Alternatively, sufficient numbers of people stop having children altogether, and then don't mind living in dense cities.
You're approaching the idea from a perspective that has been tainted by a false consensus bias. If the desire for single family homes was really as pervasive as you believe, then heavily restrictive zoning that is intended to preserve SFH zones wouldn't be necessary in the slightest...you could dismantle the zoning system completely and nothing would change. It would never make financial sense to tear down single family homes and build apartments and condos if nobody wanted to live in them and everybody wanted to live in single family homes.
In reality, increases in allowable density are almost always accompanied by increased actual density.
Even if one doesn’t desire the actual quality of life of less dense areas, they rarely want to sacrifice the chances of their children’s future. See what is happening with NYC public education currently. Hence, the zoning requirements against high density housing is to keep certain socioeconomic classes of people out, especially as it would allow their children into the school system.
That housing stock will eventually rot away as people age and their local governments can't afford to maintain the infrastructure anymore. Entropy will win eventually as future generations can no longer afford to live so far away from job centers.
Plus, it's not as if you can't have urbanism and still have garages and yards. They just end up being smaller. Plenty of places have yards and garages in urban Pittsburgh or Philly. The template for density doesn't always have to be Manhattan or Hong Kong.
There are many more mental health issues in densely populated areas, much less biodiversity, more pollution, etc.
>Alternatively, sufficient numbers of people stop having children altogether,
We tried that, it was called billed as a "aging population crisis" and used as justification to import millions of people from other failed countries into the US.
There's not more pollution, it just seems so because it's more concentrated. The pollution per capita in major US cities is quite a bit lower than the US average.
Similarly, there's plenty of biodiversity in the spaces that people are leaving free by spreading less.
Anyway, I like Christopher Alexander's "Interlocking Fingers" pattern: It seems someone has posted it here: http://iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl003.htm
> People feel comfortable when they have access to the countryside, experience of open fields, and agriculture; access to wild plants and birds and animals. For this access, cities must have boundaries with the countryside near every point. At the same time, a city becomes good for life only when it contains a great density of interactions among people and work, and different ways of life. For the sake of this interaction, the city must be continuous - not broken up. In this pattern we shall try to bring these two facts to balance.
> ...
> Therefore: Keep interlocking fingers of farmland and urban land, even at the center of the metropolis. The urban fingers should never be more than 1 mile wide, while the farmland fingers should never be less than 1 mile wide.
>mental health issues related to loneliness
Citation? It's a fact that urban living is associated with higher levels of mental illness, not just conjecture.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Of course, there's always the issue about whether suburbs and exurbs count as rural or urban, which leads to people talking past each other.
The reason why the PTB oversell high density is because of high paying jobs and high property taxes.
Funny..in CA, only Bay Area has a high density general plan. Not Visalia or Healdsburg. Because high density has nothing to do with sustainability. It only promises sustainability for the care and feeding of public sector employees who are guaranteed a pension and are racking up unfunded pension liabilities in CA.
A 400k home in Visalia with 3 acres gets much less property tax than a 1500 sq ft 1.5 million dollar condo in Bay Area. So it is ok to stress the Bay Area resources. None of the services are cheaper. We are not gaining economies of scale due to the high density. What gives?
As we automate and find alternative renewable energy(the only solution is nuclear), two things will happen..UBI and sustainability.
From my POV, clusters of high density townships(Dunbar number is a good community head count) surrounded by enough land for sustainable closed loop systems networked and interconnected to other small townships to form a large townships and large townships clustered to network etc. This fractal design would ensure that cities are decentralized and yet the veins exist.
A good example is Paris. The city’s design of Paris with its snail shape is close ..but there are other issues, but from city design perspective, it is a good functioning example.
The problem with achieving sustainability goal is government.
Edited to add: also..schools are another example. After California instituted the general plan to build more, all tax monies went into a single pot and redistributed
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/fd/ec/documents/currentexpense1718...
Higher density areas get less money per student and lower density get more. But you can buy more in Oroville than in Berkeley. Or the value of a dollar is less in Berkeley than in Oroville. So people in high density areas.. usually highly educated with smaller family sizes and paying more taxes get less out of the public education system.
This is to say that California should have get equal opportunity for education regardless of economic status. Because in a strange world of progressive politics in California, a school in Bay Area doesn’t have a proper swimming pool or PT equip and AP classes are cancelled because of anorexic school budget. But a blue collar town in Southern California has new buildings and smaller class sizes. It’s just bizarro world.
(Apologies for miles instead of kilometers.)
> The total land surface area of Earth is about 57,308,738 square miles, of which about 33% is desert and about 24% is mountainous.
In [1]: total_land_surface_area_square_miles = 57308738
...: total_land_surface_acres = total_land_surface_area_square_miles / 0.0015625
...: non_desert_non_mountain_acres = total_land_surface_acres * (1.0 - (0.33 + 0.24))
...: acres_per_human = non_desert_non_mountain_acres / 7000000000.0
...: print '%f' % acres_per_human
...:
2.253052
> we have not allowed for any amenities such as highways, schools, hospitals, shopping malls, stadiums, agricultural fields, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, parks, golf courses, etc.
The amount of land, excluding Antarctica, is less than five acres (about 2 hectares).
The notional "40 acres and a mule" threshold was crossed in 1800.
When you consider that land are translates directly to renewable energy flux, this becomes all the more interesting.
Some growth trends from a few years back:
The world population has doubled in the past 50 years. I would hazard a guess that 4 billion is bearable. Optimal would be 2 billion.
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