[thomasfl]

For thousands of years, people have seen the benefits of living in cities.What is really a city? Simply a place where people have a mutual interest in living close to each other. Urban sprawl and car centric society seems to be a really bad idea. Build better cities rather than self driving cars.

[Schiendelman]

You don't even have to tell anyone to "build better cities". All you have to do is get rid of the arbitrary restrictions on upward city growth. Zoning was a really bad idea.

[taffer]

It isn't that simple. The most important thing about a city is the streets and blocks. Manhattan and Barcelona are good examples of cities that have been designed in a way that make them walkable and high density.

[Schiendelman]

The only places where you get non-walkable streets and blocks are the ones where you restrict density dramatically. Most cities aren't designed by some individual planning out where the streets should go. They evolved. If you allow an existing city to increase its density dramatically, people start demanding the streets improve to meet their needs.

[pchristensen]

The more density that gets built, the harder it is to improve streets. Construction of the interstates, Haussman's remaking of Paris, etc were immensely destructive, even if they enabled much more legible and prosperous development afterwards.

In the West at least, basically every street and block was laid out by planners from the early 1800s until post WWII. After that it's much more done by large scale private land developers (e.g. Levittown, Irvine).

[AngryData]

It is harder but I also find that a poor excuse for not improving streets and infrastructure because it can be done and the taxes scale faster than costs. But people and politicians are short sighted and rather kick that can down the road either to make them look good from good financials or to leave enough money on the table for a bit of corruption.

[Schiendelman]

It's not harder to improve streets in higher density, no. It's both politically easier when you have more pedestrians AND you have a higher tax base.

[autoexec]

Zoning is useful for keeping people from building apartments right next to paper mills, pig farms, and superfund sites because those places tend to become slums. Building height restrictions and density limits provide people with the ability to see the sky and get sunlight. They improve air quality. They're pretty useful around places like airports. They can help improve safety and limit the damage resulting from disasters like fires and earthquakes. It's important to strike a balance between over-restrictive zoning and dystopian people-warehouses in perpetual shadow.

[Schiendelman]

I strongly disagree - as do many scholars of land use law at this point.

Zoning has nothing to do with separating uses. It never has. In Seattle, for instance, you absolutely can put an apartment building next to a pig farm. Nobody bothers because the market isn't interested in doing that. That also isn't atypical, zoning has never been used to pad uses away from each other like you see in Simcity.

Seeing the sky and getting sunlight are also very suspect reasoning. It is darn near impossible to find real problems there that zoning prevents.

Zoning also doesn't limit damage or impact earthquake survivability at all. Except - where zoning prevents you from building new buildings, it preserves old unsafe buildings. Without zoning, more of those buildings would be replaced with new structures that are safe.

There's no dystopia zoning is preventing. Most of the comments I see like this have very little understanding of what it does.

[pchristensen]

> It never has.

Your point is much more valid in a car-centric (or car-enabled) world. Back when most industrial inputs and outputs moved by rail, and labor moved on foot, there were noxious and dangerous industries very close to housing. Just read up on Seattle's Skid Road. Pig farming wasn't in cities, but things like tanneries, slaughterhouses, sawmills, etc, were. Not to mention that at the time, almost everything was powered by coal.

Now, with electrical transmission and flexible truck-based movement of goods, it's a much safer world to let the market decide. But cities during the industrial area were really, really rough.

[Schiendelman]

And zoning didn't exist then. Zoning was created purely to keep black people out of neighborhoods. The first zoning attempts were entirely race based - SCOTUS overturned them in 1918. The same group came back and recreated zoning to keep apartment buildings out of white neighborhoods. The funny part? "Single family" zoning explicitly targeted black families, who didn't have the wealth for a house, and would buy larger houses as a two or three family collective.

Industrial zoning came much later, as a post hoc justification, long after that was an issue.

Zoning truly never has.

[goobatrooba]

Just to stress that the world is larger than the US. Zoning exists pretty much everywhere and the reasons for its introduction were diverse and mostly about quality yof life, citizen health, or city esthetics (keeping polluting businesses out).I have no view on whether what you're saying is true for the US, it is however definitely false for most other places.

[autoexec]

> Zoning has nothing to do with separating uses. It never has. In Seattle, for instance, you absolutely can put an apartment building next to a pig farm. Nobody bothers because the market isn't interested in doing that. That also isn't atypical, zoning has never been used to pad uses away from each other like you see in Simcity.

You should have said something sooner. You could have prevented this whole mess where the government in Seattle mistakenly thought that zoning rules prevented shops from being opened in the middle of places zoned as residential. https://www.axios.com/local/seattle/2025/02/10/neighborhood-...

Maybe you've got a different definition of zoning laws, but I'm talking about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_laws the history of which is entirely based on "separating uses" and "padding uses away from each other"

From the wiki: "The origins of zoning districts can be traced back to antiquity.[7] The ancient walled city was the predecessor for classifying and regulating land, based on use. Outside the city walls were the undesirable functions, which were usually based on noise and smell. The space between the walls is where unsanitary and dangerous activities occurred such as butchering, waste disposal, and brick-firing. Within the walls were civic and religious places, and where the majority of people lived."

> Zoning also doesn't limit damage or impact earthquake survivability at all.

It isn't just me who thinks it does. For example, the Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1977 provided states with grants and assistance to "update building and zoning codes and ordinances to enhance seismic safety" (https://www.nehrp.gov/about/PL108-360.htm)

As they say, "earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do." The Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act came after the 1971 San Fernando earthquake and prevented the building of new structures on fault lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alquist_Priolo_Special_Studies...) but earthquakes also cause problems beyond shaking buildings apart and making them fall onto each other and zoning can help with those other hazards too "Large water waves, such as produced by tsunamis, seiches, and dam failure or overtopping, can be anticipated in many places. Their effects can be lessened by land-use regulations similar to flood-plain zoning, restrictions on location of critical structures, and appropriate warning systems." (Seismic hazards and land-use planning - https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/cir690)

> Seeing the sky and getting sunlight are also very suspect reasoning. It is darn near impossible to find real problems there that zoning prevents.

It's harder to find examples in the US where this has gone horribly wrong because people tend to be very opposed to these situations whenever they arise. Many places have already placed restrictions to prevent worst cases.

"A number of states have enacted zoning statutes which allow municipalities to consider solar access a legitimate public purpose.56 The statutes tend to employ conventional zoning techniques, such as building height limitations, lot size restrictions and set-back requirements." (https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cjel/article...)

Cities tend to talk about the problem in terms of skyline preservation and residents tend to talk more about access to the sky as "their view" being obstructed but folks really do care about it when a tall building takes their sun away. Recently the problem of dense urban housing and tall structures impacting access to sun and sky have gotten a boost as interest in solar power has risen.

Here's some additional info on the problem if you're interested:

https://www.groundreport.in/environment/cloud-cover-and-urba...

https://skyscrapersworld.com/skyscraper-shadows

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/architects-claim-no-shad...

https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/this-week-in-te...

[Schiendelman]

Are you interested in learning something? I know about everything you've sent here, but my points are still true. I'm happy to talk about it.

[autoexec]

I'm not sure how your points square with the evidence, but I'm always up for new fun facts.

[b112]

For thousands of years, high-density living meant a 3 or 4 story apartment building. Certainly not sky-scrapers, they weren't even possible to build until the last century or two.

What you state as "urban sprawl" would be "mostly normal" living density for a city like Rome. When I walk the streets of larger cities, its not like the downtown core has acres of land per house, or even a 1/4 acre.

Now of course, there are some differences over time. But my point is that it's not as if the car has caused urban sprawl, in fact, downtown cities are far more dense than 500 years ago. Or 2000, or whatever. One 40 story apartment building, which is common not even just in downtown cores, is a lot more dense than anything 1000 years ago, land use would be 10x or 20x or even 40x.

I know there's this fad to pretend the car caused every problem ever, but it's just not true.

[pchristensen]

You are mixing up a lot of different factors.

3-4 story apartment buildings gives a net residential density of 30-100 units per acre. Typical 20th century urban development is 3-10 units per acre, with suburban "urban sprawl" at the low end of that. See [1] for examples.

Yes towers exist now, and downtown areas have much more intensity and square footage. But outside of NYC (861 of the top 1000 densest census tracts) and a very short list of other parts of other US cities[2], residential density is much lower almost everywhere than it was in 1950, including in cities. Units per acre and especially people per unit have steadily and dramatically dropped. The drop in NYC population density is dramatic even as built square footage has increased[3].

But for every 40 story tower out there, there are hundreds of square miles of car-centric suburban development.

[1] https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/april-2017/visua... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFB5YooSo5M&t=936s [3] https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhat...

[jltsiren]

Modern cities have a lot of buildings that are sparsely populated. 500 years ago, major Italian cities had ~15k people / square km, which is similar to Brooklyn. Paris had 35k to 50k people / square km, making it more densely populated than Manhattan.

2000 years ago, Rome had similar population density to Paris 500 years ago.

Historically, urban people wanted to live inside city walls, if possible. When the population grew, most of the growth turned into higher density inside the walls. There was always some urban sprawl outside the walls, but that was mostly poor people and those who didn't have the right to live in the city proper. Major cities occasionally built a new set of walls surrounding a wider area, but that didn't happen every century.

[bluGill]

People lived in cities because they couldn't find a farm. Anyone who had a farm didn't leave because you controlled your survival. 95% of the people (numbers varied but this is good enough) lived on a farm. Cities were full of diseases and they didn't have good jobs.

Of course what you read in history is from the rich point of view. If you had wealth (slaves back on the farm) city life was really good.

[taffer]

You have it the wrong way round: In the US the slave owners lived on the farms. The bustling cities were in the free states.

[bluGill]

By the time the US started the industrial revolution was starting and the rules were changing.

[trgn]

that seems like a reductive truth in the other direction, i'd even say it's largely false.

the wealth explosion in the high middle ages and significant rise in standard of living was fully accompanied by (and maybe precisely because of) the flourishing of urbanity as well. there were great jobs in the city. proto industry and cottage industry, specialized trades, guilds, ... would you rather be a farmer, subject to the whims of your lord and the weather, or instead weave cloth at a more individualized pace, as a band of brothers?

that city was also a much more calm and verdant atmosphere than we now image as well. gardens, high intensity cultivation, markets, plazzas, all within city walls, not to mention a very accessible country side outside in walking distance ... no noise pollution from cars. i think people tend to forget this aspect a lot more, because they imagine the crowded industrial city. that machine-environment wasnt the norm for the hundreds of years preceding it. we should image bruges in 1370 here as the norm, not manchester in 1870.

sure, the city could be filthy, but farmlife was miserable in its own ways. and sanitation was bad in the city, it was just as bad as on the farmstead.

[Jensson]

Serfdom existed to prevent peasants from leaving those farms, people wanted to move to cities were wages and jobs were better but nobility wanted to force them to stay on those farms.

[bluGill]

Serfdom existed as a step above slavery. The city may have been better for serfs but for the free farmer (if any) the farm was better. There is a lot of 'grass is greener' in the idea that the city was better for many farmers and so they may not have liked what the city was really like.

[jollyllama]

Before the modern era, people died like flies in cities; they were population sinks.