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Comment by everdrive | Hacker News Reader

This is a very unpopular point here (and I suppose lots of places) but there are really just too many people. There's no more frontier, and nowhere to retreat to if you need to escape the crowds. Yes, we could build spaces even tighter than we currently are. But this is a new problem for humanity, and we're not dealing with it well.

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In the United States at least there's plenty of land far away from crowds, and inexpensive too. People just don't want to live there.

True, but land is only part of the expense. Labor and materials have gone way up over the last 10 years as well.

We do, there is just a strong block of voters who do not want you to have this option and make it as difficult as possible.

You can buy some land out in Texas for like $1000 per acre.

You can buy the land.

The hard part is building on it.

One reason it's unpopular is that people have been saying it for hundreds of years, with varying (and generally increasing) levels of stridency, and have been consistently depantsed by advancing quality of life. You'd need either to be extraordinarily ignorant (of history) or extraordinarily irrational to prefer life in 1950 to 2023.

There's a ton of extra space in the United States. Germany's population density is >600/sq mile. That's more than all but five states. It's not a new problem - it's one that's been solved by many other countries.

There are tons of awesome 3k sqft houses for under $300k—plus smaller, cheaper ones—all over the US.

They’re in shrinking rural towns and small cities. The schools are bad and there’s no economy to speak of.

… but they’re better than some imagined frontier. Yet nobody’s moving there. Which suggests a lack of places to escape to cheaply may not be the problem.

Or "cheap" is defined by more than the cost of a house. Usually lack of local economy and jobs is the reason those towns are shrinking.

Yes, but that’s the same problem as uninhabited “frontier” except less bad. Nobody’s taking advantage of it, regardless. Therefore…

This is not a new problem. At almost every point in history there have been more people than ever before. Historically we have built more homes and cities for the new people to live in.

I agree.

It's funny, I live in NYC, where the population has declined by over 5% since 2020 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38698353) and supposedly everyone is working from home, and yet I'm still sitting in traffic every day. The buses are still crowded. The subways are still crowded.

War, plague, famine, etc have been around since the population was 1000x smaller and before. Cities too.

Just build dense housing. People actually like dense mixed use living.

There is no way that is true. Idk anyone that enjoys living in an apartment. Where are you getting that idea from?

Density is horrible for qol in my experience.

Apartments aren't the only dense housing solution. Townhomes, repurposed warehouses, etc are excellent solutions. My favorite place I lived every was a townhome in a community of about 100 homes. It was a special 50/50 community where 50% were tax credit and the other 50% were privately-owned (I rented a privately owned townhome). They all looked the same so there was no stigma as to who had section 8 and who didn't, and the community was kept up very well.

$1,200/month for 3bd/2.5ba, 1,200sqft with hardwood flooring and free off-street assigned parking 15 minutes from the city. Lived there 3 years and moved out in 2018, loved it. Now I pay $1,200/month to live a 600sqft studio apartment behind a Costco an hour from the city.

To this day I don't understand why this style of housing isn't more popular.

> I don't understand why this style of housing isn't more popular

You answered your own question.

> They all looked the same so there was no stigma as to who had section 8 and who didn't

Part of the point of segregating by income is precisely to distinguish the haves from the have-nots.

Living with poverty brings a whole bunch of new problems. I live in a community like this. Its noisy, filled with people with their own issues. I have alcoholics getting drunk in the parking lots making noise along with regular drunk driving. The police make regular visits to my complex. Noise, traffic, safety these are realities of dense living that effect quality of life. More people mean more chances to have babies next door, crying through your shared walls, more anti social behavior from people.

People picture the wrong thing, usually soul crushing tower block. Picture Savannah, Charleston, small college towns, ... Dense, but spacious, accommodating, lush, verdant.

If the surroundings are low quality, then yes, density sucks. If the surrounding area is high quality, density makes things better. More things closer. It's awesome.

Money talks too. The denser, walkable areas are always the most expensive. Market is underserved in much of this country.

The simple reason is that dense areas are more expensive, so there is clearly a lot of demand for it, even if you dislike it.

As to why, it's really all about tradeoffs. If you live in a nice house with land, you'll be far from city amenities. If you want to be close to city amenities (concerts, theaters, stadiums, bars, restaurants, shops, activities, people, being able to walk to places, public transit, etc), then you need to live somewhere dense.

Dense areas are popular because there are so many cool things nearby you. That's just not possible if you live in the suburbs.

Sure, most people would probably prefer a single-family home also in a dense area. But that's just physically impossible. A subdivision of nice homes with yards doesn't even contain enough people to support its own infrastructure (roads, pipes, etc) let alone a vibrant local restaurant scene. So you must drive everywhere you go, which has some serious downsides.

So many people prefer being able to walk to a coffee shop or to the bar without needing to drive. There's a reason 15-minute cities are growing in popularity.

> The simple reason is that dense areas are more expensive, so there is clearly a lot of demand for it, even if you dislike it.

Just to start, this doesn't match reality. Dense cities get a lot of attention. Look at the SF Bay area. SF city is expensive yes, and it's dense. The median home is about 1.2 million. The rest of the bay's home prices suggest that people prefer less dense living. Atherton with a median home prices over 7million, palo alto at over 3 million, los altos is 3.5 million, menlo park over 2.8million, mill valley almost 2 million.

The most expensive places to live in the US are never its major cities.

I think this just proves that dense urban housing is both desirable and lower cost. What doesn’t change is that land is expensive. They aren’t making any more of it.

Just because someone prefers it over being homeless or commuting 90 minutes each way doesn't mean they like it

> Just because someone prefers it over being homeless or commuting 90 minutes each way doesn't mean they like it

Doesn't "like" have to be assessed in comparison to the available alternatives? I mean, I don't like having to cook (minimally), empty the dishwasher, and other daily household chores, but I prefer those things to store-bought meals, eating on paper plates with plastic utensils, and/or hiring a daily housekeeper.

Some people, yes. Some people also really dislike dense housing. I would suggest more people dislike dense housing than like it.

Given equal opportunity, I would bet most people would choose to live in a ranch style house with land around it than an apartment.

Do you by chance live in a city?

How do you establish that there are too many? Do you have a metric for that?

Also - I think this is a popular point as most people would agree with this Malthusian outlook. (And by the way, Malthus was always wrong in his predictions, but that didn't impact his credibility or the longevity of this idea.) Everyone, it seems, promotes this outlook - Bill Gates, David Attenborough, most politicians - I never hear the opposite idea that we should increase the population (except via immigration).

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