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Comment by gydfi | Hacker News Reader

Or people don't like living on top of one another.

Give me a nice half-acre and a self-driving car to get me where I need to go.

The fact is not everyone can live on a half acre. The tax revenue isn't dense enough to support the infrastructure people expect (ignoring the awful environmental and land use effects that would have).

The US is seeing fiscal and infrastructure problems across the country from municipalities who spread themselves too thin the past 60 years. They don't have the funds to maintain, much less improve, their infrastructure. We need to make it easier to build denser and start thinking about how to develop more sustainably going forward.

Exactly! People don't take into account how expensive it is to maintain long roads, electrical lines, water pipes, and much more to remote places; higher cost of maintenance on said infrastructure; and how most of that area doesn't produce any revenue to fund itself. Like it or not, you're receiving enormous subsidies to live that way, and if you had to pay the true costs of your lifestyle, you might reconsider how idyllic it really is.

Buying my first house gave me a high similar to some pain killers. Well, not literally, but it was so awesome having more space, more privacy, generally better neighbors and the ability to play music as loud as I want. I can also customize the interior any way I see fit. The thought of moving back into an apartment or condo is very depressing indeed.

In the end, people will keep trying to sell others on their own preferences, which is very much a nurture thing. If you grew up in the city, you're going to prefer the city. If you didn't, you probably won't enjoy living in the middle of downtown without a car. In fact, that prospect is extremely depressing and I'd honestly rather be dead myself than not have a car.

> If you grew up in the city, you're going to prefer the city. If you didn't, you probably won't enjoy living in the middle of downtown without a car.

I agree with you on everything except this one. Going by this thread, the trend seems to be opposite - a lot of HNers who grew up in "boring" suburbs and enjoy the city life, and a few (like me) who grew up in cities and now prefer more open spaces.

Great, fine, you can have that if you want it. But no one's trying to make that illegal. On the flip side, dense housing and tight residential-commercial zoning is illegal in most places.

No one is proposing forbidding your nice half-acre, just allowing the rest of us to live on top of one another if we so choose.

More likely next to one another.

Also, it would be nice if those half-acre folks were forced to pay the true cost of their decadence. Right now there's a tendency that denser areas get extra-punished with taxes, even though services are theoretically cheaper to provide.

I think "living on top of one another" is a fair, if crude, description of life in multi-family apartment buildings. It's my current situation and I wouldn't trade it for a house, but it does have downsides.

"Decadence", on the other hand, really seems like name-calling. Let's not do that.

As for the tax situation, that seems interesting. Could you provide more detail? I'm in Brazil, here there's the rural area, that's taxed much more lightly but has less services, and everything in the urban area gets taxed the same percentage of assumed property value, regardless of density. How's it like where you live, and what would you propose to change?

The idiom "on top of one another" means very crowded or close. Not actually on top of one another, although in this case it could be meant literally.

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