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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

What's your justification for saying that it's the US with a profoundly distorted market and not places like Utrecht?

How about the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand?

People want this kind of development, they flock to it, and they are willing to pay astronomically high prices to get it. The government keeps the supply low with exclusionary zoning that makes all types of construction except car-centric single family housing illegal.

You have evidence of that claim? I took a look around me. The most expensive and highest demand areas are actually not transit accessible at all and walking is not really feasible as the houses have lots of land and are very spread out. I am in the Sacramento area for reference.

Yes, Granite Bay is a great place to keep your sports car collection, but places in Sacramento where you can walk and bike command a premium compared similar places without the same walkability.

But you are moving the goal posts here. The person I responded to didn't say compared to similar places without the same walkability. They said "the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand". Granite bay shows this to not be a fact.

Well for starters Sacramento is just a really poor example. Most of CA isn't. It's a consequence of hyper aggressive SFH zoning (~80% of the SCAG area is SFH, used to be even higher) and the era in which CA grew being the mid century period.

There basically aren't any properly transit served and walkable areas in Sacramento. Closest would be Midtown and Richmond Grove, but they aren't really very good at all compared to neighborhoods in cities with actual infrastructure.

But despite that they are _still_ some of the most expensive neighborhoods in the area on a cost to sq foot basis. The trend of walkable transit served areas being in high demand is near universal across the US.

Again just like the other poster you are trying to move the goal posts. The comment did not say some. The comment said "the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand". I provided a single example that proves this statement is not a fact.

edit: comment not commit

I don't have a metric for in-demand, but as I said, they are amongst the most expensive on a per-sq-ft basis, which is a much more useful metric for "expensive" than total cost. I didn't move the goalposts at all.

Again you are moving the goal posts.

I will break it down for you. The original poster said 'most expensive' not the 'most expensive on a per-sq-ft basis'. You are arbitrarily adding the words on a per-sq-ft basis because you FEEL like its much more useful. You provide 0 evidence to support this.

For example here is evidence that most people besides you feel that total cost is a much more important and useful metric. The follow sites selling homes list total cost as the main metric NOT the price per sq foot: https://www.zillow.com/ https://www.realtor.com/ https://www.movoto.com/ https://www.redfin.com/ https://www.trulia.com/ https://www.homes.com/

Edit: Here are the top three sites on google when you search "most expensive areas to live in the us". A three seems to use median home price not median price per sq ft. https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/most-expensive-cities-i... https://realestate.usnews.com/places/rankings/most-expensive... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/08091...

To be fair, the comment didn't say "every expensive and high demand neighborhood in america is walkable and transit accessible" either.

Never forget that most statements, especially imprecise ones like the one you quoted can be interpreted in many ways. It is very easy to find an interpretation that is incorrect, especially if you disagree with/dislike the premise.

The reason I say this is that your single example didn't seem to disprove the statement in my eyes. I read the statement as meaning that walkable neighborhoods are in most cases in much higher demand than other neighborhoods in the same region.

I don't really think either of us is wrong, more that the imprecision of the statement and language in general can be unfortunate and cause disagreement.

Also note that nobody will ever respond well to being accused of a logical fallacy. They are useful to understand what is happening and to rile people up. Not so much to convince anyone (that doesn't already agree with you) about anything.

I would add that the most expensive are the areas with biggest density, naturally with this kind of traffic a city council would create as many means of transportation as possible.

Which is why I'm always surprised by the makeup of the coalition of voters that support strict zoning. Personally, I don't understand how zoning isn't seen an impairment of property value requiring ongoing payments from the government to the owners, with the idea being that if the zoning is a benefit to the community then the community's taxes should be paying for that benefit. As it is, it's a hidden tax that prevents open discussion and accurate cost/benefit analysis.

That may be true in some places, but I'm skeptical of any causal relationship. To use Portland as a example familiar to me, the urban area is the least wealthy. The most expensive, exclusive neighborhoods are around the edges and have awful transit service. Looking at bigger cities, what's a better example? You certainly don't move to Manhattan just because it's walkable.

"You certainly don't move to Manhattan just because it's walkable."

depends on the person. People might move there because of the "vibe" or "excitement" and that tends to go hand in hand with places you can walk.

If it counts I emigrated in large part to be somewhere nicer to walk, but I am unusual. Not unique, though! Jason Slaughter (of NotJustBikes) moved to Amsterdam from Canada explicitly for its urban design.

Depends on what you mean by "wealthy". Cost per sq. ft. of housing in the urban area of Portland is much higher than the suburbs of Portland. That's indicative to me of higher market demand in the urban area.

> How about the fact that America's most walkable and transit-accessible neighborhoods are also the most expensive and highest demand?

I'm not entirely sure that correlation implies causation in this case.

Do most people move to cities specifically because they're somewhat walkable with good public transportation, or do people move to cities for other reasons such as more access to better paying jobs?

Would people in cities rather drive to work if it was possible rather than taking a chance every day that the people next to them on the bus/train weren't some strange/risky people?

There are as many reasons for moving as there are people. I lived in Berkeley even when my job was in Newark because I hated the idea of living in a parking lot with a mayor (credit to Ghost Ride the Volvo's apt description of Fremont)

The massive state, federal, and local bureaucracies shaping the public & private realm to always guarantee easy parking for automobiles & a network of high-throughput roadways between them yet only occasionally & reluctantly doing the same for other modes of transportation. Note that guaranteeing easy parking for automobiles also results in destinations being so far apart that other modes of transport usually become impractical.

In lots of the US it's illegal for developers to propose anything other than Single-Family Homes. They are codified to have large minimum size requirements and often have setback requirements forcing the house to be a certain feet away from the street. Businesses are legally required to be segregated from residential used, even corner stores. Lots of businesses in the US are zoned to mandate a minimum amount of parking.

The justification for a lot of these zoning laws is explicitly that developers and the market will not provide adequate home sizes or parking, so minimum requirements are forced on developers. When law forces huge houses, no mixed use, and huge minimum parking lots, the only built environment that emerges is a car dependent one. Older US suburban neighborhoods, like the post-WWII suburbs, had smaller (900-1200 sq ft.) homes because these minimum lot and floor area size requirements weren't in place yet.

If you're curious about areas with different land-use requirements, there are cities in the US like Boston, Berkeley, or Emeryville (just off the top of my head) with more permissive zoning laws that have much lower car modeshare than other parts of the US.

I don't think I said that. All places people live, aside from frontiers, have rules applied to them and those rules affect how people get around. The Netherlands has different rules than the US, and within that framework the market (I didn't say the word free) shows a preference for ebikes.

Similarly, when I lived in the US I had to go 1.1 miles to the nearest coffee shop (or shop of any sort), and opening a coffee shop in my neighbourhood would have been illegal, and shut down very quickly. And that wasn't even all that far from the downtown of a medium-sized city (Sacramento).

Everywhere is distorted. As such it's meaningless to insist one or the other is preferred - it's down to an environment heavily influenced by policy. As such, choices can change if policies change.

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