Super dense cities are efficient in some ways, but they have tons of other problems and they externalize tons of costs. What we're missing in the U.S. is human-scale density, especially in the form of cohousing arrangements.
Tall high-rises are not actually efficient. You know how much energy it takes to have elevators going up and down 40 floors along with all the other stuff? Land is not the single factor to calculate when we want efficiency.
Most folks would prefer the “missing middle” if ever given a chance to experience it.
NYC is one of the few places that can have a lot of super tall buildings really close to each other. That's because the bedrock is so shallow and the ground can take more weight. Los Angeles, by comparison, has a much deeper bedrock, which makes it difficult to build tall buildings very close together.
If you want to get a lot of housing, medium density is the way to go. Medium density is cheaper to build and maintain, can be built in more locations, and is more pleasant to live in.
Pre-1920s neighborhoods in the USA are dense, yet spacious. So much of the density problems in America are due to our over-reliance on cars.
Funny thing is, people still will pay top dollar to either live in these neighborhoods, or visit them on vacation (Savanah, Charleston, New Orleans, Ashville, ...).
It's a complete tragedy, the answer is right there. Just do the same thing they did then, but today.
The problem is that building like that has been outlawed with euclidean zoning.
This is the rub, right? We can only redevelop a block or two at a time, so the only choice is for 10+ story towers. Especially because land is so expensive in these cities.
I'm curious if new residential buildings (non-luxury if that even exists) in Paris or Barcelona are only 5-6 stories high.
That's not necessarily true: it's much easier to build a duplexes/triplexes than a high-rise. Companies that can build the former cannot necessarily build the latter. IIRC when Bloomberg downzoned many "missing middle" outer-borough neighborhoods and upzoned core areas to support high-rises in NYC, many small building companies couldn't transition and just folded.
> I'm curious if new residential buildings (non-luxury if that even exists) in Paris or Barcelona are only 5-6 stories high.
I'm curious to see actual data on this, but many (most? almost all?) European cities have zoning rules that prevent building much taller than that in residential areas. It's especially true near the city center, where the restriction may apply to all buildings. So my guess would be it's still pretty common to not build high-rises in European cities -- similar to many NYC neighborhoods outside Manhattan (that weren't downzoned by Bloomberg).
Notably, those cities have been very expensive for decades because they also slowed their pace of housing construction below demand.
Meanwhile, cities like Houston have kept prices down by granting tons of building permits. For the purposes of pricing (as opposed to urban design), it doesn't matter what form the new units take, as long as they get built.
Cities though have the problem of allowing much more space for jobs than they have for housing. You don’t want high density housing in your city? Fine, cap your employer zoning.
It’s a big country out there and people need to decentralize and stop trying to turn nice places into hong kong density.
Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.
The political incentive is to do the opposite. Make it cheaper and more attractive to employers, then make residential housing scarce. You get huge demand for housing, then employers have to pay more (generating more income tax revenues) even though all the money goes to landlords, then landlords have to pay more in property taxes. From the perspective of the self-interested government bureaucrat, this is the system working as intended.
> Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.
Except that then things are more spread out, and what you're using inefficiently then is transportation.
If you have a twenty story building with shops at the bottom and housing at the top, anyone in that building can walk to any of those shops, or any of the ones across the street.
There is enough land that we could build all of that stuff across a hundred square miles, but then everybody needs a car. And many people don't want that, but restrictive zoning prohibits the thing they do want.
You may not want to live like that, but plenty of people do. We should allow them.
I suspect that number is a lot lower than is claimed. It's only a very loud set of vocal urbanist activitsts who clamor for these changes and create the illusion of that demand. The reality is most people grow out of wanting to live in dense areas and walkability is very overrated. In fact walk scores basically don't matter when people actually shop for a house compared to other factors (price, size, location, schools, etc). And as people age and want to establish a family, the urban life quickly loses its attractiveness.
The real question is why should any neighborhood have to 'allow' anyone who wants to live there to do so? Am I entitled to living beachfront in Maui just because I want to? Should they have to change their zoning to permit that? I feel like incumbent residents have a right to maintain their neighborhood character, density, and quality of life. Those things get eroded when you have an influx of new residents and different density - you end up with streets, parks, and other amenities that no longer work the way they're supposed to. What I see happening is that a city will build itself over time into something very attractive, and newcomers want a piece of that, so they demand zoning changes at the cost of the incumbents who made that place attractive in the first place.
And walkability is a tradeoff for space. Pretty much everyone in my family are Single-family home for life kind of people, but they all enjoy visiting walkable places and talk about how nice they are. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's not that people don't value walkability, it's that there are very, very few good walkable places to live. Would even go as far to say close to none, but I'm sure some smaller towns are out there that go under the radar.
This is not supported by home prices in many housing markets. The walkable parts of cities tend to be among the most expensive in every metro area. Realtors even have a phrase for not being able to afford to live in the dense metro core: "drive until you qualify" (for a mortgage, given your income).
This is also weird thing to note given that real estate websites pay to license walk scores presumably because they believe that home buyers want this information.
That doesn't prove anything. We don't allow very many walkable spaces, so by supply and demand it only takes a few people who actually like walkable spaces to drive the prices up.
I think the idea that people like walkable spaces is correct, but it is hard to prove it.
Cities though have a problem of allowing much more surface area than people can reasonably traverse. You don't want traffic in your city? Fine, stop adding subdivisions.
We're not farmers. We benefit from other people, not from land. Stop this fantasy that everyone can have a country estate 15 minutes from the city center. It's geometrically impossible.
Nobody needs to use time "efficiently" by going 60 miles an hour. If you can't reach what you need on foot or bicycle, that is a land use problem, not a transportation problem.
For a closer example, visit Washington DC, and another poster recommended Montreal.
Obviously, the discussion above (read: comment thread elsewhere) about "middle density housing" is the same armchair urban planning as your comment, but middle density seems like a much more "moderate" solution by comparison to your proposal.
What's so hellish about a large building?
We still need to build ways for all the new people in those new suburbs to get to the rest of the city. Building to dense neighborhoods is a lot cheaper than father out ones (because we need a lot more distance to get them) As a bonus transit works better as you become dense.
- LA is already building various large expansions of public transit, as well as walking/biking infrastructure.
- Generally the shops basically come along with the housing. "Activating" the ground floor - putting retail or other public uses into the ground floor of buildings that are residential above is standard practice when building those taller residential buildings along main arteries, on busy corners, and so on.
which suffers from many difficulties and cost overruns because of existing layout.
I think it would be more cost efficient to build another city/town nearby from the ground, and people decide where they want to live given differences in cost and lifestyle.
That is ignoring the fact that in our perfect city above, just a few years later we will discover something new we forgot to account for and now our city is imperfect.