alt Hacker NewsIn some areas, density is appropriate, and in some areas it's not. I wish we could talk about housing density and "build more housing" as if there was not one universal solution that worked everywhere and for everyone. Dense urban living is not appropriate in a rural or suburban town. Single family homes are not appropriate in a high-demand urban area. Different people want different things, too. No matter how efficient and good for the environment it is, I don't want to live in a concrete honeycomb in the middle of a loud city.
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The only difference between a rural or suburban town and the sprawl of a city is time, really. Lots of modern urban areas used to be suburban or essentially rural.
Anyway if you densify cities you can slow down the sprawl and maybe keep suburbs actually smaller? a few more ten story apartment blocks downtown might house the people who have to live in your area and commute.
>In some areas, density is appropriate, and in some areas it's not.
Indeed, the way we have effectively banned density everywhere is wildly inappropriate. Cities should allow dense development. That is, after all, the whole idea of cities: attain the benefits of agglomeration. Cities rejecting anything other than detached single family houses in most of their footprints is contradictory to their purpose.
This is a theoretical ideal, where we ignore people's desire to own large tracts of land and live in quiet places. A mega-city where all the humans human, and then massive tracts of untouched wilderness shy of any industry that has to be there.
This is also why communist countries had stuff like dense housing in deeply rural areas, and why most people were shuffled into cities. Big houses and properties do nothing for the state and just encumber society. Way easier if everyone just lives in their tightly packed central shoe box.
> I don't want to live in a concrete honeycomb in the middle of a loud city.
Yes, this is the crux. Loud, smelly, concrete cities suck. And you’re right that density alone would lead to this.
What we’d ideally want is cities that can be dense without being loud, smelly, and dangerous. These cities exist: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Zurich, Utrecht, Freiburg, etc.
We can’t do this in the US because we can’t remove the source of the noise/danger/stink/concrete problem: cars.
And that’s the catch 22: In the US everyone gets around by car, so density becomes undesirable. We can’t densify because density + cars is bad, and we can’t reduce cars because it’s not dense enough for public transit to get better.
Individuals get stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma where driving is safer, more comfortable, and faster than transit. So every individual with the means to drive chooses to drive. Public transit becomes branded as something for poor people. The concrete honeycomb fills up. The downtown becomes a noisy disaster. People can no longer imagine that good cities are possible.