Comment by baby-yoda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baby-yoda | Hacker News Reader

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> The hardest part, still fully unsolved, is operating with current legislation and outdated city planning rules. Those normatives revolve around high density and cheap development. Nature takes space and efficient buildings are expensive so housing constructors will have a hard time buying into the green zone.

where i live there is constant discussion of "we need high density housing" and this is exactly what comes to mind. eventually this would end up with something like soviet style block housing, which doesn't seem so well received around the world. not to mention this style of housing is very constrictive in terms of lifestyle - maximum 2 child family with minimal space for hobbies/interests, limited sunlight, high noise pollution, etc.

this city in Estonia [0] for example, is somewhat pleasing to look at from a birds eye view and seems to check the boxes for having green space but i wonder about the range of residents' experiences.

[0] - https://www.traveller.ee/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/852...

You can do high density without block housing! Many European cities are good examples of this. Paris, for instance, has very high density because it's packed with mid-rise (~7-8 floors) buildings[1]. Another good example is the section of Manhattan between Midtown and Lower Manhattan, which is also primarily mid-rise and very dense.

Apart from that I do think it's true that block housing separated by large parks (as shown in your picture) doesn't work well; it's discussed in e.g. Jacob's _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_.

[1]: https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/6238/5b71/3e4b/31a8/5...

I agree re: European examples but my argument there is many of these cities developed over long time periods with stable growth in population, stable industry etc, whereas now it seems like the idea is to simply explode urban housing capacity asap, which leads to the block style or high rise glass and steel.

and of course we can't forget that many places are at an inflection point in population growth so all of this capacity could be vacant in 15-20 years.

The issue is that people want to explode housing capacity ASAP in relatively limited geographic areas within cities. If mid rise was actually broadly incentivized, it wouldn’t be that challenging to rapidly increase that stock.

Strong towns [0] advocates a more bottom up approach to development, and is a good resource for anyone interested in how to add density in a sane manner.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/

How do you properly forecast housing need so your development curve (and the foundational urban planning necessary) aligns with the housing demand curve while keeping said housing affordable?

The CCP seems to have been very successful with their "build an entire city and move people into it model" (seeing the cities have filled), but I'm unsure how it works in a more capitalistic model.

As long as there is zoning in place for sufficient increases in supply, the market will build to meet demand.

The issue in the US is that zoning is excessively restrictive.

Even mid-rise is kind of bad. You tend to share walls with a few neighbours still and there's no opportunity for any private garden space. It's not great for pet ownership, either. I'm not convinced it's a lot better than high rise/block housing as a space to actually live in. I say this presently living in a mid-rise in the UK. Edit: I should probably add that the leasehold system in the UK makes them a particularly bad proposition if you want to actually own your home as well.

Terraced housing has kind of okay density, at least it's not a total land crime like US suburban detached housing but affords many of the freedoms associated with it.

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