Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HWR_14 | Hacker News Reader

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> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?

1) The US is really big. Seriously. Our population density is 1/3 that of the EUs with a similar (but now smaller) total population. Only Sweden and Latvia are less dense as EU member states. Add to that most of the US is more temperate than most of Europe and therefore we have even more desirable land (Barcelona is north of New York City).

That is to say, we have less need for it. Houston and Phoenix, our 4th and 5th biggest cities, just keep expanding out as opposed to up. This has long term costs, but certainly is cheaper.

1a) Gas is also a lot cheaper in the US than the EU. Two car families are plentiful. So spreading out costs less. And all our infrastructure (outside NYC, DC and maybe Boston/Chicago) is based around cars, not mass transit, so you need a spot to park your cars.

2) Local taxes are (in general) done based on the value of a house. If new houses in less desirable places are cheaper to originally buy, they are often also cheaper to hold. They have fewer established tax costs as well for maintenance of public transit or school because those come later (or not at all). What he's talking about is greenfield on the other side of a legal boundary, so there are different (usually fewer) governments to levy taxes. In the US, you may pay taxes to your city, county, state and the country (a lot of caveats there I'm skipping). If you buy a house outside the city, that's one fewer entity that can tax you.

3) There's a huge anti-urban political component. Literally, there are people who want rural areas to thrive and cities to fail. In some states (see Texas and Arizona, where Houston and Phoenix are), these people control the state.

4) Amazingly, for some reason (possibly holding offshore dollars), it's far more profitable to use the same square footage for luxury condos that sell out right away compared to many smaller cheaper houses/apartments in desirable cities.

5) It's literally been sold to generations of Americans that owing a lawn is a sign of having succeeded. That's where the "white picket fence" comes in. There is a huge market demand for suburbs.

I agree with all of your points in general, but I hate the framing of 5) because it presumes a narrative where people don't have agency over their own preferences.

I love density and urban living. I've lived in lots of apartments over the years. I currently live in a single family home. Having a house and a yard is absolutely awesome:

1. I get acoustic isolation from my neighbors. I don't care when they watch loud movies. They don't care when I make music.

2. I have green space that I have autonomy over. Shared parks are nice for being a passive consumer of green space. But a personal yard means I get to be an active participant in its horticulture. I can garden, which has shown repeatedly over the years to be good for mental health.

3. I have more windows that let in more natural light when I'm inside. My living space is more seamlessly connected to the outdoors. I get natural light on all sides of the structure.

4. It's easier and more efficient to let my dog out in my own fenced yard.

I don't think people need huge sprawling yards to get most of this benefit. The UK model where everyone has a little garden behind the house is probably sufficient. But I do think Americans are generally smart enough to like single family homes mostly because they like single family homes and not because they have been hoodwinked by some nefarious pro-suburbia organization.

I think there's one other major factor you're entirely overlooking here: cost. NIMBYism and bad zoning lead to that a lot of US cities with housing far, far more expensive than similar places in many other countries.

Having loved high-density cosmopolitan places, I confirm it’s not baked in American values but it’s based on actual benefits:

- In high-density, you share everything. Therefore, everything is closed for public access during Covid, but also when there is wind, rain, hot weather or risks of terrorist attacks (talking from experience of my life in cities). The rulers of the city have effective control on your ability to see the sun.

- Cities are suitable when politically leaning towards collectivization. And when you’re over with your youth ideas that everyone will fit together and do peace and love, you start starting at the poster in the hall of the building that says “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble). Given cities gather people who lean towards collectivization, you yearn to get your own lawns with friends who will understand this.

- Also, the costs.

So, it’s not cultural love for lawns, it’s a cycle of people moving by necessity.

It's not an irrational value, but it is an American value pushed by society.

> Cities are suitable when politically leaning towards collectivization.

So are suburbs, but they just represent a more exclusive collectivism. Last I checked, they still have public roads, water, sewer, and schools. In prosperous suburbs, it's just collectivism with a minimum net worth or income requirement.

> “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble).

Sounds like you had a bad urban experience with people "different" than you. That sucks, but it doesn't speak for everyone's urban experience.

> Last I checked, they still have public roads, water, sewer, and schools.

Sure. But depending on where you land, you can avoid HOAs, architectural design review boards, neighbor comment periods, 24-month permit delays, EIRs, etc. The red tape ("community involvement", if you prefer) involved in living in a city like SF is nothing like what it is in the suburbs, not even the crazy Stepford ones like Irvine.

> But I do think Americans are generally smart enough to like single family homes mostly because they like single family homes and not because they have been hoodwinked by some nefarious pro-suburbia organization.

Maybe, but I would also argue that the US dependence on cars makes anything other than single family homes totally suck.

The fact that you need a car means you need somewhere to park that car. Don't need to go anywhere for a couple days? If you've parked on the street, sucks to be you, your car got towed. So, you need a garage. And probably enough space for two cars, not one.

You want to walk? Great! Except that you have to cross several 4 lane highways because we have to accommodate all those cars. And, that's assuming you have somewhere you want to walk to within a reasonable distance.

You don't have a car so you want some big thing delivered? Hope you can wait 2 months and can take off an entire day from work.

etc.

> Maybe, but I would also argue that the US dependence on cars makes anything other than single family homes totally suck.

It's definitely hard to untangle the affects of cars on city planning from single family homes, but I don't think the two are inextricably intertwined. There are many places and have been many time periods with plenty of both single family homes and public transit use.

> The fact that you need a car means you need somewhere to park that car. Don't need to go anywhere for a couple days? If you've parked on the street, sucks to be you, your car got towed.

I live in a single family home in a very walkable city with plenty of public transit. I park on the street and have never been towed or had my truck broken into. These days because of COVID, I rarely drive more than once a month. Even before the pandemic, I usually biked to work and left my truck parked on the street for weeks without using it.

I think you're exaggerating to say that single family homes push towards giant two-car garages. There are lots and lots of single family homes that are not in sprawling suburbia.

of course Americans like single family homes. I'm sure most people throughout the world would love the option. They are appealing by definition. But are single family homes good for society? They use space so much more inefficiently. They encourage more electricity usage, along with other resources. They forcibly maintain the wastefulness of American car culture. They are ludicrously profligate yet have been normalized in this country. It's not that some "nefarious organization" hoodwinked people - they are a devil's bargain that nobody had the foreknowledge to contain.

> I'm sure most people throughout the world would love the option. ... But are single family homes good for society?

Is not the ultimate goal of society to enable people to pursue and hopefully attain what they love?

> They use space so much more inefficiently. They encourage more electricity usage, along with other resources. They forcibly maintain the wastefulness of American car culture. They are ludicrously profligate yet have been normalized in this country.

Efficiency is not a first-order goal of society. The maximally efficient society would kill all of its citizens. Everyone walks into the oceans. Plenty of free food for the fish and no human consumption whatsoever.

The goal of society is to provide meaningful happiness to its members efficiently. It doesn't strictly increase efficiency to simply take away things people want.

> Is not the ultimate goal of society to enable people to pursue and hopefully attain what they love?

That's not what I would consider the ultimate goal, if for no other reason than I don't see how that allows us to forbid drunk driving or heroin use.

Drunk driving hurts innocent people, thus preventing them from attaining what they love.

If heroin use leads to crime then maybe it could be forbidden for similar reasons. Or if the government can determine that people don't love heroin and instead only use it as an escape or due to addiction, then forbidding it might help those people to attain what they actually love.

if everyone in the world was living in a single family home, American style, we'd be completely doomed. There's no justifying the waste of our lifestyles. Is there any evidence people in Asia or Europe, where single family homes were not allowed to run rampant, are less "meaningfully happy" than Americans?

Our inefficiency is unsustainable and is on pace to destroy the climate, how can that possibly be construed as providing maximal happiness? Short-term happiness for lucky US citizens, maybe.

> 1. I get acoustic isolation from my neighbors. I don't care when they watch loud movies. They don't care when I make music.

This part is so hard to overstate! I will never voluntarily move into shared-wall or shared-ceiling housing. Unless I was so broke that I had to do it or become homeless. The neighbors' TV. The neighbors' arguments. The neighbors' partying. The neighbors having sex. The neighbors clomp-clomp-clomping up the stairs directly outside my door. The cops making loud visits to the neighbors when they misbehaved again. This has been pretty much a constant for me in apartment living, no matter the town. I knew I "made it" as a grown-up when I finally moved to a single family house where I couldn't hear a neighbor. Never again!

The other things you mentioned are great bonuses of suburban living, but the major benefit is acoustic distance from neighbors--and stepping back a bit--in general not being forced by proximity to be a part of your neighbors' wild lives.

Oh, I like SFHs too, but my new-build home in London was sound-proofed to the gills. I ran into the neighbours at the lifts one day and they apologized for their kids shrieking "they've been awful this weekend, I'm sorry". I hadn't heard a thing. I could hear the river boats and everything with my window open (faced the Thames) but I never heard a peep out of a neighbour.

American construction is shoddy, which is why American homes are relatively cheap, even at the mid-luxury end. High-end luxury is pretty good. My cousin pays some $12k/month for his home and it's really quiet.

You can’t soundproof open Windows. I lived in an insanely soundproof building. You could hear nothing if everyone had their windows closed.

I like fresh air. So did my neighbor with the shrieking parrot.

You could get some of that in a SFH too. It'll be quieter due to the distance though.

Of course. But having done multiple iterations of both, I will never, ever share walls again. With neighbors I can plant a hedge or close the facing windows. It’s not even close.

I noticed the same thing moving from an apartment to a condo. It turns out moving from wood construction to concrete slab gets you a lot of the same noise isolation in an urban environment.

A lot of people move from apartment to home and at the same time take a huge jump in the value of the residence. They assume the quality of life improvement is attributable to the SFH aspect, rather than the increase in construction quality.

Noise sometimes is more a question of build quality than living situation.

I think people state a lot of reasons for their preferences that aren't actually the origins. We were looking at real estate and I realized that emotionally I am not willing to commit to our region's bloated housing costs without getting to feel like I am insulated from neighbors by a lot of trees. This is not sensible in any way for my lifestyle. I can construct a lot of post hoc justifications, and oh boy I do when people ask, but fundamentally I just have this sense (from growing up on 5 acres) of what's satisfying. I have a friend who feels this way about lawn ("how can you have a dog without a yard"), which strikes me as completely untethered from the objective value of lawn, and probably comes from his suburban upbringing.

Probably a lot of "well the noise" "benefits" of SFH are post hoc in this way. In those more permissive areas, it just takes one family with poorly trained/exercised dogs to make you long for the relative tameness of upstairs stomping. But it makes sense as a benefit people can explain in the thing that they want regardless.

> I hate the framing of 5) because it presumes a narrative where people don't have agency over their own preferences.

People have agency over their preferences? Then why do people ever have trouble dieting? Wouldn't it be easier to just want to eat canned beans/spam/nutritious mush to keep you healthy? Why are they sad when they cannot afford something? Why don't they just stop wanting it?

Mostly agree, but disagree slightly with number 5. In most places, it is illegal to build any denser. Town zoning laws are notoriously slow to change such that they do not keep up with the market and actually codify a lot of these problems in their regulations.

I think this is covered by (3), the anti-city sentiment.

This is why there are so few cities (in the European sense) in the US, and many of the largest 'cities' are just small downtowns in an ocean of suburban neighborhoods.

The poster you're replying to still has the cause vs effect right. That gets encoded into law because that's what a lot of people want. The law follows the demand - people know that there are developers out there with far more money to throw around then they have, so they fight money with law.

So when you get densification in US cities, it happens in districts that were formerly industrial/commercial only - where people aren't giving up the form of their existing neighborhoods - or in poor areas with little political organization.

(There's also a TON of underutilized land in industrial/commerical only districts in most US cities, so the focus on single family home zoning when all those lots are already there and similarly "underutilized" is foolish. Even if you abolished zoning overnight, a big industrial or commercial property is going to be much easier to acquire than a bunch of individual home lots.)

> The poster you're replying to still has the cause vs effect right. That gets encoded into law because that's what a lot of people want. The law follows the demand - people know that there are developers out there with far more money to throw around then they have, so they fight money with law.

This doesn't make sense to me. If single-family homes are what most people want, why would a developer bother to buy up land and build something denser if people don't want to live somewhere denser? That sounds like a dumb business decision.

Nearly the entire country is zoned for single-family housing. Someone who wants to live in a SFH has no shortage of options. Meanwhile, someone who wants to live somewhere denser has very few options; we've almost entirely banned building new ones, so what dense places do exist are mostly the ones built prior to modern zoning codes.

As a result, people who do want to live somewhere denser often aren't able to, despite the demand. The data backs this up: https://cityobservatory.org/the-myth-of-revealed-preference-...

Not sure where you're living, but here in central NC we've got a record number of huge apartment complexes being built left and right over the last 4-6 years. Cheap too. It's never been easier to live "somewhere denser".

6) Americans are allergic to central planning.

In Europe cities like this would be planned much more, and as this kind of city development would be seen as undesirable, the plans just wouldn't allow it. In the US it just sort of happens because of a mass of choices by individuals.

The best cities I've visited in America have been planned, ironically. New York City follows century-old grids. Savannah maintains park squares first laid out in the early 18th century. Washington DC was designed and built from nothing. Perhaps these don't match the definition of Euro-style central planning however.

I don't think it's ironic at all. I think the poster you are responding to is making the point that better city planning leads to better cities, but that America is opposed to central planning. You're pointing out the planned cities that made it in are great.

Isn't planning the same as the zoning people are complaining about?

Not at all. American cities have extensive central planning that restricts what can be built.

Most areas have zoning that only allow single family houses and requires a minimum lot size that is quite large.

I think this is the heart of it. In a way this cuts to the heart of America itself, both its successes and failures.

> Our population density is 1/3 that of the EUs with a similar (but now smaller) total population. Only Sweden and Latvia are less dense as EU member states.

USA 36 per Km2

Sweden 22

Latvia 30

Finland 16

Estonia 29

Norway 16

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Europe#Populat...

he said EU:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_European_U...

Finland 16.3 Sweden 22.2 Estonia 29.1 Latvia 30.2

Not all of europe :). Just off by two. I think the point still greatly stands as the EU average is 105.3.

Thanks for the correction.

Overall a great answer, but I'm not so sure of #3. Yes, there are people who want big cities to fail, but AFAICT not many of them are rural themselves. They're in smaller cities or outer suburbs ("exurbs") of big ones. They play to a rural image or ethos, but typically neither know nor care about anyone truly living a rural life.

Also (6) higher level/quality of municipal services, because those are (mostly) funded from local taxes. This is most obvious in schools but you can also see it in the personnel, equipment, and training of the local police and fire departments, the number and maintenance level of parks, etc.

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