West Coast baby
I understand what’s trying to be said here but I’d pass on that.
I’ve lived in apartments most my life. Now that I live in a home that has a backyard, a garage, can’t hear what my neighbors are saying, don’t need to pay for laundry, don’t need to go down an elevator to throw away garbage, and don’t have to worry about people pissing in the elevator. I’m not going back to an apartment.
I can’t hear my neighbors, don’t need an elevator, and don’t need a garage because I don’t need a car. I don’t have a back yard but I’m pretty close to a massive city park. This apartment is pretty okay.
Meanwhile the suburbs were just crushing isolation and cultural wasteland. And needing to drive everywhere was awful.
Other than SF. Where do you live in CA that doesn’t require you to need a car?
I know you can make due. I lived without one for a long time, but it was a the biggest pain the ass not having one. Unless I only wanted to stay in my little local bubble.
Exactly. My main reasons why I want a home instead of an apartment is the lack of space, the need to have some private space outside (i.e. a courtyard) and privacy. A lower density apartment building that has all these things could be built, but it would probably be a luxury apartment that would cost an obscene amount of money.
All those issues are not intrinsic to apartments. We can have nice apartments too. Sure, cheap ones will cut corners, but it’s not required.
Based on what this meme is proposing, I can smell the urine in the elevators from here.
I think the kids are deluded and have no idea what they’re missing. Density is hell. Single family homes are expensive because the vast majority of people don’t want to spend the rest of their lives living in apartments.
You are still paying for laundry. As a homeowner the full cost of replacing and maintaining the machines is on you. You also have to pay for the electricty and the water usage.
So what? This is standard and it’s perfectly acceptable for the average homeowner. It sucks a million times worse to have to go to a laundromat, I’ve been there and done that.
Question from a European: Why does living in an apartment mean you have to go to a laundromat? Do apartments in the US not have washing machines?
Having to share on-site laundry facilities with other residents is bad enough (especially with the BRAND NEW machines breaking down all the time). If I had to go hang out at a laundromat every couple weeks for hours, I’d be even more depressed…
Good for you since you can afford it. Most people cannot. Which means you would still have your house in the suburbs somewhere, but all of these problems would be solved.
YEP. Same here. It’s a world of difference, having room to do whatever you want in peace and privacy.
When I lived in apartments back in the 2000s I couldn’t even leave anything of value on my porch or doorstep without fear of it being stolen. My girlfriend’s bike was stolen from the 2nd floor where it was parked right in front of our apartment door. At my apartment before that a drunk stole a wooden pallet that I had on the porch. They stole fucking wood!
But out here at my rural home, I have land and a garden and we can leave our cars unlocked and bikes or whatever outdoors and nobody messes with it.
So y’all can keep all that urban density and I will stay far away from it most of the time.
There is a middle ground between single family housing and high density housing, it’s just not less common in the US than either apartments or single family housing.
Medium density housing, duplexes, quadruplexes, and town homes.
And yeah crappy apartments with little to no sound dampening are really common. At my brother’s apartment I can hear his neighbor’s coffee pot turn on both outside and inside the apartment building. Shit’s got tissues for walls I swear.
I think you’re making the common mistake of thinking that advocating for dense, mixed use housing means YOU can’t have a single-story home. In reality, rezoning for this kind of thing makes your preferred kind of living much more attainable.
Think of it like this. You take a giant suburb of repeating box homes. Take what is a dozen homes next to the highway, and build a couple of four and five story apartments with bars and restaurants and a few grocery stores and hair salons on the first level. Now you’ve made a nice little main street. Put a little office space on the second levels, and suddenly there’s less congestion coming and going every morning and evening, since folks don’t need to take the highway to get to work. Shrink the highway to make room for a bus lane, and add a separated bike lane and nature trail to connect your little main street to the next one a few miles away, and eventually the next major metropolitan area.
The next thing you know, folks like you are still live just fine in your classic American home, but now you have places to shop within walking distance. You’ve got somewhere for your kids to move out to that won’t put them a plane ride away from home. And you’ve got less competition for land. This means that you can get a bigger backyard for the same price, and if your kids want to come back one day to start a family, there are affordable starter homes and condos.
Keep it up, and next thing you know, you can commute to the office without driving and kids can walk themselves to school. You see what I’m saying? You don’t have to live in the apartments to get a lot of benefits.
I don’t understand how the high density housing solves traffic. In lieu of an additional solution (public transit) I think it would make traffic worse.
Edit
The argument seems to be: high density housing would naturally result in public transit infrastructure. I don’t think that line of reasoning makes sense, it’s certainly not an obvious inevitability that public transit will always, naturally appear.
Same with homelessness. The last city I lived in offered free housing with 3 meals a day for the homeless, as in they got their own little tiny house basically that was actually kinda nice. But tons of homeless weren’t interested. They just stayed on the street. I’m curious how just making dense apartment style buildings would just fix the problem.
Often, those programs failing is because of having strings attached that people don’t like.
However, ask yourself this: why do people become homeless in the first place? Does it have anything to do with the price of housing?
I’m not sure about the extra strings attached on that program but you’re probably right, there was probably something in there that was deterring some of them. It was still surprising to me to see so much disinterest in the program.
As for why there are homeless… in my experience, no it’s usually not the price of housing. It usually has to do with drugs or mental illness. Now i’m absolutely no expert so the price of housing may be the main reason by a long shot but in my limited experience with people i’ve known and met that were homeless (which is admittedly and obviously a tiny number compared to all the homeless in this country), the large majority of them were put in that situation cause they were super addicted to drugs so that’s where all the money went and they couldn’t hold a job, or they had big time mental issues.
If you can walk/bike to your job without the threat of being run over, you are one less car on the road.
Thihk of it in levels:
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People will skip work-commuting by car (including students) when there are other viable options that are not made life-threatening by other people in cars. Fewer trips= less traffic
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People will avoid driving for errands when there is decent local public transit that lets them shop where they want. Even fewer trips = even less traffic
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People will stop owning cars when there is decent local public transit and decent regional networks. Fewer cars = less traffic
With density and admitily mixed development, it is pretty simple to live within walking distance of everything around you. A car just needs much more space then a pedestrian and you do not park your body at the site of the street. Other then that the key to good public transport is high frequency. So for a transit connection the more people want to travel the route, the more high frequency makes sense.
It doesn’t solve it, but I can see how it would help to solve it. If everyone lives in super low density suburban neighborhoods, public transportation doesn’t make any sense. You can’t build a train station that would realistically serve a dozen people tops.
Higher density makes public transportation a viable option, which in turn reduces traffic and pollution.
Also high density mixed used means you don’t need the car every time you need to go grocery shopping, or to a bar or even to a park. You can go by foot
How do you get all your groceries on foot? Do people buy personal handcarts or something? I live in a 1 BR apartment and I just would not have space for something like that.
Well, it depends. Where I live I have a grocery store like 100m from home, and I go by foot there. One or two bags (the reusable kind that don’t melt away) and you just go, get what you need, go back home. Nothing special. I’ve also seen older people use like a mini trolley thingy with a bag attached in order to bring home the groceries. When you get home it folds and you can just put it behind a door or something.
In Holland I’ve heard they also really like cargo bikes, but where I live there’s not enough bike infrastructure for that. I don’t live in a big city center like Paris or Milan btw, but in a medium density city on the outskirts, so I can also use a car and often do, especially if I need to buy lots of stuff. But if I just need a couple things, going by foot is way easier and faster.
Simple, you don’t buy a carts worth of groceries at a time. When you can walk to the grocery store in 5 mins it’s easy to go twice a week or more. Hell, I went to the grocery store 3 times in a half hour because I kept forgetting stuff for a recipe I was making.
Also there are plenty of foldable carts that could fit under a bed or in a closet.
The only reason not to build public transport is not having the density to support it…
Public transit works perfectly fine in a low-density situation. Your urban planning needs to accommodate it, though, with walkability being a prime concern.
A car-centric city will never mesh well with public transit no matter how dense it is. The best you can hope for is good subway coverage but that’s expensive and can’t be done everywhere. Nobody wants to take the bus if they feel they have no safe route to the bus stop.
But if everything is opened up with proper sidewalks and bike lanes and maybe tram tracks, if street lights prioritize pedestrians over cars, if walking to the nearest convenient stop feels safe and effortless even if it’s two miles away – then you get public transit that actually works.
It’s not terribly difficult. But your urban planning can’t be car-centric or you’re getting nowhere.
I agree with everything except your first point. It doesn’t work at all in a low density setting, to the point that low density areas are always subsidized by high density areas. Low density needs to start paying their taxes and stop relying on the urban centers to build their infrastructure.
I think when a lot of people say high density, they don’t mean 100floor residential buildings are all the housing, but tend to think of something more akin to densely packed midrise buildings and green spaces. If you have the later, there simply is not space for cars and high density. Large universities come to mind, where there may be 50k people using 1-2sq mile while 5+ story buildings are rare. You would have to walk a mile or two to get to a car to drive 6 miles around to the other side of campus at 5mph to walk a mile or two to get to you class 1000ft away from your starting point if they were car centric.
You don’t even need public transit at that level of density but it’s an option.
Anytime you have people living in dense, highly populated areas it will make nearby land a premium. High demand for land (and the resulting high prices) will result in high rent and high cost of living.
I’m not really sure how to fix this. You could have some government managed system for what businesses get the high demand land, but that will result in less popular stores being in the best locations and greatly incentivize corruption as businesses want highly profitable locations that can only be granted by politicians.
Actually, at some point the graph flips around. If everywhere is fairly dense, less dense areas go for a premium (rich people hate living near poor people).
But you can’t make Everywhere dense in the USA - have you looked at the size of the land? It’s huge and mostly uninhabited
Considering the price of home ownership near city centers, I’ll call bullshit on that one.
I have a lot of suggestions, but one that I think you’d find particularly interesting is land tax rates.
This video is 46 minutes, but it’s the mayor of Detroit explaining why low taxes on land incentivize blight and abandonment instead of productive use.
Japan has declining population, unlike basically every county in the world.
To fix this that kind of development has to be far more normalized. A big part that drives up those land values is because that style of development is both rare and desirable. If it becomes desirable, common,and meets housing/commercial needs, the market will become more competitively priced.
That could alleviate those problems, but I doubt it’d actually solve them. Not to mention, they could also get worse:
- Cost of living -> Could actually be driven up. Stuff always tends to be more expensive in dense metropolitan areas. Big corpos and rich assholes would buy up as much real state as possible.
- Traffic -> Without public transportation, this can actually get worse. The distances might be smaller, but the amount of people wanting to get there increases.
- Homelessness -> directly related to cost of living. Having lots of places to live in that you simply cannot afford will force you to live elsewhere
For the cost of living thing, ideally you just implement similar good urban planning across the country. The reason some places are so expensive is because they have relatively livable cities compared to most of the country, so people want to move their. If you just improve the cities in places people already want to be for some reason or another, then you’ll just get more people across the country interested in being there unless they have similar options near them. Guess you could alternatively make enough housing for like 50 million people in that one city. Technically, there’s always the excuse of “you just didn’t build enough”. Not sure how the cost per housing unit gets for super structures, particularly since the cost of them includes infrastructure costs we don’t usually value into the cost of the home (pipes, roads, etc) and commercial spaces + residential which would make a small city with huge population possible.
- cost of living - can be solved if its social housing provided by the government and/or assigned by need and/or there is a restriction that the properties can only be owned by individuals.
- traffic - if everything is a walkable or cycleable distance traffic should be alright even with poor public transport. Although if we are trying to right the wrongs of bad urban planning you’d like to think public transport, green spaces, utilities and amenities would be well planned out in this scenario.
- homelessness - homelessness is not directly related to cost of living, its more related to lack of a social safety net and social services. The cost of living rising just exacerbates the issue.
Cost of living is tied to supply and demand, more than anything else. When supply is constrained, prices tend to rise.
People often want to have short commutes and to live in walkable areas.
However, most cities in the US and Canada have huge swaths of their metro area zoned exclusively for low density single family housing. Upzoning neighborhoods on the edges of cities is politically difficult.
Cities like NY become expensive because people want to move there, but it’s really difficult to add a lot of net-new walkable, transit accessible housing due to zoning, permitting, etc.
If we build a lot of net-new housing, prices will fall.
As for traffic, one of the benefits of mixed use development is being able to walk 5 min to buy groceries, eat at a restaurant or go to a pub. Being able to do many daily chores on foot or bike decreases the number of times you need to either drive or take transit.
However, most cities in the US and Canada have huge swaths of their metro area zoned exclusively for low density single family housing. Upzoning neighborhoods on the edges of cities is politically difficult. If we build a lot of net-new housing, prices will fall.
Also @spiderplant@lemm.ee
This is a “your mileage may vary” case that definitely depends on where you live. Demand can always be artificially inflated
I live within 10km of a very densely populated city (Brazil), zero houses and hundreds of 12+ stories residential apartments. Problem is, the vast majority of apartments are high value. They’re also in a very desirable area, so the price of a 24 m² apartment is usually the same of a 140 m² house in a less desirable place within 15km
What about moving within said city? There’s plenty of stuff within walking distance, which is great, but the majority of people that do live there work in a different city. Also, most people that work there come from other cities. Since the only “real” public transport is a nearly straight line of metro, traffic is an absolute mess most of the day. I strongly suspect that the original planning wasn’t for such high density, especially when you account for the ridiculously low number of bus lines from there to anywhere and back, but I’d need to do proper research to assert for sure.
Ooh my first mention!
I’m not familiar with Brazil’s housing situation specifically but building more affordable homes and increasing social housing stock would increase the supply and reduce prices.
Definitely feel you on the lack of jobs locally. Its going to take provincial or national planning and investment to fix.
Sounds like a major enough city, I think most major European cities with subways usually have multiple crossing lines and a decent bus network to fill the gaps. Interestingly I don’t even think that’s the weirdest metro layout, personally I have to give it to Glasgow. They have a single subway loop that runs 2 directions and its the 3rd oldest underground rail transit system but it hasn’t had the route changed or expanded in 125 years. They do have an advantage of having a decent bus system though.
I don’t like the idea that the colonisers took the land at the barrel of a gun (inc in England with the Enclosure Acts) and we’re demanding…a shell in return.
Well designed, small, community living based on the ideas of the Commons would be just as effective as all of the above without forcing us to live on top of each other having zero connection to the land effectively in dog kennels or shipping containers.
Connect to the local; don’t create ant nests.
Well unless you’re a First Nations or American Indian tribe member you don’t have any more claim to the land than the Europeans who stole it from them.
Hold up a sec: I think this sometimes gets overlooked, but a right to occupancy has to recognize being born somewhere or growing up there as an entitlement to continued residence.
None of us have control over how our parents brought us into a specific location, or what atrocities our forebears committed. And every child has a right not to be deported, full stop.
I don’t think it’s a choice between one and the other.
First, the goal isn’t to make an endless sea of identical skyscrapers. It’s to make a blend of large and medium ones with rowhouses and duplexes mixed in, and then use the space that creates to make big, expansive parks and natural spaces for everyone. And if you want to start a commune, now there is a lot more space for communal, rustic living much closer to major cultural and transit hubs.
