or no zoning laws have also built out more than up. Dallas and Houston come to mind. Or Jakarta.

Houston still has minimum parking requirements, which pushes people towards cars, and it exists in a state that pushes car-oriented development.

This is basically what Portland, Oregon did, as I understand.

You're speaking as if people exist for the benefit of cities and not the other way around. Some people like living in more quiet, open, kid-friendly spaces: i.e., suburban sprawl. If a city can't provide that for them, they are under absolutely no obligation to get cut down to fit in the urbanist Procrustean bed.

Nothing wrong with suburbs, but many American policies have basically forced sprawl even when people might like moderate levels of density.

A good example of this is Level of Service, a policy that dictated for decades that roads be evaluated by how many cars they moved in a given amount of time. People going by other modes? Safety? Measuring how long it actually takes people to get where they need to be? Not important; always cars, always faster.

One of the dumb things about American cities is that you have big cities with large apartment complexes and sprawly suburbs and not a whole lot in between, which is entirely due to policies, not the choices of individual families or developers. See: http://missingmiddlehousing.com

Not to mention we traded the town square / main street / city center for a shopping mall in the suburbs.

I've never bought the "kid-friendly" argument. Kids grow up in cities in the US and around the world, safely and effectively. Do you have statistical evidence to the contrary? If I were to guess, it's not about being "kid-friendly", it's about being "parent-easy".

And kids, in my experience, hate suburbia, especially as they get into early teens and want some independence. It's like living in a giant protective bubble where there's nowhere to go and nothing to do, without having to have someone's parents cart you around.

Totally agree. Up to about 10-14 or so (depending on the child), the suburbs are likely great for children. Afterwards, once they grow up a bit and start to form their own identity, I'd say they're actually damaging to a lot of teenagers. Without friends, without community, without anything to do, of course teenagers turn to drugs, cutting, and other maladaptive behaviors. Most are not permanently harmed, but I have no doubt that large numbers are. Yet, it doesn't seem like parents take this into account when choosing where to live (for the ones that have a choice, that is).

I also just realized/remembered that the leading cause of death for children, particularly teenagers, is automobile accidents.

Surely whatever dangers kids are exposed to in cities absolutely pale in comparison to the increased risk of car accidents caused by living in the suburbs, where virtually every outing requires a lengthy trip by car.

Not to mention obesity. My guess is a large component is from sitting inside all day because your friends are too far away to meet up spontaneously, and there's nothing to do outside anyway — things like parks, basketball courts, etc. are all far enough away that a parent has to drive.

Look around "kid-friendly" suburbia, and there's practically no kids outside.

No kids outside, no sidewalks, no one walking around (without a dog) because there's nothing you can walk to, a bunch of unused baseball fields aka 'parks', the only place you will likely bump into your neighbor is the supermarket.

Then again, suburban dwellers aren't totally crazy because our large cities are also built for cars with space for people as a complete afterthought most of the streets in Minneapolis need a road-diet. In Minneapolis, we invented the mall (Southdale), which sucked all the retail life out the city then we added the 'Mall of America' just to finish the job, to add insult to injury we built preposterous skyways which divides what's left of our paltry street-life onto two levels.

I really should move to Europe: Paris, Milan, Utrecht, Munich, London, Budapest, Prague... heartbreaking beauty.

Early so-called streetcar suburbs are great for young people because they are scaled perfectly for bicycling.

What people are referring to on this thread is really exurbs.

Yesterday's exurbs are today's suburbs. Today's exurbs are yesterday's small towns and neighboring counties. The sprawl keeps sprawling.

I live in one of those streetcar suburbs. It WOULD be great for kids, even though my house is a short walk from those oh-so-scary high rises, because that also makes it a short walk from a lot of things a kid wants to walk to.

The one catch is the risk of my kid being squished like a bug by idiot suburban drivers.

> Some people like living in more quiet, open, kid-friendly spaces: i.e., suburban sprawl.

Good for them. If that's what they want then they should pay for it in a free and open market. I shouldn't have to subsidize their preferences via restrictive zoning.

> Cities exist to make it easy for everyone in them to meet or work with anyone else as cheaply as possible

That is your rightful opinion, but it's not everyone's opinion. As someone who already lives in SF, I believe SF exists to stay nice and to not be overrun by more people/cars/traffic/pollution. In other words, the exact opposite of what you want it to be.

"When I moved here it was ok, but you shouldn't move here!"

I guess some people were born in the right place though, in which case you can only commend them for having worked so hard to be born there.

> When cities make it difficult to meet and work with others, as they do when they sprawl

This doesn't follow. It's incredibly efficient, in time and effort terms, to get around sprawl. You just drive at 65mph on the wide-open freeways and up the parking lot with plenty of open space in front of every conceivable destination. I've never spent more than 30 minutes making a point-to-point hop where both points are in sprawl. Average case, more like 10. Traffic jams == not sprawl-y enough.

Thirty minutes for any public transit trip in San Francisco or Chicago (at least the parts I can afford) is like a once-a-year pop-the-champagne-corks celebration. Ten, forget it. Not gonna happen ever unless it's the corner store. Getting anywhere useful is usually abut 50 minutes. (I'm pretty sure this is the CTA's SLA. No matter the distance - past a point, roughly 50 minutes. Implies some design effort and a sophisticated balancing of slower and faster lines).

Sure, bus tickets are cheaper than car ownership, but our time is worth something too.

>just agglomerations of many towns without a center

This is precisely what the pro-density anti-car people on HN advocate: dense walkable neighborhoods, with no real solution for medium distance transportation. Tiny markets where local businesses get to price-gouge you because going to a competitor means lighting your afternoon on fire.

There are three grocery stores within a 15-minute walk of my house. Two of them are next to the nearest subway stop; they add no more to my commute than walking through a parking lot would add to yours. The subway gets me to many useful places in 30 minutes.

My time is valuable, and I spend none of it stuck in traffic or looking for parking.

Advocating for density means that more people have the option of living this way.

You've been served badly by public transit, but you seem to be saying that public transit should be as bad for everyone as it is for you.

The list of cities I can get to from Oakland on BART in under 30 minutes is pretty long.

Thirty minutes of time on a BART car, sure.

Suppose you live in the premium housing really close to the BART, so your walk is only five minutes to the station. Then another five getting through the fare gate and waiting for your train. Then your destination is an easy ten-minute walk from the BART. Great, but that's not a 30-minute trip, it's a 50-minute trip.

Granted, this is true for the more distant cities. But if I'm going to San Francisco or Berkeley (let's be honest, where the hell else would I want to go), the train ride itself is less than 15 minutes.

So Houston is the (a?) poster child for sprawl. But Houston now has really nice toll roads, and this greatly ameliorates any difficulty in getting around by quite a bit.

Developers do what they can in the tax and legal climate they operate in. Incentives are always extremely difficult.

sorry, they had help from the government plowing homes and businesses down for interstates and more recently for political friends.

developers aren't to blame, zoning laws, political payoffs, and more, are to blame. Your so called bogeymen have to play by the rules set by the politicians who are concerned about reelection, post office income streams, and fame. They want to name bridges, buildings, and more, and get credit for stadiums and such. They certainly are not interested in the lives of residents until an election roles around

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