Land is a finite resource but housing units are not. Once America gets over it’s love affair with single family homes, we could undercut most speculators by just building up.
Now we just need to build condos that are appropriate for all stages of life -- not just young singlehood and coupledom.
Building up will not solve the "not enough SFH/townhomes" problem, but it will fix the homeownership problem. And it may help with the former, if there are enough current SFH/townhome owners who would prefer a really nice condo close to work/downtown/parks/amenities/etc.
But one issue there is that we currently build condos but don't build the public spaces that serve to supplement them and make them comfortable for, e.g., families with kids. As a result, they're full of a certain demographic, and less appealing to others, reinforcing the issue.
Can you share some ideas about what this would look like?
If we could only scale and therefore make this cheaper.
> we currently build condos but don't build the public spaces that serve to supplement them and make them comfortable for, e.g., families with kids.
you need
* several bedrooms
* some utility space (for things one would have otherwise done in the garage)
* nearby [safe] parks and playgrounds
* nearby recreation centers
* good schools
etc
I grew up in an apartment building that absolutely felt like a neighborhood in itself. There were at least 10 other kids in the 400-unit building my own age. In the local neighborhood (consisting of other apartment buildings) there were easily another 30 kids my age, any of whom I could see in a 5-10 minute walk. Few people owned cars (it was NYC after all!) and the area was quite safe traffic-wise.
I spent countless evenings outside walking or biking along promenades, or just hanging out in parks, playgrounds — all literally steps from my apartment building — and as I got older, in libraries, cafes, restaurants, shops, etc. The building I lived in also had a pool and multiple community “rooms” that were several thousand sqft large, which we reserved for birthday parties and other events.
It was fantastic. There were kids there because the spaces were designed to support families, and the “must have SFH with yard before having kids” attitude among the middle and upper-middle class is pretty weak in NYC, so my neighbors could be similarly-high SES because not all parents immediately flee apartment living for the suburbs.
Today, I live in a Bay Area inner suburb. There are, again, 10 kids my preschooler’s age in the local (couple blocks) neighborhood. But they can’t bike alone (or even walk alone, really) because drivers often hit 50mph and don’t look where they’re going. Each of our back yards — though we have one! — is tiny, much smaller than the community rooms I had growing up, so for any serious physical activity we have to get in the car to drive somewhere, contributing to the “traffic is a problem” problem.
The closest public park is a 4000-square-foot grass triangle in a quiet almost-cul-de-sac that takes 10 minutes to walk to and 30 seconds to walk across. There is a library 5 minutes’ walk away, and it is a saving grace.
If I could transplant the apartment building I grew up in to my local neighborhood, which is about 2 miles square — 100 million sqft — its 16000 residents could be housed in about 16 buildings, each of which would have a 25,000 sqft footprint, totaling 400,000 sqft and leaving 99.6 million square feet for fantastic parks, promenades, playgrounds, schools, trails, open space, basically any use you could imagine. Each apartment could be owned, 2000+ sqft, with private decks/patios/balconies and wonderful views.
If that were available in the Bay Area…we could build them at 2x the density described above and house the next 20 years of newcomers…
I have a single-family house with a garage, and things like woodworking, painting, or even having a 3-D printer are not necessarily things I want in my utility room or garage. They require special fittings or space levels not available when you're trying to fit around a car.
It would also provide a great central hub for people to meet, because projects are a natural thing to socialize about.
Maybe its inevitable and necessary to force more people into condensed housing, maybe the societal benefits really outweigh the tradeoffs.
and that's why single family homes should be more expensive, because it is better. People continue to bid it up, because they still believe that the price is worth and hasn't reached a ceiling yet.
In asian hubs like hong kong or shanghai, they've reached a certain ceiling on land, and so building up is now what most people could buy and so they do that. The cities in countries like canada, australia and the west coast of the US, it hasn't reached that point due to large available land mass, and people prefer commute (or WFH now!) over living densely.
Of course, regulation plays a part - i think there's unnecessarily large amount of red tape in making taller denser buildings, as well as a lobby of existing owners who don't want it near themselves.
There’s a lot that can be done to add autonomy and privacy to the condo living. And then more to make it cheaper and accessible. It’s mostly a technical problem.
I live in an apartment block and so does everybody else for miles around. Our building, like almost every other around here, tops out at seven storeys. It's very solidly constructed, so there's little to no noise from neighbours, not that they make much noise to begin with as they're a pretty considerate bunch.
The downside to this way of living is almost nonexistent, but the upside is massive. Instead of everybody having their own plot of land that's too small to do anything really interesting with, and which they have to maintain themselves, we have a communal garden. When that's not enough, there are no less than four parks within two minutes' walk.
Because this higher density of living is able to sustain more amenities, everything you could possibly ever need is, at most, a short bike ride away. And I do mean everything. Bars, restaurants, shops, medical facilities, swimming pools, a velodrome, a planetarium...
I've no need of a car because it's all on my doorstep. If I do need to travel, public transport's great.
You can keep your "autonomy", I'll be too busy reaping the benefits of living among other people to worry about that.
Neither of these things have been even remotely true in any apartment I've lived in the US, even ones billed "luxury". It's always been thin-walled garbage where I can hear every word of every conversation of my neighbors, who have typically felt that listening to music 24 hours a day and slamming down their boots while walking between rooms is the right thing to do.
I feel this is mostly a US problem.
In most of Europe, apartment blocks are solidly built, especially the older ones, even in Eastern Europe.
The degrowth movements garden variety neo-pastoralist misanthropy makes it blind to the fact that more humans (given a good system of governance and rules) is actually an amazing thing.