Let's be a bit gracious. A big issue is how much value is destroyed forcing people who don't necessarily want to live in a big city to live in a big city. Take Dallas. If you condense it into a 10 mile super city, you lose the sprawl. You gain a short commute, maybe? But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good? No more sprawl, sure. But good?
> But you now have people sitting on top of each other. Is this good?
Yes, it's good. The US seems to have either massively spaced out single family housing, or high density skyscrapers. That's not good.
Most other part of the world, and even older US cities before the urban sprawl started, have reasonable densities where you share a wall or a ceiling/floor with only one other family, or not that many. It's sociable, especially if the housing offers a third space (such as a shared green or a courtyard), and the density is such that amenities are no more than a few minutes walk.
So many neighborhoods could be fixed by adding front/backyard ADUs, converting a handful of houses into commercial amenities tuned for the local community (cafes, small convenience/grocery stores, small libraries/coworking spaces, with minimal parking), and car-inaccessible passthroughs to nearby neighborhoods. There's way too much of a focus on building walkable communities, and not enough on converting existing ones with these small changes that don't disrupt the character in the way huge developments might (and in some cases might lend character to cookie-cutter sprawl that has none).
The problem is, converting an existing setup isn't easy. You just can't go and tear down houses that you got by using eminent domain - you need to either pony up a metric shit ton of money or you need to wait decades, no one will grant eminent domain to build a cafe and convenience store.
And even if you'd manage to acquire the property, you'd need to deal with zoning accomodation to allow non-residential use and that's where the NIMBYs will seriously throw wrenches wherever they can because it will mess with their property values.
Building from scratch doesn't have any of these associated efforts.
NIMBYs make new developments difficult to produce, too, actually, and for similar reasons: zoning and environmental laws. New developments also cost more, because you're putting in all-new infrastructure, whereas many old communities are approaching their replacement dates for water and sewer and whatnot anyway. You might as well get the most bang for your buck by introducing more avenues for generating property taxes (ADUs, subdivided lots, and especially commercial establishments).
Also, you don't need to tear anything down. Small neighborhood-use commercial establishments can be converted from existing housing.
This is a small neighbourhood. There are all types of houses there. To your right is half of a regular semi-detached house having become a small pub, and its garage is a barbershop. The other half is still a normal house.
To your left, the two end houses on a terrace are joined to make a shop.
It adds immediate value to the neighbourhood, as the people who live there need walk no more than a few steps to get their milk and bread, to enjoy some social company in the evening, or to get their hair cut.
You'll also notice the density is nothing like US suburban houses with their masses of space all around each one. And if you travel a little further down the road, you'll see there are more shops not that far away!
Planning permission is handled by the local council, but it is mostly standardised. This would be conversion of usage class C3 (normal house) to A1 (shop) or A4 (pub). Councils have a list of things they're allowed to consider in planning applications (and solicit comments from the public for 21 days), called Material Considerations, and things they're not allowed to consider.
For example, they are allowed to consider traffic and parking, appearance of the area, noise and disturbance, loss of sunlight or daylight, etc. But they are not allowed to consider the effect on business or property values, or the reputation of the applicant.
And the best part is that we don't even need to get this dense. Americans love our greenery, and there's space for that, just not multi-square-mile neighborhoods with NO commerce and housing only a few hundred (or a few dozen!) families. This is where planning IS helpful: identifying places to keep green-space, while also filling in dead-space.
Increasing density within the core allows people to switch to walking, cycling and transit. It reduces road traffic and those who want to commute from the burbs gain a faster commute. New housing isn't zero sum. Increasing housing in the core doesn't reduce housing in the outskirts.
The new Caltrains are a good model for transit as a valid mode for suburban commuting. A table, chair and wifi allows commuting to be a productive period to get work done. Boston's commuter rail & NYC's LIRR routes are also excellent, though they could use technological (wifi, charging, tables) upgrades. It doesn't make the commute shorter, but allows you to leave early and continue work on the train.
Not everyone wants to be required to purchase and operate a 5-figure transportation device where you must be abled to operate it, it depreciates to dust and might kill you in a crash, etc. Why is that the standard of “freedom” but “living on top of each other” is a bad thing?
Comfortable suburbs do not have to be wasteful of land, purposefully difficult to walk around, and built so that you must own a car to get around. You can live in a single family home without consuming an excessive amount of land. There are many examples of single family homes suburbs and neighborhoods within city limits where land isn’t wasted like crazy and residents are confined to living life in their vehicles.
Americans literally spend thousands of dollars on vacations to the great cities of the world (and Disney World) where people gladly “live on top of each other” in order to enjoy the benefits of walkable urban fabric.
I will also point out that sprawl is horrendous for the natural environment. Dense cities are better for the planet and our long-term survival. Replacing fertile farmland and natural habitats with development has negative consequences. Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
> Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
What is the benefit of having this type of argument with people? It sounds like you're saying that you'd prefer to live in a fascist dictatorship that just bulldozes insufficiently-dense neighborhoods as it builds large, dense apartment blocks downtown to forcibly relocate the residents into, for the "good of humanity." Setting aside logistics of this (such as who's going to pay for that project, how many gestapo do you need to force people out of their homes) you first would need absolute dictatorial powers -- and I bet you will say you don't want that. You just want all of the non-city people to all change their minds at once and move to the city. Not really a proposal that's going to be very impactful, because that's never going to happen. For one thing, because most of the people who already live in the city hate the idea of building any new housing anywhere at any time. They hate low-income housing because it's wildly unfair to give it to a lucky few while everyone else struggles, and they hate market rate housing, because (eat the rich/hate those gentrifiers/etc). And everyone agrees they would hate for Transit System or the streets to become more congested.
It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there. Work on crime, work on transit that makes people be glad to not be driving, rather than miserable that they can't afford to park a car there as they watch a full bus bypass their stop or wait 25 minutes for one to come. But also, cities would need to have a lot more high quality housing large enough for families, which again isn't something the suburbanites can fix for cities.
> It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there.
This is exactly what's needed. People should stop trying to convince others that they should be forced out of their homes and into high density apartment complexes where no one drives and instead demonstrate an alternative to having private homes and backyards that's actually more attractive. If it's actually better, people will go there naturally and demand more developments like it.
Exactly! And the funny part is, this exact thing is what’s being done on a small scale, and there are a ton of willing buyers for those developments. The main problem is that, due to the massive supply constraints imposed by urban NIMBYs, they are way too expensive for most Americans to afford living in, so the whole thing is just a nonstarter for most. Sure I’d love to live on the cutest walkable street in Brooklyn or whatever. Those houses cost $3 million though.
I never said non-city people all need to move to cities. In fact, small towns predate automobiles by thousands of years, and are not examples of urban sprawl. Furthermore, there are examples of suburbs and small towns that are well-served by transit, don't waste land wildly, and don't force you to own a car. [1]
I'm just saying that American zoning and regional planning should be adjusted to use land better and be more focused on humans than vehicles. I'm not saying that everyone needs to live in a studio apartment, nor that the government should use eminent domain to re-develop vast swaths of land and displace people. But simple things like zoning law changes can impact the direction of the future.
You've done a lot of talking about freedom, facscism, and dictatorship of being forced to live in close quarters. I would submit that the opposite has its own aspects of this "dictatorship." For example, you are forced to buy an automobile from a corporation (and most of them sold today track your every move and sell data to insurance companies [2]). You are forced to risk personal injury to drive that vehicle on the road rather than a safer alternative like walking, biking or transit. You are forced to change your job or lifestyle or home if you ever lose the ability to drive yourself by age or disability.
You say that the non-city people will never move to the city, but that has literally already been happening in the past 20 years or so.
Finally, I will point out that cities are already making themselves more attractive in exactly the way you describe. Crime has been plummeting in the last 30 years, city streets are being reconfigured to favor livability, blight is being redeveloped, and more housing is being built. For example, downtown Cleveland, Ohio has more people living downtown now than at any point in history, since before urban flight and regional population decline ever occurred.
I would also submit the idea that it's something of a misconception that cities don't have any family-friendly housing. Sure, NYC isn't a great example, but many other cities have plenty of suitable dwellings at affordable prices. Just because they aren't square footage maxxing doesn't mean they are inadequate.
I also think that many suburbanites visualize themselves as living in "small towns" when they really live in somewhat large cities in their own right that really could be entirely traversed by walking, cycling or taking financially sustainable transit like a modest bus system if they weren't made up of haphazardly parceled off farmland with winding streets rather than an easily traversed grid that has some level of long-term planning rather than a haphazard piecemeal development plan based on which farmers are selling.
Today, nobody is really being “forced” to live in either of those environments. Anybody who doesn’t want to own a car and wants to walk everywhere and hates sprawl can live in a city - as long as that city contains a home that fits their family and budget.
It’s not the fault of the suburb people that the people who control city governments, the city dwellers themselves, continually thwart the building of housing in cities that is both suitable for families in terms of things like bedroom count, and affordable (dictated almost entirely by the amount of supply, but sadly all of those in charge seem to have failed economics class so they don’t acknowledge that fact).
Also, re:crime
SF for one still has a lot more crime than the state average by all types of crime except murder, and has more crime than its surrounding suburbs. The murder stat is nice, but I still don’t like how much Rape has gone up since 2011 in these stats. Overall the line that crime is way down across the board is not proven by long-term trends. I’m sure it is for some cities, but not all.
This is a great comment. And don't forget, small towns can be walkable too. Old small towns anyway. So it's not just cities that are dense, rather it's modern suburbs aren't dense.
But how will we ever solve this when people don't seem to care?
Definitely. Are you in the US? Here in the suburbs things are just awful. Massive houses with 1 to 2 people, massive yards, many suburbanites grow no plants at all. It's very different from both rural neighborhoods and urban neighborhoods. But suburbanites tend to like it, and recent urban sprawl decisions in my area have been approved despite voices against them. And again to your question, people aren't happy with commutes now ... to get _anywhere_ in American suburbs you have to drive constantly. It's a draining way of life, that I can't even begin to describe well.
The US has already experimented with the theory that nobody wants to live in a dense city: urban sprawl is ubiquitous and also why all of our cities have the same problems.
It would be nice to have other options more like the dense cities in other parts of the world that Americans vacation to because they are far more pleasant to be in.
One single east asian style metropolis in the US would be nice.
