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As usual, the NY Times sees an actual phenomenon, but fails to understand it.

Softening rents? That’s because you have a limited resource of people willing and able to pay $3000 to $5000 for a single bedroom apartment. It doesn’t take much construction to saturate that market.

The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco. There are far more people who can pay $1000 for 1 bedroom, or $3000 for 4 bedrooms (roommates, typically), and it would be insane to ignore that market. But abusive zoning laws and the capricious permit process ensure that that price of housing would be unprofitable. So the big developers and financiers wait until the market goes to insanity levels before making a little boom of construction.

We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing.

View on HN

> The problem there is that housing is so insanely difficult to build in a place like New York or San Francisco.

What's the basis for this comment? I feel like I read something like this on HN every time the topic of affordable housing comes up, and it's usually written by a Bay Area resident who just kind of assumes that's the way things work rather than a uniquely dysfunctional characteristic of where they live.

NYC has it's issues, and expensive housing, obviously, but it doesn't seem similar to SF really at all. Where I live in downtown Brooklyn, literally dozens of huge high rise residential rental buildings have been built in just the last few years, the area is almost unrecognizable. We're talking thousands of apartments, literally.

What are these abusive zoning policies, specifically? Is NYC really suffering from a problem of low density? You sure? There are many issues with affordable housing in NYC, but I'm not at all convinced that you've really hit on any of them.

It is difficult to build in NYC from a zoning and building regulation perspective, but not nearly as difficult as SF. That people conflate the two is a mystery.

NYC is quite challenging to develop. For the story of some of those units in Brooklyn you're talking about, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Park,_Brooklyn

That's not even remotely representative of the general climate for development in the area, and wasn't one of the projects I was talking about. That was a huge and high profile project to reshape the busiest street and transit hub in a borough of 2.5 million people involving the relocation of a pro sports franchise, building over railroad tracks, etc.

It was bound to be complicated, and it's worth noting that it got built anyways. I've lived walking distance from the neighborhood in question for 17 years, and that project has nothing to do with a developer wanting to put up a regular old high rise rental apartment building or three, which seems to happen nearly daily around here. The Fulton/Flatbush corridors have been transformed literally in a matter of months.

Pacific Park has been a uniquely challenging and contentious project. It's an extreme outlier.

Brooklyn had four different tallest buildings in 2016, and all were residential [1]. Pacific Park is an outlier.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_B...

The difference in cost between building a $1000/mo apartment and a $3000/mo apartment is negligible to the builder. Stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors, granite countertops, etc are practically free compared to the cost of the land and erecting the basic structure. If you have a chance to substantially increase your future revenue with minimal additional cost, how could you not?

Add to that, most of these projects are going to be financed by debt of some sort, and lenders are not going to be keen on seeing that you could pursue a higher profit margin and choose not to.

There's no question about that. And it definitely is an issue that nearly everything new is luxury, or semi-quasi-luxury at least. With that said there are lower income requirements usually as part of the tax packages for these new projects, and also the glut of somewhat higher end studios and one bedrooms clearly puts downward pricing pressure on all the second-tier and older units nearby as well.

As mentioned, NYC isn't perfect but it has a reasonably functioning democratically elected city government that at least tries to deal with major urban issues and occasionally succeeds. Which I've heard anecdotally at least makes it a little different from San Francisco.

This is fine because a 10 year old apartment with chipped granite countertops, dingy hardwood floors, and aging appliances will rent out for cheaper. Apartments in wealthy cities are always "trickle down" more than "build cheap."

It would be pretty exceptional for a landlord to knock 2/3 off of the rent for an apartment just because its getting run down. It would have to be a real renters market for a good long while to push prices down that far.

My point was that an increase in supply of new luxury apartments does almost as much to generate a renters market as an oversupply of new modest apartments, and it's way easier to get builders to do the former than the latter.

Trickle down housing actually works though because real estate gets used (in high demand areas). Developers build at the high end for the most profit. When those that can afford it move into new fancy digs their vacated units become available to others for less.

This is fine for new construction. Building more at the high end puts downward pressure on prices in the middle, which in turn puts downward pressure on prices in the affordable housing space. This is called "filtering" and it's been shown to work.

A relevant quote from City Observatory summarizing research and implications:

But very little private housing in the United States was originally built for low-income people. Instead, homes built for the middle or even upper classes gradually became cheaper as they aged, as people with high purchasing power moved into trendier, more modern homes in “better” neighborhoods. As higher income households move on, the now somewhat older homes or apartments they formerly occupied are sold or rented to people with more modest incomes.

This process is called “filtering.” While the evidence that filtering is a real phenomenon has been around for a long time—the core of nearly every American city contains neighborhoods with once-luxurious homes now occupied by people of modest incomes—the first study to provide a rigorous measure of how it happens was published only in 2013. In it, Stuart Rosenthal of Syracuse University uses nearly 40 years of data from the American Housing Survey to figure out the average pace of filtering across the country, and what makes housing filter more quickly in some places than others. [1]

[1] http://cityobservatory.org/what-filtering-can-and-cant-do/

>The difference in cost between building a $1000/mo apartment and a $3000/mo apartment is negligible to the builder.

So you decrease the square footage from 1400 to 700.

You have to have customers willing to buy your product, and there are only so many $3000/month apartments you can make before you run out of people willing to pay that much. Either large numbers of last year's luxury places are moving downmarket or you won't be able to sell the building for what you expected.

NYC is a bastion of a "make it happen" mentality that should make every other municipality jealous.

Hmmmm having lived in the UWS I can say this is definitely not the case. Have you been to a CB meeting in New York? Just as much NIMBYism and obstructionism (look at what happened with that bike lane opposition from rich old people near prospect park). The difference is the laws on the books in New York vs the bay.

yes, but then I look at Chelsea/"Hudson Yards" and I'm like "oh my god how did they even build all of this so fast"

Indeed. And downtown Brooklyn, and LIC, and Industry City, and so on and so on. NYC is capable of adding a dense "downtown" that would dwarf the entire CBD of most American cities every year or three. There's really no comparison at all in this country at least.

> We're talking thousands of apartments, literally.

To add some more concrete numbers, in 2015 there were 14,357 units completed in New York. Permits were issued for 56,528 units. (Only 20,000 permits were issued in 2014. They were down 65% in Q1 2016.)

For a city of over 8 million people, I would expect 50,000 units/year to be the sustainable level. 20,000/year seems quite low.

http://www.nycrgb.org/downloads/research/pdf_reports/16HSR.p...

In a place like NYC, don't they have to tear down an existing building to put up a new one? That is, what you're really interested in is net adds, and completed units is only half the equation.

Although it's a densely populated city it's not without its surface parking lots. They're just smaller than in other cities where half the downtown core seems to be parking lots. You can squeeze in a bit of development here and there without necessarily having to raze buildings.

There's also opportunities to upgrade old industrial space to residential, no net loss in housing.

In Manhattan they almost never tear down, but rather do extreme gut renovations on the framework of older buildings. As a result additional units don't get added (by building up for example), the existing units are just upgraded.

The reason for this is new buildings have to follow modern regulations which drops the usable square footage of properties considerably (for example, having the building X feet back from the street etc). In Manhattan where every square foot counts this is of course unacceptable. Old buildings are grandfathered into older, less restrictive, regulations.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-...

Anyone that claims one easy fix to a complex problem is most likely talking out of their ass. Just like with anything else in life, the answer is way more complicated than the zealots on both sides would have you believe.

Like you pointed out, NYC is the most dense city in the US, followed by SF. Naturally, building shit will be difficult in these cities. SF and NYC suffer from a unique set of problems, well not totally unique, but these problems are magnified in these cities:

Space constraints

Very desirable places to live

Neighborhoods with world famous character

Large amount of wealthy people willing to pay high prices

Boom & bust industries constantly changing the rate of population migration and also the wealth of the population

Pretending that everyone else is so dumb that they don't understand supply/demand or there is some evil conspiracy to prevent building doesn't help anyone. There are actual difficulties here with no easy solution. Building in these cities used to be difficult, it's difficult today, and it will continue to be difficult. There is no fix that will magically make these problems go away.

> Like you pointed out, NYC is the most dense city in the US, followed by SF.

SF isn't the second most dense place in the country.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

I always thought the lack of density was SF's problem! Too many nice old houses in the way of proper apartment buildings.

Poster said city; that list is any incorporated area with >10000/sqmi. The top incorporated area on that list is physically smaller than Google's main campus.

If you restrict it to the saner list of cities with more than 100,000 people, San Francisco is indeed second.

Your list is the best representation of the true density of South Florida, though. It is carved up into so many independent towns that just using total populations doesn't show the true picture.

> We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing.

There's a group working hard to do this every day. Consider joining SF Yimby: https://sfyimby.org

Alternatively, you can donate to Carla, basically the legal wing of SF Yimby. They are also a nonprofit & tax deductible. They sue Bay Area cities that are not meeting building targets under the Housing Accountability Act. If they win and set precedent it will be very high leverage / make a big difference, since most municipalities here are nowhere close to meeting their housing targets today.

http://www.carlaef.org

Construction costs for housing are pretty non-negligible in these cities, I spent a few hours reading about the situation in NYC; this article (based on a private report) puts average costs in Manhattan of $400-600 per square foot: https://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/nycs-construction-cr...

I couldn't figure out if this included the cost of land, but I saw other estimates put the hard construction cost (i.e. not including insurance, etc) at ~$330/sqft in NYC (not just Manhattan).

With those sorts of prices, it's clear why people are building luxury condos.

I spent some time looking at prefab construction costs for sky scrapers to see if they could be part of the solution, and in NYC they were targeting cost reductions in the 20% range (even with union concessions), but ended with huge cost overruns and ended construction at ~60% of the planned height.

So, I'm all for building more housing, it's really the only thing that can fundamentally fix things, but it sounds like we need to get better at building cheaper housing.

A lot of that might end up as making people want to spread out, by building more transit (which also needs to get cheaper) or convincing people that they should spread out and build their own communities; they don't have to look like the suburbs, Brooklyn certainly doesn't.

$400x1000 sqftx50% markup is around $600k. Which seems reasonable to me for NYC. But the real prices are way above that.

600k seems like a best case estimate here. Given that $400 is the low end of Manhattan construction and these projects are definitely not risk free. Even at 600k per apartment, you're not going to solve housing for everyone, you're still only hitting a price point that is good for the upper middle class.

I wish I had a clearer breakdown of costs, but most of Manhattan is built up, so land costs are going to be huge in most areas; you know that developers are looking at the least developed areas because that's where land is cheapest, so if you start building in places that are already expenses your costs will go up.

There is an absolute ton of open land on Manhattan island, waiting to be built on. It's the hilariously-too-wide streets and especially our Avenues. We should infill these like crazy, leaving little ten-foot wide streets basically where the current sidewalks are.

This would have the effect of 1) reducing rents, 2) giving us Really Narrow Streets (tm), an excellent idea I stole from [0], and 3) sending property tax revenue through the roof while reducing road-maintenance expenditures so we can spend more money on subways.

Density doesn't have to mean expensive vertical construction. Instead we could just make better use of our existing land by not wasting so much of it on low-bandwidth automobile transit infrastructure. (Side rant: Have you ever counted how many humans in cars get through a crosstown intersection in one traffic light cycle? It's literally ones or tens of people, a pathetically low number).

[0] http://newworldeconomics.com/the-eco-metropolis/

NYC just built the most expensive few miles of subway in the upper east side, the next mile or two will be even more expensive. I'm sort of hoping that we get on-demand self-driving buses at some point and add a toll on vehicles driving into lower Manhattan, but I don't know if that will be enough. Bus tunnels also seem interesting, particularly when the buses are self-driving, but I don't know if they'd be any cheaper to build for us.

As much as I do think that streets are too wide and we should almost certainly get rid of on-street parking, and the front yard in front of most Brooklyn brownstones being a huge waste of space; I'm not sure you can really plonk down a new building in the space we could reclaim from roads (on most streets), which means the way you make use of that space is by knocking down old buildings and building further into the street, which is again expensive.

I wonder a little about delivery and construction in these scenarios; if the streets are that small, can you even get a crane in there? How do you do deliveries to businesses if you only have a single lane and you need to stop a truck for 15+ mins to unload? Supposedly people in Barcelona use hand carts for the last few hundred meters to get into the old town/super blocks, but that seems horribly inefficient.

I don't know what the answer is, especially with the legacy infrastructure, but nothing in this space seems super simple even if you're not a fan of cars.

>So, I'm all for building more housing, it's really the only thing that can fundamentally fix things, but it sounds like we need to get better at building cheaper housing.

I don't disagree but I think people will object to "cheap" based on aesthetics. The closest thing I can think of is Soviet Union I know they used prefabricated elements in their building construction. People love to complain about the ugliness of Soviet style architecture.

Prefabricated doesn't have to mean ugly, it doesn't have to mean it's made out of concrete. It doesn't mean that everything has to look the same either.

I think the industry prefers the term "modular" due to the stigma, but they're the same thing.

While I'm not a huge fan of how this turned out, here's a recent modular high-rise in Manhattan that doesn't look hideous: http://narchitects.com/work/carmel-place/

This doesn't really argue against your soviet comments either, but you can see that you can do a lot with the idea (though the complicated form lead and uilders' inexperience to pretty high costs): http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-innovative-homel...

But you can stick whatever facade you want onto this. I've read quite a few comments about sticking brick veneer onto these to make them look just like regular buildings.

Using modules means you can build the modules off-site in a factory, rather than on a construction site, and maybe we can eventually bring some automation into how those modules are built.

"We need to reform housing, allowing increased density and by-right permit approvals, and then the little guy has a chance to build affordable housing."

But why do we tend to create such restrictive zoning and approval processes? I think it's inescapable to conclude that this is a rational response to the low holding cost we currently impose on holding land.

If you're a landowner equipped with the power of zoning, why would you want to allow more development elsewhere? In the immediate reaction (common to NIMBYs), one has everything to gain and nothing to lose.

In a more market-driven situation, the landowner would weigh the desire for lower density against a real cost-- that is, the rising value of land would create more of a tax burden. (This would be the case in California if not for the anti-market behavior of Prop 13.) In an ideal situation, the burden of additional development nearby (congestion, shadows, etc), would be perfectly balanced against a drop in a tax burden.

So I'll just conclude that you're correct, but not looking deeply enough. All things eventually go back to the taxation policy on land and other natural resources.

I can't recommend enough the book by William Fischel, "The Economics of Zoning Laws"[0] (later published in a revised edition as "Zoning Rules!") to see the rationality of all actors in the current paradigm.

And the constructive recommendations?

1) Repeal Prop 13. 2) Push for a Land Value Tax.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Zoning-Laws-Property-Approa...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

I think that in CA the biggest factor you can point at is Prop 13. Current residential landowners are getting the benefits of rising values without the costs of higher taxes. NIMBY or otherwise, the incentives are pretty clear when framed this way. And I think the costs trickle down to things like lot-rental prices for mobile home parks rise just like rents do.

With any luck, millennials won't leave the city like their predecessors. If they stay long enough, they'll grow frustrated, and get active within city government. If they have the numbers, and the organization, we COULD see changes to restrictive housing policies in places like SF and NY.

Lots of ifs. I'm hopeful.

http://www.sfyimby.org/

For the first time, I’m also hopeful.

You should be! I'm one of those millennials.

I moved to the East Village last year and plan to attend to my first Community Board meeting early next month.

From a quick glance of what the board did in January 2017:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/mancb3/html/calendar/calendar.shtml

The focus was mostly on quality of life for existing residents - liquor license approvals, art installations and cultural activities. These are important things and people should care about them, but it's striking that those groups had meetings while the following didn't:

- Transportation and Public Safety - Land Use, Zoning, Public and Private Housing - Public Housing and Section 8 Housing

I'm going to spend the next couple of months attending these meetings to figure out how it all works.

I should caveat however that I'm atypical in this attitude. Because I spent the entirety of my childhood in dense urban environments - Dhaka and New York - I'm attached to city living. Most of my millennial friends are planning to take make the suburban trek.

I moved to Kip's Bay in May and thanks for this comment - I'm going to attend a meeting too.

> get active within city government.

The problem with this is that you only have an indirect say in the government; one can't vote if one is priced out of the city.

NYTimes reliably notices trends 10 years late, and gets the analysis wrong even with the benefit of hindsight.

You hit the nail on the head with that one. Chicago is seeing this. New housing is being built all arround me. However it's 1.5k for a studio. That's the cheapest it goes. 2 rooms goes for 2.6k starting.

Nobody is building modest housing options. They're all going luxory in Logan Square. That's incredibly unreasonable. I kind of hope that some of these developers are going to go belly up over this.

Why does it need to be the new housing that's affordable? Or are you not seeing any effect on the pricing of older housing?

The new luxury apartments are demonstrating that a higher price point is achievable in the area. Older housing pretty much is most of the market. But the newer high rises are replacing them.

New affordable housing is needed as that the demand is high. (Chicago has had a very liquidable market for housing in the last few years)

Have you looked in Pilsen, Humboldt Park, or West Logan Square? I live in Ukrainian Village and live alone in a 2BR I pay $800/mo for.

I realize this is super unpopular as an opinion, but why is it always a given that everyone should be able to live everywhere? What's inherently wrong with high rent in San Francisco?

I'm sure we can talk about lots of bad reasons why rent is high, but the mere fact of high rent isn't itself bad, right? Why do we need to reform?

Some people paying high rent is fine. You are rich, you get to spend a lot of money. Usually, I don't care.

Cities are important for too many reasons for me to enumerate right now. Basically, if we can't keep cities healthy, then our civilization will collapse, and we won't be able to rebuild.

We have a problem when the option to spend less is not available. Then, to have access to the jobs and opportunities of the city, the workers have to spend inordinate amounts of money on expensive rents and time on commuting, which reduces the social benefit of having jobs.

https://medium.com/@laurafooteclark/how-do-we-avoid-another-...

It also reduces the real wealth, as value is diverted to past landowners (and tenants taking advantage of abusive laws, which are why I never supported the San Francisco Tenants Union) and not to the city as a whole. The Bay Area schools can't even hire teachers for all of their classrooms. We are awash in money, but experiencing poverty.

If it were a "real" poverty experience, house values would drop, wouldn't they?

Apparently the issues experienced as a result of high housing prices aren't valued enough to drive prices of the homes down, yet.

I guess my point, if I had one at all, is that it seems like the housing market is absurdly high in such a way that will eventually self balance, one way or another. Either the city will continue to sustain itself on the backs of the long commuters who can't afford to live in the city, or the quality of life in the city will drop, which will in turn lower housing prices until the workers who make the city life appealing can afford to live close enough to again commute reasonably.

If, as you say, education is suffering, people will stop buying the houses, or they'll stop bringing kids to the districts. Either way, problem self-corrects, right?

Yes, it self corrects but not in a smooth and stable way.

Not everyone is driven into poverty at the same price point.

With a tech salary it's possible to float above the rising prices, but everyone else gets driven out.

Housing prices will not "balance" because demand is extremely high and much of that demand has high salaries, and supply is extremely restricted (by NIMBY's and the laws they support).

It's bad for all the people who want to live there but can't.

True, but why is that relevant? The economy doesn't owe everyone the right to live where they want. (I want to vacation a number of places where I can't; I cannot in honesty say that's a genuine problem.)

To clarify, I'm not saying that it's just fine. I'm saying that your argument doesn't work without something more - either a reason why those people not being able to live there is a problem, or is morally wrong, or something.

Because people who want to live there, who can't afford a house, will try to get the rents to go down, so they can afford to live there.

What people want is pretty much the only thing that matters when it comes to politics (although there are limitations based in what's possible and what's not).

1. Cities have lots of jobs (especially San Francisco), and if city rents are unaffordable, people can't move there to take jobs. The means less opportunity for people who need it, and it means rising prices for everything that depends on lower paying jobs (such as restaurants).

2. The money goes nowhere. It gets captured by landlords, and plowed into making real estate more expensive, instead of buying goods and rewarding productivity, or buying entertainment and rewarding people.

3. You're talking about barring the less well off from an entire city. Are you surprised that this is an unpopular opinion?

A lot of people are mad because the rents are much higher due to the constrained supply of apartments. Many current homeowners in the Bay Area try their hardest to prevent new apartment developments form getting built in their neighborhoods. Renters get stuck paying extra rent to effectively prop up the real estate prices for homeowners. Desirable places to live will always have higher rent. But, desirable places to live with NIMBY attitudes have extra high rents.

> What's inherently wrong with high rent in San Francisco?

Beyond ethics, a few things you may not have considered:

1. High rent is a systematic, generational wealth transfer from the young to the old (property owners); this is not good for society (eg, funding social security or even social stability).

2. It is an enormous drag on economic output and productivity for a variety of reasons.

3. High rents (coupled with rent control) result in really crazy inefficiencies.

> why is it always a given that everyone should be able to live everywhere?

I don't want to live everywhere. Unfortunately, my occupation has chosen to highly concentrate a ridiculous fraction of the jobs here. So I'm here. Moving is not impossible, but it's got a considerable "barrier to entry" if you will, and as someone still fairly new with the whole being-an-adult-with-a-job thing, it's not as simple as just getting up and going. Aside from the actual logistics of it, I've been with employers who look at resumes and think short gaps between jobs == bad, and so that means I can really only look if I manage to have held onto something long enough. There's also the fact that I might like my current work; finding a job that isn't soul-sucking (and isn't a startup with no hope of success) turns out to be tricky when it seems like 70% of the offerings boil down to "we sell ads".

For example, in my searches it appears that the Boston area has ~10% of the jobs that the Bay does.

Thankfully, I'm in a high-paying role. But surely the Bay Area needs janitors, transit workers, teachers, retail clerks, etc.? How are they to afford rent, let alone a home? Is the answer for them "sorry, you're priced out; commute 15-20 hours weekly?"

And, I know you're asking honestly, but when people out here say "high" w.r.t. housing in the Bay Area, they don't mean "it's above average", it means "it's literally insane". My father's current house was probably ~3 yrs of his salary; small houses are selling for ~$1.5M; an engineer making ~$100k (~starting salary) would need 15-16 years, and a very senior salary of ~$200k would still be ~8yr.

You can be an engineer and have tons of money to afford cool gadgets, but you'll never own a home.

Is there any merit to the argument that increasing population density will make bad traffic exponentially worse?

I can't imagine there wouldn't be, which is why a sane transit policy is also required. It's a slightly over-simplified but fairly-explanatory model to say that every mile traveled in a car is a failure of transit policy.

No. Because increased density goes with less reliance on individual cars. The majority of people (by far) in NY or SF don't have a car already. Traffic is not bad in the densest cities of the western world, because we have much more efficient ways of moving people around: public transit.

But you also need density to sustain public transit. So you have sour spot where there's not enough density to have good public transit, but enough to create bad traffic.

Edit: see below, it's actually the majority of new households that don't have a car in many large American cities, except for NYC, in majority car-free.

About 30% of households in San Francisco do not own cars.[1] That's not the majority "by far." NYC is the only city in the US where the majority of households do not own a car (~56%). But "by far" still only really applies to Manhattan.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_...

In the most dense part of NYC, Manhattan, 73% of people don't have access to a car[1], which supports the idea that with more density comes less car dependence/ownership.

[1] https://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/15_5YR/S...

But this is true only if there's enough public infrastructure to support that kind of living.

I'm in the East Village and I have these subways in a 10 min walk radius:

4|5|6|N|Q|R|B|D|F|M|L

I can make a no transfer trip to anywhere in Manhattan and most parts of Brooklyn and Queens.

If I lived in a part of Manhattan or NYC that didn't have these levels of access, I'd be very tempted to get a car.

I lived on a block just about the furthest from any subway in manhattan: 81st and York[0]. A car never crossed my mind.

http://iquantny.tumblr.com/post/99544282749/found-the-manhat...

To be fair, of those in the outer boroughs of NY that do have a car, (anecdotally) they don't commute with it. From what I've seen, the car is for trips out of the city or occasionally getting something big home, or used as part of their job (Taxi, Contractor truck/van, etc).

You're right. I mixed up my stats. Most of the new households come in these cities without owning a car.

Sources: http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/08/15/car-free-households-are... https://ggwash.org/view/35905/88-of-new-dc-households-are-ca... http://www.betterinstitutions.com/blog/2013/07/almost-all-of...

That doesn't surprise me much. A disproportionate percentage of new grads moving to Cambridge or Boston to live probably have a job there. Someone working out at 495 would maybe prefer to live in the city but they'd just as soon not have an hour commute each way every day.

Furthermore, recent students are used to dealing with not having cars in many cases--even if it can be inconvenient at times. In addition, Zipcar and Uber/Lyft/etc. absolutely make a difference at the margins if you don't need a car on a day-to-day basis.

Having a car and using a car two different things. I live in a city and own a car, but bike almost everywhere I go.

But the biggest cities in the world have problems with foot traffic and subway traffic.

I'm not sure that they still employ "pushers" in Tokyo but they very well might.

And that's with the benefit of Japanese culture where people are generally clean and polite. Japanese density plus American social problems sounds hellish.

Yeah all this pro density hype comes off as coming from newbies to big dense cities. High density sucks for quality of life really quickly. Especially peak hours on the subway! I've learned I prefer medium density: walk to a shopping precinct for a commuter train to CBD and essential amenities. Weekends a small car to get about to social stuff, run errands, larger shopping trips, etc. You can have this even in suburban settings by planning well and keeping lot sizes smaller. Hardly exists in the US though.

Long commutes and rush hour also sucks in low density suburban america too. I think a lot of the bad sides of high density living for people are unwanted solicitors, bad/old non-soundproofed housing and insecure shipping receiving.

> Long commutes and rush hour also sucks in low density suburban america too.

Depends on where you want to live. I lived in Dallas for just over 14 years and never had a commute that was over 30 minutes each way. Half the time I was there it was 15 minutes door-to-desk.

Now that I'm in the NYC area it's 1+ hour each way and I'm beholden to a bus or train schedule. I could cut it at the expense of increased rent and less space, but that is not a trade-off my wife and I are willing to make.

I guess your wealthier in Dallas than you are in NYC in a way? A short commute usually costs more than a long one.

I don't follow. We don't need two cars here, but my monthly public transit outlay is a small car payment in itself. Were it not for the significant drop in car insurance rates, I would still be paying more for transportation than I did in Dallas (since the car I sold had been paid off for close to seven years).

Lived in Japan for a few. Would gladly take being stuffed into a train than ever stepping foot into a car again.

I'm going to guess that you are male. Being female and stuffed into trains like that carries disadvantages when males feel free to pinch your rear. Females learn to hold their briefcase behind them while standing on the train.

I'm male, but I know it happens, regularly. When we were in a group, we always tried to put the females in the middle.

As a male who has been constantly harassed by other men, I don't understand why people love to make this about gender.

To each their own I guess. I find being crammed in like that horribly uncomfortable and claustrophobic, to the point where I would rather walk than take a subway I know is going to be a sardine can.

Walking is great too, so long as it isn't a car

I wouldn't project your preferences onto everyone. For instance, I vastly prefer being able to do stuff on my phone, even standing in a crowded bus, to driving behind the wheel not being able to do anything.

As I said,I prefer commuting by rail on weekdays, not driving. It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other.

No because the size of roads in urban areas is fixed. Traffic will reach the carrying capacity of the roads and the incentives to drive get worse and worse and people will choose alternatives to driving.

If roads and highways are expanded then traffic will increase.

Density should enable walking which changes everything.

A farmer in the middle of nowhere (US or Canada - other countries have different situations that I cannot comment on) is looking at more than 30 minutes to the nearest grocery store if he drives. To walk would be 10 hours each way.

As we go down we hit the suburbs - 10 minutes to the store, but still 2 hours to walk. (if you took the same route as the car it would be about an hour, but that means walking on a busy road with no sidewalks, so you end up having to take a much longer route)

High density allows stores and restaurants to exist just to serve the people within a couple blocks. You take the elevator downstairs, and within a couple blocks is everything you need to buy, and the job you need to earn money to buy it with. When this is the world you rarely drive anywhere so you are not adding to congestion.

Now there is still congestion all those stores/business need to be provided with goods to sell. However a truck that takes up 4 cars worth of space is bringing enough goods to last 400 people for the day, where the cars in the other examples where for 1 person (all facts in this sentence were made up - they seem reasonable but I don't know how to find the right ones). This limits how dense we can get with just surface streets.

Note that the above is a should. Zoning laws often put high density far enough away from stores that you have to drive anyway - this makes congestion worse.

Ideally you get to mixed use buildings. Ground and maybe first floor dedicated to businesses (shops, offices, gyms, etc.), everything above is residences. Not for every building, you'll still have highrise office buildings (because you need that density of workspaces still, and their ground and first floor will be their local restaurants and gyms and such). But now the average person can get to a small grocery within 100-200m, and a larger one within 500m. Busses can be more effective for transporting people between regions of high residential density to areas of higher office/industrial or shopping density (primarily used by shops carrying non-daily purchase items or requiring more space).

Grocery store is an interesting example.

I've never lived in a dense city so I don't know how this is done.

I doubt I could carry a week of groceries for my modest family (2 adults, 2 children) 1 block, let alone several. Do you maybe use personal carts or what?

Getting groceries for a whole week is an artifact of the suburbs.

And long lines at the grocery store are an artifact of the city.

The walk to my grocery store is under 5 minutes. I shop every other day because I can shop before 7AM. But if I had to shop later than 7AM, I would only go once a week, because the lines grow too long.

> And long lines at the grocery store are an artifact of the city.

NYC is the only place I've seen bouncers outside of grocery stores to control the entrance (I'm looking at you 72 street Trader Joe's).

Well, to be honest, unless I forget something, it's often more like 2 weeks :)

Father of family of three here who regularly walks; I use a large backpack and a pair of large reusable bags that I throw over each shoulder. Heavy stuff (milk, canned goods, bags of apples, etc.) go in the backpack.

Invariably, I forget something so I usually have a smaller midweek trip for things I forgot. The walk to Trader Joe's is about 20min each way.

Edit: more like a 20min walk; not 30.

In New York, many grocery stores delivery to you. Personally, I just order on FreshDirect and don't bother going into grocery stores.

I used to live a couple blocks from the grocery store. I would walk every day or over other day. I liked it.

When the grocery store is just five minutes away on foot, you don't have to shop for the whole week. It essentially acts as an extension of your cupboard/fridge/pantry.

Family of 3, our supermarket was in the groundfloor of our apartment so it was sometimes easier to just run downstairs and grab it then to search through the pantry. You'd be amazed what you can carry once you start doing it regularly. I also, proudly, walked around with those little carts you see little old ladies carry. Damn things are super useful even with a car. Carries 2 cases of beer and produce on top ;-)

The other grocer in our neighbordhood does deliveries. Go shopping as you normally do, at checkout groceries are loaded into a big plastic tote instead of a grocery bag. It's delivered to your door within the hour.

I grew up outside the cities (denser, working class suburbs, not mcmansion-style suburbs) and after city living most of my adult life I can't realistically go back.

Short answer, you don't make weekly trips because the grocery store is down the street. I walked by two good grocery stores on my way home from the subway when I lived in NYC, I'd just buy what I needed for that night.

Or you buy your own cart, you see them all over in NYC, for groceries and laundry.

It's a different perspective if you've never had to do it; I used to live across the street from a small grocery (Fresh & Easy). When the grocery store is across the street, you don't bother with a week's worth of groceries.

You just run over to get some things for dinner or for a couple of days. You can fit a surprising amount of food in a single grocery bag.

It's also the case (though less true of families) that a lot of New Yorkers basically don't cook. Kitchens are generally tiny and there are a ton of restaurant/takeout options. (Plus lots of activities that many would prefer to spend their time doing rather than cooking.)

> Density should enable walking which changes everything.

That's pipe dream. There is a problem in NY and SF because people want to go the same place. That's the appeal of big cities: lot of job or activities in a limited space.

I have all of that in the shit area I live in London. I have a variety of restaurant, a street market 3 times a week, loads of shops ( food mostly ) all within 5 min walk. All good, except for work. That's all in the City or Canary Warf, you still need to get there. Despite being shit, the area is still expensive because the connection to the City is not bad.

You can get all of that in a lot of place but the price only become affordable once you can't commute with the City anymore.

> So the big developers and financiers wait until the market goes to insanity levels before making a little boom of construction.

Seems likely that housing market insanity also puts political pressure on the zoning and permitting process to be more lenient with exceptions and approvals.

> the NY Times sees an actual phenomenon, but fails to understand it.

True but remember that the NYT, like any publication, isn't academic research or journal. It isn't 'graded' and doesn't succeed or fail on facts and accuracy. Almost the only job it has is in making interesting enough reading that will help them sell advertising. It's entertainment. Nobody (or at least no professional) is using it to make investment decisions. (Although actually I am sure that is perhaps the case but that's not the paper's responsibility).

NYT also has reputation. If they publish too many stories that are false/inaccurate their reputation falls and people with stop reading it. How low can they go before this happens is a question.

Reputation for facts and accuracy is the lifeblood for mainstream newspapers, because it attracts a specific demographic that they can charge a premium for the ad space. Degrading newspapers to the point of 'entertainment' is just fallacious

Agree, it's absurd that housing costs in these cities have been growing many times faster than GDP, wages, you name it for 20-30 years.

Now the second that the housing markets soften a bit and we might actually have a chance of catching up a little to where we should have been in terms of keeping cities affordable to more people, they're acting like we should just forget about the whole thing.

The price of money sets the cost of the land. The cost to build is not the driving factor.

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