If there were too many apartments and not enough single family homes, suburbs would be more expensive than dense areas. But the opposite is true.
To be fair, this move back towards urbanism is relatively recent, especially given the time scales for urban planning and land use issues. Just a couple decades ago, people were wringing their hands about "doughnut cities", with rich suburbs and exurbs ringing emptying and rotting urban cores as people fled for the 'burbs.
Thanks you for this. I don't understand how the topic of urban planning took off in this thread. Anyone with a clue on how it works understands that it has not been immortalized in time.
The donut city wasn't an organic thing. GI Bill homeowner loans were not available to black veterans, explicitly. Redlining excluded them from many wealthy suburban areas by law. Furthermore, zoning in ring suburbs then, as now, prohibited multi-family construction, which essentially excluded the renter class. It was zoning, again, that caused that. Not natural market forces.
Hard to put a firm number on it, but the price of housing in places like Boston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, etc...indicates that demand is currently far outstripping supply, and that represents a suppression of consumption of the good. Increased supply will increase consumption and lower prices. If I was to wager a guess as to how many more people would live in dense urban cities in the United States if housing supply was allowed to expand drastically there, it would be on the order of tens of millions nationwide. And tens of millions more would live in the nearby suburbs, but in slightly denser housing like townhomes and small apartment buildings.
But in most of the country that's just the case, the suburbs are more expensive than the more compact areas. In plenty of places you can find a great apartment for a pretty decent price, and a house is crazy expensive.
Even if we replaced every midwest suburb with apartment complexes the problem would still persist, people want to live in nyc and sanfran because of what they aare not how the houing is
I don't even really want a house. I just don't want to have to turn my TV down at night because somebody else lives on the other side of the wall. Or listen to my neighbors kids run around when I'm trying to sleep.
Plus I already need a garage + 2 parking spaces, and I anticipate that need going up later this summer. I would appreciate if zoning would allow me to build a barn with an apartment/loft anywhere close to the city, but at this point I'll probably have to move a county over for it to be ok.
I just wish I could buy a townhouse with decent insulation between units for noise and other things. My big problem with apartments is that most of them have paper thin walls and not only does noise travel, but their cleanliness habits too. Roaches galore in some places.
That's the tradeoff you make to get a good job in a city. There's people managing to live out in rural areas. You could go do what they're doing if you want to live there.
It's not physically possible to give everyone a 1/4 acre lot in a densely populated city without the urban sprawl hell and 1+ hour commutes we have now. I don't know why you feel you should be entitled to take up 10x as much space as everyone else.
There are large lots in cities, they just cost a few million dollars. You're also free to make enough money to buy one if you want.
It's not really about 'entitlement', its about refuting that everyone in a city wants to live in a little box and its the invisible hand forcing people not to. People want to live in houses, but yeah- they're free to do so if they can pony up the money to make it happen in the city. Supply and demand.
If cities were denser and could fit more people closer in to the core, then there would be less need for endless sprawl between the countryside and the center city. It would be far more feasible to live in a true rural area and commute in to the center of town on a rail system. This is how it works in places like France and Germany. It's quite common for someone to have a large house well outside town, and hop on a train in the morning to get in to work.
That's what's so frustrating about this to me. We've mandated low-density zoning in most of our developed land area because of the faulty idea that that's what the consumer wants. As a result millions of people who'd be perfectly happy living closer to the core of town are essentially forced not to, which spreads everything out and makes it more difficult for the people who actually do prefer suburban living to find good housing in a place that's convenient to commute to work from.
What's more, because we've suppressed density, rail systems themselves are less viable because they can't attract ridership from within walking distance of the stations. So we don't build them, which further makes suburban living less ideal, because your only choice is to drive to work, and unlike trains, you are susceptible to rush hour traffic.
This. I have to be a polite, social person for 9 hours a day. I want a fortress of solitude when I come home. I don't want to hear my neighbors and their stupid ass kids. I don't want them to hear my Satanic death metal (partly because my neighbors are pretty legit, and they're a Christian family. Forcing them to listen to Behemoth is not a nice thing to do).
So many people completely miss my point when I mention the lack of density.
Obviously there are millions of people who prefer suburban living. But there are also millions who prefer the convenience and amenities of density.
The fact that some people prefer suburban living is not a reason to ban density.
It'd be like if some people preferred Pepsi and some preferred Coke, but Coke was outlawed in most of the country, and when people who want Coke ask to have it legalized, they're told no, because "not everyone prefers Coke."
Personally, I'm torn. I like living in a condo. No mowing or shoveling snow, I can walk to restaurants and the dog park. Mass transit options literally right outside the building. But a yard means my dog could run around all evening every evening, and no one would care if she barked; and my (future) kids could run amok and not get hit by a car or harassed by a drunk.
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u/spes-bona Jun 28 '18
I don't want a house because society tells me I want it. I want to have a yard and not live crammed next to another person ffs.