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Comment by schnitzelstoat | Hacker News Reader

Everybody wants walkable cities, but nobody wants to live in tiny-ass flats.

I'm a European and if you look at the size of housing here (perhaps excluding the few cities that have low population density) it's tiny in comparison to most of the USA (except for NYC).

So as always there are pro's and con's - would you want to live in a city like NYC? Would you like to raise a family in those conditions?

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This is kind of a weird response to an article which is explicitly talking about high density family housing. The streets depicted are a lot like the one I live in - in our case a terrace of three bed houses (many extended into the roofspace to make a fourth room) in a residential area that has every amenity you could wish for within a ten minutes walk. The housing values are high because many people want to live here - they’re very happy to trade off the small gardens & relatively smaller houses against the obvious advantages (for them) of living in this area.

The choices are not between “tiny-ass flats” & “exurbia” - there’s a whole range of housing density in between those extremes.

I get the impression Americans buy these huge houses that they then barely use any of most of the time. And a dense neighbourhood can substitute for many rooms - I have a community hall around the corner if I want to host a party, I don't have a home gym/cinema/pool/sauna but I have those things a ten minute bike ride away....

Sure, 1bdrm apartment is more than enough when you live alone and don't have any hobbies aside of hosting parties.

Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of hobbies necessitate having a giant house to engage in them?

Sure! In our family:

- bicycles: in my case it's five bicycles plus trailer for the youngest

- motorcycle

- woodworking: tools, worktables, storage etc

- tinkering/DIY: separate table + shelf

- mountain ski gear for three people (soon four)

- hockey gear

- piano

Plus car (and her stuff), storage for seasonal clothes and such, separate rooms for kids, ideally a room for guests, IT den, deck and backyard (and garden stuff) just because I love it, so it adds up to ~1500sqft pretty quickly.

I wish I had bigger house, so I wouldn't have to share my garage between {1..3}

Fair! However, keep in mind that you're nearly 2 standard deviations above the average household size in the US [1], and probably above 2σ in physical activity as well... ;)

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242189/disitribution-of-...

Not necessarily a giant house, but many hobbies require having a detached house for noise isolation (music, woodworking, cars, etc.) or a garage to work with materials you don't want in your living area (glues, paints, 3D printer resin, etc.).

Exercise. I have a bike trainer and a rower. Plus I need stretching space. Add barbells and other equipment and one needs at least 144sq ft. That's bigger than most bedrooms.

I have plenty of hobbies thank you very much, I just don't find taking up a bunch of space for stuff I do occasionally to be a good tradeoff compared to living somewhere dense and walkable. Honestly, most of the things you listed sound like exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about - how much time did you actually spend last month doing woodworking, skiing, hockey, and piano? How often were your guest rooms occupied? How many of the seasonal clothes you store actually see the light of day again?

There are definitely downsides to having to cycle to a nearby music practice room or workshop space (I happen to live next to the community farm), or putting guests in the hotel round the corner rather than hosting them myself. But there are also upsides to doing these things as part of an actual community rather than in isolation (half the fun of making music is the social side, and at least some of the fun of cycling too). And plenty of other hobbies (team sports, theatre, ...) outright require living somewhere with enough other people around to make them doable.

Obviously the ideal would be to have a huge amount of personal living space and also a huge range of neighbours and facilities within walking/cycling distance. But given the inherent contradiction in that, I'm very glad to choose density (and while those who want the suburban lifestyle are welcome to pursue it in their own spaces, they shouldn't feel entitled to impose car traffic on the city; you can pay for your road use, pay for your parking, give way to pedestrians, follow speed limits, and carry strict liability for any injuries).

The US is not a good comparison because the house sizes are just ridiculous – and those huge houses are just as out of reach for most "common" people and are rapidly getting even more out of reach because they never were sustainable at all! But there’s a spectrum between 40m2 highrise flats and 800m2 single-family McMansions.

Not at all. Get outside the big cities and houses are very affordable. We’re talking 120m^2 homes for under $200k.

Yeah, but then I'd have to buy a car and drive it to get simple basic tasks done.

That's kind of the whole point. People want that.

Do they? Or are the places that people can afford constrained to offer that, making them think that what they can afford and what they _want_ are the same thing?

I live in a reasonably walkable section of Toronto, but I still need a car for some of what I do (if I got a bike trailer, I could reduce that need to a larger degree than I already have, but public transit where I live is suboptimal for short trips and doesn’t go everywhere we want).

I could not now afford the house I bought twelve years ago because the market has gone crazy (we estimate we could get 3–4x what we paid for the house—but then we’d have to find a place to live), especially for the more walkable sections of the city.

I _want_ more walkable, transit-able, and bikeable parts of the city. I also want it to be more affordable to more people in the city, because I don’t particularly want to force people to have 2 hour commutes into the city because they think they want more space, but in order to have more space they have to move where nothing is as reachable as it is here.

Is that why real estate in dense, walkable cities/neighborhoods is the most expensive in the country?

No one is saying get rid of suburbs. They’ll always be in the US. But when 95%+ of zoning laws make it so suburban sprawl is the _only_ thing that can get built, then you’re taking a choice away from the people who want to live in cities.

There's more choice than just 'megacity and walk everywhere' and 'bumfuck nowhere and drive everywhere'.

Small/medium towns with a fairly dense downtown/market square exist, and while yes, it's more useful to own a car there than in a large city, you still can get tons of things done by walking, biking or taking a bus.

Random example: Alsfeld, Germany, population 16,901. A 1900s house (3br, 120m^2, downtown) 180kEUR [1]. Within walking distance: daycare, multiple doctors/dentists/pharmacies, restaurants, stores... and a train station with an hourly regional train.

[1] - https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/130222273

Median house size is > 2000 sq ft, so common people are buying large houses. They're certainly not out of reach.

The US has (except maybe Australia) the largest median house sizes on the planet. Home ownership has bounced between 63% and 69% for over 50 years, and is currently rising again.

What force makes a smaller home sustainable but a larger one not sustainable?

800m2 is 8600 square feet. Thats easily less than 1% of houses in the US. The average house in the US probably less than 2500 sqft (232 m2).

I love living in a walkable city and a tiny-ass apartment (3 people, 75 square meters). When the neighborhood is attractive it becomes part of "your space". I don't need my whole world to be within the confines of these walls.

This is a key, I think. If you live somewhere that has no common space and nowhere to walk (which is most of US housing) you "need" the larger space of your own because you have nothing of any value available to you (unless you are willing to get in a car and navigate the hellscape of suburban sprawl that isolates these types of housing developments from each other and from any amenities).

It's a "tragedy of the commons" kind of scenario, since the more of this kind of living there is the worse the traffic gets and the more isolated everything gets from each other by stroads and walls of traffic.

Despite the article's suggestion that there's money to be made here I am doubtful that developers are going to be taking the risk. They have a formula that works and they are glad to keep running it. I guess at some point commutes get so bad that something has to give somewhere, but if anything the "remote first" revolution seems to just encourage more sprawl, since you don't need to live near where you work.

Removing the artificial restriction that you need to be close enough to the steel and concrete temple to go worship there 5 days a week means that people can now make more free choices about how to live.

That will result in some people choosing higher density areas and some people choosing lower density areas, but it should improve freedom of choice significantly, which is great for people.

> the "remote first" revolution seems to just encourage more sprawl, since you don't need to live near where you work.

It might be my impression, but lots of traditional tech companies have offices out in the suburbs. Because land is cheaper there for a sprawling single-story office park.

Remote work has done the opposite and allowed me to live in the city. And because I'm at a central site choosing where to commute I have more opportunities. Rather than living in one suburb and commuting to another suburb.

It’s shifted to some degree but it’s only in the past decade, two at most, almost no tech companies were actually in cities and most offices are still in suburban office parks. So most tech workers aren’t walking or taking public transit to their jobs.

and this is where things collide with capitalism. Once your neighborhood is a part of "your space", you're much more invested in that neighborhood and its future evolution. However, under the "rules" of a capitalist economy, in which the private ownership of real estate generally trumps most other concerns, you have very little ability to control the future of your neighborhood. If it starts changing in ways you don't like, it's not likely (though not impossible) that you can do anything about it.

This is at least part of the motivation for people seeking out their own larger properties, not to mention buying land adjacent to them: it's not necessarily that they have any use for the acreage, they just want to be able to exert (more) control over what happens in the "space around them".

Note: I'm not condoning that behavior in any way.

No- this is unintended consequences of anti-discrimination laws.

Capitalism had contractual things like deed restrictions and binding neighborhood covenants to deal with this problem, which were all but eliminated in the name of integration.

Of course we have trouble dictating the character of our neighborhoods- it was the express intent of those laws that we couldn't.

Yes, but you can make the US far more walkable without crushing home size by changing setback rules for homes and businesses and having mixed zoning. A major problem now is just the amount of space between things. Want to walk from one store to the other? Better cross two massive parking lots. Want to walk past six houses? Better cross some huge lawns. Want to walk between residential and business zoned locations? Fat chance.

Yes, a city constructed this way won't be as walkable as a European city. But it'd be a hell of a lot more walkable than existing suburban sprawl.

There's a whole world of difference between Manhattan and 2500-sqft single-family homes with large setbacks, street-facing garages, loads of surface parking, and vast backyards, set on culs-de-sac in exurban environments reachable only by car.

And it's not hypothetical. Every pre-war U.S. city has districts full of duplexes, tri-plexes, and other kinds of modest density -- with limited setbacks, small yards, spaced fairly close together, mixed in with commercial uses. Historically, many of these buildings would be owner-occupied.

These are medium-density neighborhoods. They look nothing like NYC, but they look nothing like the typical U.S. exurban development, either.

In my city these neighborhoods have all been taken over by lawyer's offices, therapists, accountants, etc., or turned into multiple unit housing for single people.

Yup. I’ve lived in a few dense cities in Asia and when I told people I owned a house in the US with its own yard that cost less than their 50 m^2 apartment in a block of 150 units they were shocked.

Plus most of bought cars if they could, especially families.

Most of the compromises on size of housing were due to affordability, not choice.

Berlin rents have risen a lot, but still is an exception to your rule. I pay less (with utilities) for a 3bedroom, 95sqm apartment in a super central location than what I paid for a (tiny) 1bedroom in Boston or for my room with 4 flatmates in NYC.

The available housing options govern our housing choices. I cannot afford a large flat in a very desirable and expensive neighbourhood, but I could possibly afford a very tiny flat there. If I want more space, I can live in a larger flat in a less desirable neighbourhood. If I want to own a car and have a car-centric lifestyle, I can live in a more distant suburb and live large. I can freely trade space, location, and cost as needed if the options exist. To the article's point, breaking the artificial scarcity on walkable neighbourhoods, and increasing the diversity of housing types, will allow more people to make these types of trade-offs.

The problem in the United States is there is almost no choice. If I want to live in walkable/bikable area, I might be fine with living in a tiny flat at a reasonable price. But because of zoning, parking minimums, discretionary review, setbacks, roads designed for traffic throughput etc. there is a huge shortage of these areas so they are not only small, but expensive.

We need to allow these types of communities for people to have choice.

>> would you want to live in a city like NYC? Would you like to raise a family in those conditions?

A good example of this is San Francisco. Only 13% of the population is under 18. NYC is 21.

NYC apartments are tiny because NYC just doesn't have enough housing in general, so everything that's allowed to be subdivided gets subdivided (and some things that aren't allowed get subdivided too).

Partly, but also smaller living space is in fact part of the tradeoff that you make when building stuff close together. It's a worthwhile tradeoff in my opinion, but I'm also not saying that single-family car-centric suburbs should be illegal for people who prefer it, unlike how building denser housing is illegal in many expensive cities.

While that's true, there's a significant difference between "you can't give everybody a McMansion" and "everybody must live in spaces objectively describable as 'tiny'". My objection is to the latter.

When I first played Sim City I imagined a future of towering soundproofed arcologies where everyone still had a private yard on a giant balcony, so you could increase density without overly decreasing living space per household. Is anyone trying to build like that?

I love tiny apartments. In Tokyo houses are tiny but enough. You have to be clever when there is no space. Also, we should be more careful with the space we use for living. Smaller living spaces equals more space for park, forests etc

How big are the homes that most people raise families in?

For houses? Probably about 2000 to 2500 sq. ft.

I think there's a happy medium. Perhaps closely spaced SFHs or row-houses near a small downtown with rail access to a larger city.

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