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Comment by dnissley | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I need to make this point again and again: It's not about increasing the value of properties for most (after all, allowing apartments to be built in your neighborhood would increase the value of the remaining SFHs). It's about keeping the character of the neighborhood the same as it is now (SFH vibes), and all that comes with that ("family friendliness", etc).

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I think people in the US overestimate how much upzoning "has to" affect most neighborhoods, especially infill development or removing default single-family home zoning. I used to live in Minneapolis, which has lots of century-old duplexes and fourplexes mixed in with single-family homes on similar lot sizes. Traffic, activity/noise, appearance, and overall "niceness" were almost the same as on single-family-only blocks -- but the bump in density supported lots of corner stores and restaurants in walking distance that made people want to live there or visit the neighborhood for the day.

Part of the apprehension might be caused by the difficulty of rezoning itself. The only people with the determination and money to get a zoning variance are big developers who need a big building to make it worthwhile. That's how you get 50- or 100-unit apartments going up in single-family neighborhoods, and a "missing middle" of density and affordability.

Is it not contradictory to say that traffic/activity/noise are almost the same, but it'd support lots of corner stores and restaurants and people would want to visit the neighborhood? The entire point of living in a suburb is that people who don't live here have no reason to be here. I actively do not want a restaurant or a bar or a coffee shop a block away from my home.

As counterintuitive as it seems, that was my experience living in one of those neighborhoods and visiting others over several years. A handful of small stores on one block or corner every half-mile really doesn't induce that much traffic. It's an entirely different scale from a commercial district or even a car-oriented strip mall.

Everyone wants to keep the character of their neighborhood.

Forget that ! When you go to a dense city like Barcelona where every block is nearly 4 story high rise apartments, its wonderful.

Change is beautiful, people enhance neighborhoods

I agree, and I think even the folks who are against that would actually end up enjoying it more. But people hate change, especially when it means changing something that has been that way for generations at this point. My main point though is that people who think this is about money are simply wrong. Trying to argue numbers with these folks will not move them an inch. It has everything to do with emotion.

> I agree, and I think even the folks who are against that would actually end up enjoying it more

That's a pretty remarkable belief. Many of us happy suburbanites have lived in large dense cities in our younger days. We are not ignorant of the joys of city living, we've just changed priorities.

The neighborhoods I have in mind here aren't "true suburbs" but rather "pre-war suburbs" that are already fairly dense. Think west SF, Fremont/Ballard in Seattle, etc.

Lots of people who want to live in suburbs have in fact visited or even lived in large, dense cities. They're well aware of the tradeoffs.

Barcalona is a terrible place to live due to mass tourism that the intenet has enabled.

Yup I hear nobody goes there anymore because its so popular.

Tourists go. That doesn’t mean it’s a good place to live.

The extreme example is of course Venice.

People who think it's wonderful to live in a place where every block is 4-story apartments should feel free to move to such a place.

That place doesn’t practically exist in most of the US.

It doesn't exist in most of Spain/Catalonia either; it's in a few of the largest cities.

Even in small cities in Spain, central areas are high density with three or four storey mix residential buildings.

I chose a random small city in northern Catalonia called Vielha and viewed it on Goggle Maps, there they are. They look different to Eixanple apartment buildings, but they are there in the centre. Population less than 6k.

Chose another, Gironella, a bit further south; population around 4k. One less floor on the multi family apartment buildings in the old centre, and a much higher ratio of SFDs to MFDs in the settlement as a whole, but still there.

How many should I sample to convince you?

If the yardstick moves to "three or four story residential buildings are present" from "every block is 4-story apartments", three story apartments/multi-families can be found in many cities around the US as well.

They’re multi family apartment buildings. Rather like those in the Eichample, but with a different exterior style, and of course without the famous block chamfer.

Translation: keep out them poors.

Zoning that mandates low densities is used to economically segregate areas. They're invisibly gated communities enforced by the government. "Can't live here unless you can afford to buy/rent this much land."

One of the things I noticed while living in Munich was that the differences in apparent neighborhood prosperity in different parts of the city were vastly less extreme than in major US cities. Almost every neighborhood looked kind of vaguely middling, it was rare for a place to look obviously well-to-do or obviously run down.

And it makes that it's harder to get extreme differences there if at least medium density dwellings are allowed just about everywhere. Working class people may not be able to afford a whole house, but they may be able to afford an apartment in a given neighborhood.

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