That’s not the reason we have a housing crisis. If you look at cities like Houston, where housing is relatively affordable, the vast majority of people still have single family homes. The reason we have a housing crisis is because regulations make it too hard to build housing.

While suburbs certainly are financial sinkholes, there are other factors. Housing in cities like NYC is expensive in part because there is a housing crisis in NYC, because nothing is being built. And what is being built is preposterously expensive and beyond the teach of a typical New York family (not to mention cramped; you can barely fit a queen-sized bed into many of these bedrooms). Another issue is that developers have been snatching up real estate to cater to single yuppies who will accept living in a rathole-sized bedroom. An average bedroom is split in half to accommodate twice the occupants so that rent can be raised. This can make real estate hostile to anyone but such renters. And never mind pied-à-terre apartments, a controversial practice for which we can come up with pros and cons.

You can easily get housing affordability crises even without single family homes, as is plainly evident right now in non-North-American cities.

It's a bit of a red herring. You end up sitting in traffic for an hour instead of standing on a bus or train for an hour for your commute, and other knock-on differences like that, which can be debated for various other reasons like ecological impact, but you still end up running into the same issues around ability to do new, denser constrution, desire of new, denser construction, and political issues and resistance to change regardless of if your urban area is full of SFH or 5-story buildings.

Is "make today's cities larger and denser forever" really the solution? Or can we figure out ways to disperse and decentralize things instead of just feeding more money back into the hands of those who own and control the current cities?

More like people who can afford houses want bigger houses. If selling more affordable smaller houses made more profit then they would be sold.

> The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable.

In the US, which has lots of land area, single family homes are the norm:

The majority of the housing stock in the United States is single-family detached houses. Of the total 128.5 million housing units in 2021, about 81.7 million were detached homes and 8.2 million were attached single-family homes. In comparison, roughly 31.8 million units were in multifamily buildings.[1]

The US only has a housing space crisis in over-urbanized areas.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1042111/single-family-vs...

Strong Towns is not a reliable or neutral source. They aren't necessarily wrong, but they do cherry pick data to suit the urbanist narrative that they're trying to promote. It can be a useful source for understanding the issue but don't take anything you read there at face value.

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.

Even giving people the single family housing they want, there’s ways to increase the density massively that aren’t being utilised right now. Bringing back terraced houses in the US would be a great first step, and is only an improvement over the insanity that is the Bay Area’s houses in every back and side garden while still enforcing setbacks.

The hilarious bit is how confident they all are about people wanting SFH development, yet refuse to legalize everything else.

Imagine banning every android device from the US, while also proclaiming that no one would've purchased android anyway, because Apple is so popular. Apple is good because they compete and then win.

If SFH demand is so high, surely legalizing vertical development would be no big deal, just like android still struggles to gain adoption in the US.

> "but people want single family homes"

Right, this kind of talk is completely disingenuous from the "single family homes only" crowd.

Upzoning almost always means you can build more densely, not that you absolutely have to. People can still build single family homes if they want.

Single family home zoning is really mandatory single family home zoning. You aren't allowed to make anything else on that land, no matter how much of a housing crisis there is. But that doesn't mean upzoning somehow bans single family homes.