Really an appalling point of view. There is absolutely nothing wrong with single family neighborhoods; in fact, they are greatly desirable to most.
There's a lot wrong with the government mandating them in a particular area, especially when that 'particular area' is actually 'most residential land'.
-sedentary car-dependent lifestyle
-inefficent use of arable land
-carbon intense lifestyle contributing to the collapse of ecosystems
-materialistic lifestyle enforced
-impossible to serve economically with public transit making car ownership mandatory
-energy inefficient buildings
-encourages racial and economic segregation
-anti-social lifestyle decreases face to face contact and increases barrier to connect with others
If I could vote to make these neighborhoods illegal, I would.
This cannot be overstated enough. My pet theory is that the suburbification of America led to our current division and political strife. You cannot expect great results when those with the most combined political power and wealth in the nation sequester themselves individually away from others and even each other. This ends up with anti-social people driving social policy for the nation. And it shows.
The older I get, watching the first generation fully raised in "suburban culture" seems to be a lesson in watching the threads of a society break down in real time. It's amazing to me that within 2-3 generations we completely blew up the notion of extended families and close-knit community taking care of each other.
That said...
> If I could vote to make these neighborhoods illegal, I would.
I'm not quite willing to go that far. I would simply make zoning them illegal. If an area is desirable enough to toss up a giant single family home next door to a few 3 flats - so be it. But I should be just as allowed to come buy that place, tear it down, and toss a small apartment building in it's place. Additionally I'd be in favor of laws that make it illegal (or exceedingly difficult) to require setbacks/minimum parking/etc. for most areas.
Basically I'd like to see a legal framework that brings us back to "natural" incremental city development vs. this BS planned crap that never works. The only cities in the world people marvel at (at least in western societies) are those that predated zoning law.
Choice and freedom are a beautiful thing. The problem now is there is little choice due to subsidy and zoning laws.
Sorry, yes that's exactly what I meant and we're in total agreement. There's no way I'd advocate tearing these neighborhoods down, only make it illegal to continue to protect their zoning, just like this new law in Oregon. I think that's a super solution, and I'd happily vote for it in my own state.
In the US, an apartment complex in an ordinary suburban neighborhood would swipe all the on-street parking and probably people's lawns as well. Those home owners expect nearly exclusive use of the street parking for their guests.
water restrictions that prevent wasteful lawns, eliminate HOA rules that require them
materialism is good right?
self driving EV, also bus stops used to serve suburbia well if the cost of driving was higher it would again.
you got me on the thermal inefficiency surface area to volume trumps any R factor.
how?
sit on your front porch, have block parties. works in many single family neighborhoods. culture not zoning
you can vote for that but I don't think you will be joined by many
A single family house in a good and expensive neighborhood is something many people want to get and when people want to get something, they put effort into that and drive the economy up. I'm one of those people and I'm putting a lot of effort to get such a house, paying high taxes on my way there. People who vote for dense multi family housing have probably never lived there. But I did, I came from a ghetto and don't want to go back. Those dense apartment complexes don't solve any of the problems you've listed, but rather introduce new, such as drunk addicts wandering around your complex when you're returning from work. Apartment complexes don't make anyone's lifestyle any less sedentary and any less car dependent, because you still need a car in such a huge country. The US has plenty (too much) land: that's obvious to anyone who's bothered to go on a road trip. Most of that land just sits around unused. The carbon intense lifestyle is caused by the disposable junk products that are intentionally made flawed so we'd have to keep buying new. There is nothing "carbon intense" in putting together a bunch of trees and calling that a house. The cause of materialistic lifestyle is caused by greed: a fundamental flaw in our mentality that humanity will take tens of thousands years to overcome. Petty housing laws aren't going to change that, just like laws aren't going to make a teen grow faster. Economic "segregation" is a good thing as it gives people a choice where to live. Anti-social lifestyle? ROFL. Like I've said, I lived in a ghetto good 20 years. That kind of lifestyle can't be any more anti social. Some people have that detached from reality idea that if we make all sorts of people live together in packed apartment complexes, the "pro-social lifestyle" would flourish, we'd get nice parks with crowds of happy people and kids running around. None of that would happen. What would happen is a bunch of depressing big apartment buildings with all sorts of sketchy folks wandering around your neighborhood, looking for something to keep themselves busy. And that something is rarely a talk about arts. In such neighborhoods you'd want a car even more, but now for safety reasons and you wouldn't dare to leave your kids alone in such places. "Increases barrier to connect with others" - gosh, I can't stop laughing. The kind of people you would have easier, with no barriers, communication are not MIT professors and you would want a car with tinted windows just to have that barrier to connect with others.
The single family house neighborhoods with HOAs, tiered by social status, is the right way to go as it gives everyone a choice where to live. If you want to build a bunch of tall apartment complexes next to the city center, so you could walk to work, fine, do it, vote for it, but please, keep your hands away from single family houses and HOAs.
No. I vote for what I believe is best for society, and mandatory single-family home neighborhoods are terrible for it.
They're bad for the environment, and they're bad for inequality. The sooner they go away, the better.
Do they not, by their very nature, enforce low-density housing? Is that not a bad thing to enforce in places with too few dwellings?
More housing giving people more freedom to choose where to live is good.
More housing helping make living more affordable is good.
More housing making good jobs in economically booming areas more accessible is good.
More housing density is indisputably better for the environment.
There's many good reasons to be for more housing density, and many fewer good reasons to be against.
Saying that building expensive things is segragation is thinly veiled strict socialism. What's the alternative, everyone is forced to live in the same housing? You can't force cheap apartments in nice neighborhoods, those neighborhoods will become not nice. Thats how rent control works
I'm not in the "ban SFH neighbourhoods" camp, but I think we shouldn't have as much of a problem with them becoming denser. Particularly not when the people already living there tend to have the chance to be well-compensated by selling to developers if they want.
This doesn't mean developers should be allowed to let rip either - as one of the other posts says, increased density leads to increased demand for other infrastructure as well.
Basically neither Manhattan nor Houston are really ideal states in my mind. There should be a way to live in the burbs if you want to do that, but I don't think public policy should be vigorously defending the people who do that regardless of obvious social and economic costs.
the developers have a significant amount of leverage in this situation. if they can build one large apartment building in a low-density sfh neighborhood, they can take a significant chunk of value off all the neighboring homes. if they can secure land to build several large buildings, they can seriously devalue these homes. when they start looking to buy property for the nth building, the homeowner isn't going to get anything close to the original value.
as a society, we should never have allowed this situation to happen in the first place, but now that we have, it's not going to be easy to solve. until you get to pretty high percentiles of wealth, homes tend to be a large fraction of a family's net worth. to suddenly remove the zoning would be a pretty big hit for these people; a lot of them could get upside-down on their mortgages.
Usually an increase in density in an area will increase land values rather then depress them.
Sure, but we're talking about government force, not the market.
It's one thing if the market creates SFH-only neighborhoods, but why should the government be enforcing that as law?