Low-density sprawl essentially requires cars. Further, cars need a ton of space for roads and parking lots. Denser, more walkable communities don’t need nearly as many cars and don’t need nearly as much roads and parking lots.

Low-density sprawl essentially requires cars.

I disagree. I live in the suburbs in Europe and there is plenty of single family homes with a garden here. But you’re still always within 500m of a bus stop or tramline. Have been living here without a car for quite while, it’s fine.

I’d be curious what the population density numbers are. There’s a world of difference in density between, say, single-family rowhouses and classic American suburbia.

My math is here: https://lemmy.world/comment/3165486

But essentially, for the same cost as cars, the lowest density possible before becoming rural 106 households / sq mi (6 acres per household) can have a bus pass every 6 minutes, 24/7/365. You can double frequency by adding a second stop on the way to a transit spine.

The idea that an American city might have a housing area A) without roads and B) with a bus stop and C) one that shows up every 6 minutes instead of once an hour makes me want to cry

You’d still want roads. Deliveries, emergency services, maintenance. But the roads can be just wider than a car.

Here’s a north american proof of concept of a car free neighborhood: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VWDFgzAjr1k

Yeah, I think it’s mostly rowhouses.

Also the entire suburb spreads along through a valley, so it’s like long and thin, which makes it very easy to run a central tramline through it.

But it still should be possible anywhere with good public transport.

Ah, there’s your answer. I love rowhouses and think they and other “missing middle” are a great compromise for getting denser, more walkable, more transit-oriented communities while still avoiding being like Manhattan. True low-density sprawl (as seen in so much of the US and Canada) is detached single-family homes with large setback requirements, large parking minimums, and typically large lot size minimums. It’s purposefully designed to essentially enforce car-dependent sprawl.

The style of development you describe is what we call streetcar suburbs, as they were generally developed along streetcar lines in the days of yore.

The style of development you describe is what we call streetcar suburbs, as they were generally developed along streetcar lines in the days of yore.

Yeah, you need to build these, they are great. During the busy hours, mine is like a 150m walk away and there is tram or streetcar every 3.5 minutes. It’s amazing.

Rowhouses: “let’s turn your house into an apartment!”

Why anyone would want to have their house attached to someone else’s is beyond me.

But unlike in an apartment, you have the whole height of the building, so nobody above or below you. And the walls seperating the houses are really thick, so noise is much better than in an appartment block.

I guess you give up mostly garden space. I don’t think people specifically “want” that, but it’s still usually cheaper and much better situated than a proper free-standing house.

I live in a house attached to someone else’s and it’s pretty great

We have big open spaces in front and behind us instead of each house having their own big lawn. We have separate, fenced backyards but behind that is just a big open field with some benches and tables and trees scattered about.

That’s not true you can have bikes, horses, skateboards, etc.

horses

who doesn’t ride their horse to the local grocery store?

When I lived in Lancaster, PA there was a little barn at the Costco for the Amish people to park their buggies

Single family housing is a massive contributer to (sub)urban sprawl and car dependency. Increased residential density can reduce the need for cars by reducing the distance between people’s homes and their workplace, shops, etc.

Zoning laws are a bigger contributor

Yes, let’s pack people in a dense area where diseases and tempers can and will run rampant because THAT has never happened before.

Sorry, I refuse to live on top of other people. Housing is not the enemy of nature - housing that is not in tune with nature is. It is completely possible to build homes that blend in with nature without having to resort to ultra-dense, 5-story brick behemoths filled with people who loathe one another.

I see what you are trying to convey, and I agree with you to an extent, but density is not the answer to sustainable housing.

Density reduces emissions. Low-density, car-dependent suburban sprawl is extremely unsustainable for the planet.

https://coolclimate.org/maps

Density reduces emissions

I reply to your infographic with a scientific paper that shows higher densities lead to higher CO2 emissions: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/12/9/1193#:~:text=Regarding CO2 emissions%2C the,density%2C the higher the emissions.

This study was done in Spain.

Another study, in Nature, also shows that lower density is better for reducing carbon emissions and climate change. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42949-021-00034-w

Sorry, but you and your infographic/sources are not supported by science.

Literally the frist sentence in the abstract:

More than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. Its buildings consume more than a third of the energy and generate 40% of the emissions.

“higher densities lead to higher CO2 emissions” you say…

The low density/low height example in the nature article is still 5k people per Km^2. While definitions vary wildly, I usually see 1000-400 people per km^2 for suburb definitions.

Does example D look like suburbs to you? As something undefined it could be considered suburbs, but probably “streetcar suburb” in the Canadian/American context.

Critically the article also mentions a requirement for best practice greenery management to maximize carbon sequestration. I’m no botanist, but I’m guessing caretaken parks do better then monoculture lawns (assumption).

Edit: missed that the first link was a different study. That like on spanish cities has its lowest density group defined as <100 pop/hectare, if my math is right, that means <10,000 pop/km^2. Significantly denser than any suburb. This is also a region when thermal energy is spent of cooling, not heating. And while it adjusts for climate effect, it doesn’t seem to adjust for the modernity/thermal effectiveness of the buildings. Such to say, a building with an air-conditioner will spend more thermal energy than one without.

Basically your two links are showing that cities can be too dense, and there is a point when they lose GHg efficiency. There is no mention of anything lower than what, as a Canadian, I would still call high density (just not super high density).

It’d probably depend on the park and how it’s designed/managed, but I’d be shocked if monocultured lawns sequestered any carbon. I know in agriculture it’s a huge problem that industrially-grown monocultures – where they till the soil and crop-dust fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides and fungicides – emit huge amounts of previously-sequestered soil carbon. A result is that doing the reverse – i.e., growing food regeneratively in polycultures and without tillage and artificial fertilizers and without all the -icides – is considered a good way to sequester carbon.

Considering we grow grass lawns similarly to how we grow corn monocultures, I’d bet grass lawns are similarly awful for the soil and thus the climate as well.

I’m obviously biased by the parks I live near and see/use every day, but when I think of a park, I think of tree’d sitting areas, tree’d play areas, tree’d walking paths, and some monoculture sports fields, with trees for the stands.

There are lost of community gardens around, but as a black thumb I don’t use them and bias them out.

Basically my city has a hard on for trees in parks, and I’m all for it. I also think I’ve developed a bias that roads have no trees, and streets have trees.

https://coolclimate.org/maps

Feel free to zoom in on essentially every city in America. You can even download the raw data yourself.

Further, your Nature study you link, actually read the paper and you find this nugget:

These limiting assumptions were necessary based upon the urban scale scope of this study. Providing additional levels of detail at the building scale would greatly improve the accuracy of the analysis and can be refined in future works. Employing a cradle-to-cradle approach to consider resource reuse, the impact of retrofitting existing building stock over rebuilding; the inclusion of transportation impacts; adding a dynamic time component to investigate material inflows and outflows; and including a detailed time-related analysis of carbon sequestration potential offered by urban greeneries in the simulated environments—are all valuable and important avenues for future work to build on this study and expand its relevance while reducing its limitations. This study therefore acts as a stepping-stone to provide a strong foundation from which extensive future work can be born.

It literally doesn’t even model transportation emissions. Considering this whole conversation is about sprawl causing more cars, this is kinda a glaring omission.

I’d like to come back and read over this later. The point OP is making seems pretty obvious but it is quite directly contradicted by the sources you just provided. I want to read those later

From a quick read of the Nature article they posted:

These limiting assumptions were necessary based upon the urban scale scope of this study. Providing additional levels of detail at the building scale would greatly improve the accuracy of the analysis and can be refined in future works. Employing a cradle-to-cradle approach to consider resource reuse, the impact of retrofitting existing building stock over rebuilding; the inclusion of transportation impacts; adding a dynamic time component to investigate material inflows and outflows; and including a detailed time-related analysis of carbon sequestration potential offered by urban greeneries in the simulated environments—are all valuable and important avenues for future work to build on this study and expand its relevance while reducing its limitations. This study therefore acts as a stepping-stone to provide a strong foundation from which extensive future work can be born.

It doesn’t even model transportation emissions, which kinda makes it worthless in the context of this discussion.

As for Spain, does Spain even have much “suburbia” as we understand it in a North American context? Data for cities in Spain may have nothing to say about the emissions of suburban sprawl vs denser communities, which is what the OP is mainly about.

Housing is fine, several of my personal heros lived in rural commues far away from society, where they are mostly self-sustained. They dont live in apartments, but there is no doubt I have great respect for them and believe they live in a very responsible fashion.

The problem came when people want to live in the middle of nowhere, produces nothing for their own, pays low taxes; yet think society owes them giant road infrastructure and wasteful parking lots. So that they can terrorize the lives of pedestrians and cyclists, also our dying planet, just because only their oversized driveway princess and their ecological hellhole of a lawn can give them a little sense of achievement in their otherwise fruitless life.

The fact that your immediate first association with dense housing is disease is rather telling

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