People need to remember the Hollywood sign was for a housing development at the edge of town in Los Angeles. That's how long it's been, and we've added almost no density, and eternal sprawl.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/LACounty...
Plenty of opportunity for high-rise and even more mid-rise projects, but nearly everything is low-rise. Thankfully it looks like recent zoning changes will throw nimbyism to the wolves, but op is entirely right in describing how LA is essentially the epitome of sprawl.
Hollywood density: 22,193 people per square mile
Koreatown density: 42,611 people per square mile
Source: https://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/population/density/ne...
Yes, greater LA area also has a lot of what people like to call “sprawl”, but it’s a big place and has many different neighborhoods. You also don’t need high rises for density - Paris is not all that tall, but at 53k people per square mile, it’s denser on average than NYC…
In addition to the obvious Staten Island, apparently Queens "only" has 22,125! I always thought it would be close to Brooklyn etc.
Kidding, but there is more land for industrial and commercial use in Queens that isn't residential. Including two airports and three sizable sports facilities. Brooklyn by contrast has almost no interruptions to the edge-to-edge residential street grid.
That's called sprawl.
Even in the valleys, Sherman Oaks is very different from Agoura. OC would take years to really get to know as well.
When you look at areal/satellite imagery, Santa Barbara to San Diego is basically connected by different towns and neighborhoods, with very little breaks. Yet, no one will say that it’s all the same or somehow homogeneous. The scale in itself is breathtaking from the plane.
Instead of dismissing an objective truth as derogatory, you should get to know the word.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl
Los Angeles is the most infamous example, and you can look at its evolution here: https://la.curbed.com/2014/4/3/10121264/los-angeles-sprawl-h...
Sprawl isn't a derogatory term, it's a descriptive one. Likewise just because enclaves have a unique character and governance doesn't mean they're not the outcome of sprawl. Please don't find yourself so easily offended.
(I've got almost three years of experience in the LA area largely in a box comprised of Encino, Venice, DTLA, and Burbank, if it adds any credibility to the point. Certainly not a lifetime resident but enough to have my way memorized pretty much everywhere and know why my favorite little place is Sawtelle. Everything in that box is unique, but nevertheless... it's still sprawl)
Hope this helps.
If you are still in LA, try exploring more than your commute and routine life afford. You’ll be surprised. While not as much Victorian-era architecture has survived as in say San Francisco, there are many interesting pockets to see and neighborhoods to understand. Many generations of immigrants left their marks, with neighborhoods passing from one group to the next, yet their traces remain (such as ethnically specific churches/houses of worship or other long-lived institutions).
And if it’s not for you in the end, that’s great too - not everyone enjoys every part of the world. Explore and find what you like best.
Goodnight.
That being said, at least the sprawl in a lot of LA county is basically done thanks to geography, bounded by ocean or protected mountains. Only one way to go now: up.
The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own.
It is not wrong to want that.
However, it is definitely wrong to assume that high-rise apartments are “proper” density and that LA is doing it wrong. LA is the way the people live there want it to be. If you want high density and high-rise living, there are other cities that offer that.
The overall problem, though, is that these density restrictions cause a nasty spiral. People looking for work are asked to move to one of these cities where their bosses own these wonderful homes. They mostly have to rent. Rent is high. Supply is low, so it's hard to even find a place! Every single service that you might use, also has to pay rent. Not only do you have to put a significant portion of your paycheck to rent, but basically every restaurant has to charge a very heavy amount to this. Every corner store. Parking. Every minor service. Public spaces might barely exist, but forget having community spaces run by individuals, because commercial real estate got super expensive from this same cycle.
It's hard to overstate how real estate pressure makes _everything_ more costly. People have to work to live. If they want a good job, they _have_ to buy into the urban real estate tradeoff. There are ~no good rural jobs. It's pervasive.
If every part of living wasn't so financialised, if it was possible for public spaces to survive, if teachers could actually afford to live close to schools, this is a different story. And some cities manage this better, of course. But at one point decisions around parking minimums, height restrictions, endless ability of localities to object to building development, and other whining from people who would rather have their yard than replace that with a larger public park... it just makes it harder and harder to sustain urban living at all
I used to think the NIMBYs were full of it -- they say their opponents wanted to force everyone into high-density living arrangements, everyone must live in a communist tower block dystopia, people's yards and green spaces would be taken from them, huge buildings would tower over neighborhoods and block out all the light, etc. I thought that was a pretty bad strawman representation of their opponents.
Now I realize that some people really do want those things, after seeing quite a lot of unreasonable people on HN and a few other places, who really do seem to believe the insane ideas the NIMBYs ascribe to them.
You wrote "But at one point decisions around parking minimums, height restrictions, endless ability of localities to object to building development, and other whining from people who would rather have their yard than replace that with a larger public park.."
Do you really think it's ok to build a public park right in someone's yard? Do you really, truly believe that our society should operate that way? Because if you do, the NIMBYs are right!
And honestly, if a person wants to make a little public park in their yard... I don't see what the issue is with that? But yeah, that's not what was suggested in the slightest.
This depends on your definition of a 'good job'. If this is about pay, yes, wages in the countryside are lower - but so are living costs. If I average over my contacts, people working rurally seem to be generally happier with their occupation, though.
> and other whining from people who would rather have their yard than replace that with a larger public park...
If I have the choice between my own yard, where I can park my barbecue grill, and a public park, which most likely will become a magnet for the homeless/drug user population, I know what I will choose.
People who believe public recreation infrastructure is the way to go ascribe an ideal to a public park that is rarely ever met - they live in a world where parks come right out of Edwardian England, with well-maintained flower beds and fences around them, where a park custodian closes the park at night[1]. The problem with that: That is incredibly expensive.
So parks are lucky if they get their grass cut regularly, and are relatively calm areas to sleep in at night. The problem now is that with homeless/drug user populations, the area becomes 'unsafe' for local residents, who will now avoid that park, at which point it loses all it's recreational value.
So ... why would I give up my own little yard, which I maintain, which is relatively safe, for a block-sized open sewer where it is only a matter of time for someone who ought to be in a mental hospital to shank me?
[1] ... and ironically, that type of park was not public either - it was private property often owned by the landlord, and you had to have a residents-only key to access many of those.
Perhaps not the US or many parts of the world. But like… I dunno, I was in Brisbane the other day and they had huge places with more amenities my back yard will ever have. It’s not the same as the best yard, but it’s better than most peoples yards.
I don't know where people get the idea that suburbs are nothing but houses for miles and miles. We really do have it all here. And the people who want dense housing don't want to live in my neighborhood -- they gravitate to the parts of the area with high rises.
Furthermore, you completely ignored mid-rise housing, and the fact that it can be seamlessly mixed in with SFH without significantly changing the feel or character of the neighbourhood. Oh The Urbanity made a great YouTube video about this recently where they made a neutral comparison of different densities, from 0 to ultra-dense NYC skyscrapers.
Anyone who wants to live in apartments can do so. Nobody is forced to live in single-family homes -- on the contrary, we work long and hard to afford the money to get into them because they are better than listening to our neighbors all the time.
Apartments are fun when you are young and want to live downtown and enjoy the restaurants and the night life. When you get older and want your home to be a refuge and raise a family, apartments really suck.
Re "apartments really suck" - I beg to differ. I live in a 1920s apartment block in an inner-city neighbourhood, it's 50m from a school where my neighbours kids walk every day (high school is further, but they'll take the trolley or tram), there's a cafe on the corner, a couple of local pubs on my street, and a supermarket 5 mins walk away. I don't hear neighbours through the walls, we have a shared garden with an apple tree and grape vines. I walk ~10 minutes to meet friends at my local cinema, and walk my dog in a handful of different parks which are between 5 and 15 minutes walk away. Can you please explain what part of any of this "sucks" because I am personally struggling to see it.
I suspect you'll suggest that my situation is exceptional (it's not, this describes most accommodation where I live) and counter that it's possible to make a bad apartment. But really it's possible to fuck up any kind of housing development - the UK has some spectacular examples of both shit tower blocks and shit single-family dwellings last century for starters. So the difference is that those single home developments also incur a pretty stiff cost to cities, society and the environment that you cannot handwave away unless you just want to say “well I don’t mind if the rest of the world sucks, as long as I get to have a big garden”
People do not prefer sharing a house with roommates to having their own apartment.
Also the idea that people's preferences should be encoded into bans on certain housing types is completely absurd to begin with.
Also please see the price increases in single family homes also historically outpacing inflation in major metros.
Build more of something, and dare I say it, maybe let's let the market decide what and where.
What I remember most about living in a flat was my wife and I being able to walk to work and our son being able to walk to school. Didn't hear the neighbours and we had access to really nice private gardens.
There is nothing fundamentally sucky about apartments/flats.
Edit: Of course, a lot of flats/apartments suck - but then again so do many houses. If you have flats built with proper construction and sensibly planned then they can be very pleasant.
And there your argument falls apart; vast majority can’t afford it. Policy you advocate has caused a housing shortage.
The suburbs got built because people wanted them! The zoning laws exist because the voters wanted them! It's a big mistake to think that most Americans secretly want denser housing arrangements and the zoning laws are preventing it.
and of course it is possible to have a refuge while being in shared housing. Like big apartments do get built! Not for everyone and like you said people want a nice refuge. But it’s possible to build large apartments with good insulation where people have their privacy, while simultaneously offering (for example) huge shared parks and close access to commerce or schools. every shared housing thing doesn’t turn into Manhattan.
- significantly higher cost (absent widespread R1 zoning, which drives the cost of apartments up),
- locations in the middle of desolate suburbia,
- dead neighbourhoods because almost no one lives there,
- very few nearby stores and restaurants,
- no or limited public transit because it costs far too much to run in sprawling suburbia,
- utter dependence on personal automobiles, and the complete lack of independence for children, young adults, and other non-driving members of society,
- the necessity of maintaining the grounds of your own personal park,
- poorly maintained or missing public infrastructure because everything is so spread out,
- having to endure endless traffic because of your 1hr commute to work,
and I could go on.
Given the above, if apartment living wasn't so heavily restricted by law, so many more people would choose to live in them rather than SFH. You only need to look at cities like Montreal or entire countries like the Netherlands to see that this is true.
In Montreal, housing is still cheap and most people live in multiplexes (walk-up two-to-four storey buildings with private front doors and small back yards) and live very close to where they work, but there are still a lot of different styles of SFH that people can choose to live in if they want, and many do. Again, look at the video I linked above for examples.
I love the constant description of suburbia as being desolate.
My suburban neighborhood is pretty typical and we have a vibrant community, including little free libraries, bike trails, conservation clubs, birdwatching orgs, garden clubs, needlecraft clubs, kids running lemonade stands, teens hustling to shovel driveways in the winter, a community pool, bake sales, plant sales, strawberry festivals, and more.
We even all banded together and got rid of a lot of the streetlights so now I live in a Bortle 3 (or VERY low Bortle 4) dark sky. And because I have a yard I have a huge-ass amateur radio antenna farm and a fire pit where people come over to chill out.
I raised three daughters here and they turned out fantastic, and spent their youth doing some real Stranger Things stuff without all of the upside-down bits.
If I want to feel hip and urbane I drive the 20 minutes to the train station and go into town, pay my $20 for a cocktail, see an overpriced show, and then retire to my awesome house.
I'm beginning to think that people who think suburbia is desolate are miserable shitheads who a: people don't want to be around, or b: don't want to be around other people.
Also significantly higher return on investment. Homeowners build equity, renters don't. Houses increase in value faster than owned condos/apartments/townhouses.
> - locations in the middle of desolate suburbia,
It's not desolate. We have everything -- parks, stores, restaurants, schools, nearby downtown areas...
> - dead neighbourhoods because almost no one lives there,
Not dead at all. Plenty of kids playing all the time, people walking their dogs, etc.
> - very few nearby stores and restaurants,
Not true at all. There are hundreds of stores and restaurants where I live. They just aren't jammed between people's houses.
> - no or limited public transit because it costs far too much to run in sprawling suburbia,
Plenty of transit in my suburb.
> - utter dependence on personal automobiles, and the complete lack of independence for children, young adults, and other non-driving members of society,
Not true at all. People have ways to get around. Kids ride bikes. There are buses and trains not all that far away.
> - the necessity of maintaining the grounds of your own personal park,
It's not usually a big deal to maintain your yards. Most people seem to manage. Some hire gardeners, but many also take care of it themselves.
> - poorly maintained or missing public infrastructure because everything is so spread out,
All the infrastructure in most suburbs is fine. It's not like we all live in the 1800s or something. The roads are even paved!
> - having to endure endless traffic because of your 1hr commute to work,
A 1-hour commute is an outlier. It just is. The US average, last I checked, is something like 30 or 35 minutes.
Nonetheless, NONE of what you say justifies single family home MANDATES (as well as minimum parking mandates, minimum setbacks, maximum heights, etc.). Let people build what they want to, at the price they want to, and everyone will be happier. This is the United States we're talking about, supposedly the "land of the free"—why not make it actually true?
The restrictions exist because people want to ruin neighborhoods like mine. We made laws to prevent it.
For every sane YIMBY who wants to build livable density, there seems to also be an unhinged person who thinks everyone should be forced to live in tower blocks.
Many such people are in this thread. I used to think it was a strawman argument, but those people really do exist, they really want to take my home from me and turn my whole block into a high rise, and that’s not going to happen without a fight. That’s why the mandates exist.
The biggest obstacle the YIMBY crowd faces is the insane people in their own camp: The crazy utopian socialist weirdos who think it’s morally wrong to live in a house in a suburb and drive a car. Force those people out, denounce them, and you’ll see a lot of the opposition to new housing go away.
There's a big difference between high-rise and mid-rise, and all three can peacefully coexist. If you had watched the video I linked earlier you would have seen many examples of this. I will link it here again for convenience.
Population Density 101: A Visual Guide to Suburbs and Skyscrapers by Oh The Urbanity!: https://youtu.be/y3XoUBzfXps
If the first of those is falsified, the mid-rise has a negative effect on the nearby properties. If the second is falsified, that negative effect is significantly amplified. Our part of the city of Cambridge has slightly less street sparking space than cars for the houses here. That’s made up for by about 2/3 of the houses having private driveways (which take one street spot for the curb cut, but often add 2-4 parking spots). Place even a 6-story mid-rise with no parking and 40 cars for its 8 cars worth of frontage and it creates chaos in a way that a triplex or SFR doesn’t.
Furthermore, if there is no off-street parking and cities price on-street parking appropriately such that there are always a few empty spots, no one would move into the area with the expectation that they can park their car for free, and it wouldn't be a problem.
Off-street parking mandates sound like a good idea, but they're actually horrible for cities, and they're part of why most American cities are as sprawling and car-dependent as they are. City-planners of the 20th century thought the same as you and didn't consider the consequences, and now the trend is reversing: many cities and states are beginning to eliminate those mandates, but it's going to take quite a long time before the effects are felt.
It’s not wrong to want your neighborhood to never change.
However I would argue that it is wrong to assume that every city currently has the “proper” density. Why was it ok for your house to be built but not for your neighbor to, say, redevelop their SFH into 3 town homes?
> The average person in California (and in the rest of the country) desires to live in a detached home that they own.
Then why is it necessary for LA and other localities to make it literally illegal to build denser housing? After all, if detached single family homes are what people want, then surely simple supply and demand will lead to that being what's predominantly built, right?
(Spoiler: Single family homes aren't what everyone wants. Plenty of people want other types of housing. People pushing these zoning rules aren't doing it because _they_ want single family homes - they're doing it because they want control over what type of home is available to others.)
Roughly speaking, 25% of people prefer urban living, 50% prefer suburban living, and 25% prefer rural living. Urban living is currently expensive, because there is a massive shortage of urban housing. People didn't build enough of it in the 20th century for a number of reasons.
All other things being equal, urban living should be cheaper than suburban living, because urban areas need less infrastructure for each resident. Every city where urban living continues to be expensive should build high-density mid-rise areas until that's no longer the case. High-rises rarely make sense outside central locations, as they are expensive to build.
https://la.curbed.com/2015/4/8/9972362/everything-wrong-with...
And then you put them inches away from one another, lined up in perfect rows!
I don't get it, looking on (mainly through TV/film) from the UK, what makes detached houses desirable is almost entirely lacking from North American streets, they frequently seem to look like a terrace that's been chopped up. Is it perhaps because timber framing makes noise more of a problem in terraces/semis; so that becomes the prime motivator for detached?
There are plenty of suburbs that aren't this way though, especially older ones.
It is important to be very clear about this because the HN crowd seems to have a massive over-representation of people who like dense living arrangements: the vast majority of Americans want to live in a detached home that they own, and they want to transport themselves in cars that they own. They don't want to live in apartments, they don't want to rent, and they don't like mass transit. There are indeed some Americans who want to live in places like Manhattan, but they are a small minority. A large majority of the Americans who currently live in apartments only do so because they cannot afford a detached home.
It's not a choice between suburbia and Manhattan. It's a choice between exclusionary, backwards suburban zoning (which is subsidized by denser development due to the increased cost of utilities for sprawling development), and literally any more sane option. Let people build duplexes, corner stores, local markets, and get rid of the cul de sacs. That's literally the core of the "density" people are talking about. Not Manhattan style high rises.
Saying that people (really any group, but millenials here) prefer suburbia because that's what you see them currently buying on the housing market, is ignoring the fact that the available housing stock probably doesn't match up to their preferences! Plenty of people are buying the "lesser of two evils" rather than their dream home. Plenty of people would choose something within walking distance of a decent park and grocery, if they had that option. But America, despite being built on the train and the pedestrian, has been rebuilt on the automobile and the cul-de-sac with single family home zoning. So people are buying what is available, even if it's not what they want.
If you doubt what I'm saying, check the prices of homes in prewar "streetcar suburbs" which are denser, but still have small yards, detached houses, and yet are near small commercial uses too. Plenty of people want to buy these and the prices have skyrocketed: it's illegal to build them now, so the supply is limited.
That makes logical sense yet in the same post you propose to “get rid of the cul-de-sacs” which is a type of land use that many people genuinely prefer, even if you don’t.
It's kind of funny that your reaction to my comment is "he wants to take away the cul-de-sac" when all I'm asking is if we can get zoning for a decent alternative. I'm not asking to replace all the suburbs with this style of zoning, but especially as you get to areas with high unmet housing demand, zoning needs to be reconsidered.
Even just the european solution of mixing rowhouses and 3-5 story apartment buildings would fix that. In fact, it would significantly increase density and reduce cost, in turn reducing commute times for many people.
Even an apartment can be built well enough that you don't have to worry about sharing walls with neighbors. My neighbor is regularly watching movies at THX reference volume, and so am I, and neither of us can hear each others' audio.
With land value as high as it is in LA, it's worth spending money on improving the quality of construction, so people can share walls with their neighbors without any of the negatives usually associated with it.
It’s not uncommon to read a comment so detached from economic reality but this is today’s winner. In fact causing the problem it intends to solve.
So, be honest and just compare suburban sprawl against, well, normal development where people can build town houses, duplexes, small apartment buildings, and of course small stores and restaurants. THAT is the density that the majority of people are talking about. Not high rises in ultra dense urban cores. I think more Americans than you think would like to be walking distance from a decent grocery store, bar, and breakfast place. I enjoy it!
The answer is in the dreams that everyone had, in that house, over the decades. Those hills are a pretty haunted lot. Something about the tension of the Earth, in my opinion, that can be felt if you listen long enough ..
I think of that as being the entire point of the city. It's a deliberate contrast to places like NYC, Tokyo, London.
A place where you can have a big old lot, a store that's half empty, a car collection. Cause there's so much land kicking about. Too bad it became expensive anyway, I guess.