As opposed to all the "urban lifestyle" people who readily offload their basic needs onto others. Some people are happy cooking their own basic foods. Others want them to be prepared, and their dished cleaned, by a team. Some people are happy with a beer fridge. Others want to go to a bar and pay a young person to smile and flirt while concocting a fancy drink in a silly glass. To each their own. But having a basic kitchen in an apartment is not a luxury any more than having a cupboard for cleaning supplies, a service that can also be outsourced by those too lazy to clean up after themselves. A desire for a modicum of self-sufficiency is not a vice.
In fact, if you want to have that beautiful home surrounded by nature and not suburban cookie cutter houses, then it's also in your interest to see that cities stay in the cities. Too many orchards and farms have been demolished to build miserable tracts of poorly constructed wood frame houses.
I personally believe they're mostly wrong - urbanization probably won't harm home values. And done well, might improve the values even more.
A decade ago, YIMBY-leaning people and groups were mad but mostly obscure and NIMBY-leaning people and groups were powerful. Now both sides are mad, the YIMBY side because it is still taking a long time to build enough to see affordability improve (especially with the interest rate shock), and the NIMBY side because they can see all those new townhomes and apartments going up in suburbs and smaller towns and densification projects in the city center, and dislike that.
I remember I used to complain that housing was so expensive and you never saw anything getting built despite there being plenty of great places to build things. And then one day I realized that a lot of construction was happening in a lot of those places I was thinking of, and I should stop complaining, since what I wanted to see happen was actually happening!
It's hard to feel like it's "better" for both sides to be mad while affordability is still bad, but I do think it's better than what seemed more like an insurmountable problem to me a decade ago.
What's missing is smaller apartment blocks (4-8 units), small THs or SFHs (<3000sqft), or duplex/triplex/etc.
That is beginning to change, largely as a result of rezoning around the Metro corridor. More mixed use, more low-rise condos. But, this is limited to areas that are suitable for complete redevelopment (mostly old low-rise offices within 1/2 mile of a Metro station).
Nuking the SFH zoning to allow market forces to drive development outside the immediate Metro-adjacent plots would help. Allows ADUs and "granny flats". Allow a SFH to be split into a duplex or rebuilt as 3-4 THs. Etc.
[0]: https://i0.wp.com/publicola.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/S...
They're not, as evidenced by the literally millions of apartments in existence.
Here's Fairfax CO VA. Everything in yellow or green is largely zoned for SFHs (with differing # units/acre). https://fairfaxcountygis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/i...
I live in an apartment and cook plenty, for example.
Another case point - lived my whole life in apartments (thats how much of Europe runs), and preferred to buy another one instead of almost similarly-sized house. And I like cooking a lot and currently getting a maybe bit too much into various cuisines via youtube.
Once you grok few basic concepts and rules its amazing how much one can achieve with little and some skills. Plus its creativity to the max, which everybody appreciates too. Also improves your health (better ingredients, you can make stuff with less sugar/fat).
Bad thing is, your average restaurant wont feel that fancy anymore.
If I were hunting/growing my own food, sure I'd want to live in a house with terrain around but that's a level of self-sufficiency that's quite rare in suburbia last time I checked.
I live in a 600sq ft 2-bedroom apartment with my wife, and we cook nearly every meal at home, we rarely go out to bars, or spend much money in the city.
But we have 6-7 cute cafes within a 5 minute walk, so we stop in for a coffee now and then. We have a big park that we can picnic in, three blocks away. There are a ton of fun things to do for cheap or free nearby.
We don’t need a ton of space at home because our city provides us a lot of happiness.
If you can walk to handle all of your basic needs, then you don’t need to have so much at home, is the point that the GP was making.
For example, we keep much less food at home in Europe than we used to in the US, because I can just drop by the veggie stand or mini-grocery on my walk/bike home from work and get a fresh version of whatever I want to cook that night.
We don’t need a beer fridge because there is a beer store selling cold beer cans within a block of us, and with way more selection.
When the outside environment is attractive, apartment living is glorious. When the outside is gnarly (e.g. no amenities, bad neighbors, ...), apartment living is hell.
There's a weird tipping point, where all the negatives of living in an apartment evaporate. But it's hard to put it into numbers. You just "know", experience it.
Similar for houses, there's a weird tipping point where all the negatives of a home just congeal, and it's a drag and anchor, and the house starts to own you more than the other way around.
When I tell people I hate driving so much that I'd rather sit on public transit (or even walk!) for 1 hour if the alternative was a 20 minute drive they are flabbergasted.
I go to the grocery store 3-5 times a week and that amazes people because the default assumption is a grocery trip involves getting in your car and buying a cart full of groceries for a week. People find it so hard to believe that I actually enjoy my 30 minute outings to the grocery store and carrying my groceries home. I got a granny cart for Christmas one year because my family thought "oh hey we can save him time if he can bring a bigger load of groceries home" but it doesn't occur to them that I don't even want that.
I have also had great experiences in a detached home (living with my wife’s family for a short while). They’re kind of out in the beyond-suburbs, but we were able to do lots of trail running and hiking nearby, and they had a bigger house so we could all spread out and do different activities without disrupting each other.
(Though, honestly, the extra maintenance and upkeep that they had would’ve been exhausting, if it were actually my home and I had to do it long-term)
Neither is better, exactly, but there are a ton of hidden benefits to living in an apartment in a great part of a city (Amsterdam in my case)..
