Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

As a Chicagoan, I don't understand this critique of North America. This seems to be a critique of the suburbs.

> They are dominated by detached homes, often set back from the road by lawns. Multi-family housing is generally confined to the downtown, and mainly comes in the form of high-rise towers.

This certainly doesn't describe Chicago at all, or even nearby suburbs. It seems like a third of the makeup of Chicago neighborhoods are three-floor walkups and courtyard buildings, right next to single-family housing. The high-rises are where upper-middle class people from out of town move to (and overpay for) because they've been filled with mythical tales of superpredators.

View on HN

Chicago and NYC are probably the two places this critique does not apply to. Take Houston, LA, etc. that are all around the same size, and you'll find a significantly different makeup of housing stock.

Take where I live - Seattle - and the criticism makes a lot more sense. I live in a neighborhood about two blocks from a light rail stop and still walk by single family homes on relatively large plots on my walk from door to door. In nearly any direction, you are within a block or two of what one would say looks like a suburban single family home. There is the concept of "urban villages" which are small pockets of multi-family housing surrounded by low density housing.

I have a strong conviction that the reason Montreal housing is cheaper is in no small part because of the language barrier. Even if you could work remotely, why would you move somewhere you don't speak the primary language, surrounded by people that are somewhat hostile? It's a much smaller market.

> I live in a neighborhood about two blocks from a light rail stop and still walk by single family homes on relatively large plots on my walk from door to door. In nearly any direction, you are within a block or two of what one would say looks like a suburban single family home.

I live in Chicago, in a three floor walkup three blocks from an El station, and walk by dozens of single family homes on the way there. There are single-family homes everywhere, it's very difficult not to be within 100 feet of one.

Are single-family homes the enemy? I think they're nice.

-----

edit: Houston and LA are notably strange places. I'd add Nashville into that, which turns into what seems like Russian doll-nested suburbs right after you leave downtown.

Houston is what gets held up by house-building anti-zoning advocates as a model, though, for some reason. To me, it's always been a hellhole, but I haven't visited for years.

Even Houston and LA have density pockets, apartment buildings can be found and they often cluster together.

I think more and more single-family homes have to be the enemy, because there must always be an Other preventing your paradise from being reality.

Also doesn't apply to Boston, Philly, and perhaps some smaller cities in New Jersey etc..

The author is Canadian and it seems like he's taking a lot of his perspective from Toronto, which is actually kind of bizarre in that it has clusters of high rises with single family homes in between, and leafy suburban neighborhoods right around downtown.

Toronto’s core urban density is lower than Montreal’s. Am referring to the densest neighbourhoods like Plateau. Often I go to Toronto and find I am the only one walking down many streets, which does not happen often in Montreal or NYC

It's entirely unreasonable to expect cities to look like some perfect gradient of density like something out of Cities Skylines; you'd expect the central desirable areas to be the most dense, and pockets of density here and there, but you'd still find single family homes even in dense areas for quite awhile. Paris didn't become as dense as it is overnight, and even there you can find relatively low-density housing quite close to the CBD.

The question I'd have is how close is a non single-family dwelling (exclude duplexes, too) - I'm in a relatively low density ruralish town, and there's an apartment building a block away on one side, and three on another.

> I have a strong conviction that the reason Montreal housing is cheaper is in no small part because of the language barrier.

You can totally get by in Montreal speaking English only.

Here’s the CEO of Air Canada, Michael Rousseau, on how he’s managed to thrive in Montreal without knowing French working for a legislatively bilingual organization: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/air-canada-ceo-1.6393063

> Even if you could work remotely, why would you move somewhere you don't speak the primary language

Immigrating to Quebec from outside of Canada is difficult since they have a system to keep non-French speakers from moving there.

Remember, kids, it's only racist if you're the majority /s

Most countries have language skills requirements for immigrants though, and language isn't an intrinsic part of a person but can be learned, so language skills requirements certainly aren't racist.

Canada is so heavily reliant on immigration that what's classified as barely passing English is enough to move to the suburbs of Vancouver and Toronto. There would be so much backlash in Vancouver if a bill like Quebec's Bill 96 passed to prevent first generation Hindi or Mandarin speakers from communicating to their doctors in anything but English. Quebec's actions are racist. They literally try to exit Canada with every federal election

Health services are not really affected by loi 96 and mandarin speakers have no issue talking to their doctors in my experience (specifically living with a mandarin speaker in Montreal in the past, with whom I'm still in contact).

However, doctors now have to be able to communicate in French and English along with any other language they wish.

Independence sentiment in a province annexed through war, even if it was long ago, and that has kept a different identity, has very little too do with racism it seems to me.

As someone who lived in Canada but isn't Canadian, there is so much disinformation regarding Québec in the rest of Canada, and not uncommonly outright hate, that the often heard claims of racism are very ironic.

City planning hipster-ism is great clickbait on the internet. Younger people without much experience or brains click on it and get all enthusiastic about the idea of some mythical perfect city.

In this case, the "missing middle" is what cheaper living looks like outside of a big city center. In the big cities, high rises are used because the city is literally out of space. Outside of a big city, single family homes are more popular because people almost unanimously want to live in them. But those who can't afford to live in a single family home, but live outside of a large city--those people live in places that look exactly like all the "missing middle" pictures in the article. Nothing in there looked unusual to me. I used to live in places like those. Now I don't, because I upgraded to a single family home.

The problem we have in the United States is we have a lot of growing cities, like in the sun belt were I am, it is illegal to build "missing middle" housing in a lot of places.

Perhaps we can engage with the material without insulting the people behind it. It’s not exactly a compelling argument.

I find it a little odd that the assumption is that single family homes are somehow always superior. That is not the case in a lot of the world. It’s not true in New York. It’s certainly not true in most cities outside the US and Canada. Perhaps instead of assuming everybody fits into this world view, we can accommodate other perspectives?

As for why single family housing is looked upon negatively, it’s simply inefficient. It’s inefficient for heating,for transportation, for land usage. It lends itself to cars more than public transportation, which, no matter how many teslas are sold, is a net negative. In my experience in the US, it also leads to enclaves, the so called gated community. I’m not certain if that’s just due to a history of racist housing policies or just a feature of suburbia but it’s worth noting.

That said I don’t think we’re in danger of eliminated single family housing anytime soon. Indeed the thing about single family housing is that it’s the easiest form of housing. Someone buys land and builds a house. It’s not so easy to make an apartment building.

> I find it a little odd that the assumption is that single family homes are somehow always superior.

“Superior” is a value judgement. I think “preferred” is closer to the mark. People like single-family homes and they go to great lengths to buy them and deal with the externalities of living in them (commuting, maintenance). As the externalities lessened (broader acceptance of working remotely), SFH became more valuable in the last two years.

> It’s not true in New York.

There are great swathes of lower-density housing in New York and its surrounding region. NYC is an outlier on account of its geography and place in the economy.

> Perhaps we can engage with the material without insulting the people behind it. It’s not exactly a compelling argument.

I think it was an appropriate way to engage with an article that takes “people would rather live in mixed-density neighborhoods than single family homes” as its premise. The revealed preference of the entire post-WW2 era in North America is mostly the opposite of this assertion. In general, as society has gotten richer more people have looked to own single family homes.

> The revealed preference of the entire post-WW2 era in North America is mostly the opposite of this assertion.

But with the rise of climate change, ever-growing traffic and commute, urban sprawl, and expensive housing, things are starting to shift in the other way. This narrative does not exist in the vacuum, it's been over a decade of Strong Towns, walkability, more bike lanes, millennials not owning cars, and other assorted trends pushing against the postwar status.

> as society has gotten richer more people have looked to own single family homes.

And society's purchasing power has not exactly risen in line with housing costs, especially since 2008.

I think you are misunderstanding "missing middle" in a potentially important way, or at least advocates would say that you are - you cast these "missing middle" housing options as a cheaper, inferior option to suburban detached homes. They would argue that that zoning/subsidies/etc. upset that balance and if the field was leveled (e.g. remove zoning blocks from middle density housing, remove subsidies from suburbs) then some?/many?/most? families would choose the more urban, higher density over the SFH in the suburbs.

I'm not sure they are right, but your characterization isn't what they mean.

You can argue against someone's opinion, but you shouldn't degrade their intellect to make your point.

There's a growing demand for mid-density mixed-use land because younger generations cannot afford SFHs, more incline to take public transportation, more things to do, pub/bars/live music than SFH with backyards that caters more to families with kids.

Urban sprawl happened for many decades because of cheap and abundance of land, less population so gridlocks are not as big of a deal. But now it's very hard to change the zoning or land-use to increase the density because of NIMBYs, even for suburbs that are within miles from downtown core.

So yeah, try to understand instead of just attacking them as "without brains".

My issue with the StrongTowns set is they only want homes built for the use-case thirty-one year-old single office workers. They can't imagine anything else and they are quick to denigrate people who want a yard and a driveway as knuckle-dragging apes being duped by oil companies and SUV manufacturers.

Closely related are the people who ask over and over again why everyone in the US can't ride bikes like they do in Belgium. I'll tell you why - my backyard is bigger than Belgium. But don't worry, once the typical HN reader hits 65 you will see a sharp decline in the suggestions that everyone ride bikes everywhere.

Some of us want: a yard. A garage. Space between us and a neighbor. Enough room for a family of four.

I absolutely don't see the StrongTowns model as an unassailable good - I have no desire to share a wall with my neighbors.

> There's a growing demand for mid-density mixed-use land because younger generations cannot afford SFHs, more incline to take public transportation, more things to do, pub/bars/live music than SFH with backyards that caters more to families with kids.

These are only unmet demands limited to a few cities that young wealthy educated surburbanites flocked to as a group, thereby making them very expensive. Instead of detailing my unremarkable life, apartment, and neighborhood in Chicago. I'll just say that not everybody has to live in SF, Seattle, Austin, or whatever the next desirable place is. If you can't afford it, there are other places available. It isn't like there aren't tech jobs in Chicago, or remote.

For reference, Belgium is roughly the size of Maryland, which is the 42nd largest U.S. state (out of 50). The U.S. is big and is mostly empty.

> I'll just say that not everybody has to live in SF, Seattle, Austin, or whatever the next desirable place is.

That's easy to say, but prior to the pandemic and the sudden shift to WFH, the trend was flying in the face of this droll advice. Tech hubs are consolidating. But since then, we've seen transplants buy up housing in other markets and simply spread the same issues of traffic and housing prices there too, as we've seen in markets like Phoenix, Boise, Salt Lake City, (though admittedly some of these are starting to fall). Take people out of Austin and they just end up flooding Nashville, or Raleigh, or Charlotte. New Yorkers are resettling in Philadelphia. Peter Thiel says Florida real estate prices are comparable to California now. And so on.

Maybe the young ones have seen better. I grew up in an apartment building, it was great. Basically the same as a house, but there were other kids my age living there too and we all could easily visit each other's houses and played sports together every evening.

Most of Asia, single family homes are just huge apartments with good soundproofing. There's literally no reason they have to be detached homes all you have to do is build bigger apartments.

There's so many benefits - shared spaces are better because a lot of families contribute, easier access to the city for parents and kids, potentially eliminates the need for a car as well.

>City planning hipster-ism is great clickbait on the internet. Younger people without much experience or brains click on it and get all enthusiastic about the idea of some mythical perfect city.

Single Family Homerism is very popular among boomers who have never been to Europe or Asia.

> Outside of a big city, single family homes are more popular because people almost unanimously want to live in them.

This desire isn't, like, innate to the human condition, though. It's the outcome of a long history of social, cultural, and economic policy. What people want is generally nurture, not nature.

If single family homes were so clearly superior, you wouldn't need to ban everything else.

Sure, but even U.S. city centers are way lower density than the European or Asian equivalent, often looking more like what would be a suburb there. Truly walkable areas are basically non-existent.

> Truly walkable areas are basically non-existent.

It's weird that I've made it nearly a half-century without owning a car. Edit: Sarcasm aside, I think you're critiquing a abstraction conjured by political rhetoric. I've walked every street of Chicago. In Chicago, every four blocks in every direction is a commercial street.

What I think you find if you dig into it, is that they can't find the balance of trade-offs they want. I can find a completely walkable city near me, where I could walk to everything I could possibly want, and at reasonable prices ... but crime is too high for some people.

They want the low-crime high value suburban life in a dense environment, and that's what they often can't find. It can be really hard to get this out of them, you basically have to keep providing examples of what they say they want until they finally break down and admit why they don't work.

It does describe an awful lot of US cities though. I don't think the article was claiming that Montreal is the only place in north america that looks like this, was it?

> It does describe an awful lot of US cities though.

I think it describes the suburbs that a lot of these people are from. I don't think it characterizes North American cities, which this article definitely thinks it does. I was struggling to find anything distinct between Montreal and Chicago from all of these pictures. And I've lived in a lot of different large, small, and medium-sized US cities in my twisty journey from Chicago to Chicago, although my only coastal cities are Portland, OR and Baltimore.

I think the Toronto distribution (which I'm willing to assume is accurately described) is probably characteristic of a particular very rapid growth pattern with a particular income distribution, rather than some North American collective mistake.

The funny thing is it doesn't really describe Toronto, for me, based on some exposure.

It does match my experience in several large and medium size US cities though. Of the biggest, NYC and Chicago no, LA and Houston yes. DFW, Atlanta, SF (sort of), DFW, Phoenix, etc.

I've seen far, far more terrible suburb patterns than good ones I guess, which does seem to be the collective NA mistake, from a city planning/growth point of view. Definite skew to the west, especially cities that didn't really grow until after cars were plentiful. My guess is this is mostly why NYC and Chicago are different than LA and Houston in that respect.

> This certainly doesn't describe Chicago at all, or even nearby suburbs.

Probably because a good portion of things were built pre-WW2:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

Anything post-WW2, which is probably most of (North) America, had a more car-centric design.

As a former Chicagoan, 100% agree. I do wish the city and state were better governed, as someone who grew up in West Central Illinois and served as a politician there, it’s not called Forgottonia for no reason. There are other parts of the state with some reasonable density and living spaces and could be so much more with even a bit of additional investment.

In Illinois, we choose to exclusively elect corrupt self-dealing politicians. We think that a politician without an obvious ulterior financial motive is mysterious and therefore dangerous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com