611–620 of 799 posts
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I’m struggling to imagine how less densely packed housing could be better for the environment
the key is to balance the number of jobs in an area with the amount of housing and to have mixed use land policy so housing and commercial and industrial can be much closer.
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The Los Angeles example pretty much proves that spinning out employment into multiple areas does not mean people will just move to the closest area to their job; it just adds another destination to the list of "places people drive an hour to." It is not really that people living in Stockton already are commuting into the Bay, but Bay Area workers are being displaced into Stockton. The Bay Area has added more jobs tha…
LA _could_ be much more like Tokyo if USA cared to make mass transit work. # Service accurate enough to set a clock by. # Service mesh that provides walk-able freedom. # Safety and cleanliness (both a culture and enforcement issue) Yes, there would need to be a slight increase in density as well as much more transit service; but that metro area could scale up were there enough water.
My main point is that “move the jobs” in a sufficiently large city is not generally a working way to reduce commute times.
It takes significantly less materials to build a multi-dwelling apartment/condo/townhouse structure than a single family home. In addition, the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars. We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are…
I find it amusing that many folks here are ready to clap back at this comment about how "but people want single family homes" as if that weren't why we are in a housing crisis. Yes... people want single family homes, it's just not feasible to put 3M people into single family homes in a metro area without absorbing an unsustainable amount of costs. Here we are talking literally the cost of construction, but there is a…
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...
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> Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises Yes! > with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. YES! > They would be, if not for the car. ...what? They are not because their local governments prohibit construction and actively oppose growth, which is only vaguely related to the car. Approximately zero "global metropolises" have sin…
I think we agree. But the car is a much bigger part of it than you're letting on. The reason we zone this way is because people are unable to imagine their lives without being able to drive around. The very first thing people say in my town when an apartment tower goes up is "where am I going to park? Do they have a plan for moving the parking spots that this tower displaced? Traffic on tower St. is going to get so m…
To make alternatives you can look at what the Netherlands does. They have much more relaxed lot coverage, height limits, parking requirements, etc. so they get the same single family square footage in way less geographic area and they intermix that with much higher density so their cities proper are 3-4 times denser than where I live while not feeling cramped. They didn't get rid of the car, what they did do was ensure people had great walking, biking and transit options to fulfill the normal trips that make up their lives. That is vs where I live where I am fine getting downtown with transit, but to my kids schools, groceries, or any other workplace outside of the core, I am screwed. The extra density makes providing these transit options possible (along with reasonable regulation on other areas leading to reasonable density)
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> You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. 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, ev…
> In a smaller city it can work great! The best transit is generally thought to be in NYC.
The NYC Subway is a relic from a foregone age, from a time when we built things and wasn’t mired in bureaucracy and carbrained thinking.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City...
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I find it amusing that many folks here are ready to clap back at this comment about how "but people want single family homes" as if that weren't why we are in a housing crisis. Yes... people want single family homes, it's just not feasible to put 3M people into single family homes in a metro area without absorbing an unsustainable amount of costs. Here we are talking literally the cost of construction, but there is a…
> 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 ho…
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.
If there is one industry that is the most resistant to change, it's the construction industry. There are still people who have been roofing for 50 years and refuse to change a single thing they do and learned 50 years ago. Saying a bunch of glulam will solve the issue is just incorrect. Wood is fantastic material. But using half a forest to build a 2000sqft house is certainly not the direction we should be going, we…
Honestly, if I had to choose between buying a house built 50 years ago, or one today - I personally would take the older one. Nothing scares me more (relative to owning a house) than buying a brand new one. If it has been around for fifty years, it has been tested - may have some things wrong with them, but you usually know what you are dealing with and usually the skill was better and materials better. Heck, my pare…
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> You don't sit on the train for an hour. In properly designed large cities the metro beats the car by a huge time margin unless they made cars so expensive by policy that nobody has a car and there is no traffic at that city as a result. 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, ev…
We only have 2 cities in the United States that even approach a "medium sized" Asian metro in population. Los Angeles and NYC. Only NYC has a usable public transit system. This is actually an argument for transit systems. Los Angeles, San Francisco/San Jose, Dallas, Phoenix -- could be (and should be) a global metropolises, with a populations and cultural relevance rivaling Tokyo or Hong Kong. They would be, if not f…
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This is exactly the kind of Motte-and-Bailey argument the commenter you are replying to is talking about. Sure, you can justify some of the regulations, much like you can justify not allowing a chemical plant next to a school, but there are, in many places, hundreds to thousands of such rules and the vast majority of them are _not_ that important. How does not wanting houses to flood relate to setbacks, minimum squar…
> …hundreds to thousands of such rules and the vast majority of them are _not_ that important. And you base that on…? > How does not wanting houses to flood relate to setbacks, minimum square footage, lot size, etc. requirements? Here, minimum lot sizes are based on public/private water/sewer. We’re on well water so we need room for the well. We’re on public sewer, however, so we don’t need room for a septic tank. As…
Why not admit to yourself that you just like exclusionary land use regulations, and are comfortable with the impacts on the cost of living, increased commutes, etc.?
It’s not your neighborhood under threat, it’s your status quo.
It takes significantly less materials to build a multi-dwelling apartment/condo/townhouse structure than a single family home. In addition, the required square footage per person drops by huge amounts when people can walk to nearby community centers, restaurants, kitchens, theaters, and bars. We are building massive 3-4k sq. ft. homes for families of four because all of their food, entertainment, and social needs are…