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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> Sure, suburban single-family homes may offend the aesthetic of the elites, but most other people like them just fine.

Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

No, they're not. Even if something bad is somewhere in an origin story, that doesn't taint the existence of a thing. Most of the complaining about suburbs comes from people who want people to live bunched together, ant-like lives. Should there be more room for small businesses in and around suburbs? You bet. Encouraging walkability, not having to drive forever to get groceries, etc., is useful. But this push to take away the freedom of people to not live on top of each other is another form of classism, one oriented toward the imposition of suffering rather than toward encouraging freedom.

> But this push to take away the freedom of people to not live on top of each other is another form of classism

This sounds like a ridiculous straw-man; who's pushing to take away freedom of people to not live on top of each other?

People advocating for suburbs to pay their fair share of taxes, and for less car subsidy, and for less restrictive zoning are not restricting freedom but increasing it.

This is so absurd. Zoning involves so much central planning that it would put the Soviet Union to shame.

Suppose you want to add an extra room to your house on your land that you ""own"" in this system. You would need to go prostrate yourself before some bureaucrat in city hall. Who then inevitably declines that variance because some busybody somewhere thought that it interferes with the ""neighborhood character"".

How can we even say that you own your own land if you are not allowed to build on it as you please? Where is the freedom in any of this?

No, they're not. They're a style of living that people can choose, and work to achieve. If you want to choose a different style, then do so; they're available.

If you want high density, go live in a city center. But there's no reason to allow developers and corporations to destroy other types of neighborhoods that are ALREADY residential.

This pro-developer/pro-corporate-ownership shilling is way past tired.

> Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

Prior to the widespread development of suburban single family homes post WWII, most Americans outside of those in rural areas could not afford to home their own home. Suburbs are the exact opposite of an elitist policy, and in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans, including a majority of immigrants, live in the suburbs.

> . . . post WWII[1], most Americans outside of those in rural areas[2] could not afford to home their own home[3]. Suburbs are the exact opposite of an elitist policy[4], and in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans . . . live in the suburbs[5].

[1] Note that home prices wobbled a bit but were relatively even from the recovery after WWI and the flu through the early 60s. Income over that time increased significantly (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/16-05intax.pdf). Things change rapidly after that. I think it suggests a more complicated situation than "it all changed post WWII."

https://voxeu.org/article/home-prices-1870

[2] About half of the country. Nothing like today.

https://getrawmilk.com/content/urbanization-usa-rural-vs-urb...

[3] Affordable because of VA and FHA loans after the war. And increasing wages. And flat housing prices.

[4] Actually, the FHA (#3) mainstreamed redlining. That's pretty darned elitist.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mapmaker-r...

[5] We're mostly suburban in the same way we're all middle class, smart, and attractive: self-description, but not any objective measure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/u-s-is-ma...

Part of the attraction of the suburbs is that most US cities aren't very compelling. Its not like the choice is a Cleveland suburb vs Barcelona; its a Cleveland suburb vs Cleveland. Neither choice is all that great.

That's fair.

An anecdote from Nazi Germany from the town I grew up in.

The Nazis did exactly the same! As part of their program - similar to what Putin wants to do now? - to become self-sufficient, among many other projects, they built a very large chemical fiber factory into the middle of underdeveloped Thuringia. That's the German state just above Bavaria.

https://www.all-neumann.de/rud-zellwolle.html

For the thousands of new workers, only some of which could be sourced from the local population, they build the equivalent to American suburbs, in 1935.

A few pictures, old black and white:

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/H5NXR6CAX2M...

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/2GD55POKL3R...

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/UNFBR42B35M...

The factory, by the way, even back in the 1930s included two olympic-size swimming pools, one heated (by the next door factory coal power plant) and one with waves:

https://www.all-neumann.de/images3/Schwarza_119674.jpg

That suburb still exists, with a lot of kind of equal double-houses surrounded by a lot of garden.

Google maps, you can see how all houses and plots are similar: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.6840376,11.3145743,413m/data...

Until after reunification they could still walk for shopping in little stores, Schwarza, a tiny place at the edge of which the new houses were built, even had a butcher shop. To get to the factory could be done by bike leisurely within ten minutes.

However, in my old hometown (Rudolstadt) industry and houses often were right next to one another. There were quite a few of those, and they were in the city or at the edges, next to houses and villas. There's an x-ray tube factory (https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/about/history/stor...) and quite a few other industries, beginning early 20th century. I don't know if those various factories were at the edge of town in the 1920s, but even if they were, it can't have been very long that it all got a bit mixed. Today we have zoning too, kind of, "Gewerbegebiet" (industrial park) is where you have to go with your manufacturing business these days.

We now have very similar discussions about more mixing, example (German): "Architect recommends more mixed use areas" -- https://www.nw.de/lokal/bielefeld/mitte/21979129_Architekt-e... But also the opposite, "Please don't mix" -- https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article518393/Bitte-nicht-mis...

>Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

How so?

The origins of zoning were to exclude black, Chinese, and jewish workers and residents from white neighborhoods. https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...

Today, they continue to be used to exclude poorer residents from richer neighborhoods through mechanisms like minimum lot sizes (housing is much more expensive if you require 10000 sqft lots, etc.) and prohibitions of multi-family dwellings (which make housing cheaper by allowing multiple households to split the cost of land).

That doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have to be a suburb to exclude non-whites. It could be an apartment building.

He didn't say zoning, he said homes so I was asking them why a single family home was elitist.

The single family home zoning has the stuff like the minumum lot size and prohibitions on lot splitting or multiple homes on the same lot, which essentially sets a floor price to qualify for living there. And a minimum price will lead to minimum salary requirements for a mortgage, effectively locking out those below that income, hence elitism.

its clearly more expensive than the alternative.

it excluded poorer people from the area

My city is holding public hearings about a new apartment development. People are outraged because it might bring in poor people.

False constrain on housing supply despite population boom causes housing prices to rise incredibly, an increase entirely subsidized by the desperation of the working poor to find somewhere affordable to live.

And additional costs of means of transportation in order to be able to live there, because of exclusionary single-family zoning, residential areas are wastelands of nothing, essentially requiring a car per adult individual. This also significantly constrains people with mobility issues.

Ever seen a zoning consultation meeting to build multi-family residences in a single family detached neighborhood?

The objections are wholly classist worries about What Kind of People are going to be living there.

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