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Comment by RHSeeger | Hacker News Reader

Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because you'd need to buy up the land that the current builds are on. It's not as simple a solution as "build dense housing" makes it sound.

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What about throwing as much money as it takes to not only build new towns with dense housing in places where those towns don't already exist, but to make those new places to live much more desirable than a pre-planned new development normally would be? I imagine the political will isn't there. The answer to me would be an ultimatum. Either yes in your backyard, or a tax is levied for a new development that won't be total crap.

This sounds like the original motivation of some ghost towns in China.

Yeah I agree. I can't think of many examples where this seems to have worked. Very much a chicken and egg problem, but I'd think with enough funds available there would be a way to make it work.

Bootstrapping.

Generally the area gets bootstrapped by some major need or force that is so potent that it establishes a vibrant economy around, and if it's potent enough, even after the need has passed.

Major civics projects like damns might do this. (Grand Coulee damn along the Columbia River comes to mind.)

Ongoing jobs like military bases might provide enough logistical need. Or a factories / exploitation of natural resources (fishing, forestry, coal, iron, processing / shipping along waterways) where there's sufficient density. Sometimes it's conditions favorable for the flow of talent, like good worker protections and a rich field of jobs so that someone can settle and build resources: Opportunity that, IMO the rich have largely denied those born in the 80s and after via housing policies and investments exactly like those mentioned in the article.

You've got it exactly backwards. Density is cheaper and more sustainable than running miles and miles of brand new sewerage, roads etc into spread-out suburbs.

The big difference between Japanese and American cities is that Japan is built for trains, which scale up really well, and the US is built for cars, which don't.

I don't have it backwards, you're just not following what I'm saying. I agree that denser housing and construction in general is far more efficient. However...

I'm not talking about constructing a town from scratch. I'm talking about an existing town. Adding the infrastructure for high density housing to a town that wasn't originally designed for it is very expensive.

Current "trend" is medium density housing, with smaller roads. Most of US is 9+ months out of the year a walkable climate.

Putting down a small self driving street car for short trips removes a lot of road congestion in town. And if you just place navigation tags into the pavement - you avoid the need for expensive AI based nav system.

In addition to the other replies, I've see cases where the city only approves construction on the condition that some of the land is allocated to city use. That means if the edges are developed first, it's possible for the city to get the room to expand infrastructure.

Japan sometimes don't care much about such issues caused by building large apartment, like extremely crowded station/train and lack of nursery school. I don't know it's good thing, but these are often complained.

You can't just ignore things insufficient sewers or water. And insufficient roads isn't much better.

Density brings in more tax revenue to pay for expanding the sewers and can support more mass transit to reduce traffic -- no street widening needed.

In many cities, it's the poorer denser neighborhoods that subsidize the more affluent less dense neighborhoods.

Scroll down to red and green map here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/5/10/lafayette

You can really add things like sewers after the fact. You either need to add them before or during the addition of more (higher density) housing. Generally, this means that the builder of the new housing is required to foot the bill for that added capacity, which can make it not worth the cost.

The same tends to be true of roads, but with less catastrophic results. In a town where going 2 miles can take 20 minutes, adding a lot more housing without adding road capacity is not a great plan.

I meant to say that you can't add sewers after the fact, but now it's too late to edit. My apologies for any confusion.

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