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?
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?
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?