Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

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> my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes.

I love to live in a city. I love to have access to museums, gardens, universities and good public transportation.

My fear is that people may end up killing the city in favor of single-family homes and making owning a car mandatory. That cities that I love like New York, London, Tokyo or Shanghai may disappear and become an endless shapeless blob of single-family homes without identity were people looks suspiciously to anyone that "do not belong to the neighborhood". It would be a loss to humanity to get rid of the creativity, the openness, the heterogeneity of the city. People has gathered in cities as long as civilization has existed. Cities are civilization.

I have lived in London, Barcelona and Stockholm. Great cities on their own, with good public transportation, services, restaurants, that feel safe, alive, and a bridge between past and future. But, your experience may vary depending on the quality of the cities you have lived in.

> My fear is that people may end up killing the city in favor of single-family homes and making owning a car mandatory. That cities that I love like New York, London, Tokyo or Shanghai may disappear and become an endless shapeless blob of single-family homes without identity were people looks suspiciously to anyone that "do not belong to the neighborhood". It would be a loss to humanity to get rid of the creativity, the openness, the heterogeneity of the city. People has gathered in cities as long as civilization has existed. Cities are civilization.

In what universe is anyone proposing tearing down the buildings in NY, London, Tokyo, or Shanghai and replacing them with SFH? I've seen some articles about new mega-rich construction in London with homes going deep underground, but largely replacing existing townhomes and the like, not lowering density. There are just very few people who would spend enough money to buy up a bunch of units and turn them into a handful of houses...

The only push for active change is the opposite direction: people who want to change the cities with abundant single family homes.

In the US there are massive subsidies for suburbs with single family homes, to the point where cities are stymied as people in the cities are the ones that end up paying for a massive chunk of this subsidy.

As a result there is less of a drive for people who are in between, or even want to live in the city a bit, to live there and make it a more lively area since it ends up being artificially more expensive.

On top of this, a lot of zoning makes interesting, dense cities straight up illegal or incredibly expensive to build, again, in preference of low density single family homes.

This is what people are concerned with and want to change.

There's a lot of back-and-forth subsidies that often aren't considered. In Philadelphia, for example, the city public transportation network (SEPTA) also serves the suburbs. In fact, the bulk of its revenue comes from train service to those surrounding suburbs. The local subway/buses in the city will be hard pressed to operate at the loss they are now if ridership on the suburban trains stays low.

The city also has the highest wage tax in the nation >4%, more than half of which is still due if you commute in. Unsurprisingly, these suburban commuters represent a huge line item in the city's revenue - that is gone if everyone is WFH. City schools also receive the bulk of their funding from the state, unlike suburban schools which are paid mostly out of local taxes.

In the Philly area at least, the city would never survive without its rich suburbs.

People replace flats with giant houses in San Francisco frequently. Here's an example of a 2200-sq.ft. duplex that became a 4200-sq.ft. SFH selling for over $5 million. https://www.redfin.com/CA/San-Francisco/891-Noe-St-94114/hom...

2200 sq ft duplex is a farcry from an 8 story building in nyc. if anything, apartments will get taller and taller, and up in the clouds at the pinnacle will reside a single family home with a manicured lawn. a suburb in the stratosphere. the jetsons may not be too far off.

Does Epstein's mansion in Manhattan count? It started out as an orphanage, then it was a hospital, and now it's the most expensive single-family dwelling in America.

Regardless of whether the density is being replaced, when 100% of new construction is SFH, to a renter it's like existing townhomes are disappearing; as their proportions diminish, prices rise and thus finding this kind of place near your place of work becomes more difficult.

>In what universe is anyone proposing tearing down the buildings in NY, London, Tokyo, or Shanghai and replacing them with SFH?

Maybe not "torn down", there was definitely a period of time in the US where urban areas were being abandoned for the suburbs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#United_States

> In what universe is anyone proposing tearing down the buildings in NY, London, Tokyo, or Shanghai and replacing them with SFH?

COVID-19 will kill megacities. Whether they'll all be torn down and replaced with single-family dwellings or just left to rot into slums is indeterminate, but they're going to go away one way or the other.

Cities over a certain size are only viable if they have an effective public transport network, and public transit isn't compatible with endemic COVID-19. Get one superspreader on one train car and you now have 250 infected people and multiple deaths. Even the vaccines that are currently under development would only reduce the carnage to 125, rather than 250, people. No one is going to accept this risk if they have a choice, which is why public transit ridership has cratered everywhere.

Remove public transit from the picture and you have a car dependent city. By definition car dependent cities must have a low density to keep traffic congestion barely manageable. Highrise multifamily is no longer possible, nor are high rise offices. SFH with suburban office parks are the only style of building that makes sense when everyone must drive.

Further, everyone who can is shifting to WFH, which will erode the importance of cities as a concept. Get good Internet into the rural areas and most white collar workers will live there just to reduce the risk of dying from COVID.

When, in a few decades, we eventually get COVID-19 vaccines and treatments good enough to go back to the way things were, the changes to how we live will be socially baked-in and it will be too late to walk them back.

Cities are over.

I live in downtown Minneapolis and it's the first time I no longer really need a car since my childhood in Germany. And I love it.

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