This is missing the point that land is a finite resource and homes aren't fungible. It doesn't help most Californians that more homes can be built in rural Arkansas.
The problem isn’t finite land. It’s finite voters and the politicians that represent them. In CA, the most crowded state, There are more acres than people! And somehow we still have a housing shortage.
You can go out into the middle of nowhere in CA and find houses huddled together 2 feet from another behind a giant wall, like some kind of nazi concentration camp for houses. And the sadest part is that there’s tons of land in every direction you look and people are forced to commute vast distances.
> In CA, the most crowded state, There are more acres than people!
Oh, well then, we'll just assign each person an acre, problem solved.
Which one do you want? Apparently you'll be fine with one -- maybe even two -- in the middle of nowhere, as your comment seems to assume that each has equal value, independent of either natural or social geography.
The problem is that land usage really calls out for the flavour of top-down planning we'd consider Bolshevik in the West.
The "nobody wants to live where no jobs are/nobody wants to build where there's no employees" deadlock can be solved by ensuring new economic engines are deliberately sited in areas that needs a boost. Sorry, Amazon, HQ2 is going in Gary, Indiana.
Eliminating private land ownership would remove many of the worst NIMBY objections. How many people are really "we don't want higher density homes near us" and not "It MiGhT hUrT oUr ReSaLe VaLuE tO bE nEaR pOoRs?!" It might also make it easier to remove some of the worst planning blights-- dead malls and abandoned facilities.
A central planning dictate also makes it that much easier to get commercial/industrial development, housing, and transit all on one page. I'm picturing a proactive model almost like the Chinese "Ghost City" phenomenon, where you're cutting ribbons on subway stations in the middle of swamps today, knowing that Phase III-k of the development plan means in five years the station will be servicing 8,000 commuters per day.
Land is a finite resource but housing units are not. Once America gets over it’s love affair with single family homes, we could undercut most speculators by just building up.
In the last 2 years condo prices in the Seattle area have stayed flat while everyone is desperate to buy townhomes and single families that are becoming out of reach for most. That makes me wonder if building up will actually fix the issue.
That condo prices are staying flat is fantastic news.
Now we just need to build condos that are appropriate for all stages of life -- not just young singlehood and coupledom.
Building up will not solve the "not enough SFH/townhomes" problem, but it will fix the homeownership problem. And it may help with the former, if there are enough current SFH/townhome owners who would prefer a really nice condo close to work/downtown/parks/amenities/etc.
But one issue there is that we currently build condos but don't build the public spaces that serve to supplement them and make them comfortable for, e.g., families with kids. As a result, they're full of a certain demographic, and less appealing to others, reinforcing the issue.
I think those already exist, perhaps beyond the utility space, and they don't seem to cut it. I don't think the utility room is the difference maker. I actually think the neighborhood feeling and sense of space are much more important.
You are 100% right that the neighborhood feeling matters, but to be clear, the amenities need to come first.
I grew up in an apartment building that absolutely felt like a neighborhood in itself. There were at least 10 other kids in the 400-unit building my own age. In the local neighborhood (consisting of other apartment buildings) there were easily another 30 kids my age, any of whom I could see in a 5-10 minute walk. Few people owned cars (it was NYC after all!) and the area was quite safe traffic-wise.
I spent countless evenings outside walking or biking along promenades, or just hanging out in parks, playgrounds — all literally steps from my apartment building — and as I got older, in libraries, cafes, restaurants, shops, etc. The building I lived in also had a pool and multiple community “rooms” that were several thousand sqft large, which we reserved for birthday parties and other events.
It was fantastic. There were kids there because the spaces were designed to support families, and the “must have SFH with yard before having kids” attitude among the middle and upper-middle class is pretty weak in NYC, so my neighbors could be similarly-high SES because not all parents immediately flee apartment living for the suburbs.
Today, I live in a Bay Area inner suburb. There are, again, 10 kids my preschooler’s age in the local (couple blocks) neighborhood. But they can’t bike alone (or even walk alone, really) because drivers often hit 50mph and don’t look where they’re going. Each of our back yards — though we have one! — is tiny, much smaller than the community rooms I had growing up, so for any serious physical activity we have to get in the car to drive somewhere, contributing to the “traffic is a problem” problem.
The closest public park is a 4000-square-foot grass triangle in a quiet almost-cul-de-sac that takes 10 minutes to walk to and 30 seconds to walk across. There is a library 5 minutes’ walk away, and it is a saving grace.
If I could transplant the apartment building I grew up in to my local neighborhood, which is about 2 miles square — 100 million sqft — its 16000 residents could be housed in about 16 buildings, each of which would have a 25,000 sqft footprint, totaling 400,000 sqft and leaving 99.6 million square feet for fantastic parks, promenades, playgrounds, schools, trails, open space, basically any use you could imagine. Each apartment could be owned, 2000+ sqft, with private decks/patios/balconies and wonderful views.
If that were available in the Bay Area…we could build them at 2x the density described above and house the next 20 years of newcomers…
TBH, I wonder if a good concept would be the condo/apartment complex with a maker space built-in.
I have a single-family house with a garage, and things like woodworking, painting, or even having a 3-D printer are not necessarily things I want in my utility room or garage. They require special fittings or space levels not available when you're trying to fit around a car.
It would also provide a great central hub for people to meet, because projects are a natural thing to socialize about.
There are plenty of cities worldwide where building up has worked. Regardless, if buying a town home or single-family has become out of reach, it's far better to have /something/ to live in rather than be forced to fight the market for a small box in a high-rise that you still can't afford.
Yeah, most condos in Seattle are in downtown area, and downtown Seattle really went to shit over past few years. Places are closed down, crazy homeless harass you on every intersection, and trash and tents are everywhere. No wonder few want to live there, keeping pressure on prices relatively low.
Single Family homes have the benefit of more autonomy where as building up means you're living on-top of your neighbor, its not binary but we should acknowledge the clear QoL tradeoffs of condensed living.
Maybe its inevitable and necessary to force more people into condensed housing, maybe the societal benefits really outweigh the tradeoffs.
As far as I'm concerned the quality-of-life tradeoff heavily favours higher-density housing.
I live in an apartment block and so does everybody else for miles around. Our building, like almost every other around here, tops out at seven storeys. It's very solidly constructed, so there's little to no noise from neighbours, not that they make much noise to begin with as they're a pretty considerate bunch.
The downside to this way of living is almost nonexistent, but the upside is massive. Instead of everybody having their own plot of land that's too small to do anything really interesting with, and which they have to maintain themselves, we have a communal garden. When that's not enough, there are no less than four parks within two minutes' walk.
Because this higher density of living is able to sustain more amenities, everything you could possibly ever need is, at most, a short bike ride away. And I do mean everything. Bars, restaurants, shops, medical facilities, swimming pools, a velodrome, a planetarium...
I've no need of a car because it's all on my doorstep. If I do need to travel, public transport's great.
You can keep your "autonomy", I'll be too busy reaping the benefits of living among other people to worry about that.
You might as well live in the matrix, you seem to live in an artificial world with no connection to nature. I myself desire to live on the edge of "civilization" as much as I can, I know this presents a conundrum in that I'm creating a market for destroying it, but this is a human condition as old as time.
20-30 minutes on a bike and I'm out in the sticks, a bit further and there are forests and lakes aplenty. Higher-density living means less sprawl and a shorter distance from city centre to back of beyond.
Isn't this most people in rich countries? The line's pretty fuzzy, but in most rich countries you're disconnected from nature unless your job is in nature (ranger, landscaper, farmer, ag researcher) or homeless.
> It's very solidly constructed, so there's little to no noise from neighbours, not that they make much noise to begin with as they're a pretty considerate bunch.
Neither of these things have been even remotely true in any apartment I've lived in the US, even ones billed "luxury". It's always been thin-walled garbage where I can hear every word of every conversation of my neighbors, who have typically felt that listening to music 24 hours a day and slamming down their boots while walking between rooms is the right thing to do.
and that's why single family homes should be more expensive, because it is better. People continue to bid it up, because they still believe that the price is worth and hasn't reached a ceiling yet.
In asian hubs like hong kong or shanghai, they've reached a certain ceiling on land, and so building up is now what most people could buy and so they do that. The cities in countries like canada, australia and the west coast of the US, it hasn't reached that point due to large available land mass, and people prefer commute (or WFH now!) over living densely.
Of course, regulation plays a part - i think there's unnecessarily large amount of red tape in making taller denser buildings, as well as a lobby of existing owners who don't want it near themselves.
This is a massive failure of imagination. I moved into a new 5 by 1. Don’t even know who lives above me (never heard em). Sound Insulation has come a long way.
There’s a lot that can be done to add autonomy and privacy to the condo living. And then more to make it cheaper and accessible. It’s mostly a technical problem.
If people can reasonably afford a (non-tiny) condo but pine after a single family home that they can't afford, there isn't a housing crisis there's economic diversity.
Nonesense. People are going homeless because they can’t pay 3k a month to rent a shitty studio. Low income housing cannot be produced for less. Boomers wanting to mow lawns is obviously, for clear thinking individuals, not even a factor.
Why can't the US just have less people with a higher standard of living? Why is "progress" always more. Why do we have to make everything worse by shifting the baseline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline).
Because a higher standard of living requires more people to come up with the said standard of living (see: history, the shifting of innovation centers to population centers)
The degrowth movements garden variety neo-pastoralist misanthropy makes it blind to the fact that more humans (given a good system of governance and rules) is actually an amazing thing.
I hope you do accept there are physical limits to growth that there is no way get around short of colonizing other planets and that we should at least take care of our mother planet.
This is not in short supply either. In California, the capital of the American housing crisis, the overwhelming majority of new residential development in the last 50+ years is low-density single-family on greenfield land. This is certainly true within the high-demand metro areas like the Bay and Greater LA. We could multiply the housing supply of these metro areas by many times without ever building on greenfield land ever again. The land is unbelievably not scarce. It is just illegal to put a sane number of people on it.
The legal restrictions on where you can build a new home are more of a problem in California than in rural Arkansas so your response doesn't address OP's point.
