People that advocate this are advocating for lowering the quality of life. Long term it raises the price per square foot and makes it harder to have the space you want and need.
I suppose if I had a larger family I would want more bedrooms. But we are done growing our family at this point - and mine is roughly the size of the median, so I don't see why we need to flood the market with homes that are too big.
If you zoned more places to be walkable and lowered rent for the kinds of places people wanted to walk to you wouldn’t have to cram people into a few desirable places.
https://www.vox.com/22524829/wall-street-housing-market-blac...
> If you zoned more places to be walkable and lowered rent for the kinds of places people wanted to walk to you wouldn’t have to cram people into a few desirable places.
Yes, we should absolutely relax zoning! But rents are set by the market, by and large. You drop them by allowing housing to be built to meet market demand.
i.e. make them an offer to buy their property which they, of their own choice, accept.
> If you zoned more places to be walkable and lowered rent for the kinds of places people wanted to walk to you wouldn’t have to cram people into a few desirable places.
I'm unclear on what your point is now. Lowering the rent means allowing supply to respond to demand (since we don't set market rent by fiat), i.e. allowing developers to make offers to buy parcels and upgrade them to higher density. Are you for this or not?
1500 sqft is 140 m^2, my first apartment was 30m^2. I can't imagine what you would put in a 3500 sqft (325 m^2) house, never mind something like answering the door if you were at the other side of your house.
But I believe that the GP's point is that "more housing" usually means "more, primarily smaller, units". And that may in fact be true. Though, if you can get a small apartment rather than live in your car, you're still moving up, even if the average square feet per unit moves down.
Very few do.
> and in any event, it should be a choice.
It is a choice, if you can afford not to. That's why the people in those environments are disproportionately both the very poor who can't afford to choose and the very rich who can afford the expense of mitigating the harms; the people who aren't super rich but can afford to choose just tend to choose not to live in dense environments.
> Very few do.
So the people living in NYC, LA, Chicago, etc are not living well? That's news. Tell me how else I'm not living.
Outside of the very core of these cities, you can live, and live well while benefitting off of all the things large urban centers provide (culturally, financially, etc).
Not the ones that aren't making significantly above national median income, no. High income work (and even more so large acal5 capital ownership) makes it possible for people to afford to mitigate the downsides of dense living, which is why the presence of high wage work and capital returns leads to more people voluntarily accepting sense living conditions.
Eliminating the choice of low-density living by reducing availability will force more people who can’t afford to mitigate the downsides of dense living into it.
(We need more dense housing in places where it will relieve the problem of people being unhoused; those people already typically experience dense conditions with added downsides; but forcing people who would otherwise choose to be housed in lense-dense conditions into dense conditions is reducing the quality of life.)
OP is asking for it to become a good choice by fixing the problems that lead it to be a poor choice right now.
The main way of mitigating it is spending lots of money to make your own living conditions not dense, despite living in an area that is otherwise dense.
That is, it is convenient to live in an area where services and amenities and the people needed to staff them are dense, so long as you personally can afford not to be packed in a tin like the rest of the sardines.
The issue at hand is that many economic centers like San Francisco are adding several times more residents than housing units. There's onerous zoning and processes by which existing residents can block new housing. There's also price controls that disincentivize housing. These factors cause a chronic undersupply of housing, making housing very expensive even though San Francisco isn't all that dense. That's why almost all the YIMBY attention is on urban areas like these experiencing housing shortages.
Why would they push for more housing in suburban and rural areas that aren't experiencing chronic housing shortages? Most rural areas have shrinking populations.
Why is proximity to amenities and jobs so important? Many people spend hours of their lives driving themselves from home to work, the grocery store, really anywhere of interest and back. Driving is such a strong requirement we rarely revoke drivers licenses, even when drivers kill others through their negligence. Driving is expensive (costs thousands per year), dangerous (drivers kill 30,000 people a year), and leads to a sedentary lifestyle that is bad for your health. The quality of life impacts are massive.
From personal experience: living and working in San Francisco I would easily hit 10,000 steps per day just going about my daily life. When visiting the car-dependent suburb I grew up in for the holidays, that dropped to almost zero. It's no wonder obesity rates, life expectancy, and therefore quality of life is lower in these areas.
Only the wealthy with the money and time to spend on exercise (in addition to the extra transportation costs) are able to mitigate these deleterious harms. Car breakdown? You are literally unable to do anything, and incur massive costs in emergency repairs in addition to possibly losing your job. The poor are more likely to defer maintenance and buy older vehicles, so they are likely to fall into a vicious cycle of payday loans due to a something like this.
Are you sure that's causation and not correlation?