[mebazaa]

As a Parisian, who is generally angry at the city’s housing policy (build taller!), I find the public housing of the past few years to be a great achievement. In general, public housing sits on the outer edges of Paris, but the city has been agressive in reconverting buildings in posher neighborhoods. It doesn’t really lead to reduced rent (because no additional supply), but it decreases social segregation. That alone is critical to keep a city alive.

[rTX5CMRXIfFG]

> build taller

As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that this is a perfect recipe for creating congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution.

[digging]

Light pollution is relatively easily solved, there's just not much will to do so. Noise pollution is best solved by reducing car-dependency which is a non-starter in most North American cities; I can't speak for Europe but I understand Paris to have undertaken a serious revolution in purging cars within the past decade.

[vladvasiliu]

> I understand Paris to have undertaken a serious revolution in purging cars within the past decade.

The issue is that they have mainly increased the friction of using cars in the city (reducing lanes, restricting parking, converting avenues to one-way) all the while the public transit enhancements are running late, and whatever lines were already there saw a drop in service quality.

So increasing density would require a major improvement in public transit. Note, however, that the city of Paris proper already has one of the highest densities in the world.

[mpweiher]

> [increase friction for cars...no improvement to public transport]

Hmm...aren't you forgetting something?

Last I checked, Paris had a veritable bicycling revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_Paris

Le Plan vélo de Paris (2015-2020) doubled bicycle lanes to 1000km and increased ridership (apparently already high?) by 50% or more.

The current plan is to add another 180km and make Paris 100% cyclable.

[vladvasiliu]

Sure, if you live in the city proper.

But what that doesn't mention: the bike sharing schemes are hit-and-miss. I usually commute each way a good hour before rush-hour traffic, so I have a good probability of finding a usable bike. But during rush hour? Fat chance.

Oh, you're going to point out that there's a scheme helping you purchase your own bike? Indeed. What are you going to do with it, though? At home, you may be able to find a spot to park in your flat (it's not my case). You wanna leave it outside? Sure, go ahead, if you don't care about finding it in one piece in the morning. Ditto for the other end of your commute.

There's also the fact that bike sharing schemes only work in Paris proper and adjacent towns. If you want to commute in from further away [0], you better be ready to ride in traffic and have your own bike, assuming you don't live that far. If you're lucky enough to live in one of the places served by the new metro, it's still not ready (but should be real soon now - fingers crossed).

So sure, having more dedicated bike lanes (and some of the new ones are actually physically separate from car lanes) is great. Although sometimes the layout is... puzzling? Bike lanes switching from the left to the right side of the roads, narrow two-way lanes (Bd Sébastopol), etc.

But I wouldn't exactly call it a "revolution" in practice. My commute goes from the east to the northwest of the city, around 7 km. Of these, only around 1 km is a bike lane separate from the traffic. And it's ridiculously narrow. Bonus points for it being painted with a slippery paint for some reason (look up Boulevard Magenta). The rest is half on bike lanes shared with a bus, the other half on regular roads with no bike lane at all.

---

[0] Don't forget that Paris proper is home to ~2M people, while the Paris Region has ~12M.

[cycomanic]

The original post was complaining about increasing density and how investment in public transport hasn't kept up. The previous poster said what about bikes, and you are now saying that bikes are not a solution to people coming from the greater Paris region. But that was not what we are talking about, we were talking about higher density (=more people) in Paris proper. Bikes are certainly a solution to transport in the high density city.

[seanmcdirmid]

One reason I don't get a bike here in Seattle is because bike theft is just way too common, and I have no way to secure it in my house (not enclosed garage, no space inside to keep it). It is funny, because they have better infrastructure now, but the theft problem (and lack of police/government care for the problem) means less people are actually riding bikes here.

[mrpopo]

Safe (locked) bike parks are popping up everywhere in Paris

[CalRobert]

For what it's worth, I got a folding bike (a Brompton) to address the storage issues you cite.

[harimau777]

How do people deal with being sweaty at work? Do offices generally have showers?

[Fradow]

Offices generally don't have showers.

People also generally don't arrive sweaty when biking (at least not more than those taking public transportation in the summer).

To avoid being sweaty: go slower to not over-exert yourself, wear less clothing (you might be a bit cold when starting your commute, but that's not a big deal), and if it's still not enough (not fit enough, hills, etc...), an electric-assisted bike might be the solution.

[twelve40]

they don't; it's just not practical. You have to be relatively fit and energetic to do it every day, have no chores like kids pickup, have extra time on your hands, the weather has to be perfect - no rain or god forbid snow. This only works for a particular segment of working people out there.

[usr1106]

I have biked to work over 30 years in various places. Some with uphill in the morning. The point is just that you bike comfortably. When I was younger that probably meant something like 18 km/h in sligthly hilly places. Nowadays it's less. You can actually debug your code while biking (mentally, no screen involved). I have solved many problems after 15 minutes on the bike better than in 3 hours in front of the screen. Yes, I avoid heavy traffic, even if it means a detour.

If you want to bike fast you can do it when not on the way to the office.

(I once biked in Dallas at 95F. There not getting sweaty might be a challenge...)

[CuriouslyC]

You wear wicking clothing, don't ride too hard and change into work clothes in the office bathroom.

[lern_too_spel]

Paris is mostly flat. As long as you aren't racing to work, sweat shouldn't be an issue.

[javiramos]

ebike

[Aromasin]

The same is happening in the UK. They've made car travel harder without making public transport any better (outside of London), which has just lowered the average person's productivity rather than making any headway into tackling the core issue of people getting from A to B quicker, cheaper, with less pollution.

They put in some heavy traffic restrictions in my local city of Oxford by closing off residential roads, forcing all traffic down "arterial" roads instead and putting parking restrictions all over the place. A year later, there are no fewer cars on the road or increased public transport usage; some local studies by the university confirmed that. People just spend more time stuck in traffic travelling longer distances.

It's like having a person with an injured leg and a missing one. Instead of giving the person a prosthesis to remove the load, they've just lopped the other off altogether, leaving them to crawl from place to place instead of hobble.

[mpweiher]

> [car travel harder without making public transport better]

Erm aren't you forgetting something?

London just quadrupled its bicycle network. That seems like a massive improvement to me. When I lived there, biking was...let's be kind and say "less than ideal". Last time I visited I was amazed by the improvement, with protected two-way bike lanes right on the Thames and much more.

https://momentummag.com/london-just-quadrupled-its-bicycle-n...

[tom_]

The comment specifically excludes London, as it works differently from the rest of the UK.

[Hamuko]

Since when have bicycles been public transport?

[amanaplanacanal]

I feel like the best way to make getting from A to B quicker is for A and B to be closer together. Which makes walking or biking more practical and you don’t have to spend as much money on public transit.

[bombcar]

A and B being closer works for cars, too.

A 15 minute walk is 2 minutes by car, five by bike.

[MichaelZuo]

‘ making public transport any better (outside of London)’ is not really under the government’s control until after the local electorate agrees to it.

So it’s a moot point when only one decision pathway can actually be budged by more then a few inches.

[8note]

This doesn't sound right?

If you increase density, you should be avoiding the need to improve public transit, as more people will be closer to their destination than it's worth driving to.

For the same population increase, less density means people have to travel farther to get to their destination. More people travelling farther necessitates more public transit

[AnthonyMouse]

Suppose that you have a grid-like road network across an area of 100 square miles, where intersecting roads go north-south and east-west and roads are half a mile apart. If you want to get from one corner of the square to the adjacent one, you have to travel 10 miles. If there are a million people doing this, you have ten million vehicle miles.

Now suppose you compress this many people into an area of 25 square miles, where the roads are still half a mile apart. Now the distance along one of the edges is 5 miles and the same million people only have to travel 5 million miles. But now instead of having 400 miles of roads (10/0.5 * 10 on each axis), you have 100 miles of roads (5/0.5 * 5 * 2), so each road has twice as many cars, or each bus has to carry twice as many passengers or whatever.

This is why mass transit works in cities and not in the suburbs. In a city you have enough passengers to fill the bus or subway car, in the suburbs you don't. But if you increase the density without putting in any mass transit, you just get more traffic.

On the other hand, the people who say we can't increase density until we build mass transit are full of crap. You can add a bus route in a day, you just buy a bus and hire a driver. In urban areas subways are generally more efficient, and those take time to build, but you can run a bus until the subway is built. It's no excuse to hold up housing construction.

[dublinben]

You can't assume that the number of cars is a constant though. As point A and point B become farther apart, car usage goes up. When they become closer together, car usage scales down.

[digging]

That is unfortunate but realistically there's never going to be a political overhaul of that scale where all moves are perfectly synced. As long as they're actually working on the transit enhancements it seems completely acceptable to me (in the abstract; I'm not a Parisian)

[testingParisGPE]

Paris is building a lot of transit enhancements right now.

[andrepd]

Both the fight against car dependency and the housing policy in TFA have been spearheaded by the current mayor, Anne Hidalgo

[marsRoverDev]

The purging has really picked up pace in the last couple of years, and I think a major highlight will be the upcoming cleansing of Place de la Concorde.

[the_gastropod]

Hear hear! Anytime someone argues something like "I could never give up my car and live in a city! They're so noisy!" I feel like a version of that Goose meme. "NOISY FROM WHAT?"

[creer]

> "NOISY FROM WHAT?"

More of this, it's fun - when you don't live there: trams running on insanely poorly designed, or maintained tracks, trams running on extremely squeally wheels (see design, maintenance), sirens (running on overtime and at full strength, see screaming people), preachers (see screaming people :-), protests (The birds aren't real!), drummers, motorcycles ("Harleys"), dirt bikes (kids). In San Francisco, cars are the well behaved and quiet group in there.

[AnthonyMouse]

> "NOISY FROM WHAT?"

Sirens, people yelling, loud music, construction, etc.

[the_gastropod]

Credentials: Lived in NYC for 10+ years

Sirens: valid. But those suckers are usually attached to vehicles

People yelling: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when someone is yelling, it's some doofus in a car yelling at some other doofus in a car.

Loud music: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when there is loud music, it's some doofus playing loud music in their car.

Construction: valid

But the single most frequent / annoying loud sound: car horns. Constantly.

[mlrtime]

I'm not going to argue the point that cars aren't loud they are!

However, in Manhattan the city is still very loud with 0 cars. Meaning in the middle of the night in midtown, not a single car, the city itself hums with a constant noise that is not healthy.

Witnessed this during covid when I didn't see a car for hours on a typically busy midtown avenue, but the city is still very very loud compared to a suburban setting.

So, we get rid of all cars, then what? You still live in a noisy city. No thanks.

Credentials: 5 years in midtown, 15 years downtown Manhattan.

[bombcar]

It varies by area; I remember staying in Brooklyn with a friend and being a few floors up the traffic noise was minimal (constant), few horns, but it seemed an emergency vehicle went by every few minutes.

Most of what I remember of European cities, too, when anywhere near the denser parts.

Part of "city noise" is dependent where you're living, and how new it is. Close, cramped, older building with people arguing above and below and beside you? Not fun. Newer building with excellent soundproofing? Nowhere near as bad.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Sirens: valid. But those suckers are usually attached to vehicles

But they're attached to emergency vehicles. The fire department is not going to wait for the bus when responding to a fire, so you can't actually get rid of this by installing mass transit, and then its prevalence is proportional to density.

> People yelling: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when someone is yelling, it's some doofus in a car yelling at some other doofus in a car.

> Loud music: not often in my experience. And the usual offender when there is loud music, it's some doofus playing loud music in their car.

If people are usually in cars then the people making noise will usually be in cars. But it's not as if they're going to stop having business disputes or lovers' quarrels or whatever it is this time just because they're on foot.

And whether loud music is a problem depends primarily on who your neighbors are. In a city you'll have a lot of them and you don't get to choose who they are.

> car horns

Ironically this doesn't happen in the suburbs because there are more roads and parking per car, and thereby fewer traffic disputes and no need to summon someone from a building immediately instead of parking and going inside. So you're now equally making the case for cities to have wider roads and more parking.

[s_dev]

France already has some of the most densely populated cities in the world, Paris is #32. French cities feel less congested than the likes of US cities because it has better cycling infrastructure and public transport options. High population density is not a cure for the bias car infrastructure imposes on a city. So your recipe will need to take more in to account than just density.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popul...

[kwhitefoot]

But why are French cities so densely populated? The country is twice the size of the UK with roughly the same population.

[creer]

There was a semi-arbitrary building height adopted during the Haussmannian reorganization in Paris. My feeling is people noticed it led to perfectly liveable blocks. (Most places go a bit higher than this by now but Paris is strongly attached to the "roofs of Paris" and actively protects them. So Paris is a mix of Haussmannian building heights and higher.)

In the 50es through 70es, there was a strong need for extra housing which led to the projects outside Paris ("citées"), to many factories torn down to make space, but also to much higher residential buildings here and there. Still worked fine (well, not many of the citées worked fine).

And people really, but REALLY love being able to walk to their preferred local baker and pastry shop (out of a choice of several of course), and to the local grocery store. The density has to be high enough to support these.

Turns out, high density also allows a great subway system. Nobody complains that it exists.

[OkGoDoIt]

How does that linked Wikipedia page not contain any cities in China, which in my experience are more dense than just about anywhere else in the world?

[bobthepanda]

one is that Chinese "city" boundaries also generally include a lot of rural land, mountains, etc. Chongqing is the size of Austria.

The other is that while the buildings are certainly tall, China also does a lot of "tower-in-the-park" style development where the plazas and landscaping in between tall buildings decrease overall density.

[maxglute]

PRC cities are not particularly dense. Population densities in cities within a country tend to follow zipfs law, which would predict BJ and SH to be 3-4x larger than it currently is. Many economists and urban planners was suggesting PRC should densify tier1 about 10 years ago. But hukou anbd industrial policy seems to be designed to limit megacity sizes to redirect popuation towards growing 3rd, 4th+ tier cities into their own economic hubs. IMO trying to avoid SKR/JP where everyone rushes to a few economically viable regions.

[shortsunblack]

China is deurbanizing and dedensifying. It's a popular myth that Chinese cities are dense. Density peaked a decade ago.

This will spell economic worries someway down the road as maintenance upkeep costs start to kick in.

[maattdd]

What is your experience ? China cities are noticeably less dense than other cities in Asia (Manilla, Delhi..) or even Paris

[resolutebat]

Most of Manila is an endless sprawl low-rise housing and single-story slums, with a few areas of high-rise buildings (Makati, BGC, etc). In the average large Chinese city, more or less all the housing is high-rise.

[bobthepanda]

how much of that housing is occupied vs investment, and how large are the apartments? slums get quite packed.

[ketralnis]

As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings, I can attest that I love it and I wish there were more American cities that were an option for my lifestyle.

[ipaddr]

America is filled with high rises. Where are you from?

[harimau777]

What do you mean? In my experience outside of the few major cities (New York, LA, etc.) there are only high rises in the very downtown of large cities.

[ipaddr]

Highrises are just apartments.

Very large like Columbus Ohio?

https://borror.com/high-rise-apartments-columbus-ohio/

Waterkloof, Maine https://www.booking.com/hotel/za/menlyn-maine-high-rise-1-be...

Pikeville, Ky http://hapky.org/myers-towers.html

[harimau777]

I guess I tend to think of "high-rise" as a synonym for skyscraper. Something in the neighborhood of 10+ stories. I'm fairly certain that Columbus at least doesn't have many residential buildings that high outside of its downtown.

However, if we are counting 3 or so story apartments then there are definitely high-rises all over the place like you say.

[em-bee]

i don't remember any high rises outside of downtown in LA either.

and most of those downtown high rises in most cities are office buildings. New York is really the exception.

[rsynnott]

It can certainly cause light issues, but I'm not sure why it would cause _congestion_?

[bluefirebrand]

More people in a smaller area?

Congestion doesn't just refer to car traffic

Edit: think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line. Congestion

[Jensson]

> Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time.

They aren't, with dense housing there is so much room for parks that they are everywhere. I live in such a place, you go out and you mostly hear birds chirping, not people, it is a cheap suburb with high rise apartments next to public transit and everything you need in walkable distance including hospital and government services and hardware stores.

Dense housing means there is more room for everything else, not less, so everything is less crowded. Birds singing outside of my windows is the main noise pollution where I live.

[kazinator]

That's only true if we hold the population constant, and get everyone to scrunch together onto smaller lots built taller.

The main aim of density is to turn cities of a million into cities of ten million, not to just stick with a million and have birds chirping in parks everywhere you go.

[not2b]

No, the aim is to have that one million people occupy a smaller area, so that there's more space for parks, open space, farms, etc.

[stefs]

paris proper is already one of the densest areas in the world (and definitely in europe). when i lived there i wouldn't have noticed any problems with crowded grocery stores or community spaces compared to the comparatively low-density city i currently live in.

there definitely were a lot more people in the streets, other cities feel deserted in comparison.

[lostlogin]

> i wouldn't have noticed any problems with crowded grocery stores or community spaces

There are so many of them. Every block seemed to have grocers and a small park.

Where I am it’s a massive supermarket every 5km, not a small one every 200m. You can shop different when it’s less hassle to go.

[bombcar]

Delivery also lets you have more smaller stores carrying the 80% you need regularly, and the 20% that is less common can come via delivery in a day or two.

[brailsafe]

This seems like a fundamentally suburban perspective, and I don't mean that to be an insult, it's just what all of my small home town family members and friends think, and it overwhelmingly and ironically relates to the real traffic congestion they actually experience coupled with the hypothetical imagined congestion they pre-emptively avoid exposure to by driving instead of getting on the train.

Not that there's _no_ foot traffic congestion or lines, but it's the same thing that happens in a case where there's only one Starbucks in a sprawling suburb or business district at lunch time.

A high density area is likewise it's own complex economy and system that seeks balance, when there's too many people in one area, you just go somewhere else or enjoy or compete with it. That's partly why Tokyo is simultaneously the most populated city on earth and one of the most quiet, clean, and least congested places I've visited.

In my sparsely populated city that sprawls, it's extremely noisy, dusty, time consuming to get around, the infrastructure is failing, and I rarely bump into anyone I know, because people are only visible at the beginning and end of their journey. Meanwhile here in Vancouver I often run into people I know multiple times per day because we're in the same spaces, or I can go somewhere else and not see anyone just like any other place.

[mlrtime]

>Tokyo is simultaneously the most populated city on earth and one of the most quiet, clean, and least congested places I've visited.

Sorry, no this is culture. The same virtues exist in Japanese suburbs, nothing to do with a city.

[brailsafe]

"Partly why". It's just an example, I'm sure other cities are more hectic. I didn't get the impression that Japanese suburbs were particularly different than North American ones in terms of volume levels or how uninteresting they are.

It seems to me that it's mainly cars and a scarcity of places to be that make cities horrible and congested. More pollution, more noise, less space.

[rsynnott]

> Edit: think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line.

Have you lived (rather than just visited; extremely tourist-oriented areas can be broken in the way you describe, because all of the tourists stay there) in a large dense city? I'm sure there are exceptions (chiefly places with broken zoning/planning) but _in general_, if there's enough traffic for the cafe that people have to wait in long lines, _someone will open a cafe_. To the point where "there are a silly number of cafes" is a complaint people sometimes make about such cities.

Same goes for the rest of it, of course, but "dense cities have insufficient cafe provision" is a particularly bizarre take.

In Dublin (not a massively dense city; it's about a quarter the density of Paris, or a little less than San Francisco), we had an almost complete collapse of construction following the financial crisis, only really resuming around 2014. One interesting consequence of this was _fake cafes_. When you build an apartment block, you probably want to do _something_ with the ground floor, and in urban apartment blocks it'll rarely be used for housing; instead it'll be used for retail units. So if you build the apartment block, and then the next day the construction industry collapses and there's an unfinished site next door for five years, what do you do with the retail units? You don't want them to look derelict, so you put in fake cafes! (Via images on the windows).

Growth has since resumed, the unfinished sites are gone, and the fake cafes have become manifest, adding to the bafflingly large number of cafes in the city.

[wolverine876]

> think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line. Congestion

That depends on supply and demand, not simply demand. More people attract, open and staff more shops, etc. It's easier to find a restaurant in a major city than a quiet rural town.

[itronitron]

Mixed use zoning solves that as businesses (grocery stores, cafes, pharmacies, etc.) are able to locate closer to people.

[underlipton]

I would imagine that the answer would be to open more shops. Obviously, to avoid a NYC-like situation, you would have to bust the CRE cartels that keep retail square-footage absurdly expensive. Parks and libraries are harder... though building taller does tend to allow for more open land space.

[globular-toast]

I guess one person's congestion is another person's lively and bustling city?

[verisimi]

> think about crowded grocery stores and restaurants. Think community spaces like parks and libraries being packed all the time. Think about never being able to stop and get a coffee without waiting in a long line.

It also changes behaviour. People are under stress all the time. It's not a nice or natural way to live. But it is easier to govern people.

[rsynnott]

I really think people underestimate how much of this is down to _taste_. Personally I've lived in pretty sparse suburbs of Dublin (by European standards, anyway; think semi-detached houses, as far as the eye can see), in the city centre, and in dense inner suburbs (walking distance to the centre, generally terraced houses and apartment buildings). I wouldn't consider going back to an outer suburb, never mind a rural area. But I know some people who live in the middle of nowhere and love it! Couldn't do it, myself.

[digging]

...This is the state of people living under car-dependency, not dense urbanism supported by public transit and walkable areas. Car noises stress people out, make them irritable, impact their health. Driving in traffic makes people angry/furious/insane (literally - it is not sane to pull a gun on someone driving past you but it happens). Prioritizing parking and roads is a colossal misuse of land which causes crowded public spaces; imagine if every parking lot was an additional market or park.

[verisimi]

But, they are closing roads making them one way etc, that creates the traffic problem. It's bad governance - creating pain to allow government to administer the preordained 'solution' - no cars!

Moving to car less city is the goal, but, as others note, the infrastructure is not there. So you're just pushing cars out... with no real answers being provided.

How is that good government?

And the roads you call mismanagement are already there! Removing them, deteriorating their use is what's new...

[triceratops]

> People are under stress all the time. It's not a nice or natural way to live

You might be thinking of packed slums in a developing country.

> But it is easier to govern people.

Ah yes, like the French, a famously docile people who never, ever rise up against their government.

[orwin]

We just like to be vocal and share our disagreements publicly. It used to force a bit of honesty (it's not working much right now)

[dv_dt]

It causes congestion if the city refuses to invest in public transportation - which is more a problem in US cities - though some European cities could be behind on keeping up with changes to different degrees

[rayiner]

Congestion is a problem even in cities with excellent public transportation. Have you ever been on the Tokyo subway at 8:30 am?

[dv_dt]

Yes, it always a balance of factors in the system, but what you're talking about is a higher threshold of capacity already. They've built up to higher rise density in Tokyo and are already managing much higher people movement in core higher density areas than the edges of Paris.

[rsynnott]

Oh, right, I see, yeah. Would not generally be an issue in Paris, I would've thought, at least not towards the centre.

[vladvasiliu]

You'd be mistaken. Public transit is extremely crowded in the centre during rush hour.

For example, two regional lines (RER B and D) need to share a tunnel in the middle of the city. They've been investigating digging another one for a long time, but, AFAIK. they haven't found an economical way of doing so. The solution is to try to move people to other lines, but those are already very crowded and I'm not aware of any project to build a new line inside of the city limits.

[bragr]

Ultimately you have more people coming and going from each building, which means more people on the streets, and more demand for all utilities and public services. Building up doesn't build out those other things. That's why you have things like Air Rights in NYC to limit building.

[rcpt]

People aren't very noisy. Cars are

[kcorbitt]

I don't know... I lived in Barcelona for two years recently and had pretty bad luck. In addition to one-off incidents, some consistent noise issues we had:

- The Pakistani restaurant below our apartment would regularly host receptions/weddings until 2-3am. The sendoff typically involved groups of 20-30 people banging large drums loudly and singing as the happy couple walked out and were driven away.

- We had a neighborhood drunk who frequently (multiple times a week) would wander down the street singing Flamenco-style ballads about his unfortunate love life. My assumption was that the ex he was singing to lived on the street? Anyway, he had quite a voice and was great at projecting.

- The building behind us was shorter than ours and our rear balcony faced their rooftop. In the summer one of the apartments there would semi-regularly hold parties until 1am.

Cars were an occasional issue too, but people were a much bigger problem in that particular neighborhood. That said, I've also lived in dense neighborhoods with none of those problems, so maybe better norms/regulations are the answer... but existing noise ordinances in the US are rarely enforced.

Beyond the noise issues though I did enjoy the convenience/amenities that a dense neighborhood provides!

[digging]

Theoretically all those interactions breach the social contract and could be acted upon by making complaints. However, someone loudly driving a multi-ton car down your road is always "okay".

Also... I live in a low-density urban neighborhood currently and it's the loudest place I've ever lived. Mostly it's road noise, but also one of my neighbors parties 12+ hours every weekend playing music very loudly. Some people are just loud, but cars make everybody loud.

[mactrey]

As you note, no two dense neighborhoods are the same. Those experiences would be rare in Tokyo or Kuala Lumpur. I would say that cultural norms dominate density when it comes to explaining late-night partying.

[hackeraccount]

recently moved half a mile further out from city center and can attest to all of this. Hookah bar in my case was blaring music at 1AM. People in various states of inebriation shouting to each other outside my bedroom window.

There's less car traffic too but that was such a background noise that I hardly noticed it. Though truthfully the first week or so at the new place I was conscious of it's absence.

[lelandfe]

NYC started making certain streets pedestrian-only during COVID. The silence was astonishing.

[rcpt]

Same thing on snow days in Manhattan. It's eerily quiet

[ReptileMan]

I have never met a car that had a fight with her spouse that woke up the whole block at 3AM

[romafirst3]

Cars get into wrecks all the time :) Seriously though we just normalise it. If there is a car accident on your street everyone is awake. How about cop cars and ambulances racing by sirens blaring at all hours. People blast horns way louder than anyone will shout.

[Jensson]

You need better walls, aren't there standards that apartment walls need to be sound proof?

[hollerith]

The higher the density, the more vehicles get in each others way.

If your reply is that the vehicles are not needed because everyone can just walk: it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile -- and that's before we get to transporting things other than people. (Growing food is very energy intensive; walking burns food.)

[circlefavshape]

A 155lb human burns 177kcal when walking at 2.5mph[1], so that's 71kcal per mile

There are 340kcal in 100g of wholemeal wheat flour[2], so walking one mile takes around 21g of wheat

Wheat flour creates carbon emissions of 0.80 kg CO₂e/kg [3], so walking one mile creates carbon emissions of 170 g CO₂e

Driving a vehicle powered by gasoline produces tailpipe emissions of around 400g per mile [4]

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health/calories-burned-walking#Wa... [2] https://knowledge4policy.ec.europa.eu/health-promotion-knowl... [3] https://apps.carboncloud.com/climatehub/product-reports/id/9... [4] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

[circlefavshape]

However if the calories from your walk come from beef ...

100g of beef gives you 217 kcal [1], so you need 33g of beef for your walk

Carbon cost for beef is 99.48 kg CO₂e/kg [2]

So walking one mile fueled by beef creates ~3.3kg of carbon emissions, over 8 times what would be emitted if you drove

[1] https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/foods/beef#nutrition [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201677/greenhouse-gas-e...

[circlefavshape]

Oh and it turns out the carbon footprint for beef varies significantly by where the beef is raised. Average carbon footprint per 1kg of beef in the EU is 22.1 kg CO₂e [1], so if you're in the EU your beef-fueled 1 mile walk emits ~730g of CO₂e, a little under twice what you'd have emitted if you drove

[1] https://www.thebeefsite.com/news/33676/uk-beef-carbon-footpr...

[burntwater]

If I'm reading this right it's not quite apples for apples, as it's comparing the cost to create and move the beef, but doesn't consider the cost to create the car, only the movement of the car.

[scott_w]

Except the only people who eat that much beef are certainly not walking anywhere so it’s a fun “statistic” that has no basis in reality.

[mactrey]

A car driver could easily eat the same amount of food as a walker, the extra calories would be stored as fat. This also ignores upfront CO2 output from assembling and delivering the car and increased CO2 output from maintaining car infrastructure vs. pedestrian infrastructure. Not to mention numerous other externalities.

[leereeves]

Don't forget that the person would be burning calories even if they weren't walking.

[circlefavshape]

The figure for calories consumed when walking is excess calories consumed (compared to sitting still)

[simonw]

"it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile"

I've never heard that before, can you expand on that?

[everforward]

I wouldnt be completely surprised if it were true, though I lack the background and willpower to try to get an actual answer lol.

My thought process is that food also implies some level of driving (delivering pesticides/fertilizer, driving crops away), the fertilizers are fossil-fuel derived, and if you count the sun it takes to grow crops to eat (or worse, as feed for meat).

The whole chain is pretty inefficient, too. Crops are pretty good at converting sunlight to stored energy, but animals and us are bad at retrieving that stored energy. The losses compound if we're eating meat.

Walking isn't a particularly efficient method of movement either, to my understanding.

The energy gets a bit spurious though. One could argue that if we're going to count sunlight going into the crops, we should do the same for the sunlight that raised the dinos so they could become oil.

I also would wager that starts and stops would impact this heavily. The human weighs a lot less so they can accelerate/decelerate much cheaper. The car would have a better edge on a long, straight mile with no stops.

[OkayPhysicist]

A human walking is absurdly efficient, as anyone who's ever tried to outrun a bad diet can tell you. Running or walking a mile burns ~100 extra calories relative to sitting on your couch. Unless you're putting active effort into not doing so, most diets fluctuate by far more than that.

[hollerith]

I don't remember where I heard it, only that it was an expert on agriculture saying it.

The easiest way to see that it is plausible is to note that only 400 years ago, something like 90% of all human labor went into growing food, which is the way agricultural societies had always been everywhere. The way society was able reduce that to the 5% or so it is today was to use fossil fuels. The first big reduction came with the mechanization of textile production, freeing the food-growers from the need to make their own yarn and weave it into fabric to make clothes with. The tractor was of course also responsible for a drastic reduction in human labor as input to food-growing. Also, the replacement of horses with trucks for transportation of food from the farm to the nearest rail head or port or river (and transportation of inputs like fertilizer to the farm) meant that the food-growers could concentrate on growing food for people now that horses were much less needed.

It's not just the extra calories needed to walk as opposed to rest or to watch television: it's the fact that a single person in a delivery truck can do the work of a dozen people who have to do the deliveries on foot, and keeping one person alive and productive costs only one twelfth as much as keeping a dozen alive and productive -- even if no one walks anywhere or does any exercise. Sometimes for example in order to remain alive and productive, one of the dozen will need to visit a doctor. The doctor requires food to stay alive and productive. Doctors don't live forever and so need to be replaced, and that is an expensive process in part because medical students need food and lots of other energy-requiring things to stay alive and able to learn (and to grow from babies to people mature enough to go to medical school).

My guess is that that analysis continues to hold even if the dozen delivery workers can take public transportation as well as walk although maybe we have to replace "dozen" with "six".

I'm not saying that restricting vehicles in Paris is a bad move: I'm just saying that the effects on, e.g., carbon emission is not obviously good and that the planners who chose (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...) to devote a large fraction of the area of cities to make it easy for vehicle traffic to flow were not just stupid benighted fools or evil people bent on making life worse for everyone.

[abdullahkhalids]

When people suggest that we reduce the number of cars driven, they are generally not talking about reducing commercial delivery vehicles [1]. Obviously our civilization depends on moving essential stuff around, and we need to do continue doing that, albeit with a electrified fleet of trucks/vans. The problem is with private cars, electric or internal combustion.

[1] Excluding Uber style car-based food delivery services.

[mitthrowaway2]

High density is what enables mass rail transportation, which is much more efficient than personal vehicles.

[bombcar]

Mass rail is most efficient when it's full.

https://afdc.energy.gov/conserve/public_transportation.html - a full car gets amazingly close to a average train (USA).

And this is seen in that trains are most common where they can be mostly full.

What's scary about that is how quickly busses just get outclassed - they have to be as big as their biggest loads, but they're usually empty.

[mitthrowaway2]

How often do you see a full car? Average vehicle occupancy is 1.67, and has been for years.

[bezier-curve]

> it takes more energy and more carbon emissions to walk a mile than it takes to drive a vehicle a mile

Do you have a source for this? Sounds questionable.

[fnord123]

It's false. People will not go into suspend mode when not walking; they still burn calories. A very large person would burn about 130 calories walking a mile. i.e. one large latte. And most people who are this large are not at risk of a caloric deficit by burning an extra 130 calories.

[mrguyorama]

Humans are INSANELY efficient at walking. That's why walking and running are terrible ways to lose weight.

[ramblenode]

I agree that OP's assertion sounds dubious (especially considering the entire supply chain) but calories are a measure of energy, not CO2. You need to know the rate of CO2 emitted per kcal.

[SV_BubbleTime]

A single mile, no.

100 miles? That seems very likely. That happens far quicker for the energy leaking heat machine sitting in the seat.

So, while maybe the theme of the statement is correct?

[resonantjacket5]

The problem that this is the wrong measure to use emissions per mile, when it's really about emissions per trip.

A car flying down the freeway uses less emissions per mile, but if one is traveling 50 miles versus just walking to down the block the former is using a lot more emissions even if it is more efficient per mile.

[scott_w]

This is simply abject nonsense. I know the research you obliquely referenced and it assumes you specifically fuel that movement by eating beef burgers. And even that's on shaky ground.

You can use your eyes to instantly observe that car drivers are not reducing their caloric intake to compensate for the fact that they "save" that energy by not walking.

[jauntywundrkind]

Thankfully Paris was also super super super smart & has rapidly developed dedicated bike infrastructure that is incredibly popular & nice to use. It rapidly reduces the need for cars for many many people.

They also are restricting the use of cars in their city center, which will help force de-car'ing for casual use & make people take efficient less demanding forms of transit.

This should help keep congestion & din from being aggravating!

[gxs]

This is a huge problem with housing in general that is mostly ignored.

Let people build 4 units where today it's zone for 1, and if you disagree, you're an out of touch racist/classist/luddite who is just not a visionary and can't embrace the future.

Surely nothing bad is going to happen when you take a subdivision with 30 homes and take just 10 of those and turn them into quadplexes.

30 homes might approximate something like 60 cars and 60 children.

Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes.

You're now asking infrastructure that hasn't been touched since the 60s to accommodate nearly twice as many people. And I get that not every new unit will also have 2 children, but some will and it no doubt leads to a net increase.

Where as before the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100. And this is just a minor inconvenience.

The real issues arise when you've doubled the amount of school children, but the number of teachers hires or classrooms built hasn't increased, and let's not even talk about teacher salaries.

Then there are utilities and other public services (first responders, etc.)

This was just one small subdivision with 30 homes, now imagine this happening across multiple parts of town at once and you can see the problem.

All that is to say, I've never been against building more housing (omg build up! it's so easy!), what I'm against is building more housing without proportional investments everywhere else.

It's a hard problem to solve, I admit it, but that's my whole point. It's hard, you can't just build more housing and call it a day.

[pjc50]

> 30 homes might approximate something like 60 cars and 60 children.

> Now instead of 30 homes, you have 20 + 10*4 = 60 homes.

Not building the houses doesn't make the people go away. What ends up happening is they have to commute in from somewhere else, and

> the road leading out your development had to accommodate 50 cars in the morning commute, now it has to handle more than 100

happens in a different road.

(sure, in the long run people learn not to have children in the West because living space is scarce, and your "doubled the amount of school children" problem goes away)

[Aspos]

It is not a hard problem to solve and was/is being solved all around the world. If a developer is building not 60 homes but 6000 homes then they can be tasked to build a school, a few kindergartens, a fire station, cafes, grocery shop, a few bus stops and plenty of individual and communal parking spaces.

Going from single family homes to quadplexes does not solve the problem, build taller!

[martythemaniak]

Maybe the reason people accuse you of being "racist/classist/luddite" is because you're fearmongering, and they suspect these talking points are just a cover for looking out for your financial interest (keep increasing property prices), or keeping your community free from "others" or something.

Why is this fearmongering? Because your figures are wildly, wildly out of touch with reality. If you legalize quadplexes by right, you're not going to magically see a doubling of housing, there just aren't that many people! That is completely made up bullshit. Fast growing place have growth rates in the low single digits, like 2%/a, not 50%. Growth projections for fast growing regions like the Toronto area have 50% growth projections on the scale of decades. But "If we legalize quadplexes, our 100 home with turn into 102 home next years and there'll be one extra car" just doesn't have the same zing and it's hard to keep the housing crisis going with realistic complaints.

[gxs]

How is this fearmongering?

I can just as easily accuse you of moral righteousness, it's not a cover for anything, it's what's happening and with neither you nor I citing sources, it's just your word against mine.

Even then, come up with whatever cutesy numbers you want regarding housing, there are concrete numbers to point to for the side effects. Depressed teacher salaries is a well known issue. Overcrowding in schools is a real issue. Congestion and lack of public transportation is a real issue.

You can argue causality all you want, but if you leave out suddenly overpopulating areas as part of your equation, it's already flawed.

Lastly, you didn't read what I said.

I said it's fine to build more housing provides it comes with equal investments in infrastructure. You conveniently glossed over this fact because your solution of building taller still doesn't address it. So no, build taller isn't the only solution.

Again, reread what I said. I'm not against building more housing. Do you understand that? Again, I am not against building more housing.

All for building out public transportation, all for doing that is required to build more housing.

So either you take a slow and moderate approach to building more housing, which is fine, and will allow other infrastructure more time to catch up, or you make these investments up front with your larger scale development, as long as it's addressed it's all I'm saying.

Not sure what you're so up in arms about.

[wolverine876]

> congested cities with such intense light and noise pollution

I'm not sure how you mean that. Obviously you know that many people love cities with lots of tall buildings, NYC being the obvious US example. Clearly you don't like them, but are you saying the busy-ness is inherently bad? If you don't like it, can you leave? Usually, that's an expensive place to live.

[jorvi]

Cool cool, except the situation is dire and people need a roof over their head. Other priorities can wait.

[justinator]

It's literally been dubbed the City of Light and the highest density cities in France already. It's not even close.

[carabiner]

Part of the draw of a city is bustling night life. You don't move to Manhattan for dark skies.

[int_19h]

Can we at least acknowledge that it is not universally a draw, and many people actually hate it?

[enaaem]

Cities aren’t loud. Cars are.

[mlrtime]

Cars are very loud, Cities are still loud with 0 cars.

Source: Manhattan, NYC

[dionidium]

> As someone who lives in an area with plenty of high-density residential buildings

And yet you live there, which means, presumably, that it's your best option relative to the alternatives. People should be allowed to choose living arrangements that meet their most critical needs, even if they also find reasons to complain about aspects of those arrangements that are self-evidently less important to them.

[CalRobert]

What is making the noise?

[spaniard89277]

Paris needs a new center. Like many other cities, build more places where people want to flock so you get pressure off the center.

Most new developments are in dead areas because nobody wants to spend time surrounded by ugly, bland and functional architecture.

[lou1306]

The problem is, when you are competing with the center of Paris, it is pretty hard to build a compelling alternative. Say what you will about the streets being loud, chaotic and dirty, the area between the II, III, V and VI arrondissements (Latin quarter, Pantheon, Beaubourg, Jardin du Luxembourg, Tuilleries, Notre Dame, Place des Vosges) is still just swell.

[mebazaa]

Yeah, and also you have the problem of job location. The regional government says they want to make the Paris area more "polycentric", but there’s a limit to that if jobs are heavily concentrated in one area. We are racing to open more subway lines, and that will surely help, but at some point, raw distance will remain a bottleneck.

[Ragnarork]

This reminds of the project that aimed at creating a new business/commercial complex south-east of Paris in Noisy-Le-Grand. A real estate promoter had a big project, and a metro line was designed, then built, but the real estate project went into bankruptcy and never got out of the ground.[0]

The metro line was completed, inaugurated, but never opened to the public, and eventually mothballed. For quite a while, it was rumored that they operated trains once a month to keep the system working and maintained, not sure up until when.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noisy-le-Grand_Metro

[Pyrodogg]

The Tim Traveller channel on YouTube did a couple videos about this [1] and [2]. The station was open for a brief time for some public tours before being redeveloped. He also links to some archival footage from 1997 showing it in motion [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWxESIzJhCU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGIz_zwoALU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMHW9cEAO78

[mywittyname]

Seems like governments could lead the charge by building new government facilities in an alternate location, which is created with a solid plan for incorporating public transport, housing, event spaces, and retail.

Its entirely possible to build a new city from the ground up. And starting with a clean slate allows planners to design with the next 10,20,30,50 years of growth in mind. It's very difficult to scale a city effectively without a long-term city plan.

[spaniard89277]

It's not a problem in the sense that nowadays we know how to make it. It's a question of money and political build. More housing, more offices, make it pleasent, connect it, etc.

[yieldcrv]

> but it decreases social segregation. That alone is critical to keep a city alive.

I agree that is a net boon to society. I think the cross drift of ideas is a net positive, the human interaction can create more opportunities for those that have less, I don't think it reduces inequality meaningfully and I'm not suggesting that was a goal only that my prior statements might lead one to believe it does, but I've seen far more segregated cities be without many services during an infrastructure failure, because the people doing those services didn't live there.

[asimovfan]

Building taller means people see the sky less. In my home city that is the case and you definitely dont want that. Where ive been living the last few years, no building is above 3 stories and its wonderful.

[Tiktaalik]

Not necessarily.

There's a big difference between building a tall building with a large uniform floorplate that takes up much of a block and a tall building that is thin, only taking up a tiny slice of a block, and thus allowing sunlight to pass through.

For this reason gloomy Vancouver for a long time mandated point towers, for the purpose of maximizing light.

Paris' status quo of uniform 6 story streetwalls could arguably let in less light than a mixed amount of much taller thinner towers on 3 story podiums.

[cm2187]

Most of New York has 10-15 floors buildings with wide streets. Light and fresh air isn't a problem. But you can't really widen Paris street and the uniformity of the architecture is what makes it a beautiful city. Tourists aren't flocking to Paris to take pictures of some boring glass and concrete buildings.

[GuB-42]

For the same density, geometrically, you should see the same amount of sky it you are at the ground floor (or outside), and more if you are on the upper floors.

Here is a low rise area, H represent housing units, _ is the ground

  H_H_H_H_H_H

Now for the same density with high rise buildings

  H   H   H
  H___H___H__

For someone on the ground, between buildings, the field of view occupied by the sky is the same, that's because buildings are twice taller and the distance between buildings is twice longer, which cancel out. Or equivalently, the average apparent size of buildings (how much of your field of view they take) is also the same. Obviously, people higher up have a better view of the sky.

[charnould]

I've made a 3D map of social housings in Paris/France: https://charnould.github.io/rpls-3d/ Territorial segregation is a thing.

[presentation]

Don’t necessarily need to build taller, if transit (not bad in Paris already) is brought up to Tokyo levels (meaning an order of magnitude greater than anywhere else) then you just build densely outwards. Tokyo has far higher population but is mostly low-rise. A city like Paris has the bones for this.

[retinaros]

impossible to brong it to tokyo level. our people are not educated like japanese people. add the strikes, the frequent infrastructure issues and we will never reach tokyo levels. also since covid transportation is worse since they figured out they could make more money cramping up less trains

[presentation]

lol then I guess Paris is doomed

[littlestymaar]

> build taller

Paris is already among the densest places on earth.

The problem comes from the excessive centralization of practically everything France has, in Paris, leading to an overpopulation of the entire Ile de France region, which drive prices in Paris itself to the roof.

[othello]

We are already the densest OECD city by quite a margin! (22,000 per sqkm in the inner 20 district, twice that of Manhanttan and 3 times that of Tokyo - and still 8,600 in the Petite Couronne, which includes 8 million people)

[alecthomas]

Manhattan has a population density of 28,154 per sqkm according to Wikipedia?

[rsynnott]

Yeah; they're probably thinking of New York City. If taken on its own, Manhattan is one of the densest cities in the world; the rest of NYC brings it down a lot.

[amelius]

> but it decreases social segregation. That alone is critical to keep a city alive.

So rich people need poor/middle-class people to keep cities alive?

Maybe they should start charging for that ...

[bombcar]

It's effectively doing just that - tax the entire city (which taxes are usually mainly paid by the richer people) and use the taxes to subsidize poor people.

So since rich people need baristas to serve them Starbucks, tax them to enable the barista to live near where she works.

It should work.

[rayiner]

> So since rich people need baristas to serve them Starbucks, tax them to enable the barista to live near where she works.

That's a good characterization of what's happening. But is subsidizing people to be service workers for wealthy Parisians a good public policy and good use of public funds?

[dctoedt]

> But is subsidizing people to be service workers for wealthy Parisians a good public policy and good use of public funds?

Given that each of us is allotted exactly 8,760 hours in a year: Is it good public policy to force non-wealthy people to spend so many more of those hours in commuting than those who can afford to live closer to their jobs?

I live in a small, separately-incorporated city, a few minutes from downtown Houston, that has become increasingly wealthy. For several decades, the affordable bungalows built in the years following 1930s have been torn down and replaced by big houses. (Yes, my wife and I did that to build our house, more than 35 years ago.) Nowadays, though, many really big single-family homes are being put up on what used to be two-, three-, and four single-house lots. I get disgruntled every time we walk by one of those giant houses, because every one of them is, in effect, forcing two or more less-wealthy families to live further away — they're hoarding the space.

(My own thought is that for big, space-hoarding houses like that, property taxes should be progressive, so that such a house might be taxed at 2X, 3X, 4X, 10X the per-foot rate of houses on smaller lots.)

[rayiner]

> Given that each of us is allotted exactly 8,760 hours in a year: Is it good public policy to force non-wealthy people to spend so many more of those hours in commuting than those who can afford to live closer to their jobs?

Wouldn't it be better to direct public policy and funding to helping create jobs elsewhere and leave the wealthy urban people make their own coffee?

[closeparen]

If we are going to develop the state capacity to override inexorable forces of nature, like the productivity and desirability of the metropole over the hinterlands, might I suggest we first give the people a good show by turning off gravity? Bring the Mediterranean climate to Chicago? Maybe do something about climate change?

[dctoedt]

> Wouldn't it be better to direct public policy and funding to helping create jobs elsewhere and leave the wealthy urban people make their own coffee?

That’s certainly worth exploring too. But there’s a reason I no longer mow my own lawn nor do my own auto maintenance: I flatter myself that I’m now more productive for the larger community when I do work that uses the skills I’ve spent years developing.

[closeparen]

California perspective: rich people could meet their needs for workers/artists/etc by liberalizing the market, but this would cost them property value and eat into the market rents they're collecting. Favoring income-restricted housing allows them to address the same objectives without this blowback.

The cost of the necessary subsidy is calibrated to fall on grubby new-money high earners, so it is effectively free for the long-established propertied class who don't need much taxable income & locked in their property taxes long ago.

[seanmcdirmid]

Income-restricted housing isn't sustainable, nor is it very accessible (you either win the lottery and have it, or you are stuck in a very long line).

Liberalizing the market doesn't always work, even in the most dense economic liberal cities, the best environment for sustainable affordable housing is depopulation or some sort of recession or economic stagnation.

[kelipso]

Everyone needs service workers. Even service workers need service workers.

[bombcar]

My service workers have service workers who go to the market FOR them!

Wait, that's actually what we have now.

[AnimalMuppet]

Rich people need to keep encountering not-rich people, rather than just live in a rich-person bubble. They need that, whether or not they want that.

[amelius]

Of course, because what does it mean to be rich if you can't show it off to poorer people.

Note, by the way, that this inflicts real psychological damage, and perhaps we could also make the case that this should be financially compensated.

[AnimalMuppet]

Not at all. The rich need it to maintain some humanity and empathy, not to boost their ego.

[int_19h]

I wouldn't be so sure it does that. Slave owners interacted with (some of) their slaves daily, and yet...

[bombcar]

Depending on what you mean by "rich" they're already insulated entirely, no matter where they live.

It's much easier to make sure middle and upper middle class people interact with the poor and such, but once you're rich enough to hire an assistant, you're rich enough to avoid most anything you don't want to deal with.

[joelfried]

> Maybe they should start charging for that ...

Let's call it "taxes".

[retinaros]

it is already one of the densest cities on earth.. dont build within paris but modernize its suburbs and create more centers there. the public housing is actually adding social segregation as it is edging out middle class and now paris is segregated between ultra rich and poor people working to serve the rich ones

[cm2187]

You seem to neglect the cost of it. The city is nearly bankrupt, parisians will pay for this with high taxes for a very long time.

[barbazoo]

> parisians will pay for this with high taxes for a very long time

Is that a bad thing?

[cm2187]

I guess not for the people who think they are entitled to the rest of the population subsidising their lifestyle.

[itishappy]

So, everybody? It's a city. Last I checked Paris was not full of homesteads and organic farms.

[SV_BubbleTime]

Do you live in one of these places?

[charles_f]

Building taller is the equivalent of building more lanes. The main problem with housing shortage and infrastructure congestion in Paris is that everything is centralized and concentrated on Paris, and thus everyone want to be there