[tharne]

> 97% of zoning that has been horrible for land use in the US

If it's so horrible, why do so few people want to get rid of it? The truth is that most Americans are pretty happy with their neighborhoods and communities. Sure, suburban single-family homes may offend the aesthetic of the elites, but most other people like them just fine.

[droidist2]

The fact that the few dense cities in the US where you don't need to drive everywhere are ridiculously expensive would indicate there's more demand for these kinds of places than we're supplying.

[treis]

Your cause and effect is backwards. They're dense because they're expensive.

[spacemanmatt]

They're dense and expensive because they're desirable.

[treis]

Desirable for reasons independent of their density. You can't, as an example, replicate Manhattan in Upstate NY and expect people to flock there.

[nrr]

I'm not sure I follow. Could you perhaps explain?

[pandaman]

You could make an argument that people like traveling packed like sardines because airlines flight most people this way and it's also an expensive way to travel. However it does not follow, it's likely that people like convenience of air travel and value it more than the abysmal accommodations. To wit, the richest people travel in roomy private planes with plenty of room and the less rich go with business/1st class, also allowing more room.

Likewise, even the most expensive cities still have mansions in the middle of micro-apartments. If these cities really were valued for their density, the mansions would either be gone or would be cheaper than the surrounding dense dwellings.

[droidist2]

It's not the density directly though that people desire, it's what the density makes possible. Having a large home close to this hub of activity is what many consider the best of both worlds, and you have to be very rich to have that combination.

[pandaman]

If people do not desire density per se, they might not be desiring "not having to drive everywhere" either and that is just a side-effect of dense dwelling. E.g. the rich people living in the said mansions usually don't walk everywhere, do they now?

[nrr]

What's the economic model you're applying?

[pandaman]

I am applying the same reasoning the GGP post applies: the high price indicates desirability of dense accommodations. And I am explaining the GP's critique of this model.

[ClumsyPilot]

if they were undesirable they woupd be cheaper than suburban properties. obviously the demand is there

[justapassenger]

Like land locked Manhattan? Or land locked SF?

[masklinn]

> Sure, suburban single-family homes may offend the aesthetic of the elites, but most other people like them just fine.

Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

[flenserboy]

No, they're not. Even if something bad is somewhere in an origin story, that doesn't taint the existence of a thing. Most of the complaining about suburbs comes from people who want people to live bunched together, ant-like lives. Should there be more room for small businesses in and around suburbs? You bet. Encouraging walkability, not having to drive forever to get groceries, etc., is useful. But this push to take away the freedom of people to not live on top of each other is another form of classism, one oriented toward the imposition of suffering rather than toward encouraging freedom.

[BirdieNZ]

> But this push to take away the freedom of people to not live on top of each other is another form of classism

This sounds like a ridiculous straw-man; who's pushing to take away freedom of people to not live on top of each other?

People advocating for suburbs to pay their fair share of taxes, and for less car subsidy, and for less restrictive zoning are not restricting freedom but increasing it.

[cuteboy19]

This is so absurd. Zoning involves so much central planning that it would put the Soviet Union to shame.

Suppose you want to add an extra room to your house on your land that you ""own"" in this system. You would need to go prostrate yourself before some bureaucrat in city hall. Who then inevitably declines that variance because some busybody somewhere thought that it interferes with the ""neighborhood character"".

How can we even say that you own your own land if you are not allowed to build on it as you please? Where is the freedom in any of this?

[NonNefarious]

No, they're not. They're a style of living that people can choose, and work to achieve. If you want to choose a different style, then do so; they're available.

If you want high density, go live in a city center. But there's no reason to allow developers and corporations to destroy other types of neighborhoods that are ALREADY residential.

This pro-developer/pro-corporate-ownership shilling is way past tired.

[tharne]

> Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

Prior to the widespread development of suburban single family homes post WWII, most Americans outside of those in rural areas could not afford to home their own home. Suburbs are the exact opposite of an elitist policy, and in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans, including a majority of immigrants, live in the suburbs.

[drewcoo]

> . . . post WWII[1], most Americans outside of those in rural areas[2] could not afford to home their own home[3]. Suburbs are the exact opposite of an elitist policy[4], and in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans . . . live in the suburbs[5].

[1] Note that home prices wobbled a bit but were relatively even from the recovery after WWI and the flu through the early 60s. Income over that time increased significantly (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/16-05intax.pdf). Things change rapidly after that. I think it suggests a more complicated situation than "it all changed post WWII."

https://voxeu.org/article/home-prices-1870

[2] About half of the country. Nothing like today.

https://getrawmilk.com/content/urbanization-usa-rural-vs-urb...

[3] Affordable because of VA and FHA loans after the war. And increasing wages. And flat housing prices.

[4] Actually, the FHA (#3) mainstreamed redlining. That's pretty darned elitist.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/mapmaker-r...

[5] We're mostly suburban in the same way we're all middle class, smart, and attractive: self-description, but not any objective measure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-14/u-s-is-ma...

[pru567]

Part of the attraction of the suburbs is that most US cities aren't very compelling. Its not like the choice is a Cleveland suburb vs Barcelona; its a Cleveland suburb vs Cleveland. Neither choice is all that great.

[tharne]

That's fair.

[nosianu]

An anecdote from Nazi Germany from the town I grew up in.

The Nazis did exactly the same! As part of their program - similar to what Putin wants to do now? - to become self-sufficient, among many other projects, they built a very large chemical fiber factory into the middle of underdeveloped Thuringia. That's the German state just above Bavaria.

https://www.all-neumann.de/rud-zellwolle.html

For the thousands of new workers, only some of which could be sourced from the local population, they build the equivalent to American suburbs, in 1935.

A few pictures, old black and white:

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/H5NXR6CAX2M...

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/2GD55POKL3R...

https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/item/UNFBR42B35M...

The factory, by the way, even back in the 1930s included two olympic-size swimming pools, one heated (by the next door factory coal power plant) and one with waves:

https://www.all-neumann.de/images3/Schwarza_119674.jpg

That suburb still exists, with a lot of kind of equal double-houses surrounded by a lot of garden.

Google maps, you can see how all houses and plots are similar: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.6840376,11.3145743,413m/data...

Until after reunification they could still walk for shopping in little stores, Schwarza, a tiny place at the edge of which the new houses were built, even had a butcher shop. To get to the factory could be done by bike leisurely within ten minutes.

However, in my old hometown (Rudolstadt) industry and houses often were right next to one another. There were quite a few of those, and they were in the city or at the edges, next to houses and villas. There's an x-ray tube factory (https://new.siemens.com/global/en/company/about/history/stor...) and quite a few other industries, beginning early 20th century. I don't know if those various factories were at the edge of town in the 1920s, but even if they were, it can't have been very long that it all got a bit mixed. Today we have zoning too, kind of, "Gewerbegebiet" (industrial park) is where you have to go with your manufacturing business these days.

We now have very similar discussions about more mixing, example (German): "Architect recommends more mixed use areas" -- https://www.nw.de/lokal/bielefeld/mitte/21979129_Architekt-e... But also the opposite, "Please don't mix" -- https://www.welt.de/print-welt/article518393/Bitte-nicht-mis...

[JaimeThompson]

>Suburban single-family homes are specifically an elitist policy.

How so?

[belligeront]

The origins of zoning were to exclude black, Chinese, and jewish workers and residents from white neighborhoods. https://www.kqed.org/news/11840548/the-racist-history-of-sin...

Today, they continue to be used to exclude poorer residents from richer neighborhoods through mechanisms like minimum lot sizes (housing is much more expensive if you require 10000 sqft lots, etc.) and prohibitions of multi-family dwellings (which make housing cheaper by allowing multiple households to split the cost of land).

[refurb]

That doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t have to be a suburb to exclude non-whites. It could be an apartment building.

[JaimeThompson]

He didn't say zoning, he said homes so I was asking them why a single family home was elitist.

[bobthepanda]

The single family home zoning has the stuff like the minumum lot size and prohibitions on lot splitting or multiple homes on the same lot, which essentially sets a floor price to qualify for living there. And a minimum price will lead to minimum salary requirements for a mortgage, effectively locking out those below that income, hence elitism.

[ClumsyPilot]

its clearly more expensive than the alternative.

it excluded poorer people from the area

[zip1234]

My city is holding public hearings about a new apartment development. People are outraged because it might bring in poor people.

[kingkawn]

False constrain on housing supply despite population boom causes housing prices to rise incredibly, an increase entirely subsidized by the desperation of the working poor to find somewhere affordable to live.

[masklinn]

And additional costs of means of transportation in order to be able to live there, because of exclusionary single-family zoning, residential areas are wastelands of nothing, essentially requiring a car per adult individual. This also significantly constrains people with mobility issues.

[Pxtl]

Ever seen a zoning consultation meeting to build multi-family residences in a single family detached neighborhood?

The objections are wholly classist worries about What Kind of People are going to be living there.

[asveikau]

Build a car centric life and then wonder why everyone is so stressed and obese. But the people are happy with it!

Many of those people are conditioned to expect these things because it was considered progress and increasingly it's all that they can get, and I think have some blind spots that probably keep them from living their best life.

Surely pointing this out is elitist.

[justapassenger]

There’s waaaay more reasons to why Americans are obese and stressed, than single family houses zoning.

[goosedragons]

Of course but requiring a car to do 95% of tasks surely doesn't help.

[bandyaboot]

More precisely, nearly all the people who can afford to live there like them just fine.

[rychco]

This is an intentionally poor & misleading question.

So few people want to get rid of it because so few people are even aware of what it is, why it’s bad, and how it affects their community.

[tharne]

> So few people want to get rid of it because so few people are even aware of what it is, why it’s bad, and how it affects their community.

So you're going to convince us to abandon zoning using the the argument that it's bad but we're all just too stupid to know better? Good luck with that. A great many suburbanites lived in cities at one point in their life and decided to move out.

[rychco]

Nobody is too stupid to understand zoning, and I never suggested that was the case. I am saying that most people are entirely unaware how/why zoning occurs around them at all.

[nrr]

Is this true? This fact isn't obvious to me.

[belligeront]

I don't think there is much evidence, since voters don't directly vote on this, but some points to no: - Houston voted against zoning on a public vote - Many people report wanting to live in more walkable neighborhoods - The few cities that have walkable, dense neighborhoods in the US are much more expensive than other cities and walkable neighborhoods are more expensive than non-walkable. This suggests that there is something limiting the supply of walkable neighborhoods (zoning).

[drewcoo]

> If it's so horrible, why do so few people want to get rid of it?

People fear change? And media reinforces that.

Things suck now . . . but how much worse is the unknown? [cue scary music]