Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

I lived in Tokyo which is full of high density and the world's best public transit without the drug abuse issues in the West. Safe, omnipresent public transit like this is absolutely necessary for high density — and it's not ideal at all.

Getting from point A to B for work is miserable. You walk to the station, wait for your train, then switch as necessary. Switching trains can be awful — Yotsuya to the Marunouchi line was particularly horrible. Maybe you are a winner with a job at Tokyo station; but I thought the point was empowering all people, not just the top tier of society?

Of course, you can choose to align yourself with the train system. Leaving aside your subsequent disadvantage when changing jobs, you are then competing with everyone for a decent place to live. Suddenly you need to fight for denser and denser (aka smaller and smaller) housing again and people eventually get priced out to a new town two hours out of Tokyo.

And that's in the city; Try visiting your family in Saitama if you live in the wrong part of Tokyo. Your selfish human desire to connect with family turns a 25-30 minute car ride into a 1.5 hour painful hassle, and one that is not cheap either. Try getting your friends together for a board game — transit is one reason why such home parties are so rare.

For the Bike utopians, I used to bike from Koenji to Ikebukuro at Sunshine 60 and would routinely beat the train. I had to stop because, even with the ideal small back roads, it was dangerous — and someone stole my bike. This is an inevitable part of density, you aren't going to have bigger roads and you get more rolls of the dice to encounter dishonest people.

Finally, the more density, the less you can do. Humans have their own social gravity and it shows. You will be poorer overall as going to the spice grocery is going to take up all your activity time (since so much will vanish in transit). Maybe it's ok if you wish to conform to everyone else's choice of food and activity but that's literally the opposite of diversity.

This is with the very best public transit system in the safest city in the world (for men, let's not talk sexual harassment of women) — any attempt in North America will be much, much worse for reasons that are obvious.

I still believe cities should enable higher density as homelessness is worse than everything I outlined above; but it won't be pleasant and many people will be forced into a cramped housing situation that they will never be able to get out of.

In that context, finding ways to bring jobs to smaller cities makes a lot of sense. I am sorry you got downvoted op, but a lot of people seem to be attracted to high density without appreciating realistic drawbacks.

(And to be honest, I still like the Tokyo train system, I'm just not going to mindlessly worship it)

You're entitled to move away from a toxic river that catches fire. But you might need to open your mind to the idea that not everyone feels the way you do. Perhaps some people like to work at the factory that produces the toxic slime.

Urban density is pollution. Its effects are not limited to cities.

By making it easier for companies to open offices in dense urban cores, it ensures that smaller cities are starved of jobs and die. So people are forced to move to ever-densifying areas, driving up the price. This in turn makes it even easier for companies to hire people living near dense urban cores.

Rinse, wash, repeat.

On densities, cities like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle (high rents) are comparable or higher in density than larger European cities with the exception of Paris (and I may have missed another). London, Berlin, or Madrid are noticeably lower than New York or possibly the other two US cities as well.

(Naturally, the city boundaries of somewhere like London include many less-urban areas so this doesn’t quite capture exactly what either of us presumably mean, but it’s loosely demonstrative.)

By creating a denser unit, you're forcing (via economic forces) more people to move closer to denser areas. This in turn makes these areas more attractive for employers, making it easier to do business. This in turn makes dense areas more attractive for employees, so they are willing to pay more to live closer to dense areas.

Result: density increases, and prices rise along with it.

And an additional toxic component: the population is basically not growing anymore. It's nearly a zero-sum game now, so each new dense unit means one more dilapidated house in Kansas as its occupants had to move to find a job.

Seattle: grew the number of units by 25% within the last 12 years. SF: only 5% within that timeframe.

Their price growth curve is nearly identical.

> Housing scales far far far better than freeways. It's easy to double, triple, quintuple, and even 10x or more the density from single detached units.

LOL, no. You have no idea how much city infrastructure costs.

> Freeways don't scale like that.

One mile of subway in Manhattan now costs more than 1000 miles of a 6-lane freeway.