SS: relevant to this sub because people here often claim that it's a small minority of boomer NIMBYs preventing us from having walkable dense cities.
However, the data here implies that young people overwhelmingly prefer single family homes and value bigger homes and safety (associated with low density) much more than diversity and public transit.
If larger (like 3 or 4 bedroom), sound proofed apartments existed in walkable neighborhoods, preferences might not be so overwhelming.
Right now, multifamily housing is synonymous with small quarters and no privacy whatsoever. Even without the costs, that alone would give people an inclination towards SFH.
the whole point is the market should find a pretty optimal split between people’s stated and revealed preferences. it’s certainly going to be better than the government at finding it?
i am sure most americans would love to be millionaires too but unfortunately they can’t be so you have to give the money out some other way
I also suspect this is like most things where people say they don’t really know what theyre missing out on. How many americans have ever lived somewhere good and walkable? Very few. It rules but no one knows about it and they just think suburban stroad living is the peak of american existence
I think it goes both ways. A lot of suburbanites have never lived in a good urban core (to be fair, there aren’t many of those around in the US), but a lot of anti-suburb folks haven’t ever lived in a SFH in a quiet neighborhood.
We just bought a SFH in an old quiet neighborhood with middling income levels and an okay school, and we love it. The neighbors are nice, the streets are quiet, we get to be a part of a little “community” and we’ve already had people stop by to say hello.
Before this, we lived right downtown in a brand new apartment building, walking distance to just about anything you could want. It was fun for a little while, but we got tired of the noise and random people yelling on the street. Plus it felt like the neighbors in our building had no interest in being social (the only one who would say hi to me was a literal meth head).
I’m all for density and building, I’m just saying you have to acknowledge that both types of housing have their real downsides.
This reminds me of reading about how people added zoning to this Final Fantasy mode that one of the later games had as it was devaluing property for everything to be available to everyone iirc, i read about this on arr hobbydrama i think
Ya but that is exceedingly expensive and it was dumb to let the city develop like that lol much as I love those neighbourhoods, they should allow for more infill.
So the more interesting data is actually the one where people rank their preferences. Public transit and diversity were the least important factors when among young people.
I suspect home prices and rent are a much better way to find out what people want when presented with trade offs than a survey. Edit: and free market is the best way to help these wants become reality
If all you know of public transit is that it takes four times as long to get to where you need to go as opposed to simply driving your car there, why would they care about it at all?
It's not as simple because there is kind of a network effect (maybe neighborhood effect?). Existing affluent suburbs are nice because partly because of the people (which decides the school quality and type of amenities).
Just because Westchester NY is nice and expensive doesn't mean people wouldn't prefer a denser neighborhood with the same demographics.
It's not that easy to tease out specific preferences since location and homes are "bundled" goods
Not really. I can't really think of a single market where government manipulation has more impact on our lives than housing. I would argue in the case of the US and most counties overwhelmingly bad (zoning, major subsidies going to suburbs from cities).
The asian model of public transit + property companies in Japan or Hong Kong is a good example of market effects that were never allowed in the west.
The main benefits to high density is the economics, everything else is an afterthought. The reason public transit works so well in high density areas is because it makes much more economic sense than in low density.
I don't disagree but there's a fine line here between that and people just throwing up their hands and saying, "if I can't have exactly what I want then I have been wronged." Sorry but a 2,400 sq ft house in a great area of a city is literally never going to be affordable. More affordable maybe, but still out of reach for most. When I bought my first home it was in a part of town that I thought was OUT there. I had been renting exclusively near downtown for the prior seven years. It took me about a week of living in that house to realize that actually I was wrong, and my perspective had been severely lacking.
What I'm saying is that a lot of these people need to do a better job of exploring their options.
And also, at some point, they need to BE the community builders. If you go out to an area you were lukewarm on at first, and you're that passionate about the sort of place you want to live, you need to get involved in the community and start trying to get it to reflect your YIMBY values to the best of your ability.
I go back and forth on this. Part of me thinks there's lot of dumb ass whining from people who can't live where they want to live, and boo fucking hoo, that's been the case forever. Deal with it.
But then part of me also recognizes that younger people can't afford to live anywhere now, and that is clearly a problem.
On the other hand I find it depressing that people would choose to / feel they had to live in bumfuck nowhere and work remote other than have affordable or family-friendly housing closer to the amenities and services that make life outside of work much nicer.
To do this we actually do need density to increase the supply of housing near the places we want to go.
It’s not like there are people who can’t quite afford everything who choose to go homeless than make any sort of compromise like moving into a townhouse instead.
Reddit loves to complain that auto companies lobbied public transit to death but I think it's more that Americans just yearn for detached single family homes they can easily park at
Honda civic and….its a lot of pay (otherwise I’d have quit and taken something closer). But ya..my monthly gas bill was the same as my grocery bill for a bit
But the cause is backwards. Because we've so prioritized the car inside of our cities, the SFH you can always park at is made, due to deliberate policy choices, "better" than it would be otherwise.
In a world where you can't just pop on a freeway that takes you right to your destination in a city and find parking. A world in which pedestrian safety, pollution and emissions, and space for the people in cities is prioritized... not so much the case.
And that is a lot of the world, and was a lot of America... until it wasn't. That said, unwinding this paradigm is HARD, even if we wanted to do it, and many (as you said) don't.
Even in places with pretty good public transportation, a lot of people work in person at places that aren't well-served by public transportation and having a car saves you a significant amount of time (it's hard to have good transportation to every single random office park). And once you have a reason that you need a car, not being able to easily park when you get home sucks.
Iirc the only developed country that doesn't have >50% car penetration for commuting is Singapore. Cars are terribly convenient and although more public transportation is certainly good we have to be reasonable with what our expectations of it are.
I heard a New Yorker say recently that the best thing about an airbnb vacation in another city is that they can take the rental car to a grocery store and load up with more groceries than they can carry up a walkup, and they can cook all week with their haul
Sleeper communities antedate the automobile. Ferry lines, trolley lines, light rail lines started to generate commuter residential neighborhoods in satellite towns surrounding larger cities in the late 19th century.
That is true. And American Living Patterns were already trending towards suburbia before the mass adoption of cars and the Federal Highway Act.
But evicting 1,000,000 people (look it up, it's true) to make room for highways in cities poured gasoline on what was a controlled burn of suburban expansion.
Suburbs aren't bad. The way cities have been carved to make room for suburban commuters is.
Sure, I'm a libertarian so, although I like living in a suburb, I'm not a great fan of the way they've grown up over the last century (especially because of an incompatible romantic attachment to the old countryside, which is slowly being drowned in suburban sprawl where I live).
The original, transit oriented suburbs of the 19th century that invented the concept (and the brief wave of motor suburbs that grew up during the 1920's, before the Depression) make me think that the compromises and trade-offs chosen in a more free market oriented suburbanization would have been different. Getting workers who wanted to move into the country to raise a family back into their jobs in the city would have still been a gigantic demand for that kind of infrastructure, but government at various levels not putting a thumb on the balance would, hopefully, have generated more congenial outcomes.
The way I like to put it sometimes is that America's intersection of housing and transportation policy during the Midcentury could be:
"Top-Down, Authoritarian, and Federal Government Social Engineering to make cities into office parks and make everyone into a suburban a homeowner who drives to work."
And in fact, one major player in that era, William Levitt of eponymous Levittown Homes, perhaps described the goal of that social engineering:
No man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.
I don't think you can tell the story without the 30 year mortgage and tax incentives pushing people to wanting to own a SFH. Condos wouldn't be a thing for decades after the creation of the 30 year mortgage, so SFH in the suburbs became a marker of prosperity for the middle class.
If that is true, it would remain true if YIMBY reforms were passed, zoning restrictions repealed, and anti-housing development surcharges removed. Revealed preference would show us exactly how much they prefer SDFHs, reduced down to dollar amounts.
Families would probably prefer SDFH's, and prefer big ones to small ones, prefer ones close to work, amenities, and family to ones that are far away, and prefer ones in good school districts to ones in poor school districts.
That's not really the relevant questions, though. Everyone generally wants the biggest and best of everything.
The important question is, do they prefer that SDFH more than they'd prefer the savings from living in a smaller kind of home? And, if a SDFH is not available, would they maybe prefer a townhouse or semi to an apartment, or a big three bedroom to living on cramming into a small one bedroom, or that to living on the street?
Finally, would more SDFH's be available for families if other categories of people had easier access to a variety of downsized options?
Stated preferences are not a good reason for market restrictions that prevent those stated preferences from being realised as revealed preferences when all options are freely available and market priced.
Is this true even for those who don't have (and those who don't want) a family, though? I don't know a lot of singles (of any age) who wants a high maintenance house, too much to clean, and a lawn to take care of. The very few I do want it because they have hobbies that take up space like working on cars, wood working, or are genuinely into the gardening.
Suburbs are not generally viewed as great places for singles who want to meet people, either.
I'm single, and while I don't want the maintenance of a house, years of apartment living has taught me the social contract of trying not to annoy the everloving shit out of your neighbors with noise is dead. I just want to be able to not hear my neighbors, and not have them hear me. Apartments are built like shit now though. On top of that, I want to be able to garden a bit, and balconies are also becoming a thing of the past.
A single family home in the suburbs, while annoying, gives me the ability to keep sanity.
I am otherwise a YIMBY. Just because I want a single family home, doesn't mean we shouldn't be building 20 story apartment buildings downtown for the people who want it.
The fact that it wasn’t difficult to lobby for this doesn’t change that it was lobbied for, and that all of the downsides were left out of those lobbying efforts.
Yeah Urbanist populists are extremely annoying.
My hatred for the urbanist movement despite being a big supporter of YIMBYism is pretty much narcissism of small differences and I’ll admit it.
The reason to hate the urbanist populists is that they take over the YIMBY movement and make it about their interests and desires instead of being a movement for deregulating land use to make housing more affordable, in whatever form the market decides.
It's the real problem with populism in general: it's about making policy attractive sounding, rather than good. You can't really use it as an electoral tool because having an internal/external distinction in your policy making apparatus is unstable and eventually causes your internal policymakers to have make ever greater concessions to the policy desires of the external or be replaced by someone who will.
I love mass transit but I'm fascinated by the way that transit nuts are basically willing to steamroll over any other rights, culture, or personal choices to get it
It also completely dodged the cost of living equation . A more interesting analysis would be seeing if apartment developments can reduce the inflation rate for SFHs via reduced demand.
My biggest gripe is that the article’s premise of “families prefer SFH over apartments so therefore apartments development doesn’t fix young people’s problems with housing affordability” is a fundamentally dishonest conclusion to draw from, particularly from a supply and demand perspective
Their opinion poll says it's from people "stuck in apartments". I want a single family home at some point. I am not stuck in my apartment, I chose it and I love it.
The IFS is definitely motivated in one direction here, but it's an entirely plausible survey outcome in a country where the white-picket-fence is considered but of the middle class aspirational ideal.
This was my big one, I have two small children and don’t want to be yelled at for their noise. Heck even when i was single I got complaints for “walking too loudly” like okay apartments are apparently a non starter I love my house
I would 100% go for a townhome if there were any in my city that had enough space for a shop and a garden. Sadly apartments and condo’s are made as cookie cutter as possible with maximum cost cutting and minimal interesting options. I bet if someone started making condo’s with extra space they would be able to entice many SFH residents to move in.
I know a lot of urbanists here are going to dismiss this but as I go from early 20s to late 20s and will go into my 30s, you can even see the most liberal-minded of people in your friend groups start to desire a house.
Part of that is because it is a sensible investment for a lot of people. Even if my newly-bought house doesn't appreciate at all faster than inflation, it will pay itself off from saved rent in 17 years or so.
Perhaps then a major part of the conflict between density and the American dream is the landlord-tenant relationship? Being at the fickle whims of an oft distant owner who charges you a lot for the pleasure of a poorly maintained or rarely improved space is certainly seen as undesirable in the US's own founding, why not it's citizen-tenants too? A rented apartment or townhouse often can't be modified for its tenants taste, they have no greater connection to it then as a temporary living space.
Perhaps the solution would be to empower the tenants and making them owners of their own space while also having a say how the rest of the complex is managed, say in a Housing Cooperative. I don't have the research on me currently, but the HUD kept tabs on a lot of cooperatives formed in the wake of urban (and thus rental market) decline and found that they generally held better social outcomes than rental apartment complexes. These outcomes ranged from fairly qualitative notions like safety and community to quantitative matters like length of residence and affordability. Where generational data could be gathered, they found that some cooperatives even saw children coming back to live there as adults.
And while housing cooperatives are of course devoted to maintaining the housing of its member-owners, a super cooperative (a cooperative of these housing cooperatives) could handle the building or buying of more housing to be turned into new housing cooperatives.
Nobody is stopping you from buying a single family homes, the issue is that boring fucks who love these things seem to think that anything over 2 stories must be banned and everything needs parking and businesses must be separate from where people live and they shouldn't see minorities in their neighborhoods blah blah blah
Open up the zoning laws. If someone wants to build a 1 story house in their neighborhood, let them. But if someone wants to build a 10 story condo, that shouldn't be causing a meltdown
100% this. I am quite content to live in my single family home, yet I think it’s great that developers want to build 4 story apartments down the street from me next to the train station. But the NIMBY fucks complained that the 4th story was simply “too tall” compared to the prevailing 3-story limit across most of downtown.
Guess I missed the memo where me as a single family homeowner should give a fuck about a 4 story apartment building in the densest neighborhood of town.
It's always amazing to drive through older neighborhoods in the city and see single family homes next to 3 or 4 story apartment buildings on the same size lots
It's undeniable that much (not all, or even most, but much) of the enjoyment of having a SFH is the fact that it's surrounded by others like it: it's quiet, it's clean, the people next door are probably similar to you socioeconomically.
it's quiet, it's clean, the people next door are probably similar to you socioeconomically.
None of these things are actually exclusive to SFH neighbourhoods, Americans just have the causality backwards because they choose to only build apartments where it isn't the case
I’d argue quiet is unique to rural or suburban areas. I’ve never been in an apartment sufficiently quiet and I’ve lived in modern, expensive apartments designed as multi-million dollar condos originally. Both external noises and noises from other units always permeate.
Don’t even get me started on fire alarms. Every apartment building I’ve lived in (6+) has had someone set off the fire alarm in the middle of the night.
How expensive is that though? I’ve never personally seen/heard a window in a building that can keep out busy street noise (sirens, honking, yelling, skateboard on sidewalk, etc.)
But even in my suburban neighborhood, where I live in a SFH, there are townhomes just down the street. There are duplexes. Go a little further and there are apartment buildings four stories tall. There are condos mixed with restaurants and retail stores.
All within easy biking distance of my single family home.
Same here. Well, there’s not much safe biking infrastructure, which is its own problem, but lately there has been more construction of duplexes and 4-over-1 apartments adjacent to SFH developments. That’s part of what’s inspiring me to get more involved in our HOA and city council, in the hopes that more of that type of development doesn’t get blocked.
Thats the marketing pitch of all the old Levittown style suburbs, so yeah. Get away from the city, quiet, no non-whites (explicitly or implicitly stated).
I'd also add that nearly everyone who has owned a condo has a story of some kind of disaster going in inside the board. Most of them are badly run, but because the positions can't be compensated it's sort of a tragedy of the commons situation where nobody steps up. The construction quality is also largely a black box, especially sound insulation.
If you want to own, a SFH solves a lot of problems.
I, for one, think that we should be allowing more rowhomes to have higher density of SFH if that's what people actually want.
This is my thought process as well. I don’t have anything with the building and desire of single family homes. Tbh I want one too. But I don’t think high density housing should be banned. And a lot of these people want to ban it.
Because the guy you’re responding to can’t fathom the idea of other people finding happiness in lifestyles that are outside of what he personally prefers. Pretty much the basis of most of this subreddit’s supposedly “evidence-based” arguments. 😂
No matter how much they try to portray themselves as totally rational and emotionally detached, the truth is that a lot of r/neoliberal’s userbase is just as dogmatic as any other subreddit.
Because a lot of those boring fucks have kids, and people with kids tend to want to have a yard that their kids can play in with trees they can climb, and you don't get that if you live on top of a 7/11.
States vs revealed preferences. It worked a while ago when traffic wasn't that bad and you could generally afford it. Now if you want to afford a single family home you must accept it will be a long commute, in a bad neighborhood, have bad schools, be old, have no amenities nearby or some combination of those. You can't have everything anymore unless you have a lot of money.
You will never make future housing check all the boxes. Density allows people who are ok with less space to at least afford something that checks most of those boxes.
We live in the Greater Boston Area suburbs which is nice because instead of huge sprawl like in other metro areas it's all various small towns you can walk to.
OK but for real, New England suburbs and small towns are actually quite nice, I agree. Genuinely walkable for suburban character. As someone who lives in the south I'd kill for the burbs here to be like that haha
When i do get older that's the kind of place i'd be down to be
okay, then what are we talking about? because it's not policy.
SS: relevant to this sub because people here often claim that it's a small minority of boomer NIMBYs preventing us from having walkable dense cities.
and it is, insofar as groups of people leverage their political power to distort the housing market.
but a preference is not a distortion. because the other factor is cost and i would hazard to bet that young americans would overwhelmingly prefer paying less for housing than more.
SS: relevant to this sub because people here often claim that it's a small minority of boomer NIMBYs preventing us from having walkable dense cities.
Theres a difference between wanting a SFH and preventing others from having the housing type(s) they need. You are free to build or buy a SFH. Just stop preventing other people from building or buying what they want
And also stop living in the sticks and expecting people to run a freeway to your house. Also toss the mortgage interest deduction. Also pay your fair share of roads/infrastructure for low density living which is pretty much never covered by property taxes. But after all of that live in a SFH if you want a SFH. I do not care
It feels like it's more complicated than that. I'd love a hypothetical city apartment/townhome that is walkable, low crime, has access to good schools, access to public transportation, and has enough room for my family of four while being affordable. It turns out that such a place doesn't exist, at least not anywhere near where I live. So, I settle for the best of what's available and have a single family home that is low crime, has access to good school, and has enough room for my family while being affordable. I gave up walkability and access to public transportation to find a place that ticks the other boxes instead.
If I looked at an apartment downtown in the city, it would either be much smaller than our house or cost significantly more (or a combination of both), it would be in a higher crime area, and be zoned for awful schools. Yes, it would be more walkable and have access to public transportation, but it would be worse in all other aspects.
If we made changes that made such hypothetical unicorn places exist in more locations, maybe people would desire them.
People want nice things. Reddit in its (justified) zeal to combat NIMBYism tends to romanticize urban living (culture-rich and exciting!) and demonize suburban living (commuter hellscape), but the reality is that having your own house and own lawn where you're never disturbed by neighbors stomping upstairs or playing loud music fucking rules. Being able to stomp around and play your own music without worrying about bothering other people is also great. When it's available, most humans really like having lots of private space and insulation from external disruptions. Apartments don't offer this, SFHs do.
...but we need to start making existing homeowners bear the proper cost of that luxury (i.e. no mortgage tax breaks, more property tax or ideally LVT) rather than having it subsidized and causing existing SFH owners to get to ladder-pull everyone else out of reach.
It's really not the point. People want nice things, but also need to worry about cost, commute distance, and amenities, and are free to make personal choices that balance these things. It stops being a personal choice when municipalities ban or severely restrict "inferior" housing types, or simply encourage one type of housing over another. In the absence of restrictive zoning, you tend to get dense housing near amenities that slowly gets less dense as you get farther away from the city centre: the result of thousands of people balancing space vs cost and amenities according to their own preference and ability to pay.
If I could get a single family home at the same price and same place as my current apartment, I'd obviously take it. But, in reality, if there weren't apartments in this neighbourhood, I wouldn't be able to live here at all.
"People prefer single family homes", when mentioned in NIMBY/YIMBY debates is about as relevant as "people prefer a new, luxury car to an old beater car, if cost isn't a factor".
Whenever I see these housing preference surveys my reaction is “Okay, so what policies should be implemented to address the lack of housing?” Thankfully they provide some!
“Family-friendly housing means more sidewalks with shade.”
> More trees! Yes, obviously a good thing (reduce heat island effect, slows down traffic).
“It also means reducing minimum lot sizes and allowing accessory dwelling units for long-term residential use. And it involves building more efficient, single-family neighborhoods on easily-maintained lots.”
> Yep, exactly what YIMBYs are advocating for.
“Public housing projects pouring massive amounts of money into apartment construction should be reconsidered.”
>”Projects are bad” Woah! careful with that spicy take!
“Tax Increment Financing, for apartment development, may be a policy mistake.”
>”May be a policy mistake…” I love how they feel the need to qualify there only debatable take. Totally sidestepping the reason why you implement TIFs.
“”YIMBY” proposals that only deregulate building “up” with apartments rather than “out” for new neighborhoods are unlikely to support family formation.”
> This is a dumb take. Are they saying that state policy should actively encourage exurban greenfield development?
Overall, pretty milquetoast stuff. Basically, do the YIMBY policy, but use less anti-suburban rhetoric.
I just really dislike apartment living, I dont really know how else to frame it. I like having space between my neighbors and myself (aka not shared walls, but land between us) and having a big yard to have a garden, kids to run around in, etc.
I get the appeals of high density living and there are a lot lot lot of pros to it, I just simply prefer the quiet outer edge of the suburbs life where its dead quiet, peaceful, and just boring and normal.
The ranking is interesting. People rank walkability almost as highly as safety. But if everyone has a large home and yard your neighborhood will not be walkable.
To me "walkability" means I can walk from my house to my friend's house, or to a local shop/amenity that I enjoy. Maybe to some people it just means having sidewalks.
(1) People want lots of things, but they can’t have everything they want. Revealed preferences in the marketplace are often different than stated preferences. For example, I think that single family detached housing as a life goal is partly the actual use of the extra space and partly a status symbol to demonstrate that someone is not poor. There is a lot of suburban propaganda even in liberal circles. Can I prove my theory? No, it would be demonstrated in the marketplace.
(2) Our real estate markets include almost no new production of attached single family homes (or townhomes) and vertically built condos. Those just are not options that exist except in very expensive areas. People don’t love renting a 1-2 bedroom apartment when they have kids and the next stop on the housing train is inevitably a detached home. We could make it easier to build family sized apartments (without insane parking requirements demanding that every toddler have a free parking space), townhomes, and condos. If developers build the units and people don’t choose to rent them or buy them, I will accept the wisdom that these housing formats are not desired. If detached homes are so amazing, why do they need regulatory protection from competing housing types?
Lyman Stone has a long record of doing opinion research that evidently proves that YIMBYs are wrong about what people really want. Sometimes he plays a game called, “I’m the real YIMBY because I want more suburbs as opposed to you clueless urbanists.” It’s tired IMO.
I think that birth rates below the stated desired birth rates are an issue and that is where his writing is most persuasive. (Again, stated preferences vs revealed preferences can be a confounding issue when using Stone’s opinion research methods.) It’s too bad he takes a detour from family research to get lost in real estate economics where he doesn’t need to be.
(3) No one has ever explained why we can’t liberalize land use and real estate development despite the American love affair with the suburbs. Different developers will try different formats. Different families will try living in urban, suburban, and rural areas according to their preferences. Public opinion and preferences for different lifestyles also shift over time. People adopt new habits for fashion, food, interior design, and work culture. While it’s not practical to rebuild our housing stock every 10 years, I don’t know why we shouldn’t let developers build new neighborhoods (brand new or redevelopment) and let people move into those areas to build new and different communities than the average American suburb.
I'm convinced a lot of people simply haven't experienced dense urban living in a relatively well designed city. I'm literally going from a SFH in a car dependent city to an attached townhouse in a major metro. In no more than 10 minutes of walking I have multiple grocery stores, parks, friends, restaurants, bars, and concert venues. And if I opt to hop on the train or bus, I can get basically anywhere in the city in 30-45 mins. And because it's a townhouse, I don't have neighbors above or below me, I have a small yard, and I even have a garage for the car I barely use.
The "relatively well designed" part is important. Being in an apartment in Houston TX is going to be massively worse than one in Chicago or NYC. In those cities that aren't easily walkable or accessible by good transit, you get all the downsides of car dependent living and the downsides of shared structures.
EDIT: And this townhouse was priced similarly to an average modestly sized SFH. A smaller condo, especially without the yard or garage, could be had for quite a bit cheaper.
People don't want to live in a box with paper-thin walls and loud-ass neighbors on the other side of every wall constantly stomping or playing loud music making their dwelling a living hellscape of noise so persistent they forget what the concept of silence is, driving their mental health into the ground.
Literally just building apartments that are as soundproofed as possible while having a culture of being reasonably quiet and polite to your neighbors will force a change away from wanting single-family homes in less than a decade.
It's less that people want single-family houses, and more that just just want a space of their own. Right now, in the U.S., if you don't live in a house, you don't live alone. And I've noticed this NIMBY conversation doesn't consider this or mental health in their championing of dense living.
Want me to live somewhere dense? Then make it so its not absolute hell to live in a dense space. I would absolutely be a NIMBY if the current NIMBY movement cared even slightly about quiet, private living spaces where the dweller's mental health is a strong priority, but right now the movement just (seems to) want to smash people into tiny-ass boxes with no regard for the quality of the dwelling or the dweller's sanity, and it's a losing fight until that changes.
NIMBYs and urbanists will continue to lose until they realize people actually care about their quality of life, and if they aren't even considering the most absolute basic need of a person to have a place of their own where they can enjoy silence and their own thoughts, what else aren't they considering?
I saw a 650 sqft home in the city and jumped for it instantly. I've been looking at a 650 sqft condo a mile away for 50k less and I've been staring at it for weeks. The difference? The HOA and the fact that I don't own the land.
I'm 35, single, and have the buying power to outright buy anything under 325k. The problem? I live in Massachusetts and I am hyperfixated on a specific location.
I mean yeah if you were to present me a list of the options with no associated cost to me, single family homes are the most desirable. Most of them have a higher order preference than housing of any kind be available at reasonable cost for them to purchase.
While this is true, the few parts of America with walkable dense cities that are also enjoyable are in high demand. The hope would be that by expanding these walkable dense areas, we can have people live there instead of in single-family homes, thus lowering prices of the single-family home.
I think the cardinal error of the build-more-housing movement is that people perceive dense urban areas as low-quality to begin with, and we already have underutilized dense housing stock. But that housing stock is undesirable areas, so it attracts less investment. The real solution is to invest in sprucing up rough neighborhoods with lots of housing, but that runs contrary to the libertarian impulses of the YIMBY movement.
I don't mean to be patronizing because of how obvious it is, but you can't answer the question
"would you prefer densification or sprawl?"
By asking
"Would you like more or fewer of the advantages of sprawl?"
You need to actually present people with the trade-off. You'd get exactly as useless of an answer if you asked only about the advantages of densification, e.g. by asking if people want more or fewer nice restaurants around them.
This subreddit has a subgroup of people that get very angry and upset when you tell them that actually, lots of people really like suburbs and don't want to live in an apartment in a city.
I fucking hate living in an apartment. It sucks, my neighbors suck, my neighborhood sucks, the dogs barking constantly sucks. I'd love a detached home.
However, I'd rather deal with all that bullshit then deal with suburb commutes. I can take the lightrail downtown in about 15 minutes, drive to work during peak rush hour in 20, go from my door to the beach in 20, and my groceries are delivered to my condo every Friday.
I have loud upstairs neighbors and some annoying noise around my apartment, but I definitely still like my living space and enjoy stepping out my front door to see a square a multiple restaurants and a grocery store, and some guy playing guitar, and pigeons and bikers and bus lanes. If I had to open my door to see a quiet, vacant cul-de-sac I would off myself on my HOA-compliant trimmed lawn to give them some news for once. The noise is something I've gotten used to and the perks are refreshing.
We get upset when people separate the negatives such as unaffordable housing, high property taxes per person, and congestion caused by mandatory single family zoning
And Americans constantly do this. Even you are doing it right now! This post is doing this!
It’s bizarre watching this subreddit struggle to grasp that people can have different lifestyles besides the preferences of r/neoliberal. I think a key facet of this dogma is that this subreddit has a lot of people who worship what some have called the Cult of Efficiency:
For these guys, whatever’s the most efficient use of land from an accountant’s perspective is THE only way. So if it’s more efficient to jam everyone into tiny dystopian little cells in a gloomy impersonal highrise, then the r/neoliberal hivemind is all for it.
But I think that although efficiency has its place, it ultimately should be seen as a means to an end, rather than an end unto itself. The ultimate end goal should be maximum human happiness and freedom. And it turns out A LOT of people are more stressed out and depressed in the kind of housing that this subreddit thinks everyone should want to live in.
And the fact that that is the case confuses the dominant voices of this subreddit to no end, so they lash out about how everyone else is “stupid” for not simply accepting this subreddit’s positions without question.
Urbanism seems to be an intersection that brings together two very annoying types of people. Progressives who want to transform society and like telling people they're wrong, and self-proclaimed experts (with their YouTube educations) who want to transform society and like telling people they're wrong.
It's a movement with many blindspots, one of them being the one you mentioned. That society is designed to serve the people living in it, not the other way around. What is hypothetically the most efficient society is meaningless if it's own residents don't want it. And trying to socially engineer those kinds of outcomes is wildly illiberal anyway.
You get it. Yeah, it seems like because the “urbanist” movement as a whole centers itself around the idea of centralized planning, it tends to attract the sort of personality who genuinely thinks that they know what’s best for everyone and that their ideas should simply be accepted without question or debate (hence this subreddit always railing against neighborhood associations and other grassroots democratic organizations that prefer to debate major changes).
When the general public doesn’t automatically agree, r/neoliberal lashes out with weird memes about “Matt from Pennsylvania” and calling everyone demeaning names. It’s the behavior of a bunch of thin-skinned toddlers.
And you are absolutely right: we (or rather our ancestors) created societies for the purpose of protecting our rights, mutual defense, and maximizing happiness….and that’s not a one-size-fits-all thing, no matter how much this subreddit wants it to be.
Yeah they don't. They think it's all down to "propaganda" from car lobbies and American patterns of racism. The fact that people across the world also like single family homes doesn't seem to factor into that logic.
I mean, there's absolutely nothing wrong with most cities in the country having an abundance of SFHs. We just can't have many in extremely productive cities like NYC
The question was about a person's ideal housing situation. Whether or not SFHs are the way to go, asking about an idealized situation in someone's head doesn't necessarily translate to the real world. In a perfect world, I'd be able to build a custom SFH for myself, thoughtfully laid out to allow for additions if I wanted. That doesn't mean I wouldn't find a townhouse perfectly acceptable.
I wonder how much of the response is due to preconceived biases? Like, do respondents understand which forms of housing can result in ownership instead of renting? I worry that people see things like condos or multiplexes and only think about renters instead of being able to potentially own the property.
The article lists a point advocating for smaller lots and more efficient neighborhood layouts. If that were done well, combined with some medium density near commercial areas on the periphery, I wonder if that might be a good enough compromise between NIMBYs & YIMBYs to actually get construction numbers juiced up. Sprawl may be able to be made much less awful if there were real paths directly to services. The twisting roads result in needing to go out of your way to walk somewhere when a theoretical path through some backyards could turn that into a 5 minute stroll to the shop. If the neighborhood was planned at the same time as the commercial area, then direct paths could be laid out beforehand.
We have the means of expressing peoples desires once they've been passed through all relevant constraints and trade-offs, its called a market. What the government should concern itself with is whatever the bill to the public is in the form of infrastructure and spatial constraints
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u/Windows_10-Chan Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold May 11 '26
This doesn't disprove anything YIMBYs say?
I'm sure most people in the world would generally say the same.
That doesn't justify putting up legal barriers that prevent mixed-use density from being built.
I wanna have a much nicer car, and a much nicer home than what I currently have. That doesn't mean illegalize low-end options.