We recently moved to a large-ish (but not huge) city and since I would be working downtown we looked at becoming urbanites (easy commute, can get rid of one of our cars, proximity to restaurants, shopping, things to do, etc.).
Then we discovered that urban accommodations for a family of 5 do not exist at any price (and small 3bdr apartments can be had but are hard to find and extremely expensive). So, into the suburbs we went. The only people that seem to live in/around downtown here are either young singles (with good jobs, given the costs) or homeless.
Maybe when the kids move out and I'm close to retirement, but then I'd rather live in a shack on/near a beach somewhere, so nah...
I lived in the downtown of a major metro for close to two decades. Many of my neighbors vowed to raise urban street smart kids but when the children actually came plans changed. They'd quickly discover their current condo wasn't large enough, so they'd upgrade to something larger. Then transition to a townhouse and eventually a detached single family home, though often inside the city limits. Once they hit school age, things split between those who could afford private school and those who made convoluted excuses as to why the nearby inner city school wasn't appropriate for their child and then move somewhere else. Most often to the suburbs but sometimes to wealthier part of town. I moved away before any of the children became teenagers but it would be interesting to check in and see how things evolve once that happens.
> a detached single family home, though often inside the city limits
Wow, to even have that as a viable upgrade path.
I don't even live on the coast and in my metro, with the local range for a middling middle-class income, having a detached house within the city limits is an absolute pipe dream.
This is absolutely the case in Metro Vancouver; finding a 3+ bedroom, 2+ bathroom condominium is an almost insurmountable challenge.
The issue, almost entirely, is decades of municipal councils who could not imagine families wanting to live in towers, and so zoning for and approving almost exclusively singles and partnered housing in condos.
Recently, some of the councils have seen the err of their ways and begun approving a small amount of family housing; but it's woefully inadequate.
The mayor of New West himself resorted to buying two adjacent suites and joining them when he couldn't find family housing!
I think your story needs to include the specific city to be judged. Also what do you mean by urbanites? In DC, you can buy a 3 bedroom rowhouse not near downtown but near a subway for ~750K ~ 1M, which is basically the limit of what a two lawyer family can afford. In Baltimore, depending on how big you want your house to be and where, you can spend between 250K and 750K. I'm not as familiar with other markets.
Then we discovered that urban accommodations for a family of 5 do not exist at any price
I grew up in a large city and had a ton of friends in families of 5+. Their houses still stand today. I live in the same city today and have neighbors with 3 kids. Maybe this is true of the unnamed city you're speaking of, but this is a bad generalization.
Most people given a choice want each kid to have their own bedroom. The kids CAN share, but it is a lot easier when each kid has their own space to escape to.
Was this some intensely sprawl-based city like Dallas? Because the only way this seems realistic to me is if by 'house' you mean actual single-family detached housing. And there aren't many highly populated cities that have a lot of that within their municipal borders.
That's probably a matter of lack of demand, though. In my Southern European city you can find everything from a tiny studio to a 3200sq ft apartment with 5+ bedrooms, right in the middle of the city. Of course, it'll cost you.
In the US it isn't lack of demand it is lack of supply. Yes it will cost, but most cities won't allow you to build such thing, so you can't get 5+ bedrooms at any price.
We do it but our kids share rooms. The girls are in one room and the boy in the other. They will complain when they’re older but that’s life. Most people aren’t willing to have 5 people in 1050 square feet.
Alon’s continued insistence on super spiky housing with a focus on towers remains something I can’t get behind.
The East Village is mostly 3-5 story mixed use apartment buildings. It has a population density of 82000 people per square mile.
If we could get Queens and Brooklyn up to that, we could literally double the population of the city.
We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through.
It’s not just NY. I spent a few months living in São Paulo (Pinheiros and Jardin’s) which does exactly what Alon suggests - big towers near subway stations that are spaced far apart often with awkward tiny buildings next to them and fall off in density a kilometer or so away. Also miserable.
What the spiky housing near trains theory fails to address is that ultimately housing is for people to have lives. And there is a scale at which life is comfortable - it’s like the East Village, like Miraflores in Lima, like Ximending in Taipei.
If we reduce the problem to people per square meter and transit carrying capacity problem we can theoretically make space for people but I’m not so sure they’ll want to live in them.
It is really hard for me to believe that it would be better to push past the 5-7 story mark instead of just trying to spread the 5-7 story housing zoning wider.
If I haven’t convinced you yet, consider this - if you brought the greater NY area to the density of the East Village it could fit over 370 million people or roughly the entire population of the United States.
Are people in the Netherlands similar to people in the United States? In the US you will primarily get a neighbor that is watching football, shouting swear words and always accompanied with the smell of budweiser as you pass them in the halls. You will always know when they are home... And if you don't get that guy it will be the screaming couple.
Queens and Brooklyn can't get up to that level of density unless we build more transit lines. This is very difficult to do in NYC. Without additional lines, the city's road infrastructure would not be able to handle the additional traffic.
I think the author's point is to build more density along existing lines. Many stops in Queens and Brooklyn already have 3-5 storey development around them. Thus, build higher in those areas.
I agree that 3-5 storey development is a nice density for living in (I choose to myself). But practically speaking, spreading that zone wider in NYC, without any sort of transit plan, is not possible.
You might not like walking through it, but I think Long Island City is a success story for this model. Thousands of workers, who otherwise would've been driving up rent in Manhattan, decide to live near the LIC transit hub in high rises, and I think the city as a whole is better off because of it.
Walking through LIC makes me deeply unhappy but I agree with you completely. In terms of its ability to deliver on raw numbers of housing increase it has been a total success and arguably helped keep rental pressure off my crappy Alphabet City apartment (and by extension the cheaper apartment I would have moved to and so on down the chain) by drawing away midtown finance types.
I do wonder which is harder: changing zoning laws in Gramercy and the West Village or fixing capacity problems on the F/G/NQR or LIRR
Replying to this after having a spent a few days in Tokyo, a city based on which Alon makes many of his arguments and I have to say it is also miserable. The experience of Tokyo neighborhoods is a relentless wall of gray, right until you take the train into an outlying neighborhood which is of course mostly three and four story mixed use apartment buildings and homes.
> We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through.
I've never been to NY. What makes those parts miserable?
Rich people move in, place looses its vibrancy, everything starts to look the same, etc. Ofc, the miserable part is not true for the affluent who gentrify the place. New York is a dirty old place but sometimes something special happens naturally, when people from all over the world, from all cultures, blend in and create something, it’s very hard to describe if you don’t experience it in person. The problem is that New York’s specialness is slowly dying out
As it relates to the US, this post had interesting ideas regarding urban development, and no grasp at all of suburban development.
While urban lifestyles are becoming more fashionable in the US, growth is higher in the suburbs[1]. Whether this is because suburbs are the only option for people moving to new cities (as urban cores become "full"), or because Americans (including millennials) are much more comfortable with suburban lifestyles than they are given credit for is up for debate. But to speak as if a sharp turn towards public transit based cityscapes is America's fait accompli betrays a serious lack of understanding of the country and it's people as they currently are.
> It’s not even an imposition. It’s opportunity. People can live in high-quality housing with access to extensive social as well as job networks
Here's the author is saying that "high-quality" housing and social network is supposedly stronger in urban areas. With regards to housing quality, I think the urban/suburban quality is highly debatable. In terms of social network as well, I think this is probably most true in the context of "professional network". Many people move to more suburban or rural areas precisely because of feelings of alienation and lack of personal connection traditionally associated with large urban areas. This has been remarked on by social observers for well over a century.
The most ironic thing about this whole post though is that it gives no credence to how the "future" predicted by the '90s kind of won: The Internet has made many professional and communication opportunities available to people wherever they may live. While we might not live in that IBM commercial version of an anonymized future where "The Internet does not care if you are X", we do live in a world where the internet has disseminated many of the traditional benefits of cities (and "civilization") to wherever a person may live. Knowledge, education, communication, art, work: all of these are much easier to obtain outside of cities now, and that has massively factored into why our current "future" has allowed that demographic shift into the suburbs to continue.
>Knowledge, education, communication, art, work: all of these are much easier to obtain outside of cities now, and that has massively factored into why our current "future" has allowed that demographic shift into the suburbs to continue.
This is really underselling the simple fact that our federal dollars still heavily subsidize suburban development at the expense of urban amenities and development patterns. Most of the rapidly growing cities haven't actually built any expansions of transit capacity or coverage since they hit their growth spurts over the past few decades, and the housing supply hasn't kept up either. If it's functionally illegal to build urban capacity you're not going to get urban development. It's a much simpler story than grandiose tales about how the internet obviates the need for human interaction.
The idea that a social network is better or of a higher quality simply because there are more bodies around you is a false premise. This sweeps aside the idea that people may prefer a lower density social network where each party mutually seeks another out as opposed to forced through proximity.
Certain groups/bubbles look at their friends who, like themselves, tend to be college-educated, relatively well paid, young, childless, etc. and conclude that everyone is (or at least wants to) move into urban cores. In fact, there is a general migration out of areas like the rust belt and many very rural towns to places where there are more jobs. But the migration into urban cores is mostly fairly specific demographic groups into a relatively small number of elite cities. Which is a notable change from the net outflow as recently as 20 years ago. But it's still a relatively modest shift in the scheme of things.
Wonder if Starlink and other LEO internet services will make rural living accessible to high salary remote workers. While the rural lifestyle isn't for everyone, it's the extreme that would also open the door to exurban and small town living. Add in online shopping and ever evolving streaming entertainment options, it wouldn't be surprising if many small towns and rural areas saw new migration into them.
>While urban lifestyles are becoming more fashionable in the US, growth is higher in the suburbs
You would really need to conduct surveys questioning where people want to live versus where they do live before it's possible to understand current state and likely future trends. I have a suspicion that most people would rather live in a different place, but have had to compromise because the place they have in mind doesn't exist. Not that it couldn't exist, just that today it doesn't because <circumstances>.
From just observing people's personal anecdotes about where they'd like to live, I've noticed a few common situations:
- Folks trying to find a way to host a growing family in a dense urban setting (examples in this thread). They often end up in suburbia, and endure soul-sucking commutes.
- Young single high-earning professionals that want to live in a remote/rural/setting. They often just stay in the city while pining for the fjords as a kind of long-term early retirement plan.
- Retirees that want to live in dense urban places with great public transport and medical facilities. They're simply priced out of this for the most part.
I don't feel this article has a very strong point or that it offers strong arguments towards why this non-retro future is unavoidable and / or better.
> "The status anxieties of Basil Fawlty types who either can’t or won’t adapt to a world that has little use for their prejudices are not a serious public concern."
This is exactly what Urban Planning is concerned with. If Urban Planning ignores a subset of people as they are not a serious public concern (hint: they are), is it really building a future for people? Or a future designed to optimize moving cargo (people?) around...
Furthermore, it seems like a "strawman" argument. Where exactly are people arguing that the future of urban settlement must be exactly the same as it was pre-auto?
The title of the article should be "I do not want the future to be retro" or, more honestly: "I do not want the future to be traditional."
Given the authors biography, frequent relocation amongst expensive, elite international cities, this is not surprising. The fact that the author ended up settling in Paris, however, is very funny.
Having lived and worked in several highrises, I'll say that density advocates (which includes me, mostly) almost always glaze over vertical commute time and annoyance. Elevators and steps are a huge pain in the ass any time you're carrying anything more than a messenger bag/handbag and a travel mug. And there always seem to be way more doorways involved, somehow, with doors that don't really want to be opened or stay open long enough to allow real-world transit.
> Already, people lead full lives in big global cities like New York and London without any of the trappings of what passed for normality in the middle of the 20th century, like a detached house with a yard and no racial minorities or working-class people within sight. The rest will adapt to this reality, just as early 20th century urbanites adapted to the reality of suburbanization a generation later.
What patronising guff. Some people love city living, a lot can't stand it. You may be happy to live without a back yard and without your own space, that doesn't mean that we all will, nor does it mean that many of those already in cities aren't already compromising.
Yes, let's build train networks. No, let's not pretend that means everyone will be happy to live in a box ten floors up, or that this is somehow inevitable.
Not really an accurate picture of the big global cities in the middle of the 20th Century, either. If anything, the working-class density has declined in core areas of New York and London, hasn't it?
Well, by and large, people in the US at least who could afford to were leaving city cores in the latter half of the 20th century. And, even before that, densities were down from their peaks as cities moved away from tenement housing etc.
Your life right now has unpriced externalities among them: deaths from vehicle miles driven, sedentary car bound lifestyles, parking lot deserts, reduced childhood autonomy, pollution, highway driving commute times, class segregation by neighborhood).
You are welcome of course to continue living that way, but I wish you luck affording it once society chooses to price those externalities in.
> our life right now has unpriced externalities among them: deaths from vehicle miles driven, sedentary car bound lifestyles, parking lot deserts, reduced childhood autonomy, pollution, highway driving commute times, class segregation by neighborhood).
I commute into a city by train a couple of times a week, working remotely otherwise, and don't drive all that much at other times, so your stereotypical assumptions here don't really count for much.
Solving population problems with density + transit isn't exactly non-retro. Building trains and subways has been a thing for longer than interstate highway connected suburbs.
It's historically rare for people to accept a reduction in convenience, or quality of life. Even then it's only a reduction as a trade off for other improvements.
If we are talking about future mass transit, I'd expect it to look more like a larger version of Uber pool. Where a destination is entered into a smartphone, and transit mode selection is handled in the background. Something along the lines of smart buses combined with micro mobility.
The future of transit appears to be headed towards the smartphones and e-bikes, not the train station.
That future cannot work. In dense areas there are too many people trying to get around and it leads to congestion just like individual cars do. Only mass transit can solve the problem. In less dense areas the wait for the car is too long as so you may as well have your own.
Readit News
Then we discovered that urban accommodations for a family of 5 do not exist at any price (and small 3bdr apartments can be had but are hard to find and extremely expensive). So, into the suburbs we went. The only people that seem to live in/around downtown here are either young singles (with good jobs, given the costs) or homeless.
Maybe when the kids move out and I'm close to retirement, but then I'd rather live in a shack on/near a beach somewhere, so nah...
Wow, to even have that as a viable upgrade path.
I don't even live on the coast and in my metro, with the local range for a middling middle-class income, having a detached house within the city limits is an absolute pipe dream.
The issue, almost entirely, is decades of municipal councils who could not imagine families wanting to live in towers, and so zoning for and approving almost exclusively singles and partnered housing in condos.
Recently, some of the councils have seen the err of their ways and begun approving a small amount of family housing; but it's woefully inadequate.
The mayor of New West himself resorted to buying two adjacent suites and joining them when he couldn't find family housing!
I grew up in a large city and had a ton of friends in families of 5+. Their houses still stand today. I live in the same city today and have neighbors with 3 kids. Maybe this is true of the unnamed city you're speaking of, but this is a bad generalization.
Was this some intensely sprawl-based city like Dallas? Because the only way this seems realistic to me is if by 'house' you mean actual single-family detached housing. And there aren't many highly populated cities that have a lot of that within their municipal borders.
The East Village is mostly 3-5 story mixed use apartment buildings. It has a population density of 82000 people per square mile.
If we could get Queens and Brooklyn up to that, we could literally double the population of the city.
We know what happens when NY gets big tower housing - it turns into the Upper West Side, Midtown West or FiDi all of which are miserable places to walk through.
It’s not just NY. I spent a few months living in São Paulo (Pinheiros and Jardin’s) which does exactly what Alon suggests - big towers near subway stations that are spaced far apart often with awkward tiny buildings next to them and fall off in density a kilometer or so away. Also miserable.
What the spiky housing near trains theory fails to address is that ultimately housing is for people to have lives. And there is a scale at which life is comfortable - it’s like the East Village, like Miraflores in Lima, like Ximending in Taipei.
If we reduce the problem to people per square meter and transit carrying capacity problem we can theoretically make space for people but I’m not so sure they’ll want to live in them.
It is really hard for me to believe that it would be better to push past the 5-7 story mark instead of just trying to spread the 5-7 story housing zoning wider.
If I haven’t convinced you yet, consider this - if you brought the greater NY area to the density of the East Village it could fit over 370 million people or roughly the entire population of the United States.
So yeah, no towers please.
The Netherlands is one of the most dense regions in the world. But it doesn't feel like it -- at all. It is human-scale.
We don't have to sacrifice our humanity or quality of life. There is plenty of room.
I think the author's point is to build more density along existing lines. Many stops in Queens and Brooklyn already have 3-5 storey development around them. Thus, build higher in those areas.
I agree that 3-5 storey development is a nice density for living in (I choose to myself). But practically speaking, spreading that zone wider in NYC, without any sort of transit plan, is not possible.
You might not like walking through it, but I think Long Island City is a success story for this model. Thousands of workers, who otherwise would've been driving up rent in Manhattan, decide to live near the LIC transit hub in high rises, and I think the city as a whole is better off because of it.
I do wonder which is harder: changing zoning laws in Gramercy and the West Village or fixing capacity problems on the F/G/NQR or LIRR
I've never been to NY. What makes those parts miserable?
While urban lifestyles are becoming more fashionable in the US, growth is higher in the suburbs[1]. Whether this is because suburbs are the only option for people moving to new cities (as urban cores become "full"), or because Americans (including millennials) are much more comfortable with suburban lifestyles than they are given credit for is up for debate. But to speak as if a sharp turn towards public transit based cityscapes is America's fait accompli betrays a serious lack of understanding of the country and it's people as they currently are.
[1]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/24/big-cit...
There is also this statement:
> It’s not even an imposition. It’s opportunity. People can live in high-quality housing with access to extensive social as well as job networks
Here's the author is saying that "high-quality" housing and social network is supposedly stronger in urban areas. With regards to housing quality, I think the urban/suburban quality is highly debatable. In terms of social network as well, I think this is probably most true in the context of "professional network". Many people move to more suburban or rural areas precisely because of feelings of alienation and lack of personal connection traditionally associated with large urban areas. This has been remarked on by social observers for well over a century.
The most ironic thing about this whole post though is that it gives no credence to how the "future" predicted by the '90s kind of won: The Internet has made many professional and communication opportunities available to people wherever they may live. While we might not live in that IBM commercial version of an anonymized future where "The Internet does not care if you are X", we do live in a world where the internet has disseminated many of the traditional benefits of cities (and "civilization") to wherever a person may live. Knowledge, education, communication, art, work: all of these are much easier to obtain outside of cities now, and that has massively factored into why our current "future" has allowed that demographic shift into the suburbs to continue.
This is really underselling the simple fact that our federal dollars still heavily subsidize suburban development at the expense of urban amenities and development patterns. Most of the rapidly growing cities haven't actually built any expansions of transit capacity or coverage since they hit their growth spurts over the past few decades, and the housing supply hasn't kept up either. If it's functionally illegal to build urban capacity you're not going to get urban development. It's a much simpler story than grandiose tales about how the internet obviates the need for human interaction.
The idea that a social network is better or of a higher quality simply because there are more bodies around you is a false premise. This sweeps aside the idea that people may prefer a lower density social network where each party mutually seeks another out as opposed to forced through proximity.
You would really need to conduct surveys questioning where people want to live versus where they do live before it's possible to understand current state and likely future trends. I have a suspicion that most people would rather live in a different place, but have had to compromise because the place they have in mind doesn't exist. Not that it couldn't exist, just that today it doesn't because <circumstances>.
From just observing people's personal anecdotes about where they'd like to live, I've noticed a few common situations:
- Folks trying to find a way to host a growing family in a dense urban setting (examples in this thread). They often end up in suburbia, and endure soul-sucking commutes.
- Young single high-earning professionals that want to live in a remote/rural/setting. They often just stay in the city while pining for the fjords as a kind of long-term early retirement plan.
- Retirees that want to live in dense urban places with great public transport and medical facilities. They're simply priced out of this for the most part.
> "The status anxieties of Basil Fawlty types who either can’t or won’t adapt to a world that has little use for their prejudices are not a serious public concern."
This is exactly what Urban Planning is concerned with. If Urban Planning ignores a subset of people as they are not a serious public concern (hint: they are), is it really building a future for people? Or a future designed to optimize moving cargo (people?) around...
Given the authors biography, frequent relocation amongst expensive, elite international cities, this is not surprising. The fact that the author ended up settling in Paris, however, is very funny.
What patronising guff. Some people love city living, a lot can't stand it. You may be happy to live without a back yard and without your own space, that doesn't mean that we all will, nor does it mean that many of those already in cities aren't already compromising.
Yes, let's build train networks. No, let's not pretend that means everyone will be happy to live in a box ten floors up, or that this is somehow inevitable.
You are welcome of course to continue living that way, but I wish you luck affording it once society chooses to price those externalities in.
I commute into a city by train a couple of times a week, working remotely otherwise, and don't drive all that much at other times, so your stereotypical assumptions here don't really count for much.
It's historically rare for people to accept a reduction in convenience, or quality of life. Even then it's only a reduction as a trade off for other improvements.
If we are talking about future mass transit, I'd expect it to look more like a larger version of Uber pool. Where a destination is entered into a smartphone, and transit mode selection is handled in the background. Something along the lines of smart buses combined with micro mobility.
The future of transit appears to be headed towards the smartphones and e-bikes, not the train station.