In many parts of the east coast and even some in the west coast of the USA, what was once pastureland or farmland has returned to a more natural state and a naive person would not know these places were one productive agricultural lands. This is why today the USA has more forest than it did at the turn of the 1900s.
But yeah, it’s sad that all the orchards from mountain view to San Jose and beyond in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay Areas have turned into housing tracts. I also long for the peaceful orchards, vineyards and fields of corn, but alas, time marches on.
> But yeah, it’s sad that all the orchards from mountain view to San Jose and beyond in the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay Areas have turned into housing tracts. I also long for the peaceful orchards, vineyards and fields of corn, but alas, time marches on.
i was under the impression no additional housing is being built and that was a major problem.
> i was under the impression no additional housing is being built and that was a major problem.
People act like it is, the reality is different. Why do people all need to live in SF?
Serious question, why?
There are small towns throughout the country within 30-45 min of a major city. If you want to go further out, you can find small towns / cities everywhere. I'm currently living a fair distance from any major city and can still get literally anything I can imagine delivered. It's cheaper, taxes are cheaper, food is cheaper, fuel is cheaper, I have more land, I can see trees / stars. Yet within a brief drive I can be in the center of a major city with all it entails.
San Francisco is fairly dystopian. I used to live there, walking over human waste, people getting head in the street. Naked women rolling around after a bender, a persons leg rotting off. This was my daily walk through SF to work. Now, I see cows, sit in the grass and still make more money and am away from the tragedy.
I think most people think building more buildings would solve the homeless problem. The reality is that dispersing production would save the city. I.e. limiting growth and having strict policing. The homeless would leave / be swept up and arrested. The housing would be expensive, but wealthy people would still live there. Then Sacramento, San Diego, Colorado, Texas, etc. is where people would move. This would help wealth inequality (spreading the wealth) and improve mental / societal health.
No, the serious question is why aren't more people living in SF, instead of the sprawl of low-density suburbs and pseudo-suburbs that surround the Bay Area?
The tiny area that makes up the City and County of San Francisco is relatively high density for its size, but the fall off in density once you leave the county (which occupies only the tip of the San Francisco peninsula) is precipitous.
> People act like it is, the reality is different.
No, people act like it is, because it really is... When you're talking about building high-density housing in the actual city (or medium-density in the suburbs with reasonable transit options)... Which is literally always what they are actually talking about. No one is talking about there being problems building low-density housing in the middle of nowhere.
> San Francisco is fairly dystopian.
If it is dystopian, it is not because of density. There are numerous higher density parts of the world that do not struggle with the issues San Francisco does. It has nothing to do with people's inability to see cows. It has to do with the US' refusal to support the things that facilitate living in cities.
> This would help wealth inequality (spreading the wealth) and improve mental / societal health.
The idea that increased suburbanization would have any positive effect on wealth inequality is completely absurd.
> The tiny area that makes up the City and County of San Francisco is relatively high density for its size,
Somewhat, but not to the extent you'd expect of an metropolitan core (which it arguably isn't, it's more just the cultural core of the Bay Area.) The City and County of San Francisco is the most dense county in California, but not the most dense city in the Bay Area, or even the densest area of similar size in the Bay Area. A similar sized slice of Santa Clara County including all of San Jose would still be higher density if the entire 50ish mi² outside of San Jose was completely depopulated. The urban core of Alameda County (the continuous strip consisting of the cities of Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, Emeryville, Alameda, Piedmont, San Leandro, San Lorenzo, and Hayward) has greater population and greater population density than San Francisco, too.
Many people think "idealistically" but sometimes forget to ground it in reality.
People often don't realize that the "utopia" of the Soviet Union where everyone got a guaranteed apartment, pay and a job, was in many ways behind Mexico for example (not to knock on Mexico) but in the USSR and the second world with it's then "UBI"-like system, people could afford less living space and food variety than your median person in Mexico. Often in second world economies, you were forced to live with strangers (not multi-gen families) in the same appt. You could not afford a second hand car and many luxuries were reserved for Politburo, Scientists and those in the nomenklatura.
But some "thinkers" believe that if only SF and other big cities would build complexes like the USSR, except that they would look more like SoMa mid-rises than the more utilitarian Soviet Apt blocks we could fit and satisfy everyone who wants to live in SF and other large cities.
Across the world, people live happily (lots of them, anyway) in large scale apartment complexes. As long ago as the turn of the 20th century, people like Gaudi were already taking that a step further and designing beautiful apartment buildings:
Notice how La Pedrera is surrounded by other less aesthetic yet still fully occupied apartment buildings? There are hundreds of cities worldwide filled with people living in relatively affordable non-single-family housing, nothing like the structures or experience of the Soviet Union.
Building denser housing does not mean that we will be living in some soviet-era world. Why on earth would you think this?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want government mandated roommates either. OTOH lots of people are compelled to live with roommates in SF too, just by different forces.
Kind of, but roommates are self-selecting and you _can_ opt to move out. In the USSR, it was very difficult to opt out. If you were part of the nomenklatura, you did have some other options such as private apartments --but that was a small minority of people.
Stalinist USSR forced strangers to live in the same apartment (or, alternatively, families living in what were essentially SRO units), because the impoverished, largely rural population was force-urbanized over a very brief time period, and the living space was simply not there to support this influx into the cities. And then that thing called 'World War II' happened, which sapped a decade of economic output on building guns, and rebuilding. It also killed ~15 million young men, and invalided many, many more. [1]
Post-Stalin planning focused on solving this problem, through a massive build-out of single-family apartments. Non-relative roommates weren't much of a thing after that point.
> But some "thinkers" believe that if only SF and other big cities would build complexes like the USSR, except that they would look more like SoMa mid-rises than the more utilitarian Soviet Apt blocks we could fit and satisfy everyone who wants to live in SF and other large cities.
Given how much of an unmitigated disaster the current housing situation in SF/Seattle/etc is, buying out a hundred or so blocks and replacing them with Khrushchevkas would be an improvement for everyone[2] in the city.
[1] I hear this sort of thing does wonders for construction productivity.
[2] Except for people who paid 3 million dollars to buy the equivalent of a shed in the current insane housing market. Unfortunately, they have both political capital, and the desire to exercise it, and would rather see the city burn down around them, than lose the money they locked into their home.
If you built 100 blocks worth of Khrushchevkas we're looking at 25,000 to 100,000 people. That could be a city on its own and does not have to be in SF proper. Funnily, Khrushchevkas were affectionally known as Khrushchev slums.
The Singaporean take on this style of housing is anything but affordable coming in at ~500/sft -after gov't subsidies. Contrast that with ~150sft for most new housing in the US.
Singapore proves it'd doable in a dense city, but it's cheaper to build outside cities and if you're going to house that many people you might as well build an altogether new low-cost city.
There's ~11,000 homeless people in King County right now. Getting them out of the park, the freeway onramp, the greenspace north of my apartment, the coffeehouse bench across the street from it, the doorway across the other street from it, and into shitty SRO[1] apartments would be a god-send.
> Contrast that with ~150sft for most new housing in the US.
You're telling me that we can build a brand-new, 600 SQFT apartment in Seattle for $90,000? I didn't realize solving the housing shortage was that simple! And I must be an utter idiot for paying ~$30,000/year in rent for a one-hundred-year-old, 800 SQFT one.
[1] Or, if we really splurge[2], and build some Brezhnevkas, actual apartments.
[2] Somehow an impoverished, paranoid, hopelessly corrupt, backwards-thinking communist country that spent half of its economic output on tanks and nuclear weapons managed to afford building them...
Yep sorry forgot to mention that was the good part in the tier one cities... Once you went out to the countryside and beyond the Urals, it actually got even more interesting.
Imagine confusing a concept like UBI that uses tax dollars skimmed off a decentralized economy with a centralized planned economy. Even funnier when you are also comparing a democracy with an authoritarian strongman regime. You do you though.
Strange, I'm not Bernie. I don't know why you would try to gotcha my statements based on someone else's, different statements from decades ago. Would you mind telling me how some people talking 30-40 years ago has anything to do with me and my observation?
Everyone did move further from SF. That's where all the bay area sprawl came from. That farm land got filled in with housing, so now there's not much countryside anymore.
People then moved even further away, causing the sprawl to spread out even more. We're well on our way to being a giant low density megacity as a result.
This could be a good amenity for you, but not for everyone. Me, I don't really like the idea of having to maintain all that land as well as having to drive everywhere because everything is so far apart.
An amenity I need that I definitely would not be able to get in a small town would be access to a Chinese grocer. As someone who is ethnic Chinese, I have recipes that need ingredients that either aren't normally found in regular US markets or are available in poor quality and at higher prices. Delivery of niche goods is astronomically expensive. That limits me to a few major cities.
> Then Sacramento, San Diego, Colorado, Texas, etc. is where people would move. This would help wealth inequality (spreading the wealth) and improve mental / societal health.
The first part is happening, the second part isn't. If anything, some of them are starting to see San Francisco type problems, and it didn't take very long for them to get there because there are so many Californians that it takes a small percentage of CA's population to go and massively disrupt a smaller city.
I think it's fair that people value different things. BUT my point is that we shouldn't assume everyone needs to live in the same location to obtain their wants.
> An amenity I need that I definitely would not be able to get in a small town would be access to a Chinese grocer. As someone who is ethnic Chinese, I have recipes that need ingredients that either aren't normally found in regular US markets or are available in poor quality and at higher prices. Delivery of niche goods is astronomically expensive. That limits me to a few major cities.
I live near a town of 15,000 people, they have a Chinese grocer, multiple Mexican grocers, an African grocer and several home style greek restaurants, thai restaurants, some great sushi, etc.
The U.S. is very diverse and there are different people everywhere. Like I said, I can drive 40 min and be in a multi-million person city while still living out in the country. When I lived in SF it would still take me 30-60 min to get to many places via public transit.
I guess if you really need "high quality" niche goods, sure... But I've never had an issue lol
You're arguing against a strawman. Nobody is saying that everyone needs to live in SF. The argument is simply that developers should be allowed to supply housing that meets demand. The fact is that lots of people do want to live in cities, for various reasons; but they can't, because building dense housing is illegal or heavily disincentivized.
If you want to live in semi-rural America that's great, I prefer a similar situation for myself. I fail to see what that has to do with allowing or disallowing density in cities. In fact allowing density in cities preserves rural and natural areas outside of cities, so that seeing cows and hiking in forests is available for those who want it. Feels like a win-win.
> BUT my point is that we shouldn't assume everyone needs to live in the same location to obtain their wants.
Aren’t you doing the opposite, and assuming that people can just happily substitute their lives somewhere else? Or did they do that and still think SF is preferable?
If there is clearly a shortage of housing in SF, do you think that people haven’t tried looking other places?
College towns and seasonal activity towns with specialty stores tend to see the stores slow or shut down during the off-season, which is a problem if you want to be a year-round resident.
Not going to give it particularly away, but here are some similar towns I've visited before deciding on my current town (very similar):
* Bloomington, Champaign, Morris, Charleston IL
* Kenosha, Sheboygan WI
* Hendersonville, Gatlinburg, Greeneville TN
* Milton, Concord NH
There's probably more, but these are just off the top of my head. They were fairly similar in the sense you had most amenities and what you didn't have was <1 hr away.
I can only speak to Champaign (UIUC engineering) and Bloomington, IL, but I think your prior comment misrepresents the circumstances in these cities.
The Asian/African/(-American) populations are mostly transient (students) and while grocery options exist they are oriented toward a student’s diet: expansive in snacks and novelties, but short on staple vegetables, grains, and meats. I’ve heard of times in the past when friends of mine had to travel to Chicago, which is 3 hours away, for their haircuts because their regular stylist closes down for the summer when students leave.
Not to say this is representative of the other cities on your list, but your comparing the ones I’ve experienced to San Francisco is laughable.
> I’ve heard of times in the past when friends of mine had to travel to Chicago, which is 3 hours away, for their haircuts because their regular stylist closes down for the summer when students leave.
This sounds more like a person is doing something unnecessary / eccentric. The majority hair stylists are definitely there year round lol.
As I said, it's not a comparison directly to San Francisco in terms of all amenities - obviously a city such as SF with a massive Asian population will likely have additional options for food.
As you said, if that's all you value than sure; massive city is your best bet. You'll give up other amenities for the food selection (such as space).
I was pointing out that you can get 95+% of your wants and 100% of your needs met in a place that costs 1/4 as much with plenty of opportunity as well.
I think most students don't realize how many different grocers and what not there are either. For instance, I knew people who would travel large distances to a trader joes... why? Because the brand name / status is what they were looking for. If you weren't looking for that, you can get almost anything you wanted.
A team I managed worked in Champaign IL (why I knew about it) and all the adults I spoke with said they could make any dish they wanted (they were: American, Iranian, Vietnamese and Chinese). The Vietnamese guy in particular would bring in homemade food every day with pretty exotic produce.
> > Then Sacramento, San Diego, Colorado, Texas, etc. is where people would move.
> some of them are starting to see San Francisco type problems, and it didn't take very long for them to get there because there are so many Californians that it takes a small percentage of CA's population to go and massively disrupt a smaller city.
Yes, all those Californians moving to Sacramento and San Diego really wrecked their pre-existing way of life.
I’m a homosexual. Living in cities provides a network and security that living in more remote and rural places does not. One day (hopefully) cultural circumstances will change and I can avail myself of the benefits you mentioned, but at present living in culturally unpredictable places is simply a gamble whose return is not worth the roll.
You're not very serious if you don't realize that this is an extraordinarily privileged position based on your position in the socioeconomic ladder.
> I'm currently living a fair distance from any major city and can still get literally anything I can imagine delivered. It's cheaper, taxes are cheaper, food is cheaper, fuel is cheaper,
It's cheaper FOR YOU based on your job that you can do remotely, and comparing to the lifestyle you maintained in San Francisco.
Do you seriously believe that every janitor, parking lot attendant, nurse, and waiter, could move to the small town you are discussing and commute in for work? Here's a headline for you: "A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M. Like many in the housing-starved San Francisco region, Sheila James has moved far inland, gaining affordable space at the price of a brutal commute." [0]
> San Francisco is fairly dystopian. I used to live there, walking over human waste, people getting head in the street. Naked women rolling around after a bender, a persons leg rotting off. This was my daily walk through SF to work. Now, I see cows, sit in the grass and still make more money and am away from the tragedy.
You're so close
> taxes are cheaper
But so far.
The reason why your new area doesn't have any people with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow these people to survive in San Francisco. Which, like Seattle, Vancouver, and LA tend to concentrate human misery in North American not because they attract misery but because they're the only places on the continent where these human beings can SURVIVE. Homeless people struggle to not die in the winter in most of the East. The Deep south has no social programs or jobs. Once you get to the SouthWest, the local policies is just to put homeless people on the bus to California.
Which is where everyone - from homeless to billionaire - has the best outcomes for health and life expectancy.
Yes, one way of dealing with human misery, is to be able to afford to put it out of your sight and out of mind, and not deal with the structural issues that create them. It's great that you get to ignore them to live your best life.
But don't think that a society can be created where those things don't exist, just by moving to a more pastoral/agrarian lifestyle. What you describe is not scalable to the rest of society without massive social programs the kind that don't exist across America (and likely never will)
> The reason why your new area doesn't have any people with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow these people to survive in San Francisco.
Ah, so social programs attract and cause drug, mental health and poverty issues? Well, I guess it is lucky for them providing for the general welfare is literally in the US Constitution twice, in the Preamble and also in the Taxing and Spending Clause. But I guess that is what is wrong with this country, the Constitution and the government should be disbanded, so you don't have to look down on all those less fortunate than you, right? The Framers were supremely foolish not to realize that welfare causes poverty and drug and mental health issues. You should really tell someone so we can fix this problem.
> The reason why your new area doesn't have any people with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow these people to survive in San Francisco.
It’s a well known fact that ceteris paribus the more you spend on something the more you get of it. I honestly can’t understand why people in those cities want more open air drug markets, feces, and crime, among other things, but there’s no arguing with revealed preference. They observably want those things and vote to get more of them.
From my point of view it’s simple enabling behavior, like with an alcoholic. It’s not like these problems are ordained by nature. People in cities are the ones enabling human misery.
> People in cities are the ones enabling human misery.
And people in locales that solve these problems by kicking out their problem citizens are the ones creating this human misery, but we never seem to be able to hold them to account for it, or to demand that they pull their own weight.
That’s really interesting. Can you document a single locale that is “kicking out their problem citizens?” That was the plot of Rambo and that was a great movie, but I’ve never heard of such a thing in this century. I welcome being educated so please do tell if you can point to some examples that aren’t old enough to legally drink.
> Can you document a single locale that is “kicking out their problem citizens?”
Would Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond dumping their homeless people into Seattle, as they NIMBY shelter/housing satisfy you?
There's fewer than 500 sheltered/unsheltered homeless people in those three cities, compared to ~11,000 in the rest of King county - yet they make up ~1/6th of the county's population.
Or, on a smaller scale, nice parts of town calling the cops to sweep the homeless into less nice parts of town? For some reason, I can't say I've seen a lot of tent cities in Magnolia...
> Would Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond dumping their homeless people into Seattle, as they NIMBY shelter/housing satisfy you?
That doesn’t sound like kicking out. That sounds like Seattle for reasons that I don’t understand inviting vagabonds from elsewhere in King County.
More to the point, I wasn’t referring to your local county politics, I was asking for specific evidence of rural communities shipping vagrants to far away cities as the person I was replying to implied is happening.
You don't understand that people need a few basic needs to live, and the suburbs aren't pulling their weight in providing them?
You don't understand that the suburbs keep harassing and arresting people for being homeless, and taking their things, until they fuck off to the city?
If we did that to you, until you left whichever town you live in, would you consider yourself getting kicked out of it?
You don't understand that if Seattle did the same thing, all of those suburbs would suddenly discover that they had to pull their own weight, and not just sweep their problem to the other side of lake Washington?
You're splitting hairs over semantics of what 'kicking out' means. The bottom line is that rural America gives it's problem people a choice between jail, harassment, death, or taking themselves and all their problems to urban America.
It then complains about how urban America is a cesspit that 'invites vagabonds'.
Thanks for so vividly exposing the enabler mindset.
I’m still confused though. Do you like vagrancy, violence, drug abuse, and filth? Or is your misplaced resentment of the communities that refuse to tolerate that trash some kind of extreme cognitive dissonance?
> Thanks for so vividly exposing the enabler mindset.
Aha! You have me dead to rights. I'm an enabler, because I don't think that these problems can be solved by just dumping the problem people to the next town over.
> Do you like vagrancy, violence, drug abuse, and filth?
Less than you, since you seem to think that the right thing to do is for your community to export it to its neighbours.
> Or is your misplaced resentment of the communities that refuse to tolerate that trash some kind of extreme cognitive dissonance?
Those communities create 'that trash', and then don't deal with it. If I just start dumping trash on your front lawn, because I don't want to pay the cost of garbage pickup, which one of us is the problem?
> Aha! You have me dead to rights. I'm an enabler, because I don't think that these problems can be solved by just dumping the problem people to the next town over.
Yes, I know, I'm capable of noticing clear objective truths. Big city policies demonstrably enable these social ills. You don't have to get defensive. You just observably believe that it's better to tolerate anti-social behavior than to put a stop to it. We disagree on this point, but perhaps you take some comfort from knowing that your co-urbanites also inexplicably like to live surrounded by filth.
> Less than you, since you seem to think that the right thing to do is for your community to export it to its neighbours.
I never said any such thing. I said I don't believe such a thing is even happening. You have failed to provide any evidence of a systematic push of rural undesirables to cities. Rather, all the evidence indicates that urban policies, that city-dwellers reliably vote for and thus observably want, are attracting undesirables. Furthermore, those policies are enabling people who might otherwise live with some semblance of social responsibility to fully embrace an anti-social manner of living.
> Those communities create 'that trash', and then don't deal with it. If I just start dumping trash on your front lawn, because I don't want to pay the cost of garbage pickup, which one of us is the problem?
The policies that city dwellers support are creating the trash. There is no rural conspiracy to ship undesirables to the cities. Individual vagrants may be attracted by urban enabling policies, but that's the responsibility of the vagrants and urban policymakers, not rural communities. If city people don't want more vagrants then they shouldn't support policies that enable them.
Please link me the free bus tickets to SF/LA from flyover country. I’ve done my googles and can’t find the program where I get my ticket. I don’t believe it exists without evidence.
Any actual evidence of such a program where rural areas are shipping out vagrants. I’m not talking about lateral moves from one major city to another as should be clear from the comment history. Perhaps a local newspaper ad offering free bus tickets?
> Do you seriously believe that every janitor, parking lot attendant, nurse, and waiter, could move to the small town you are discussing and commute in for work? Here's a headline for you: "A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M. Like many in the housing-starved San Francisco region, Sheila James has moved far inland, gaining affordable space at the price of a brutal commute." [0]
My wife literally used to do the same thing... It was a 3 hr commute to and from work (6+hrs per day), if all the services were up; but they never were in SF. At least twice a week it would take her 4 hrs one of the ways.
That's why we moved, her commute is now 10 min.
You're kind of making my point, everyone where I live has a higher quality of life than they do in SF. They have more space, cheaper food, fuel, breathing less pollution, etc.
Just FYI you're talking a 1-3% difference in life expectancy between most of the states. That's probably within the margin of error. It appears to have more to do with wealth than anything, but that's neither here, nor there (The bottom 20 states have lower life expectancy and that's where smoking is more common and legal indoors).
> Yes, one way of dealing with human misery, is to be able to afford to put it out of your sight and out of mind, and not deal with the structural issues that create them. It's great that you get to ignore them to live your best life.
> But don't think that a society can be created where those things don't exist, just by moving to a more pastoral/agrarian lifestyle. What you describe is not scalable to the rest of society without massive social programs the kind that don't exist across America (and likely never will)
I can tell you're living in a city. It's FAR easier to make it in the suburbs than either a city or the country. It's also FAR easier to purchase land than people think. You can get land at $4,000-$6,000/acre within 40 min of most cities. You can build a $180,000 house on that land that's larger than the vast majority of residence in major cities (I know because I've developed said land repeatedly). So we're talking what, $200,000 for a house and a couple acres. You can afford that on $35-40k a year, which you can make at walmart or Amazon.
People experience misery in cities because the citizens of that city don't care. If they did, they'd tighten up the laws and encourage people to get jobs and prosper. That's not what SF does.
> So we're talking what, $200,000 for a house and a couple acres. You can afford that on $35-40k a year, which you can make at walmart or Amazon
This is misguided. When you are making that little it is extremely difficult to save enough money to buy a house. Most of your income will be going to expenses, and pray you don’t get hit with health complications, periods of unemployment, broken down cars, or any number of other rolls of the dice that could zap any/all savings you’ve managed or drive you into debt.
Not to mention, even if you manage to buy a house you can still get screwed by a period of bad luck making it impossible to keep up on your mortgage.
The average income in my area is less than $35k / year. ~80% own homes.
I find it funny when people tell me "this is misguided" and they have no idea what they're talking about.
I've lived off <$35k / year for about a decade; really not that hard. You don't take trips, you limit purchases. It's the way most of America works.
Let me breakdown the math:
- $600 taxes / month (often get decent returns at year end, put that into emergency fund)
- $600 food / month
- $600 rent / month (1 - 2 bedroom)
- $200 gas / month
- $500 emergency fund / month
- $220 house fund / month
In 2 years, you'll have $5,000 saved for a house and $12,000 in an emergency fund (assuming nothing happened). That's for one person, and I assume you can either take public transit OR you already have a beat up car (you can often get those for free, I had a couple cars for <$1000 that worked fine)
If you're married (ideally, you would), you'll have $10,000 for a house and that's enough for the 5% down on a $200,000 property. Alternatively, you can drain some of the emergency fund (provided you have some) and you can put that down.
Now, with inflation and increasing gas prices; yeah these people are going to be screwed for the time being. That means, either multiple jobs, cutting rent costs, cutting the emergency costs, what have you.
People were moving in like crazy which is why Tracy and mountain house exist. Those were largely farmland some years ago. More people are moving in than housing is built. If it were just local pop growth it would have been fine.
There are some social bubble dynamics that affect the discussions you read, here and on various subreddits or other forums.
1. People believe there should more abundant affordable housing. BUT...
2. A lot of people here despise rural people, as a matter of cultural tribal affiliation. And also a lot of people here hate cars, which is 50% environmentalism and 50% about despising rural life as a matter of cultural tribal affiliation (I suspect that car hate would persist even if zero-emission solar powered vehicles became the norm).
Therefore, we need more affordable housing, but only in the "cool places" where I want to live. Basically, I just want my rent to go down, and cultures that I don't like to cease to exist. Or this seems to be the line of thought, if you distill it down.
> A lot of people here despise rural people, as a matter of cultural tribal affiliation.
I have seen way more city bashing then rural people bashing here.
> Therefore, we need more affordable housing, but only in the "cool places" where I want to live.
The mass is moving where the jobs are. Really. There are cool places and less cool places, but the places lacking housing are the ones where people move to have work.
Absolutely not. I live in a rural area. A car is a necessity but it isn't my ideology. Living in cities is a lot of fun. Living in cities built for people and not cars is life changing. No hate for anyone here or there.
My car is a tool. Full stop. If provided an alternative I would take it (and have).
There was a post on hacker news about this. Study in Finland showed it doesn't matter the type of housing, if it's luxury people move up and out of what they are currently in and the people below follow.
Not surprising really, it's just supply and demand.
Cities aren’t black holes that cause all job locations to collapse into a singularity. If density were allowed to grow you’d find jobs appearing in other places (and the biggest cities have this already - the jobs aren’t only in the central metro area).
We have the technology to stack dwellings on top of each other. If commute times become unreasonable we also have the technology to reduce it, with trams or rail. Even better build the commute infrastructure first and then the housing but Singapore and Manhattan show pretty clearly what’s possible. Shanghai didn’t have a metro system 20 years ago. Now it’s the world's biggest.
It doesn't all fall into affordable housing category, people are complaining in London about new luxury high rise apartments because they are high end and "not affordable".
This is a problem, where we effectively don’t allow multi family or cheap apartments in many areas and only allow expensive single family units. However I believe California housing supply is so far behind demand that even expensive units are desirable to alleviate pressure on less expensive units, that people might otherwise compete for.
Most of the new housing I see built are 5-over-1s. Giant 6 story apartment buildings built on already busy streets.
What California needs is flexible zoning to allow mixed-use medium density development connected by safe bicycling paths and public transit.
Too much space is taken by automobile parking and there is too far of a distance between places people live and the grocery stores, shopping areas, and gyms they frequent.
Well it's no longer managed as farmland and has young forests growing on it now. It's hard to say what would be "natural". The land on the east coast was being actively managed with controlled burning and cultivation of wild plants basically as soon as people arrived. Interestingly, there weren't indigenous earth worms then, so forests that weren't burned had deep beds of leaves. Before that there were glaciers and a totally different climate.
I heard this recently that forestlands expanded somehow through the decades. It's too bad there were no aerial views of things long ago to see this before and after.
There aren't "many" aerial photos as testament but there are quite a few panoramic photographs of towns and their surrounds with denuded hills and meadows all being farmed one way or another and today are new growth forests and grasslands. Old abandoned railroads are among the witnesses to prior industrial activity.
We're already short on housing even with this to the degree that real wages have stagnated or shrank since the 1970s. The only way to do that would be to almost completely stop immigration and population growth.
The US has plenty of housing. It's just not where the jobs are. With the automation of agriculture and moving manufacturing to other countries, the employment map of the US changed rapidly in the past few decades, and our physical infrastructure hasn't caught up yet.
> The only way to do that would be to almost completely stop immigration and population growth.
Assuming current trends continue (and I see no reason they wouldn't), the US will probably be net negative relatively soon. I know so many young people who have no plans to have children because they can't afford it and don't want to bring them into a world they think will be in a worse state than the one they grew up in.
Tangentially, I am amazed at the data in your source about how fast population growth is leveling off in the US. In 2020, the census projected US population to continue growing and cross 400 million by 2058 [1]. This projection accounts for the observed trends in falling fertility rate and assumes relatively constant rate of immigration:
>By 2030, immigration is projected to become the primary driver of population
>growth: more people are projected to be added to the population through net
>international migration than from natural increase. The projected shift to net
>international immigration as the primary driver of population growth is the
>result of falling fertility rates and the rising number of deaths in an aging
>population, not because of a projected increase in international migration.
I guess the pandemic broke a lot of those assumptions. We will see if they hold in the long run though.
I’d really like to see more Parisian style density.
I really find it hard to believe we could triple the density of major cities and magically there’d never be empty housing. At some point demand will drop off.
It's just a pity they all turn into housing developments. We should really be setting aside more as green space.