Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

The irony is that anyone who has ever tried to go anywhere in LA can never find a place to park.

I maintain that the problem is not "we need more housing for all these people!" rather, "we have too many people!"

Why do we have so many people so densely packed? That is the problem we should solve for, not treating the side effects of density. Lower density is what we want, less people in any given square mile.

In other words, we shouldn't be trying to live near major population centers. We shouldn't have to. Our notion of 'work' is/needs to change to reflect that. LA, NY, SF, etc... historically became huge because it needed to be that way. Remote work is becoming more and more common. Regular work is being automated away by software or machines.

I made this argument once before and was totally shot down because I didn't articulate it properly ... but who wants to live in a densely packed apartment complex in the middle of a noisy city? Sure, some people LOVE that, and they should have every right to choose it. But... a lot of people HATE that and are forced to do it, because it's all they can afford. That is the problem that we need to change.

This is a great point often overlooked by the “punish motorists” crowd: some of us actually like the suburbs and don’t want to live in a dense urban hellscape. All this work to get rid of parking and remove roads is not going to result in us realizing how wrong our single family home lifestyle is—it’s just going to inconvenience/rage us even more than the roads already do.

I lived in a shared-wall apartment in the city when I was younger. Never again. You are never going to convince me to enjoy those nights with neighbors blasting their music until 2AM. Or the guy walking past my home every 3 hours yelling at his own fist.

My town recently got new leadership that decided that they’d fix traffic by dedicating half of some roads’ lanes to carpoolers. All that happened is already-bad two-lane roads became one-lane nightmares, with the “carpool only” lane unused (except for the cheaters who gamble they wont get caught). Everything is worse now except a few politicians get to put “I pretended to fix traffic” on their resumes.

You’re not going to get cars off the road by writing laws to making driving more miserable than it already is. All that’s going to do is convince motorists to vote for the other guy next time.

What about social, cultural, and civic life and public services? These depend on density, scale, and networks.

> "a densely packed apartment complex in the middle of a noisy city"

I dispute the notion that dense urbanism is not necessarily unpleasant. What you describe is a consequence of thoughtless architectural and urban design. I live in a four-storey apartment building with a garden in a quiet, bucolic neighbourhood in a core urban district in the Randstad — a dense megalopolis of over 8 mil people in The Netherlands. Density makes cycling, public transit, and walking feasible. This greatly reduces car traffic. Reduced car traffic requires less urban space to be spent on road and parking surfaces — urban space that can instead be spent on green and public spaces. Reduced car traffic in turn means less urban noise. It is a virtuous cycle.

To preempt the expected protests that this kind of urbanism is only achievable by centuries-old cities: it is true that it is much easier for old cities to achieve this, but it is possible for car-centric cities as well. Rotterdam — its centre razed in WW2 and rebuilt to be car-centric — managed the transition. Old cities have many modern districts: see IJBurg of Amsterdam.

Really? We want less people in any given square mile? People with a certain level of wealth already have (and will likely for a long time maintain) access to that.

If your argument is that semi-rural or suburban living should be made as affordable or desirable as urban living, I think you should provide some evidence for that. By default, it's easier to be less isolated and have access to more infrastructure (healthcare, social, financial, economic, cultural, arts) and to access them at a lower marginal cost due to economies of scale. You also can bring in a level of standardization politically in that one polis can (for better or worse) create political infrastructure that effectively serves more consituents for its base operational costs than a a more rural one.

If your argument is about quality of life, I'd argue that LA is not a great example of a city to use as an example of the ills of population density. It has awful transportation infrastructure and is structured like a giant suburb, in effect. There are cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen or Berlin in Europe, and in America cities like Chicago or NYC where you can survive biking or taking public transport everywhere. You get access to everything you need to live your entire life without needing a car.

The only thing that you've said that runs contrary to what I value is the idea of people hating living a densely packed apartment complex in the middle of a noisy city. First of all, you can live in a quiet complex in a quiet portion of an otherwise noisy city (I do so in NYC), and second of all, the homestead lifestyle of having "40 acres and a mule" only makes sense in the context of a society wanting sparsely settled land to be settled.

Its end goal does not necessarily result in a happy, free society. I believe that's why you were shot down -- it's not that you failed to articulate your idea properly. It's that your idea was flawed in the first place.

> Our notion of 'work' is/needs to change to reflect that.

Our work (where ‘we’ are typical HN readers) changed decades ago, and could be contributing practically nothing to congestion or emissions, if not for Silly Valley upper management's love of sardine cans.

LA is hardly dense though.

I grew up here. I live here. What makes you think it’s not dense? “LA” is HUGE. Parts of it are dense, parts of it are less dense.

When most people think of LA they need to think in the context of the entire county. There are ten million people living here, that’s more than the entire state of Michigan.

LA is 3,100 ppl/km2. [1] Tokyo is double that. [2]

It's all a matter of perspective. Personally I've been living in Asia so long that most places outside of New York feel under-developed to me. Just sticking to major first-world cities and the most obvious example of Tokyo blows LA's density out of the water. If we dipped into less-developed metropoli, we could throw, say, Manila into the conversation at [20,000;70,000]/km2 and then LA's density looks positively quaint.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila

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