Opposition to High Density Development
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But being opposed to it generally, in a city no less, is a bit ridiculous. Either you want/need to live in a place with a ton of people or you don't. If you don't like traffic and neighbors upstairs don't live in a city. If you don't like long drives to the grocery store and needing to rely on a car to get around and on interpersonal business instead of professional employment, live in a city. But this middle of the road, cake and eat it too, cities designed for cars, urban sprawl by ordinance just makes things suck for everyone involved, it's the worst of both worlds.
My comment is that many people who prefer living in lower density areas are forced out due to lack of jobs in those areas.
The corollary to high housing prices is that people sprawl outward for lower prices and end up with very long commutes. Around me, ~40% of SF renters are paying more than 30% of income on housing. I for get the portion of people super commuting (> 90 minutes each way) but the % grows when SF adds more offices.
So prohibitions on dense housing screw over people that want a rural life, but are forced to take jobs in a city. They'll have a harder time even saving up to go back.
"So prohibitions on dense housing screw over people that want a rural life, but are forced to take jobs in a city."
According to the article in this post, people prefer lower density housing. I don't see how adding more higher density housing will meaningfully change that. Because as you make the commutes shorter, etc you entice more people to move there.
The goal is that when prices go up, there should be a way for people to build more homes that have a reasonable commute.
"The goal is that when prices go up, there should be a way for people to build more homes that have a reasonable commute."
If they can't, then that should encourage employers to look elsewhere and move.
It doesn't. That's why the most prosperous American cities have the longest commutes and least affordable housing.
If a metro area decided they don't want job growth and limited new office construction I'd be fine with that. But when a municipality allows new offices and prohibits new housing it hurts a lot of people.
No, one of the biggest lessons of COVID is that lots of people can't, and being in a field where you can can be a massive advantage in certain circumstances, which accelerates inequality when those manifest because it correlates strongly (though not perfectly) with higher income work.
Ironically, that's because we restrict density in cities.
Suppose you have a city, San Francisco, ~17,000 people per square mile. About a quarter of what it is in Manhattan.
For the same number of people, if the density was higher, the city would cover less area. And then the number of miles away from the city center you would have to go before you were living with cows would go down.
There are entire regions with small cities and towns where the commute is already reasonable, but the companies choose to bunch together in the biggest cities. Just look at Appalachia - plenty of small cities to choose from with vacant factories to be repurposed, vacant housing from population shrinkage, etc.
It all boils down to choices, and it's very difficult to influence those choices - where company locate, where people want to live, etc.
That is, rural folks would be much happier if the city had more density and a great public transit system that integrates with cars. But just the density would make things worse.
Where I live, you can pay your own rent alone working a full time minimum wage job. If you're turning that down, the trade off isn't worth it. You would rather live in a densely packed place if it enables you to do professional work not available to you otherwise.
It's always a trade off.
Again, a trade off. Why are benefits sacrosanct when we talk about this? Why is anything?
If a rural town doesn't have enough business to go around to support it's population, it shrinks. It becomes more rural. People make trade offs. Cities get denser. When it has enough business to support a larger population, it grows. When a city becomes unable to support it's population, it decays. People move away. There's an ebb and flow. But it is important to understand that nobody is being forced to do anything here, they're moving where their priorities are, no place is perfect, it's all about what you're willing to live with to get the benefits of where you live.
Because we're talking about supporting oneself. You can't support yourself with a minimum wage job and paying healthcare out of pocket.
That's my whole point. If you live in an urban environment it is hard to see how someone could do it, I understand, but you need to understand just how much cheaper it is to live in a place where you're not competing with 100 people for a place to live. When your rent is 350 bucks a month you can 100% support yourself on 1000 bucks a month, paying for insurance out of pocket.
"Not in my city" is the same thing on a smaller scale. We could take it to an absurd conclusion and say "let's just move to the jungle in the amazon and live for free, there's no traffic there either!" but that's not the point I'm making.
Health insurance is a big sticking point, I'm not trying to downplay the overinflated cost at all, even where I live it's still a huge burden and consideration. Too many people do without it, but that's anywhere you go, city or rural town. I don't believe this is a distinction of living inside or outside of a city, if anything, working class people in cities are more likely to do without because of inflated housing cost, and there's more working class people in cities than outside of them.
It's not easy living anywhere. But what negatives are you willing to live with for what positives?
People are rarely interested in living in dense urban areas due to the density itself. They are usually far more interested in the consequences of the density and the opportunities enabled by it.
If someone says give me your wallet or I'll stab you, that's still a choice. I wouldn't call it voluntary. It's a choice of survival.
Some people want to do something they consider more rewarding and meaningful, its like the age old trope of the small town girl moving to Los Angeles to be a movie star. They move to the city because it's a trade off, their priorities tell them that living in a more densely packed environment will make their life better.
But at the end of the day, it is always a choice.
We are talking about deciding to move somewhere with a higher quality of life. For some, that means better pay in an office and diverse food options a short drive/walk/subway ride away, in exchange for more rent and more people. For others, it means a better view of the night sky and less traffic and cheaper rent in exchange for lower paying work.
Exaclty, it varies by person. For some, it is a matter of survival, and can be dramatic with consequences on par with being physically attacked.
If anything, survival is easier outside of cities, because cost of living is cheaper and the minimum wage rate is the same.
Anyway, we started with you saying you want to move more rural but you can't. But is that true? Could you do it, if you were willing to work a different type of job?
Financial margins in rural areas have been decreasing over the last 100 years as corporations take over farms and people move to urban areas for more opportunities. There's not a lot of opportunity left in rural America.
Cities are economic machines. Everything is abstracted. There are overarching systems to everything. And it has to be that way, that's both the draw and the solution to the density.
Rural areas are entirely interpersonal relationships. People do business with one another. You have to do something within your local economy to get along.
So there's not a lot of opportunity to go work for the big chemical factory that used to support your entire company town. But there's plenty of opportunity to live a simple life, if that's what you want. The bug difference is that you have to do things for the people you directly interact with to get paid, it's much smaller scale. It's less about employment and more about interpersonal business.
Besides, in a modern society, unemployment rarely causes people to starve/freeze to death. The choice between urban/rural living is about quality of life, not survival.
Commendable, I'd say.
What's OP's course of action now? To move again?
I'm not excusing the effects of NIMBYism, but it's natural phenomena for many people and often not about raising property values, but resistance to change--especially as folks age and become less willing to adapt or move elsewhere.
Yes, if that's what I want. It's not really my backyard. it's proverbial, but we can't make the mistake of taking it literally. it's someone else's front yard. I have no say in it.
So I have a choice, move somewhere more rural, or enjoy the financial benefit of being an early resident of a growing community. But the onus is always on me, I cannot externalize my preferences onto others unwillingly. There are always decisions to be made, there is always a trade off. You're right about resistance to change.
Personally if where I live began to urbanize, I'd leave.
Isn't that exactly what those arguing for higher densities are doing?
telling people they:
- have to live next to a skyrise is externalizing.
- have to use public transit is externalizing.
- can't let their kids get a good education is externalizing.
- can't let their kids play safely without adult supervision is externalizing.
I'll freely admit zoning laws kind of suck in some instances, but you are going to be hard pressed to find a place that does not have them. In fact, the more dense the housing, the more rigorous the zone laws are likely to be. The reality almost everywhere is that one simply cannot do whatever one pleases with their property including keeping it from the government.
So, yes my proverbial view of your smog may well be legally protected and that might suck, but you and I are both also protected from a neighbor converting their property into a toxic waste dump.
A century of established case law say otherwise. If a private landowner wants to change the zoning on a parcel of land near established residences and the residences can show decrease in property values as a result of rezoning the courts have consistently awarded financial damages to the owners of the residences from the city that decides to change the zoning.
It’s just not reasonable to say, “the houses I saw growing up cannot change”
Why should I care if there's high density housing in cities if I don't live there? Let those people decide what they want for that area.
The problem in this case is that it's not different desires. The existing landowners in every area have the same incentive -- to increase artificial scarcity so that the land they already own increases in value.
The people this comes at the expense of are the future residents of that area, who for that very reason don't have a vote there. If you live in town A and get a job in town B, you might like for town A to have restrictive zoning (where you're selling your old house) and town B to have relaxed zoning (where you're buying a new one), but you only get a vote in town A, until you've actually moved to town B at which point your incentives invert. So if zoning is local, every place structurally has unduly restrictive zoning.
This is one of the few places where local control doesn't work, specifically because the interests of current residents and future residents are in conflict.
Only above a certain population number. Many smaller cities and towns don't have this issue.
"at which point your incentives invert."
Only if you own land. And only if your ideals support it. With a sufficient renting population there can be change.
"The existing landowners in every area have the same incentive -- to increase artificial scarcity so that the land they already own increases in value."
If this is true, then why even have a discussion? I mean, it's settled then - this is a democracy and the voting base will not support changes. Otherwise, there are multiple incentives and desires, so your statement would be an over simplification.
Then we are also ignoring effects of housing crunches. In theory, jobs people are moving to should have leadership that realizes the issue and moves to alleviate it (and have competitive cost advantages), or doesn't move there in the first place. Same for people, if it doesn't make financial sense to move somewhere, then they will select other options. We are already seeing some of these affects in movement from places like CA to TX.
So only every place where it matters then.
Not having restrictions on 20 story buildings in farm country where nobody has any incentive to build 20 story buildings is irrelevant.
> Only if you own land. And only if your ideals support it. With a sufficient renting population there can be change.
This is another instance of "only where it matters" -- you have an area zoned exclusively for single family homes and nobody is renting because nobody who has to rent can afford to live there.
Also, this is "solved" by the scam of rent control. You bring just enough of the existing renters into the "screw the new guys" fold to prevent changes adverse to landlords.
> If this is true, then why even have a discussion? I mean, it's settled then - this is a democracy and the voting base will not support changes.
The question is at which level of government it should be decided. You do it at the state level instead of the town level and now there are a lot of people willing to remove zoning restrictions in the places they want to move to.
Not having restrictions on 20 story buildings in farm country where nobody has any incentive to build 20 story buildings is irrelevant."
This brings us to the root of the issue - job location and density. There's no reason companies can't move to existing small cities or towns. They don't have to cluster together in places like SF. It's tough to influence those choices, just like the preference of people to want low density housing. Some of it occurs naturally, at least for the worst offenders, like CA to TX in recent years.
"You do it at the state level instead of the town level and now there are a lot of people willing to remove zoning restrictions in the places they want to move to."
Are there though? I haven't really seen this. It also ignore local concerns. Maybe in low density places they don't care about higher density housing going in because the setbacks are naturally large. This changes if you go to a medium density area.
There is. They put their offices where they can find workers. You can staff a Google office from the people who already live in San Francisco, not from the people who already live in Tuscon.
And people don't want to live in a company town. If you live in a major city which has offices for every major company in your industry, you can buy a house there and not worry about what happens if you switch jobs. Are you going to want to buy a house some place you'd have to sell it if you ever wanted to work for a different company?
> Some of it occurs naturally, at least for the worst offenders, like CA to TX in recent years.
That only happens when the offenders are extraordinarily egregious. And even then, they're not moving from San Francisco to a thousand separate little towns. They're pretty much all going to Austin -- which has a higher population than San Francisco.
> Are there though? I haven't really seen this.
Have they actually moved zoning control to the state level anywhere? There are proposals to do it in California but I'm not sure that any of them have been implemented.
Not just implemented, but even studied/surveyed.
If you need a given amount of tax revenue per person, set the tax rate so that you get that amount of tax revenue per person. This might be a different rate based on a different housing market. So what?
To be blunt, a high density housing project going into a low density community is literally leaching off the existing tax basis. Exacerbating this is the fact that developers often know how to game local tax laws further reducing their tax burdens and thus shouldering it on others.
Doing so, generally, will make things worse for someone like GP, because when they do go into the city, it will be less car-friendly.
So I think your reply is somewhat less than charitable.
Here in NYC we call these folks 'Manhattanites against the Manhattanization of Manhattan'. Shockingly, quite a few of them exist.
What utter nonsense.
“city” encompasses suburbs/exurbs as well as urban cores
Functionally I'd say that the urban space ends where mass transit ends.
I didn’t say that a city encompasses (it's associated) suburbs, I said that the term “city” encompasses, within its meaning, suburbs, to the extent that these are often literally their own cities. The term does not only refer to metropolitan cores. When the source article refers to “virtually every city in the USA bans single family homes...”, you have to understand that virtually every city in the USA is not a metropolitan core city. The vast majority of cities in the USA are suburbs or isolated small cities in rural areas that are exurbs of or even not associated tightly with a metropolitan core.
Weighted by population things are different, but that's not what is referenced.
Naturally, people living in suburbia mostly do so willingly, and resist attempts to erect cities on the middle of that tissue. If they wanted to live in a city, they'd move to one!
It probably seems nice to these people at first.
Their property values go up, undesirable (a.k.a. poor) neighbors get pushed away to the outskirts of town, gridlock traffic is kept at bay, the town maintains its low-rise charm (whatever that means), etc.
But longer term, it causes strange distortions. In San Francisco, the people working the customer services jobs are sometimes homeless because there is nowhere affordable within commuting distance. Artists and musicians just straight-up leave, causing the city to become a cultural wasteland. And in the past year or two we're finally starting to see talent flight due to the out-of-control rent spirals and the rise of remote work.
Nobody's really benefitting from this; it's just lousy regulatory capture by landowners that's begun to backfire on them. You can't encase a tree in a glass box and expect it to magically stop growing. Ultimately, you just have to let people build what they want on their land, or your city will not only stop growing, it will begin to wither.
US GDP would be 50% higher than it is now if we did not have exclusionary zoning laws. (https://www.theregreview.org/2018/06/14/somogyi-zoning-codes...)
If New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area alone removed their exclusionary and needlessly restrictive zoning laws, the average worker's income would rise by $9,000 per year.
Sometimes the city comes to you. That's what's happening all over, where people are in suburbs outside the city, but the city grows and suddenly they learn that where they live isn't considered the outskirts anymore, and everyone's pissed that they oppose high density housing.
They even considered this a benefit when they decided that as the population rose their property value would go up. They considered the state of affairs they're complaining about to be a good investment decision.
The suburbs are never truly outside the city, this is an illusion, and everyone knows it, and they knew it going in, they're just pretending they're getting the short end of the stick here.
In every place except for a handful of cities on the West Coast this is still true.
If I had moved to San Francisco or San Jose in 1980 to live in a nice single-family neighborhood setting, there is no way that anyone could have predicted just how many people would have moved to Silicon Valley in the next 40 years. If I had moved to Minneapolis, or Kansas City, or Austin, TX in 1980, I would still (most likely) be in that single-family neighborhood and not having to worry about developers wanting to put up a boatload of high-rises around me.
Well, thanks to restrictive zoning, they probably could have, in net if not in gross; there's a reason that while lots of money has moved into Silicon Valley, it (San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Clara counties combined) have seen less growth since 1980 than the East Bay, absolutely and relatively.
That's not always true either. I moved as far away from the city as I could, while still remaining close to my job, friends, and family. I chose my particular, because they already had zoning laws against high-density housing on the books. One of those was, no buildings over 6 stories. Now all of a sudden, they're allowing buildings up to 36 stories, and I get to have one overlooking my back yard. This isn't what I signed up for.
So you stayed in proximity to enjoy the benefits?
I'm not downplaying it BTW, I've been in that situation before. It's a little different when you're from a city, and it's more than just exotic food at midnight. I'm from a city too, that's where my life was, that's where my family is. I have experienced first hand my little suburb becoming an urban-clinging-onto-suburban-delusion hellscape.
Still though, we stayed in proximity and expected the world to stagnate for us. I realized that's not going to happen and I left. The city will grow, and like it or not you never left it, you just avoided the trade off for a while.
The question of whether one form of housing development is better than the other is a red herring.
What we must ask is why we've organized cities the way we have, whether we can change how they are organized, and if we even should. That's because, let's face it, there's a form of NIMBY for both. Create more high density housing and the people with McMansions complain. Build some McMansions and the high density people cry "gentrification!" None of these people are going away, and neither one necessarily needs to lose their way of life.
The way I see it, there's too much a dichotomy between the city-life and the suburban or rural life. We might find ways to for them to better work together
For instance, although high density housing can be a good thing for many, from a structural standpoint they mostly make sense in dense urban cities and the outskirts of said cities. But why have dense urban cities in the 2020's? Why can't suburbs actually live up to the urb part?
Maybe we can actually use a lot of the vacant land we still have in America to create systems of small cities that can satisfy the needs of the many as well as the few? I don't think that there would be as much an opposition to high density development if it could be planned in such a way not to step on the toes of those who don't want to be around high density housing while still having a place for it. It would be better for policing and a sense of community.
Better yet, create networks of paths for bikes and tiny vehicles between said small cities. I mean actual bike paths, not the fake ones we paint on existing roads designed for cars. Economic opportunities could be created along those paths and make it simpler for towns to have their own cultures yet be involved with each other and easy to travel between without the hell of vehicle traffic.
I guess my thought is rather vague, but I still feel that we always end up asking the wrong questions.
I think a big problem is that laws as they are prevent variety. Either everything must be single family homes with huge setbacks and wide roads, or it is doomed to be bought up by large apartment developers. Is it a threat to your ability to have a yard and two car garage if the house next door is a duplex and the end of the block has a corner store with a couple apartments above it? No, but the laws make it so that only your yard and two car garage can exist in your neighborhood regardless.
If I had to choose between protecting "housing value" and having people be homeless (or rather, the working class spending 60-70% of their income on housing), I'd side with the high density people.
More specifically,
>For instance, although high density housing can be a good thing for many, from a structural standpoint they mostly make sense in dense urban cities and the outskirts of said cities. But why have dense urban cities in the 2020's? Why can't suburbs actually live up to the urb part?
There is a huge difference between Manhattan and Amsterdam, and Amsterdam's multifamily housing is what alot of YIMBYs argue we should have; however alot of Amsterdam's housing is completely banned in the US.
It's possible that one side is more morally wrong than the other, and it's at least inherently true. In fact I would bet we'd agree on which is the most morally wrong. That doesn't really matter because both sides have valid positions.
[1] This presumes that the gentrification complaint is a good faith one. Instead, it could amount to "I want my neighborhood to be remain one of small, single-family homes, but I don't want it to rise in price." I guess it's fine to want it, but I'm not sure that it's a problem that policy should solve.
[2] Increasing density in this way may also hinder gentrification. People who are causing gentrification by buying up homes in such neighborhoods are looking for that style of neighborhood. If some of the houses get replaced by high-rise apartments, well, do the gentrifiers really want to live in that neighborhood?
For said high density to be able to operate, people should widely use mass transit, because streets cannot and should not have room to let everybody drive a car.
This is why suburbia with single-family houses and driving everywhere, and a dense city with high-rises and subway are like oil and water, they can't mix freely.
A suburb living up to the urb part is really just a town or a small city. As for why you have suburbs, I think the primary reasons are economic, though there are social (and in some places racial) reasons as well. As it currently stands, ignoring the problem of atmospheric carbonization and climate change, it's cheaper to centralize industry. This issue is quite poignant in the tech industry, where things are extremely centralized, and where many people flock to the handful of cities that have the biggest tech companies.
There are existing solutions that would "create systems of small cities that can satisfy the needs of the many as well as the few." If US trains did not suck, Lawrence, Worcester, Springfield and more would see an economic boom and take pressure off the Boston housing market. I can fly into Schiphol overnight and take a train to Hilversum in the morning more easily and vastly more reliably than I can take the MBTA to Amtrak to New York.
I personally really like a hub and spoke styled system for cities and towns, we have a little of that here in my neck of the woods (south-east Michigan). I can choose to live in a fast(ish) growing city or it's burbs, the small cozy town 15 minutes north of the city, or 20 minutes west in the rural country. To your point about biking trails, I'm in total favor of these types of developments and have been absolutely elated about the growth of it in my region.
[0] This is a recent map of the built and in-progress routes, it uses Ann Arbor, a small city with ~120k pop, as the hub, and connects it's to its various sister cities. It's got a long way to go, but having ridden some of these stretches, it's been an awesome experience to say the least. Part of this has been that, yes, it connects up small towns such as Chelsea, Dexter, and Ypsilanti, but it also connects up with various parks and recreation areas.
I've been planning a move from the city into the country, and these paths are part of the reason why. It doesn't really allow me to bike in on the daily, but it does make it a LOT more reasonable to spend an afternoon biking into the city, grabbing coffee, hitting the theater, grabbing dinner, and then grabbing groceries before heading back. Pair this with a remote job, and I don't think I would actually end up using my car very often, this is a huge win in my opinion.
[0] https://www.washtenaw.org/DocumentCenter/View/1258/B2B-Overv...
I don't know if it is just where I live (Seattle) or if it is common in other big cities trying to densify as well, but the "gentrification!" chant seems to be prevalent across both sides, not just the McMansion side.
Here we get "gentrification!" yells even when high-density residential buildings are constructed. In fact, we have NIMBYs fighting against increasing density behind their chant of "gentrification!" and "we have to preserve the character of this neighborhood!" at the same time.
Anecdotally, there's a lot of mythology in America about the supremacy of single family exclusive neighborhoods that's contradicted by actual numbers (mentioned in the abstract). There's also people's preference for the thing they know and at this point we have two generations that have grown up in single family exclusive neighborhoods.
It's really difficult to soften this kind of opposition.
Can you accept that your preferences are not shared by large numbers of people? And that they have free will and know what they want?
I'm not going to sugar coat it, public schooling is terrible in most dense large cities in America. Raising a kid in general is terrible in large cities. Without these perspectives it is bogus to claim "flawed data".
Solve schooling and create safe places for children to grow and play without the need to constant adult supervision before condemning suburbia.
I'm not saying that density is without merits but it is certainly not without flaws.
BTW, I would love to know more about why you feel suburbia destroys local businesses and how it exacerbate homelessness, unless your argument is that higher density is more houses and thus fewer homeless. If you do believe this, you need to do some more research on the causes of chronic homelessness.
I don't see how this is relevant to housing, unless you also believe public schooling worldwide is terrible in most dense cities. It's a uniquely American problem that public schooling is terrible in all but the most elite of zip codes. Rural schools suffer the same problem too, and it has little to do with housing (except for, surprisingly, Texas, which allocates funding for schools at the state level). In short, in the US, school quality is not a function of density; it's a function of funding; and in the US school funding is primarily allocated from property taxes.
>BTW, I would love to know more about why you feel suburbia destroys local businesses and how it exacerbate homelessness,
Suburban zoning (as designed in America) lead to strip malls and big box dependence. When every store is 10 miles from each other, you end up in a situation where Walmart becomes the only game in town. Secondly, the parking requirements also increase the fixed costs for any business; which limits the type of businesses you can open. You can see this effect in a the types of businesses and restaurants you have in San Jose vs San Francisco. San Jose is a larger city than SF but is far more hostile to local businesses.
To be clear, I'm not advocating that every city should be Manhattan. The missing middle housing (https://missingmiddlehousing.com/) has been posted a number of times, and Not Just Bikes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0) goes into it as well. There's a middle ground that is better than American designed suburbs that aren't as suffocating as Manhattan.
A simple plot of funding per student vs test scores would lay that to rest. Some of the worst school systems in the country spend the most per student. If we went to worldwide data, I don't think we would find that Singapore and Finland spend more than the US on schools, but their schools are vastly superior. (A real comparison would involve some serious economic analysis; maybe someone's done that?)
> "San Jose is a larger city than SF but is far more hostile to local businesses"
Since I live in San Jose, I'd like to see what support you have for this statement. Taxes, regulations, crime, wages...?
>Since I live in San Jose, I'd like to see what support you have for this statement. Taxes, regulations, crime, wages...?
Regulations. To be specific I'm talking about how housing density affects local businesses and minimum parking requirements for businesses is one of those regulations.
I also have first had experiences with several small town schools in America and while I agree it is a mixed bag, what I can say is that community expectations make or break the school.
I have lived in areas where the community had no expectation that their kids attend college and to no surprise, the quality of the school was crap. I currently live in a community that expects all children to go to college and thus the quality of the system is great.
Seriously? You're seriously asserting that small businesses would rather be in SF than in SJ, because of minimum parking?
We can do some research on that. I don't think it's going to come out the way you like, though. The research would have to do with cost-of-doing-business, profitability, etc. etc.
As for schools & population density: I think you're shifting the goal posts after the game's turned against you. First it was :
> In short, in the US, school quality is not a function of density; it's a function of funding.
So, just so we're clear: you're giving up on that one?
I'm asserting that some types of businesses cannot exist due to the low density requirements due to parking requirements + lack of traffic. Whether any arbitrary local business can exist in SJ and be more profitable is obviously something an individual business owner as to weigh.
For example, here is one effect I was talking about how parking regulations affect the types of restaurants you can open: https://twitter.com/BayBetter/status/1306681675301048320
When you look at restaurants in San Jose vs San Francisco I don't think you can argue that density didn't play a factor.
>So, just so we're clear: you're giving up on that one?
No it's not; I see now you aren't the same poster as GP; the assertion was schools in high density neighborhoods are poor. My response is that there are other, more pertinent factors at play, like funding, that affect school quality and that simply upzoning will not destroy schools. Discussing the minutiae of the return of funding on school performance isn't relevant the topic of high density development.
I showed in another post how "parking requirements" are a bogus issue, in reality. I can walk (and do so every day with the dog) to a corner mall with two Chinese restaurants, Japanese restaurant, water store, sandwich shop, nail salon, barber shop, florist, watch repair business, dental office, tea business, pizza place, health food store, bike shop, post office, Safeway, IHOP, and Chase bank branch. Plus a very large Chinese restaurant going up where the Rite Aid used to be.
All sharing the same parking lot.
Is it paradise? No, but some people prefer it to urban squalor.
You've honed into one small aspect of my argument and ignored your own counter argument that you've made. I don't understand what point you are trying to prove. It's minutiae because, as you've already shown, Singapore has amazing schools while having incredibly high population density. The link between school budgets and performance is not completely divorced as it has been shown within America there is a correlation. However those arguments, and the research behind them are simply not relevant to the current discussion. The claim was schools in dense neighborhoods are worse. I claimed that funding was a far more important factor. You've shown that Singapore has exceptional schools in the densest urban capital.
>I can walk (and do so every day with the dog) to a corner mall with two Chinese restaurants, Japanese restaurant, water store, sandwich shop, nail salon, barber shop, florist, watch repair business, dental office, tea business, pizza place, health food store, bike shop, post office, Safeway, IHOP, and Chase bank branch. Plus a very large Chinese restaurant going up where the Rite Aid used to be.
It's also snowing in Denver so global warming must not exist. Like seriously, what are you trying to argue here and what does it have to do with high density development?
>No, but some people prefer it to urban squalor.
Again, there is a mountain of options between San Jose and Manhattan and these cities have existed in Europe for longer than America has been around. To consider a city like Amsterdamn "urban squalor" because they have mutli-family zoning is just ignorant. Children can walk to school in the "urban squalor" of Amsterdam (which is almost 3x as dense as San Jose). San Jose still struggles with having sidewalks in many areas.
Let me tell you how small businesses (like sandwich shops or nail salons or tutoring academies) work in San Jose:
You find an empty storefront in a strip mall on some street corner. You don't put it in the middle of a busy street like this San Francisco place. If you do, it's probably set back a little from the street with parking in front of it.
The strip mall has a large shared parking lot for all the stores, and as long as your shop doesn't have extremely high customer counts, you're good to go. If you're a marijuana dispensary or something high traffic, you may have a problem.
Would you like some pictures of little sandwich shops around here?
However I am not convinced that is what has happened in the US and Canada's suburban development with regards to the overwhelming adoption of single family homes.
Charles Marohn, a former city planner and engineer, has written about this "the free market has spoken" position as his own previous position on this topic which he no longer holds:
> At this point in my life, I was a self-described free-market Republican with an outspoken passion for markets and my chosen profession of civil engineering, which to me was a technical way to say “city building.” If I had been pushed to reconcile my rejection of congestion pricing with my support for the free market, I would have had no problem. I would have said something like:
> > Markets are about the expression of personal preference. It was clear that, since most people drove automobiles, auto-based infrastructure was the clear market preference. Since most people lived in single-family homes, they were also the clear market preference. Given those clear and obvious preferences—combined with the fact that people paid taxes and expected the government to respond to their desires—charging people more for something they already paid for was a ploy to benefit the rich. Instead of congestion pricing, the state should have been building more capacity.
The ubiquity of a given mode of something, in this case single family homes in US and Canadian suburbs, is not necessarily evidence that people overwhelming want or support those modes. Especially if there is rarely, if ever, a true alternative available to actually choose instead.
Further, even if we assume that the free market _did_ actually freely choose this mode that it should stand unquestioned in perpetuity. Needs and desires change as people and the world change together.
0: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/10/25/my-journey-fr...
Anyone in the suburbs can move to the city if they want to, and the ubiquity of expensive downtown condo projects for empty-nesters demonstrates that a fair number do. So your citing of a lack of alternatives is pretty unconvincing. You're left with forcing people to do what they choose not to.
In the most prosperous cities there's an entire conversation around displacement because costs are too high for people to live where they group up. So no, not everyone can.
> you citing of a lack of alternatives is pretty unconvincing.
There's a government commission deciding how much of each type of housing can exist. What alternative do people have other than living in what has been allowed? We can look at price to reveal preferences and the price per interior square foot is highest close to jobs. That's a far stronger signal than a survey that doesn't even ask people to imagine the tradeoffs.
Given that much or even most high-density housing in big cities is rental and not condo or other ownership, it does seem like most people worldwide prefer to own. I don't have the data on single-family vs. multi-unit.
Canada and the US are nowhere near the top of the list.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/home-ownership-rat...
[2] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/countries-with-the-highe...
I demonstrated the home ownership is well over 50% worldwide. I conceded that that might well be more condos / flats / coops in other countries, but I don't have that data.
As for single-family being the cheapest to build: that is quite likely true worldwide outside of urban cores. If you think it's not, it's on you to prove it. If it IS true, then it's obviously not a US political problem.
My point about single-family being cheapest to build is indeed a US political problem, because through law/taxation we have incentivized it to be. By cheapest to build, I mean including municipal development charges and the land cost. The external costs of these developments (increased carbon emissions, less efficient land use) are not being paid for by the developer, so taxpayers/local governments are not being forced to pay for that burden.
Having lived in suburbs, exurbs, dense and extremely dense cities, I find most people have no idea of the benefits and disadvantages of each place.
My impression is that the vast majority of suburbanites live in thoroughly suboptimal conditions and that their health and social lives would be massively better served by living in more dense and walkable areas.
And yet, they don't believe that. What are you going to do, force them?
https://faculty.ucmerced.edu/jtrounstine/Skittles_UAR_ALL.pd...
So we're in agreement, then? zoning should stay the way it is now?
How about everyone can build the type of house they want on their own land.
It does not follow that we need to regulate the number of kitchens and locations of doors in a house. Because kitchens and doors are often the only difference between a oneplex, duplex, triplex, and fourplex.
The point of zoning should be to channel market demand not suppress it, but the current state of America makes me question if that's possible. Perhaps a system where price per square foot going over a threshold triggers an automatic upzoning. There's a whole spectrum of housing for America to rediscover: https://missingmiddlehousing.com/
Private property doesn't mean "mine and mine alone"; it means you get to use it in a way accordingly granted by the state's monopoly of force.
Back in my younger days I had a 600$ apartment in LA right next to the train. Moderately safe area, and I didn't need a car. 10$ an hour was livable. Hell it was downright nice. 3$ bottles of Soju and 4$ Tortas. LA used to be a great place.
Now that same apartment is 1300$. In most of LA, really America, you need a car. With a car you're out like 500 to 800$ a month on the low end.
Before you know it even making good money your very very poor. If I get fired I don't need to keep making my car payment, having a car loan puts you in a bad spot.
> Virtually every city in the United States bans multifamily homes in at least some neighborhoods, and in many cities most residential land is restricted to single family homes. This is the case even though many metropolitan areas are facing skyrocketing housing costs and increased environmental degradation that could be alleviated by denser housing supply. Some scholars have argued that an unrepresentative set of vocal development opponents are the culprits behind this collective action failure. Yet, recent work suggests that opposition to density may be widespread. In this research note, I use a conjoint survey experiment to provide evidence that preferences for single-family development are ubiquitous. Across every demographic subgroup analyzed, respondents preferred single-family home developments by a wide margin. Relative to single family homes, apartments are viewed as decreasing property values, increasing crime rates, lowering school quality, increasing traffic, and decreasing desirability.
My personal values make "decreasing desirability" is the biggest factor, but I can't read the article to see if I'm representative.
What is worth more?
The average house in the country with a couple of acres of land or a 700square foot condo in Manhattan.
Generally the presence of other people tend to push up property values as it brings in a lot more amenities.
I'm not saying it's a majority, but I think a lot of suburb-dwellers would rather live in one or either of the country or the city, but are stuck in the 'burbs for the public schools.
Yes, the economic value and desirability are exactly the same. You just seem to discount the location of the condo as not being part of the value the condo is providing. But it is in fact the most important part of the value.
That's not it.
If you have a hundred acres of land and a hundred families and you require every house to be built on an acre of land, housing will be pretty expensive, because even the poor will have to pay the price for a full acre, when you might otherwise have mix of half acre lots, two acre lots, etc.
If you have a hundred acres of land and two hundred families and you require every house to be built on an acre of land, housing will be really expensive, because building enough for everyone is prohibited by law. And relaxing the zoning to allow higher density will lower housing prices because the supply of housing increases.
That's not because people don't want to live there anymore, it's just because you don't have to outbid your neighbors in a fight over the artificially scarce housing anymore because if you get more people you can build more housing.
And there's nothing about allowing higher densities that prohibits you from paying for the lower density housing -- it just doesn't prohibit someone else from doing otherwise. Which actually makes lower density housing more affordable, because you can buy it without having to outbid people who would choose higher density housing given the option.
this is why rent is so cheap in manhattan, san fransisco, london, etc
People who want to live in a single-family residence, they hate the noise from inconsiderate neighbors, and weird smells (cooking or otherwise). They hate fighting for parking. Technically, it is possible to construct multi-family buildings with good noise insulation and decent venting. In reality, people who have had a lot of miserable experiences in apartment buildings and dorms know that this will emphatically not happen. It could! It really could! But it won't.
It would be great if we were angels, but we are not. The people who construct apartment buildings cut so many corners, and we have ongoing evidence of issues with maintaining those buildings, which sometimes do things like collapse. Some people are not a lot of fun to live near, and people who recognize this want to put them at arm's length.
Suburban life is far, far more expensive for it to be sustainable than it is currently priced in most American suburbs. This issue cannot be overlooked.
We can have a conversation about the costs, but we should really focus on the conversation on hand -- people have real preferences.
In a similar light, I pay property taxes on the land I ranch. I'm a software developer but I raise beef cattle and horses. Please let me know how you propose I pay for my massive land use outside of the taxes I already pay. Just keep in mind, that it would probably be best if other small business owners also agreed with your tax proposals.
The problem is most cities only allow two kinds of development: Low density or high density. We're missing the middle!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing
I've really enjoyed these two YouTube channels on the subject.
"Oh the Urbanity" has a great video on Montreal's "missing middle" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYCAVmKzX10
And "Not Just Bikes" discusses a "missing middle" neighborhood in Toronto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
https://faculty.ucmerced.edu/jtrounstine/Skittles_UAR_ALL.pd...
That said, I've long thought that the opposition to high density development is partly driven by the complete asynchrony between private development and public infrastructure. I live in a rural area adjacent to a medium-size metropolitan area (pop ~400K). With alarming frequency, private entities put up high-rise residential structures; but beyond cursory project review and maybe an access lane or two our municipal governments do nothing with foresight. There is no consideration given to the system-wide impact of these dense developments.
The sweet spot is when you have space, and others do not have space.
As for infrastructure, I am convinced there is no in between possibility. Either you optimize for dense living, or non dense living. There is no world where we can have our cake and eat it too.
One thing is verbal preference in questionnaire, a different thing is revealed preference in the market, where realistic economic constraints are applied (equi-affordable high density apartments would be in much more desirable locations than single-family homes, in the same location high-density apartments would be much cheaper).
Revealed preference is just a polite way of describing either exploiting vice or taking advantage of someone in a weaker economic position. Works well enough for your average A/B test on a small website, but we can and should be more aspirational when dealing with housing, community, and society.
More housing should certainly be built, but the YIMBY crowd ignores the inherent dis-incentives that one has towards more housing near them. People bring in the morality of more/cheap housing, which is fair enough, but isn't sufficient to get people to change their behavior.
I don't want to drive to those things. I want to live among them.
Not everyone dislikes density and not everyone is motivated by rising housing prices. People are different. It's why I find it so silly that US zoning has created a lifestyle monoculture through most of the US.
> ... but isn't sufficient to get people to change their behavior.
That may still be true, despite what I say here.
I feel like as a country we should be spreading out, not huddling. But i also dislike living in cities, so maybe that's just me.
There is a lot of opposition to high density that is racist and selfish. However, in my experience, a lot of people who are not ignorant or racist are opposed to high density housing because it is built in places that lack infrastructure to support high density housing. I think there would be a lot less opposition if cities were more proactive in improving infrastructure (more parks, mass transit, wider roads, etc.) before high density housing was developed.
One thing or the other has to happen, and there is demand for more development now. Let the development happen and the demand for infrastructure will follow.
I've seen this objection a few times now but never actually seen it sourced. Do you have a source?
I feel like there's some kind of conflict between that being true and the fact that suburbs can't afford to maintain the infrastructure that they _do_ have.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/8/weve-built-citi...
To add, my experience is limited to living on the edge of a mid sized city that is currently seeing lots of growth in sections that were rural (think 2 lane roads and wide open meadows and creeks). I have no idea why people oppose HD housing in big cities or rural areas.
There are many enormous negative externalities associated with suburban development: that this kind of forced restrictive zoning is responsible for GDP being _50% lower_ than it otherwise would be (https://www.theregreview.org/2018/06/14/somogyi-zoning-codes...), that it vastly increases carbon emissions by necessitating that everyone drive everywhere for every trip, and that it is responsible for the vast majority of the housing affordability and homelessness crisis.
The laws of supply and demand are simple, yet people seem to think it can't apply to housing.
"South Korea says it will boost available housing nationwide with a positive supply “shock” as President Moon Jae-in struggles to tame soaring home prices that are weighing on his approval ratings." (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-04/south-kor...)
In Tokyo, a huge megacity with a population of 37 million people, apartment rents can be incredibly cheap (https://twitter.com/IDoTheThinking/status/139141180481584743...), $400/month in an area only a 20 minute train ride from the center of town. There is not one city in the United States where this is true, because every city makes affordable housing illegal to placate rich NIMBYs.
Suburban NIMBY aesthetic and lifestyle preferences that are forced on everyone are causing middle-income and lower-income people to cut back on food, transportation, healthcare, and retirement savings. (https://twitter.com/aaronAcarr/status/1460393017639153673)
If it is wrong to force someone who prefers a suburban area to live in a dense urban area, is it not also wrong to force people who prefer cheaper rents, walkability, and the amenities of urban life to pay 3-6x as much to live in a desolate, anti-social, car-centric suburb?
I like my medium density neighbourhood and I like being in a city that has them.
If I wanted to live in a tower block I'd move more centrally or to another city.
I also don't think that people who don't live somewhere, or are temporarily staying somewhere, should have a say in this over established families.
Self driving will be an interesting addition to the mix. We will probably come up with new cultures around that technology.
According to the article, this is a common desire.
I have not studied the issue. Are there examples of where switching from low density to high density worked out well?
That's the default for most cities around the around besides American cities where low density suburbs eventually start building 4/5 story buildings and then taller ones.
- I don't want to share my street with anyone, let alone a wall.
- I don't want increased traffic.
- Increased population density also tends to increase crime.
- Increased population density has economic benefits that tend to go to companies and developers, not me.
- It's too hard to get infrastructure built. Roads will never be enough and we'll never have good public transit.
- Culture is too antagonistic. Public shared spaces with no charge or admission control always get overtaken by inconsiderate, loud people. The less of them, the better.
"Increased population density also tends to increase crime."
This is a myth. Murder rates by county https://i.redd.it/xl23t365qub41.png
"Increased population density has economic benefits that tend to go to companies and developers, not me."
This is a self fulfilling prophecy. The thing killing budgets of the middle and working class in cities is the cost of housing. The cost of housing is so high because we prohibit building more of it!
"It's too hard to get infrastructure built. Roads will never be enough and we'll never have good public transit."
We use to be good at this. America had great transit before WW2. Other rich countries are still good at building it. We should not accept the status quo here.
"Culture is too antagonistic. Public shared spaces with no charge or admission control always get overtaken by inconsiderate, loud people. The less of them, the better."
American's go on vacation and come back raving about the parks and plazas of Europe so there's plenty of American's that would enjoy the things we outlaw.
I helped a friend run for city council years ago at a time when almost everyone else on the council and the mayor were connected to the property or construction industries. They wanted more development because they got paid -- the cost of housing is high, so let's build more so we can make more money. This is what people who currently live in smaller suburbs or rural areas see as driving the push for more housing -- more greed from their corrupt city council.
You're mad because a business is making money? Developers increase the supply of housing. It's a net good that housing supply increases rather than stagnates.
That's how markets are suppose to work. Make money by making something people want to buy.
It shouldn't require a corrupt city council to have enough housing for everyone that works in an area. If you want to stop growth then prohibit office construction.
It's no coincidence that congested cities are looking for ways to build higher density housing. There are just too many people to manage the logistics of a city that is built horizontally rather than vertically.
What it really comes down to is, do you want to live in a city or not? Cities are going to be densely packed. I personally do not want to live in shared housing and ride a train or bus, sit in traffic and hang out in free public spaces and the like either, so I don't live in a city. But people that choose to live in them really ought not complain about the facts of life of living in a city, specifically, that people are packed together like sardines.
What happens in most of these HN threads is that people who live in cities start telling people who don't want to live in cities that they have no choice in the matter, and that they're coming to destroy their town next.
> Also, it's much more costly to build infrastructure for low-density development, so you're complaining about a problem which your advocacy directly causes
My real complaint here is this--and I'll use a recent event as an example. In a town (not city) I used to live in, adjacent to a major city, somehow some developer got approval to build these really narrow row-home style town houses - 3 deep from the street and about 20 units wide. About 12 of these things. About a year has passed and this housing is up and ready for service. The additional roads that support that population increase will probably take at least 5 times as long. Until infrastructure improvement is strictly tied to additional housing supply and one doesn't move without the other, it doesn't benefit me to have more people in a place I live clogging up the roads.
> Oh, and lack of public transportation directly increases traffic
Goes back into antagonistic culture. How can we keep public transportation safe and without criminal elements? We need to really solve a bunch of problems first - some of which are economic (homelessness), and some of which are culture (people using these facilities for drugs and as bathrooms, etc.) before it's something I really want.
Some of your points are self-fulfilling: Commuting from suburbs necessitates more expensive infrastructure, for example.
American urban problems mostly have solutions that are exemplified in other parts of the world: Social housing from Austria; highly trained armed response police separate from "everyday" police in several countries.
Letting go of American exceptionalism is in most cases a good thing.
when people look at urban sprawl they see the culprit as cars, which is maybe true, but the real cause is democracy.
The problem is wealth. We've solved our other problems so now we have nothing better to do than complain about what nearby landowners do on their own damn private property.
But society previously couldn't afford to indulge in wasting resources (either directly on process or implicitly by preventing people from doing what's economically optimal) mediating these disputes to the same extent they do now. That's why I think it's a wealth thing.
Pretty much everyone who has lived next to a duplex would rather live next to single-family. (I'm not saying that every instance of living next to single-family goes well.)
Yes, duplexes are less expensive than single-family, so they're the best that some people can do, but that's no reason to make them the only option.
There are costs and benefits to every kind of living arrangement.
Most people who have actual experience with duplexes think that they are a bad compromise between single-family and apartments.
I was going to write that duplexes combine the worst aspects of single-family and apartments until I remembered that they also have some unique problems.
There are rich people who live in single-family. There are rich people who live in apartment-like housing.
No one who can afford better lives in a duplex. (I live in a duplex...)
The result is that they're the right choice for no one.
I also should not have said that they're never the right choice. Some times the best choice available isn't that good, and isn't what you'd do if things were a bit different.
That's how people end up in duplexes. It isn't what they want, but it is the best that they can do at that moment in time.
both options have their tradeoffs and what makes sense is both individual and subjective.