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> However it seems that when density occurs I have no recourse but move.

Sure, and what's wrong with that? If your goal is to live in a rural area without many people, then many countries today have plenty of depopulated areas on the outskirts of rural towns. Why not live there?

It's like the parent commenter said; expecting desirable land near a city not to densify is like expecting a puppy to never grow into a dog.

>expecting desirable land near a city not to densify

I think that's fair. I'm worried that some of this conversation is just a misunderstanding between the California-based population on HN. I'm fine with residents of California voting to modify their zoning laws to allow more density in principle.

My claim is that even areas away from dense urban environments seem to be getting more crowded. It seems like every place is. If it were restricted to urban environments and their suburbs I wouldn't worry so much. Even the rural areas are growing up and getting more crowded.

> My claim is that even areas away from dense urban environments seem to be getting more crowded. It seems like every place is.

Of course it is. No one likes density, even those that say they like it (they enjoy the benefits, not the drawbacks) so it gets voted down almost literally everywhere - such as how you feel about greater density in your community.

Due to this, the only option to build was sprawl as density was banned.

The US really doesn't have "urban" other than for a few legacy pre-war cities that have marginally functional mass transit. The suburban/exurban way of life is pretty much the default for most of the country.

I'd feel a lot better about this debate if there were truly reasonable urban living choices. It would be nice to remove all forms of subsidy so everyone was paying their actual externalized costs.

One thing I've made note of my entire life as I watched sprawl continue unabated was that this is a historical anomaly. The human condition seems to be enough density to keep agriculture going in the hinterlands, with only a very select few being able to afford the upkeep/transport/etc. costs of maintaining an estate outside of the "dirty" city. To me it seems we might have spent a couple generations building a wildly unsustainable house of cards.

> My claim is that even areas away from dense urban environments seem to be getting more crowded. It seems like every place is.

Look at this picture:

http://www.dannyquah.com/writings/en/files/2015/09/2015.09.2...

Notice how even in that circle most of that is water. People are moving out of that area for a variety of reasons, some density, some environmental (both natural and pollution), and some economic.

The current low-density north american way of living is a historical anomaly outside of agrarian lifestyles (farms are just open air biological farms). Expecting post-war living to continue is like expecting the post-war economy to continue.

Personally, I bought a 100 acres that are remote and off-road to build my own place off-grid. This is put-up-or-shut-up. You cannot expect to find less dense living without purposefully securing it.

> The current low-density north american way of living is a historical anomaly outside of agrarian lifestyles (farms are just open air biological farms).

Most of what we do today is a historical anomaly, because our times are very unique. However, it is the dense city living that's historical anomaly. As recently as 100 years ago, majority of Americans lived in rural places. Before 1900, only a small minority of people globally lived in urban environments, and before 1700, it was a very minuscule minority indeed.

When people lived less densely it was because the land was actively being used for production. So the land use was still dense, just not with people. The suburbs and small towns have lots of land with no use at all just yards. That is an inefficiency the market will resolve.

> If your goal is to live in a rural area without many people, then many countries today have plenty of depopulated areas on the outskirts of rural towns. Why not live there?

If your goal is to live in a dense area packed with people, then many countries today have plenty of densely populated areas in the center of urban cities. Why not live there?

The entire point for many americans, is there is really no choice for the most part. It's either rural areas, suburbs or hyper expensive urban areas because building an urban city is effectively illegal in most of the USA, so the few legacy cities that still exist have extremely high demand. In countries where there is a choice, this debate hardly happens.

People who want their village life surrounded by farmland can go live in a small village with a train line stop and commute into the huge downtown city for work within 45 - 60 minutes. Look at berlin for example:

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dabendorf,+15806+Zossen,+Ger...

"Move to another country" is a complete non-starter for most Americans too.

What Americans have done to their country is a fence sitting exercise that creates the worse of both worlds. Cities in Europe are smaller, more dense and the drop off into nature is significantly faster. When americans attempt to make something city like, they're noisy, dirty, traffic clogged and crime ridden because it's against the culture to make walkable, transit orientated cities that are significantly quieter, than an american car dependent 'city'. They still give themselves long commutes, but you get huge suburban sprawl that never really ends until your hours out, so you still don't get your log cabin lifestyle anyway.

By allowing cities to properly happen, you ironically create the conditions that make what you want more frequent and would still let you work close enough to a city core to actually make good money. A key issue with rural living is a bad income, because your too far away from other humans to make large productive groups than can make money.

Desirable cities in Europe also have the same “housing affordability crisis”, so I’m not sure I buy your hypothesis.

They don't have the same affordability crisis. It's actually much worse in Europe. Prices are as high as they are in US, but people make even less, and pay higher taxes.

Go to https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/region_rankings_c... and check out some European cities you know by name. I recommend looking at the "Mortgage as Percentage of Income" metric:

Mortgage as Percentage of Income is a ratio of the actual monthly cost of the mortgage to take-home family income (lower is better). Average monthly salary is used to estimate family income. It assumes 100% mortgage is taken on 20 years for the house(or apt) of 90 square meters which price per square meter is the average of price in the city center and outside of city center.

90 square meters is around 1000 square feet. In San Francisco, that's 50%. Sounds bad, huh? Well, it's 70% in Madrid, 92% in London and Munich, 101% in Rome, and 117% in Paris, and these are not even the worst: Kiev, Moscow, Minsk, Krakow or Dubrovnik are much worse than that. Maybe it's better in 2nd tier cities? Well, in some (e.g. 31% in Antwerp or 37% in Aarhus), but not in most: 115% in Brno, 93% in Zagreb, or 61% in Lyon.

Back to US: San Francisco 50% is basically as bad as it gets in US, outside of NYC (where it's 66%). Most places in US are in 20-30%s. You think Seattle or Denver are not affordable? Well, the mortgage-to-income ratio there is only around 27%. That's cheaper than basically any major European city.

So yeah, compared to most of European cities, San Francisco houses are a steal.

IMO the choice frame here is a little too narrow. They're just different environments--I wouldn't necessarily say you get more choice in one or the other. Sure in low-density areas you can crank out the jams without anyone else hearing. You might also have a well, septic system, propane tank, spotty internet, an hour drive to the nearest hospital, limited DoorDash options, no good dive bars, etc.

As a counterexample, my partner and I require wherever we live to support life without a car. There's a handful of places in the US we can do that, all super urban. We'd be open to a lot of other places in the US were that possible, but it's singularly important to us.

I wouldn't say you're making the following point exactly but, there is definitely a contingent of people who argue for rural or single-family housing by saying "it's just objectively better". But I really think that's incredibly hard to substantiate. Probably the best we can do here is that people have strong preferences for one or the other (though they can change over time) and we should try to get people what they want without destroying the planet/creating infested hell pits.

>we should try to get people what they want without destroying the planet/creating infested hell pits.

I completely agree. I know there are a large number of people (perhaps a majority?) who prefer dense urban environments. I certainly don't want those to go away. I just also don't want to lose rural spaces.

> I don't have any way to preserve something which is singularly important to me.

Well, have you thought about buying a larger plot of land? Seems like the obvious solution if you are intent on controlling wide swaths of land surrounding your house.

Great idea. Expensive, though. What if, instead, a bunch of us buy land in the area, form a democratically-elected government, and mutually agree to limit development on that land such as to preserve the current level of density and our quality of life?

We can call this idea “zoning”.

Why not buy it jointly? Otherwise you are telling people who bought the land what to do with it. If you want to have a say in it, pony up for it. Buy the land in the name of the township and turn it into a park.

No, you’re limiting the externalities that an individual land owner can impose on everyone else.

"Externality" is one of the most tortured terms in widespread use and it would have been better if non-economists had never heard of it. Just because you don't like something, that doesn't mean anything has been "imposed" on you. You're dangerously close to describing the existence of other human beings as an "externality" that needs to be solved for, a view with a less-than-stellar track record.

The reason we put some things in a Constitution is that we think those things are so important that they aren't subject to the whims of the electorate -- they aren't up to a vote. You don't get to have a vote about which religion will be the state religion. You don't get to vote away my right to Free Speech. And you shouldn't get to vote to limit my Constitutionally-defined private property rights.

Of course human beings want to restrict what other people do on their own land. History is full of groups of people just, you know, taking land whenever they think it suits their purposes. That's why the right to private property is in the Constitution. It's why Euclid was wrongly decided. And it's why you don't get to appeal to "democracy" in an attempt to abridge a fundamental right.

Oh cool, so as a suburbanite I get a vote too?

No?

Oh great, I guess I'll be commuting 2 hours to get to an office that is walking distance for my boss.

In practice I'm looking to do exactly this.

I think there's a big difference in this case between what I should practically do to meet my goals and the philosophical argument at issue. In other words, even if I always lose the philosophical argument, I can simply try to buy some large plot of rural land as you suggest.

Philosophically, I worry about what happens when density is the only choice left for people, and a large majority of them don't or won't understand why that might be so unpalatable for a significant minority of people.

Move to a rural place where everyone is moving out and you'll find a place that is not densifying over time, but the opposite. And buying land & housing there is incredibly cheap, probably less than the cost it would be to build it! This is pretty much happening in every small-ish town in japan for example.

Your social life and neighbors will more skew towards the grey haired spectrum, but that is the sacrifice you will need to make!