Here we are talking literally the cost of construction, but there is also the cost of infrastructure, and the cost of transport. The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable. If everyone were to live in a single family home, then after the transportation infrastructure reaches capacity, there is a cascade of issues that leads a region becoming totally unaffordable and ultimately unsustainable.
I would recommend the Strong Towns organization for anyone more interested in the interaction between long-term affordability issues and surburban infrastructure problems: https://www.strongtowns.org
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?
Americans often think the shitty experience they have in their country applies universally. Ex: The bus & light rail is bad and slow, so therefore it will always be bad everywhere. Americans haven't lived or even travelled to places in europe and asia with functional transit systems and do not realize what they are missing.
Another common american assumption is: apartments are only for the poor, so they will always be made shitty with bad soundproofing when you can make them with good soundproofing as a standard and a good amount of square feet. Or metros are always dirty, dangerous and the gross homeless live there, while that is also a pure policy choice of america.
I grew up in north america, lived in places with good metros and good apartments, and then moved to America. America doesn't know how bad they have it.
You should meet some of my old coworkers in large cities in Asia... (you don't SIT on the train at all in rush hour!)
In a smaller city it can work great! But in a small NA city, everything is a 5-to-10-minute drive from everything and everyone's also happy about that. That's easy mode. But London, NY, Paris, Beijing, etc - those are the cases that are somewhat broken everywhere, affordability-wise and commute-wise.
What’s a properly designed city? Even in Tokyo a car usually beats the train unless it’s an inter-regional trip. Im a huge Japan nerd and love their train system. But I just got back from carting three kids around Tokyo and daily life is just far easier in my American exurb.
Do Americans have it bad? The median Parisian spends 69 minutes per day commuting: https://www.mynewsdesk.com/eurofound/news/budapest-paris-and.... The median commute time in Dallas is under an hour round trip: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B080ACS048113 (28 minutes one way). And the folks in Dallas live in huge houses compared to those in Paris.
Outside of Boston and NYC (well, maybe not NYC right now), I hear of no one happy with public transit in the US. We need to stop pretending that if we just move into cities, the problems will address themselves. Make public transit attractive and more people will want to live there.
Also can be done in today s time:
Whether this is true or not, what matters to me - a person living in the US - is that public transit in the US is a relatively poor experience compared with driving. Until that changes, I will keep driving and I will resist efforts that would force me to use public transit. I don't care if it's better elsewhere because I don't live there nor do I want to move there.
I want our public transit to be good, but that simply isn't the case right now. Walkable cities with quality public transit and good community infrastructure sound great, but until they are a reality here I will have no interest in living in a dense urban location.
About 10 years ago I had a project and stayed in an apartment in haugong, a residential area about 6 miles from my office. Uber was the only realistic commute - about 15-20 minutes. Public transport was about an hour to do the journey.
This may be changing. You see a growing awareness of the shabbiness of certain American norms in parts of so-called "populist" circles (left and right).
I think that shared ride self driving cars have a lot of potential in both types of cities. They give you a lot of what's good about private cars (door to door, good average speed, comfort, some privacy), and a lot of what's good about metros (higher density on the road than private cars due to sharing and less need for parking)
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/113n0ee/average_sp...
We should be aiming for some degree of density. I would hazard a guess that size is largely dependent upon what a person wants out of life.
Infrastructure is very expensive to build and maintain, and everyone demands it in multiple forms (roads, water, sewage, and power at a minimum). Containing the costs by reducing either extent or capacity would allow us to allocate those resources to other things, things that could improve the collective quality of life.
As for decentralization, it depends upon how it is done. I've lived in or visited towns with a few thousand people. Nearly everything one needed was within walking distance, though people often left town for things they wanted. I've also lived in similarly sized urban communities where virtually nothing one needed was within a reasonable walking distance. Suburban communities often take the latter to the extreme. What was the difference? Everything in the small town was centralized, yet businesses and services in those urban communities were effectively decentralized.
Let's say you build a bunch of small towns to decentralize the population and get away from feeding money back into the hands of those who own and control cities. You now have another major consideration: are people going to live most of their daily lives in those towns, or are they going to live in one town and work in another? A big part of the reason why people spend so much of their life commuting, whether it is by car or train, is because opportunities (may it be home ownership or careers) don't necessarily fall in the same place.
Yes, you can get an affordability crisis anywhere you make it illegal to build housing. Nobody is arguing that. The point is that you also get an affordability crisis simply by pushing the transportation infrastructure to the point of failure, and then reject density.
>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?
This is literally what's happening in every tech satellite city, the point is that many-if-not-most of our urban centers are already at their transportation capacities, simply because that is the suburban development model: it's extremely cheap until suddenly it's no longer functional. The suburban model has no equilibrium, it's a cascade, once the planned automobile infrastructure reaches capacity, you cannot increase it at a rate that is sustainable. Thus, once that capacity is gone, suddenly the real estate in the core becomes extremely valuable -> which incentivizes density -> which further strains peak infrastructure -> which increases the value of core real estate -> which further incentivizes density -> etc. -> etc. -> etc.
We can't wish this away, beyond wishing other people just didn't exist. It's like wishing that other people would take the bus, but not wanting to take it yourself. Nobody in the bay area wants to move to affordable Red Bluff, CA, without a reason, much less the CEO of a major corporation moving their entire company there out of the kindness of his heart we he or she already has a house and friends in Atherton.
Not to say, in a vacuum, multi-family housing won't provide more housing units per unit of land area than single-family. Clearly, it will. But unless you build every city from scratch to house 20 million people, whether you started with single-family or multi-family, the most desirable cities will end up in a future state whereby more people want to live there than housing exists for, and even if regulations and zoning allow you to build higher and denser than is currently done, to do it where people want to live, you'll have to tear down existing buildings, including existing housing, and many of the owners and occupants of that housing won't want that. You'll also need to run more utility lines, build new pipes, run them under existing roads, which means shutting down those roads, and even if they're perfect utopian European roads that have zero cars on them and only have pedestrians and bicycles, the user of those roads are still going to get annoyed and inconvenienced, and it's going to cost more to do this than building new housing where nobody currently lives, pretty much no matter what.
Why are you acting like driving a vehicle and being a passenger in a vehicle are the same experience? One is clearly more demanding and inhibiting than the other.
On a train you can work, read, listen to a podcast, sometimes eat... Lots of things you can't do while in a car. Unless your job is driving. Which, if you commute for work, it kinda is.
I commuted for awhile between Baltimore and DC on Amtrak and apart from being hellaciously unreliable it was great for working. But my commute from the upper west side to east midtown when I lived in NYC was completely different—being crammed into the 1/2/3 and then fighting through the masses to take the S across town.
I do all of those things in my car while driving too. Maybe not read but I’ve listened to audiobooks. I also sit in Teams meetings, read and respond to emails and IMs on my phone as well when I’m at a stop light. Maybe some people can’t do these things while driving but plenty of us do.
The pandemic showed that millions of us can work from home. My office was closed for about 2 years. Our stock price shot way up.
There were lots of stories about the environmental benefits. Air pollution in big cities decreased dramatically. Wildlife started returning in places.
We keep building commercial real estate and most people I know have little desire to commute to the office and sit in a cubicle disturbed by other people constantly.
I would severely limit commercial real estate building permits, encourage companies to have employees work at home via tax breaks or whatever. This will help with the housing issues, greenhouse gas emissions, decrease the need for new roads because of less traffic.
Everyone wins except dumb control freak managers and restaurants that do lunch in the business areas.
This would imply that a company's stock price is directly influenced by its productive output; in reality, it's only very tangentially so. Especially for low-profit, high-growth tech companies, I'd wager the federal funds rate's effect on the stock price is way higher.
Unless forced to due to scarcity, dense development does not really clump up together all at once for good reason, since clumping up will drive up costs in a hyper local area. Tokyo for example, has a lot of detached housing, even in the central wards. The density there is more pockmarked and random, and notably never really concentrates all that highly; there is not a single Japanese building in the top 100 skyscrapers, because skyscraper concentration is an artifact of how we force dense developments only in certain places.
If it’s not any of these it’s owned and thus controlled by someone.
^this is the real issue.
But we dont want to tackle the real issue of few ppl wanting to own the whole world :)
If we cut out that cancer ppl everyone on Earth could have a lot better living standards than we do now.
Yes the issue are ultra rich and yes they will propaganda everything to hide it keep it safe.
Almost the entirety of coastal California (and Oregon and WA as well.) It's insane. It's the best climate on the planet and the most protected from climate change.
Tokyo Metro handles 6m+ riders a day with a population of 40m. So, yes, at least until you surpass 40m people.
> 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?
“Disperse and decentralize” is exactly how every city I have ever been to is built.
Everyone complains about the city’s endless verticalização (verticalizication) because they like the idea of old houses, but I say keep it coming.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2019/12/18/how-houston-is-b...
I'm also really happy with how they have handled their homeless.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-...
Multifamily housing is valuable against car-dependence in the context of a city street grid with mixed use zones or at least somewhat proximate neighborhood commercial zones. Then the people living there actually have destinations they can walk to, and routes they can bike or take transit on that aren't "snake around to the subdivison's one interface to the 6-lane arterial, and try not to die on it."
https://abc13.com/floodplain-housing-building-houston-flood/...
Houston is just second-to-last in line in Texas to face the affordability crisis (followed by San Antonio) because they have the highest capacity automobile infrastructure, but it's already regularly ranked with the worst traffic in the United States.
While I agree that Houston does a lot of things right, especially just literally allowing density, I do not think they would survive an influx of folks while maintaining affordability any better than Austin has.
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...
FTFY, but fully agree.
In urbanized areas (where most people live), we have hit the capacity of the automobile transportation infrastructure. This causes a cascade of real estate prices in urban cores, making the vast majority of these areas unaffordable for normal folks. This is leading to myriad crises, like a massive teacher shortage in California, simply because lower-income people cannot build normal/desirable lives for themselves.
The issue is that automobile-centric infrastructure makes this cascade inevitable in areas where cities grow to the point of infrastructure failure, but the cost of maintaining the infrastructure creates financial problems in areas that do not grow to this point.
None of this would be an issue if jobs were not clustered in big cities, but they are.
The advantages of having more people living in your metro are are massive even if one is a remote worker. The advantages might not be needed for one's special case, and you might prefer to, say, live near a beach with great surfing opportunities in Portugal, but you'll still be accepting significant tradeoffs for not living near more people.
If you really think their hypothesis is totally wrong, we're currently living in a real time experiment of the thesis in the Phoenix metro area. Due to water concerns, the suburban development model is no longer feasible. It's unlikely that Phoenix will suddenly become density mecca (as it's not feasible with automobile transportation), so we should expect to see a massive hole in the metro cities' budgets sooner rather than later. If Phoenix turns out to be fine a in 15 years, I'll happily concede the point and will have learned a lot.
The Detroit metro area would be a mess even if it had higher density housing and better public transit. The problems there are more due to federal trade policies, toxic labor relations, and failed progressive social policies. It isn't valid evidence to either support or refute the Strong Towns hypothesis: too many confounding variables.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
