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Comment by thinkpad20 | Hacker News Reader

> Meanwhile over here it's taken as assumed that cities cannot and/or should not grow ever again.

How do you mean?

Probably referring to the hatred many in the United States have towards urban development. In pretty much every city in the United States development has been slowed to a crawl due to zoning restrictions, despite increasing huge demand. People love to use SF as a prime example but I will point to my city, Somerville MA where rents have been soaring, yet there are only 22 lots that meet the residential zoning requirements. All other lots are over the density requirement. So practically any future development has to decrease the number of people who can live in the city, rather then increase it. http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/

That is weird, and saddening. As a lifelong city dweller (primarily Chicago) I love the character, chaos, and depth of dense cities. Visiting some of the big cities in China, I was really taken with their bustling nature, the crowded street markets, the densely packed housing, and the diverse architecture. They seem to me so much more "alive" than the sprawling, strip-mall-filled anonymity of many American cities. I had chalked it up to American's desire for personal space, proliferation of cars and scarcity of public transit options. But I hadn't really considered the effects of zoning and other legal restrictions.

It's shit. It might be fine if you're living in a luxury flat but otherwise a lot of Chinese cities are shit. Maybe not in 30 years when they develop further but I don't understand how anyone could want to live there. I'm excluding the wealthy areas of Shanghai in these, I'm talking more of the tier 2/3 places.

When people rhapsodize about the aesthetic appeal of densely packed cities, I always wonder how that translates into quality of life for the majority of residents, especially those below the poverty line.

Poverty exists within cities and without. I’m not sure how suburban sprawl is helpful to those in poverty.

Maybe it doesn't cause poverty so much as it allows you to see poverty, so it's natural to assume that cities must have created it.

> In pretty much every city in the United States development has been slowed to a crawl

You don't think that's far too much of a generalization?

Houston has added a city the size of San Francisco since 1980. Austin and Charlotte doubled in size since 1990, and are both now comparable to SF in size. Las Vegas grew by 140% or so since 1990. Seattle's population curve goes vertical the last decade, they added about 16% to their population in seven years, and 50% expansion since 1990.

New York has added a million people in 20 years, after five decades of stagnation. There's plenty of development going on there.

There overwhelming evidence that labor mobility has decreased drastically over recent decades, that this is a tremendous drag on economic growth, and that local land use restrictions are a primary cause of it.

http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-l...

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/the-other-side-of-har...

entrenched building zoning and building restrictions that mop up massive amounts of economic potential in rent (see the housing crises throughout the major cities of the US)

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