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Comment by tomcar288 | Hacker News Reader

we had no problem building houses for people in the 50s and 60s. Why all the sudden we can't do it in the last 20 years? There's plenty of land out there. Even in the CA, the most densley populated state, there are more acres in CA than people and yet somehow there's a huge land shortage and ridiculous amounts of regulation. Even 100 miles away from the city, you'll see houses squeezed together like some kind of concentration camp, with open land in every direction and a 5 lane highway to service the equally insane commuting distances created by these land use policies: talk about terrible for the environment.

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>we had no problem building houses for people in the 50s and 60s. Why all the sudden we can't do it in the last 20 years?

Yea, it's actually pretty easy. Just get in a time machine and go back to 1956 when the Federal Highway Act made all that development possible, and just tell them to build sixteen-lane highways through every major city instead of two-lane highways. Explain that in 70 years, those highways will be operating overcapacity, so that a commute in and out of the city will not be able to operate at optimal speed of a vehicle, so that traveling 30 miles will not take 30 minutes, rather it will often take 60 minutes or longer, thus making central real estate more valuable. Which, in turn, creates a feedback loop that makes the viable transportation range of the urban center smaller and smaller. And, thus, makes the real estate in that smaller area more and more valuable. However, if you can get those highways doubled or tripled in size it should stop that feedback loop for now.

Once you convince them to do that, feel free to come back to 2024, and all our development concerns will go away for another 70 years, at which point, someone will have to get in the time machine to make it 38 lane highways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...

My God! This is the most American comment, sorry.

Those poor souls living in cities. I read somewhere that Austin (or another place in Texas), despite being the dominant settlement in its metro area, had much lower representation than the rich and less populated suburbs.

I grew up in Austin, so I'm intimately familiar with it. I don't really understand your comment, but I'm happy to talk about Austin if you have any questions.

I forget if it's Austin or Houston or whichever it was. But the metro representative body, handling the local budget, was basically like this:

Main city in the metro area, let's say 2 million people: 2 representatives.

Every other settlement in the metro area, let's say 3 million people: 20 representatives.

Guess why they kept building highways which cut through city neighborhoods?

Edit: found it:

https://www.fairforhouston.com/

Gerrymandering, starting to be undone 60+ decades later.

> Even in the CA, the most densley populated state

California is far from the most densely populated state! It is the most highly populated, but it's also one of the largest.

The most densely populated states are on the Eastern seaboard: NJ (1263 ppl/mi² or 488 ppl/km²), then RI, MA, CT, MD, DE, FL, NY, PA, and OH. CA is 11th, at 250ppl/mi² or 97 ppl/km², approximately 20% of the NJ density.

I’m struggling to imagine how less densely packed housing could be better for the environment

the key is to balance the number of jobs in an area with the amount of housing and to have mixed use land policy so housing and commercial and industrial can be much closer.

That sounds unrelated to housing density

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