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by baby-yoda 1512 days ago
I agree re: European examples but my argument there is many of these cities developed over long time periods with stable growth in population, stable industry etc, whereas now it seems like the idea is to simply explode urban housing capacity asap, which leads to the block style or high rise glass and steel.

and of course we can't forget that many places are at an inflection point in population growth so all of this capacity could be vacant in 15-20 years.

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The issue is that people want to explode housing capacity ASAP in relatively limited geographic areas within cities. If mid rise was actually broadly incentivized, it wouldn’t be that challenging to rapidly increase that stock.

Strong towns [0] advocates a more bottom up approach to development, and is a good resource for anyone interested in how to add density in a sane manner.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/

How do you properly forecast housing need so your development curve (and the foundational urban planning necessary) aligns with the housing demand curve while keeping said housing affordable?

The CCP seems to have been very successful with their "build an entire city and move people into it model" (seeing the cities have filled), but I'm unsure how it works in a more capitalistic model.

As long as there is zoning in place for sufficient increases in supply, the market will build to meet demand.

The issue in the US is that zoning is excessively restrictive.