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The vast majority of residential land in the US is dedicated to these types of homes. You're basically saying, "legally enshrine my preference as the default for 90% of available space". That's unreasonable and kind of dumb, honestly.

The market wants denser housing because people want it. I have no problem with single family homes being allowed all over the place, I just don't think they should be mandated, which you apparently think is a good idea. It's an injustice that this preference for SFHs is written into the law when people want something else, and indeed, there are many advantages to denser urban forms.

If most people really wanted denser housing, the laws would change. Despite money and developers being aligned for dense housing, the majority stops it because they like their houses. What you are really saying is the a minority of people want dense housing where people already own single family homes, and aren't getting their way.

Most Americans are hardly even aware of zoning. It's an obscure section of law. Thus, cultural momentum prevails. And the people who would most want denser housing are the people who would move to an area, and they don't get a vote.

I moved to Munich last year. I can hardly even tell which neighborhoods are affluent or poorer, it's so different from the US.

What I'm saying is that we have entrenched economic segregation in our country, and people like you defend it because "whatever is desirable is acceptable".

As someone in the bay area in a SFH, I can tell you that in my neighborhood that is incorrect. People are incredibly aware of zoning, it isn't obscure, and people obsess over it in the neighborhood groups and lists.

You mean, the majority of money stops it?

No, not money, votes. They money (developers, businesses) have more money, and want more development.

Most people in small cities that don't have enough people for their land area don't want denser area. Basically, a small and privileged subset in cities like Berkeley is making decisions against the will of the majority of Californians - hence laws being passed easily on the state level to override local government.

Why shouldn't Berkeley make rules for Berkeley? They are the stakeholders. If a majority of Berkeley wanted density, but Sacramento said no, that would be weird. Whose interests are being upheld when the representatives of Chino, and Long Beach are determining Berkeley's zoning?

Why is that weird? We have state and federal level laws for all kinds of things. A city's zoning laws don't just affect it, as the insane housing prices in the bay area will attest to.

We tried letting cities decide on their own, the results have been atrocious. That's why recently the state legislature recently passed a bunch more laws to compel cities to allow more housing. If you want affordable rents, the status quo is clearly broken.

Because 80% of the legislators of the state aren't from the bay area, and have no stake in setting local zoning, and really are in no position to say whether the results are atrocious or perfection.

“If more people wanted dense housing the laws would change” - This is not true. I do a lot of political organizing in this space. The issue here (SFBA) is that the zoning laws are made by the current residents of a small geographic area (neighborhood or city). The problem is that narrowing the universe of stakeholders that can influence zoning to “current residents” excludes a lot of people who would want to densify the area, mainly people who commute to that community to work because they cannot afford the home prices near their job. The people who are most impacted by these communities decisions to outlaw apartments are politically disenfranchised by the existing political structures. A great example of this is Cupertino, a city of 35k, which recently built the new Apple campus, which has room for 12k workers. The city of Cupertino did not build new housing for 12k new people though, so they take the payroll takes from Apple, and the sales taxes from the vibrant local economy these 12k commuters create, and exclude the 12k new workers from the benefits of their taxation (schools, parks, etc) through not building housing for them. We need to change the laws so the universe of stakeholders in zoning decisions expands from the current set of people who already live in a small geographic area, hopefully giving the power to a regional government or the state itself.

That's my point, current residents should make the law. If you want to change it, convince them, or move in and vote yourself. Renters can vote too. Non residents shouldn't get to dictate to residents how to run their cities. RE: Cupertino, I agree. It is unfair for cities to add workers without housing. It would be fair to demand cities match new housing with new office space. But given that cities should be able to opt out of building anything.

Just like the majority of people do not want this latest tax reform to pass? Right, let me know how a voting majority works out for you.

Wait until the 2018 election before you make that judgement.

Why? This is happening now. Democrats likely won't take back what they need to make changes, and this is going to crater the economy.

Then maybe you should questopm your assumptions. There is certainly no reason to think it will crater the economy. Whether it will help much is questionable. If it does, Democrats could take 100 seats when coupled with the Trump antipathy.

There are lots of people that would like to live in places that they cannot.

> Let me keep the option of living in a single family home.

This is the basic demand that effectively all of the current residents of everywhere are making.

Why not let me have the option of living in dense urban housing? If not your city or your neighborhood, then which one?

Currently, pretty much every city and every neighborhood is vetoing any increase in density anywhere. Political conflict is inevitable!

That's totally fine and dandy. I encourage you to do so.

What I don't suggest is moving to a dense urban area and then complaining about it being a dense urban area.

But that's what all this YIMBY stuff is: People wanting to drive bulldozers into existing suburban neighborhoods with 1/2 acre lots and single-family homes, and urbanize them with apartments and townhomes.

But you got yourself a deal: I won't argue for building single family homes in downtown San Francisco (really, who is?) and you don't argue for building apartment complexes in Tracy and Gilroy.

Who's talking about bulldozing Tracy? The article is about a three-unit condo in the already dense Berkeley/Emeryville area.

To use two extremes. Berkeley is probably somewhere in the middle with some single-family areas and some more urban areas.

Only due to the hills and the older homes. Berkeley is an urban area, full stop.

It just doesn’t want to acknowledge that due to NIMBYs

Legally a condo, but notably, no shared walls, so nothing like apartments or town homes.

Tiny back yards, but mine (which was built by the same developer as the cargo bike picture development in the article) is big enough for me. Not my wife, but c’est la vie.

We have to pick our priorities here. If you want to live in a big, desirable city, you have to make the sacrifices that come with high-density living. If you prefer to live in wide open spaces, then move to a place that's conducive to that life style.

Like 95+% of the suburbs in the USA are at little to no risk of urbanization in our lifetime.

If you prefer to live in wide open spaces, then move to a place that's conducive to that life style

Many people did exactly that, back when the Bay was half orchards and no one knew tech was going to explode.

Yeah, let me get out my violin for the people who made millions on appreciation alone. Sell your house and move somewhere rural if that's what you want.

You realize Manhattan used to be mostly farmland too, right?

I spent the last 10 years in a moderately rural area, and unfortunately unless you want to be a Walmart greeter or work at the Amazon store there aren’t a whole lot of employment options left. The last few tech jobs there were very quickly being sucked out by centralization into various cloud services.

And that's the problem -- people want it both ways. They want the wild economy and real estate appreciation but don't want to deal with the reality of living in a boom town. It's classic "I got mine" syndrome.

And if they move to a rural area with more room, but a decade down the line people start immigrating there en masse and building town homes all over the place, reshaping the community to fit their (the new peoples') needs rather than adapt to the existing community?

You seem to be expressing an ideology in this thread that the ability to exist and occupy space is a default-deny privilege that communities should only have to grant if they want to.

I'm struggling to understand how this could work, except as a prior restraint on childbirth. Otherwise, if someone comes into being and no community wants to house them, what do we do? Execute them? Cast them out into the countryside, see if they can survive as a hermit off the land? (Whose land?) Lifetime imprisonment for trespassing, since there are zero places they're entitled to be?

Is the privilege revokable? Can I decide my neighborhood is too crowded, get together with 51% of my neighbors, and vote the other 49% out? Bulldoze their houses and turn them into open space preserves?

What the heck are you talking about?

There is plenty of available space in the USA. It doesn’t have to be some crazy dog pile into desirable areas. Spread jobs and amenities out and we all don’t have to jam into a few cities or fight people off our lawns.

So what’s your plan for spreading those out? Because the former isn’t happening (or even practical in many areas) and the latter presents an order of magnitude more difficult logistics (ie, expense) that would balloon costs.

It’s all well & good to say a solution but when that solution is a complete fantasy it’s hsrdky helping

What you want is socialism for the rich. In a working land market, a group of 3 people could outbid a single person for property in your neighborhood and build a suitable dwelling for them that objectively is not disruptive to the community. You want to use government power to prevent these three families from buying the land and make sure only one of them can.

It’s not the Middle Ages anymore. People live off of communities and centers of economic activity, not the land. There being enough land to go around is irrelevant.

Successful economic centers grow; failed ones shrink. Yes, there is cheap housing around economically crumbling places, but bricks and dirt don’t sustain life. Economies do.

You could try to counteract economic centralization by restricting commercial development as aggressively as residential in growing places, but (as with housing) you’ll see all but the highest value businesses displaced. I don’t see how you could pull off decentralization without full-on central planning. Capitalism wants megacities, badly. To decentralize the economy, you need extreme policy interventions for every aspect of life and commerce. It might work, but what’s certainly not working is making the intervention only for housing.

I'll add that this is literally what smallnamespace endorsed elsewhere in the thread [0]: exile for unwanted former citizens.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15834153

Where I lived in Italy, there were several single family homes near where we lived, which was in a 6-unit building. No one prevents it; it's just a market thing. Want to live in SF or NY? Maybe you should be ok with some density. Not wanting that is fine too - live somewhere else with more room.

I think most people here have the opposite experience, they grew up in suburbia and like to hate it now and love the city with its restaurants, night life, public transport. The grass is greener type thing.

I also grew up in the city, had loud neighbors, flooding us, elevators full of piss, sometimes didn't work and had to climb stairs 9 floors up. Public transport was fun and great, unless people step on your toes or there are pickpockets and such. For all the hate suburbia gets here, I'll pay extra for my house and a lawn.

It's a cycle. I grew up in the suburbs, swore against ever living in that kind of environment again when I went to college. After college and spending 4 years in New York and having a kid, I long for the suburbs again.

If only there was some way to reduce the price of detached dwellings. If only there was a substitute which less discerning consumers would accept, giving them a place to make soup, have sex, and cook meth without using up too much land.

It seems like if you can afford a single-family home, you could afford an apartment that wasn't also rented to people cooking meth?

My data point: I've lived in two 2-3 story apts in suburbs and lived in a 5 story condo in city and never had noisy or bothersome neighbors. None of these were particularly new or fancy, but not trashy either. Just middle of the road housing.

My impression is it helps if you live on the bottom or top floors. Bottom floor I think guarantees cement walls, which are good sound insulators. Some apts have multiple floors of cement which helps a lot. TMYK.

> I'm fine with having to pay through the nose for a little privacy and a backyard, given the alternative.

One could argue that, despite high house prices in the Bay Area, homebuyers are actually drastically underpaying for their land!

If we upzoned all of, say, Berkeley, to 3 units per lot rather than the current 1 unit per lot, SFH prices would probably double. (This is because, even if the extra supply reduces home prices, say, from $1m to $700k, each lot will now have the potential to build 3 houses on it, making the lot's land value $2.1m. Of course, this isn't exactly correct—I did not account for construction costs—but you get the idea.).

So, in a unzoned/loosely zoned/"fair" world, you would pay a pretty dime for a SF house in a desirable city like Berkeley—a lot more than SF homebuyers pay today.

This is something people don't appreciate—SF zoning actually subsidizes SF homebuyers by artificially depressing the value of the land, and therefore not making buyers pay the full opportunity cost for underutilizing the land. (Here the opportunity cost is the 3+ houses that could be built on it instead.)

(Not trying to attack OP, who doesn't seem to live in, or want to live in, Berkeley anyway, just making a general point here.)