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Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

I think a lot of this is true too. In particular I think lending is out of control (HTB is indeed a complete farce).

In the UK we could basically fix this stuff overnight by just building council houses on a trivial amount of the green belt and bringing back the idea that everyone just gets a family home. It won't happen because we have a broken political system.

But I also think a major pressure relief valve would be somehow eliminating this idea that everyone has to live in SF/NYC/London/etc.

It just doesn't make sense on any level. We can't just have every part of the world outside of a few capital or capital-like cities turn into an economic wasteland.

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This sentiment I don’t understand. What’s the problem with aggregating most of the population in a few urban centers? It makes sense to me from an economic point of view where the productivity of clusters benefits greatly from density. It also makes sense from an environmental perspective because it reduces sprawl and using elevators instead of cars should significantly lower carbon emissions. More importantly, unlike other environmentally friendly policies, like carbon taxes or not eating beef, people actually want to move to the more successful cities. Although every individual is familiar with the downsides of cities the economies seem to be large enough to overcome them.

A big problem of aggregation is fragility. You are literally putting all your eggs into a small number of baskets.

The number of cities isn't small. Economy of scale overrides a slight lack of range.

Traffic is one issue. 2D road systems only scale so far.

It's not just traffic. It's literally the fact that a downtown has a finite capacity.

Walk about in Central London on a weekday and tell me if you doubled the population that'd be fine and dandy.

High density housing in the UK has a bad rep. It has not been done well in the past. Now only 8% of Londoners live in a high rise, and very few live in mid rise (3-6 storeys, as common in many European cities)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_blocks_in_Great_Britain

Well let's see.

Few seem to want to live in high density housing beyond their 30s. As soon as families are being thought about thoughts turn to having safe places to play, quality of air and schools, thoughts of the logistics of pram, a couple of children, nappies and bottles being manoeuvred up and down 10 floors. It's bad enough doing that when the car is on the street in front of your house.

That's the point people are trying, to the extent their finances allow, de-aggregating themselves to a house in the suburbs or somewhere pleasant and rural.

Those are problems of bad architecture, not high density. Apartment buildings offer great value -- you don't need to deal with baby seats in cars. Children can walk to school and social life, often without leaving the building, which is great in winter. Mass transit it easy to build efficiently. Overall families in balc hours of their week from the bane of driving. Greenways can be built and well appointed close in to the city when there isn't housing sprawl. Everyone has wealthier to afford luxuries because they aren't wasting money on low-density utility systems that bankrupt suburbs. Arts and culture and special services for the disabled are on abundance.

I've never encountered high density housing that had an attached school in the building in any of the places I've visited. Neither does it avoid the need to travel, or have a car. Mass transit may be efficient, but travelling with a toddler by bus and train is a nightmare on crowded city services. Unless it's a short trip when you don't need much beyond the buggy.

Sure the schools may be nearer in a city, but they often come with a poor reputation, or the nearby ones are full so you have to travel just as far anyway. Air quality and neighbours aren't a problem of bad architecture either.

Perhaps if we went back and levelled the place and rebuilt with some of the values of pre-war times we could create high density housing that worked. We'd need local shops, services, transport hubs and schools. The very things that have been consolidating away from local hubs throughout the past 50 years.

Having a few urban centres makes sense.

The UK is already fairly urbanized. Basically everyone lives in or around a city. You could densify the cities if the residents actually want that.

What's being discussed here is not that though, it's the problem that everyone seems to want to go to alpha cities like London/SF/NYC and treats elsewhere as "inferior".

You can't just stuff the entire population of the UK in to London because it would be a hellscape regardless of how much you improve infrastructure.

Yes, we can and should return most land outside of dense urban centers to nature. It’s rarely if ever reasonable to have significant development beyond the walkable radius of a neighborhood center or transit stop.

Adam Smith pointed out that people go live in cities because then they can specialize in their trades; you are not going to be a shoemaker in a hamlet, nor a porter in a village.

Given that the trend goes that far back, it is not really strange that we see more of it now, when even fewer people are working the land.

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