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Comment by zzbzq | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

>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.

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