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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

Don’t many people love cities specifically because of density and the diversity of opportunities that usually follows?

Yes many people love big dense cities like NY, which is why they live there.

The problem is when people love low density cities and make it a great place to live. Then new people want to change it into denser cities with everyone living in apartments. Who should win out?

This is exactly the problem. Lots of people love low or medium density cities because they make great places to live. And then other people who want the same thing start moving there, not asking what made it great in the first place. When lots of people do that, the prices go up and then the newcomers demand that they be accommodated at whatever price they want.

Also the hate against rent control here is myopic. Rent control is meant to protect those incumbents who were a part of the community prior to rapid growth / increase in prices. It allows low supply (protection of quality of life) to work without displacing incumbents when faced with rapid growth. Now we can argue about how effective specific implementations if rent control are, but a lot of folks misconstrue the underlying goals.

"The problem is when people love low density cities and make it a great place to live. Then new people want to change it into denser cities with everyone living in apartments. Who should win out?"

How related is this question to the gentrification of poor neighbourhoods and cities? If we go historically, the newcomers with new money always win out via (often violent) eviction. See: The People's History Podcast regarding Boston's government-supported gentrification of its public housing.

I feel that if we would take the stand to be against sparse neighbourhoods being changed into dense cities due to increased population, we should also protect and support low-income neighbourhoods and public housing from gentrifying construction projects and income-related displacement. But broadly the latter is often viewed as a sad but inevitable phenomenon, and therefore I don't know why that same logic shouldn't apply to increasingly dense cities.

I think the argument is that we’re better off decentralizing opportunity than increasing density, considering long term sustainability (ie, we have a lot of room to decentralize) and human well-being (ie, mega-cities aren’t great — and get worse the higher density).

There's a trade-off though, if it comes at the cost of smaller and worse living accomodation for themselves. And you have to be careful that the transport and other infrastructure can keep up. Transport in particular always seems to get ignored.

Right but lets focus on one problem at a time. With more people in the city, you have a bigger tax base, meaning more tax revenue, meaning you can spend more to improve infrastructure like public transit.

The population of SF has only increased by 111K (14%) in the last 20 years. Imagine what we could do with twice as many people contributing tax revenue?

It isn't just tax base. If you have a lot of people taking transit you can recover the costs of the system just from riders paying their fare, and the riders are saving money over the cost for insuring a car for a year. Less dense areas cannot do this, both because people need to go farther (less dense means you have to go farther to get there), and because there are less riders.

Dense areas need less taxes in general: the cost difference of a big pipe vs a small one isn't nearly as much as the amount the big pipe can carry. However this is more than made up by the fact that the more people to spread it out with means many services that were not affordable are now cheap and those cheap things add up (you don't need a library, and at farm density you can't afford one - but at city density it is cheap per person so you pay a little more), you need to ask if those extras you can have are worth it.

I am not so sure that dense areas need fewer taxes. Some of the most heavily taxes areas are dense cities.

They NEED less taxes for the same amount of infrastructure. They have more anyway because things less dense areas cannot afford at any price are affordable. That is they are getting more for their money, but also spending more.

I'm making two assumptions above: corruption, and higher cost of living forcing higher wagers are both not significant issues. Both are factors, but I'm going to contend they are not significant - you get to decide if you believe me (different answers for different cities are likely!)

I think if you don't take transit into account before hand (public and road infrastructure) you're likely to end up with more people, more traffic and more of what parts of California is already famous for... hours-long tailbacks!

What do you mean? Transport, considered to be the time it takes to get to your relevant destinations, has been objectively worse in pretty much every suburb I've lived in.

A 15-minute drive at maximum speed still takes longer than a 5 minute walk to the supermarket. Most suburbs end up experiencing traffic jams, with no option of foot traffic, subways, or other alternatives.

I mean that if you blindly shove more housing capacity into an area without considering upgrading your transport links, you'll end up with more traffic and more chaos.

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