I am, as you know, terribly frustrated with (some) (online) YIMBY people. I think the guys who make up a prominent slice of the YIMBY public face need to decide if they want to be a rude hippie-punching online irony cult or part of a political movement that will necessarily include people they don’t like. But I don’t want to constantly react to YIMBY content negatively, as this country desperately needs regulatory and zoning reform that makes building easier and less expensive, along with robust public investment in housing as we inch closer towards a world where housing is fully decommodified. So to be more positive here’s a pro-housing abundance messages that I wish was a little more prominent: higher housing density can actually protect the undeveloped spaces that make the country more verdant and beautiful. Increased density in higher-density places reduces building in America’s beautiful low-density places. This is good substantively and politically. We just have to be strategic and value housing affordability itself rather than engage in the maximalist pro-construction rhetoric that’s too common.
I study urban ecology, and one of the fascinating but poorly understood phenomena in my field is deurbanization. There are dozens of medium-sized cities in the US and hundreds of smaller cities that have declined in population in the last several decades, with previously-thriving downtowns and nearby neighborhoods that are in dire condition. If we could make these places desirable with a diversity of housing types, then it could really change the situation. A win-win is building dense or dense-ish housing but not just in NYC, Seattle, and SF. I read Matt Yglesias' "One Billion Americans" and thought it was weakly argued and flippant about obvious criticisms of its central thesis. However, two ideas stuck out as potentially beneficial: 1) relocating national agencies (USDA, FDA, etc etc) out of the DC area and scattering them around the country in smaller cities, and perhaps regionalizing them much more than is currently done; and 2) granting visas to immigrants that are region specific (i.e. you get a visa to live in Rochester, NY for 10 years and then can apply for citizenship). Trump tried #1 as kind of an anti-government punishment for the USDA, but done well it could work just fine. A version of #2 already exists for overseas physicians that are willing to work in rural hospitals. A new round of land-grant universities in struggling small- to medium-sized cities might also be useful. The regional rural campuses are struggling and will start to close or be combined with others, but might find new life in these forgotten cities. Revitalizing these pre-existing urban areas takes a lot of pressure off less-dense areas. Many people would love to have a nice Victorian single-family home in a cute downtown of a small thriving city rather than an ugly Toll Brothers piece of garbage built on a former farm field or clearcut area with no trees or amenities.
Aesthetics 100% matter, are these fools out of their minds? Homes are not just places you sleep and shower in, they are where you LIVE. People need places they can feel comfortable, secure and feel happy in. For many of us, we need green spaces. We need trees, grass, gardens etc. I don't care how cheap it was, you couldn't get me to live n a bare bones, concrete building with nothing to offer. With density there needs to be true neighborhood scaping and care. I lived in Philly for ten years, its remarkably dirty and entire neighborhoods have 0 trees. Its honestly a depressing and stark way to live.
If you want the kind of people who currently prefer to live in low-density suburbs or rural areas to want to live in denser urban areas (or at least accept the necessity of doing so), the biggest thing you'll have to address is the unpleasantness of living close to other people, a small but significant percentage of which are statistically guaranteed (in the US, anyway) to be antisocial jerks with little consideration for others. In other words, you'll have to address the perception among suburban types that cities are lawless shitholes. As far as I can tell, this will require the kind of aggressive broken-windows policing that the left currently sees as evil.
Many people have heard about the studies that show that conservatives tend to have a higher "disgust response" than liberals. I think it's entirely possible and likely that people who currently live in suburbs are choosing to do so because they find things like trash on the streets, graffiti, panhandlers, homeless encampments, human feces on the sidewalk, open-air drug use, etc. to be deeply disturbing phenomena (that progressive urbanites either don't care about, or somehow actually think makes a city have more "character" than suburbs). I also once heard somebody say that if a libertarian's primary axis of concern is freedom versus coercion, and a progressive's primary axis of concern is expression versus oppression, than a conservative's primary axis of concern is order versus chaos. Cities seem like chaos to suburbanites.
The most common response to almost every other objection in the other comments on this post has been "this isn't a problem in Europe", to which I say "Great! If you can figure out how to make Americans more like Europeans, I'll be happy to live close to more of them."
Also, none of this is racist dog-whistling. I live in the PNW and there's plenty of anti-social, mentally deranged white people openly smoking fentanyl on the sidewalks in downtown Portland I don't want to live next to either.
"And so often they say, 'that’s stupid, they shouldn’t care about crime.'"
Maybe it has to do with the stereotypical rural/suburban vs. urban political divide, but I think many leftists don't understand just how abnormal big-city crime seems to many centrists and conservatives. I grew up in a suburban-ish city where muggings and public gun violence basically didn't happen. I would read about people getting shot or robbed in broad daylight in places like NYC and Chicago, and it felt like civic order must have completely broken down in those places for such things to even be possible. The first time a teenager was arrested for bringing a gun to the park where I'd played as a kid, it was deeply unsettling, in part because it made me wonder if my town was about to go the same route as those bigger cities.
Now I live in a more urban area with much higher crime rates, and while I haven't exactly made my peace with kids bringing guns to school or killing each other in the street, it rolls off my back more than it used to. I understand that the people doing the shooting are mostly shooting at each other, and that I probably don't have much to worry about if I stay away from certain areas at certain times. I want to do something about it, and help the people affected by those cycles of violence, but high crime no longer feels like the ONLY thing we should be worried about in order to prevent complete civic breakdown.
I can almost feel some commenters gearing up to tell me that I was a sheltered, privileged snowflake for being so touchy about a few muggings, and they might even be right, but that's just shooting the messenger. The point is that Freddie is correct: many people really care about crime, on a much more visceral level than some leftists seem to understand. Rightly or wrongly, reading about high crime elsewhere (let alone in their own towns), and then hearing leftists say "Fuck the police. Only losers and racists worry about crime", makes those people--many of whom live in swing states!--less likely to join liberal/left coalitions. And, to bring it back around to Freddie's main point, it makes them more likely to go ultra-NIMBY with regard to low-income housing and higher population densities in their towns. They equate those urban characteristics with higher crime, and they think they're being asked to give up not just their "neighborhood character" but their safety as well.
When I encounter people who are dismissive of open spaces having value I immediately start to avoid them because they are sociopaths incapable of perceiving beauty or experiencing happiness. I think this is a pretty normal reaction in the USA.
Does this vision take into consideration people raising families? If your household is one or two people, that is a very different set of considerations from life with several kids (and even grandparents).
For example, grocery stores within walking distance mean little if you are shopping for the week for seven. If you need to buy more than you can carry home, then you are driving, and the difference between a two-minute drive and a ten-minute drive isn't going to factor in. For working parents, grocery shopping multiple times a week is incredibly costly when time is at a premium.
Even density itself is viewed differently depending on your household. A low density suburban neighborhood where you know almost all your neighbors and has very few random strangers walking around has much more intrinsic appeal when you have children. Likewise, easy access to a vibrant nightlife has less value when you have children.
FWIW, I think you have the hippie-punching thing backwards. YIMBYs are culturally aligned with the left but need to do the hippie-punching to build their coalition with the types of people who actually hold power in cities.
On the whole, the bigger problem for YIMBY is lots of YIMBYs want to put their effort into alleviating esoteric leftist concerns (public housing, free transit) rather than normie concerns like parking, traffic, and crime.
When I see that photo of Inland Empire, somewhere in the background, the rap hit "Developer's Paradise" is playing in the background...
More seriously, there's a subtle fallacy about density leading to wilder spaces remaining wild.
Of course it's entirely true, that for the same # of people, if some are diverted into denser places than they would otherwise, the less dense places will see smaller population increases and relatively less development.
The problem however is that for places to remain wild or to regain wilderness, virtually no one can develop there. This is a case where absolutes matter, and 'relative' is mostly irrelevant. We know this through studies that find that biodiversity drops just about everywhere within 10km of a road, even with no dwellings.
The best way to slow down the loss of wild places is not density, but decreasing human population (although both is even better). Absent a fall in population, to preserve biodiversity, among other things, we have to prohibit development across large tracts of land, and even de-populate some low-density rural areas.
Why do desirable neighborhoods have to be so scarce? When did we stop building places people actually like living? The most desirable and expensive places to live are usually walkable urban neighborhoods that urbanized organically before automobiles became common, that have a good intermingling of housing, commercial services, third spaces (cafes/pubs/libraries) and natural open space/parks. Not only are there very few of these neighborhoods in the US, we have virtually stopped creating any more of them. Now we prefer to build sprawling car-dependent socially-alienating exurban subdivisions that lock-in poor land use for decades. If these places do have any kind of mixed-use walkability, it is master planned and sterile. That makes the desirable neighborhoods an extremely scarce resource destined to get more and more expensive. We absolutely have to think about revitalizing the older neighborhoods in our secondary and tertiary cities, upzoning some of our suburbs, and, when we do build out new areas, think about building the kind of places that will become desirable neighborhoods down the road.
"Some people won’t be happy until Park Slope looks like Hudson Yards"
This is one thing that I find infuriating. Neighborhoods like PS are a magnificent showcase for how appealing density can be. If we made a lot more of them across the country we would be in great shape. And yet YIMBYs want to destroy it.
Most people do not want to live in high-density housing. It works for young people, but families need space. High density living isn't natural. It isn't good. Yes, smart designs can incorporate shared green space, but no private space is a problem for many people and can make a person go insane... literally.
We need more housing development of all types.
One point that we ignore is immigration. We have been flooded with 10-15 million new illegal immigrants over the last decade. Add that to the 20 million already here. The elite ruling class wants their cheap house cleaners... while they also agitate as the most aggressive NIMBYs. California, for example, is short about 2 million housing units... about the same number of recent illegal immigrants estimated to live in the state.
We keep allowing millions of new people in while making housing development more costly and impossible and then act surprised when our homeless population explodes.
I think that the most frustrating findings with YIMBY folks is that they see racism where it often doesn't exist. Calling a NIMBY racist just ends the conversation and all productive discussion is gone. I live in a nice suburb in a big house. Not wanting a 300 unit apartment complex in my backyard isn't about brown and black, but green ($$$). It would destroy my property value. I don't think I am wrong to care about that. As Freddie points out, if you can't meet me on that issue, then nothing productive can be accomplished. I have no qualms with building higher density housing downtown, and even seeing some government regulations loosened to allow this to happen.
You smuggle a huge idea into a throwaway parenthetical: "(I do think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to be picked in terms of broadening people’s idea of desirable housing.)" I think that fruit is much higher up in the tree than you do, though I do agree it's well worth the picking.
I grew up in the 60s in an LA suburb. We were a family of four living in a VA financed 1000 square foot, 3 bedroom house. I had a very fortunate neighborhood to grow up in, and while cars were a necessary part of that lifestyle, I can still remember the names and families of our neighbors there, as well as many of our adventures, not to mention my own formative experiences.
That was a normal house size then, but our expectations have grown exponentially. Today a family that size would expect 2-3,000 square feet or so, a two or three car garage, a generous yard, and much more than we could have dreamed of.
By contrast, my niece is now living in a Brooklyn apartment by herself that's a bit larger than the house her mother and I grew up in, and she was so glad to move there from her smaller, shared place in Chelsea. She doesn't have a car and doesn't want one, but boy is that space important to her.
Our expectations for the size of our homes is exactly the thing I think we'd want to broaden (as you say), but I think that's going to be a very heavy lift. Your experience in Brooklyn is a good example. I don't know how big your new house will be, but the picture of your current kitchen shows the problem. While my mom's kitchen wasn't much bigger, the house we next moved into had a much more comfortable kitchen (this was in the '70s), our bedrooms were bigger, and we had a fancy (for the time) living room apart from the family room.
That's closer to the homes most people then grew up in, and their kids couldn't imagine much less. It's going to be hard to get them to expect less space like that, which also includes walk-in closets and en suite bathrooms, practically necessities in new homes now.
I agree with just about everything else in the article, but I think the size and scope of current housing expectations is maybe a bigger problem than you do, and it will likely take a couple of generations or so to change.
I agree with almost everything you say here Freddie, except for one not-so-little thing: the uniquely American dream of having the suburban mini-estate as the ideal way of life.
Partly because of our history as a late-comer to populating their continent (only talking about non-natives here, the indigenous aspect is another matter), a transportation system overwhelmingly favoring cars, as well as massive post-WW2 suburban planning, a lot of Americans tend to have this insatiable desire for that suburban ideal. The 3-4 bedroom house, with attached garage, green grass and trees surrounding, and a nice backyard patio or even pool to top it off.
I think THAT is a major part of the problem, everyone wants their own mini-estate...even a lot of people living in cities, I would bet, would choose that if they could afford it. I mean, when everyone talks about the good ole' times of America's greatness (not Donald's version here!) it almost always involves images of those zero-crime picturesque suburbs for miles and miles. Granted they were mostly white, but that's a whole 'nother matter I'm not going to get into here.
I think America's infatuation with the suburban ideal is not something that can easily be excised from our own expectations of what it means to live the 'good life' in this country. I mean, we can't even get quality interstate rail in this country (or even poor quality in some cases). And since suburban sprawl goes hand in hand with automobile primacy, what makes us think we can ever fix our housing issues without a massive rethinking on what a good life is here in America?
Unfortunately, the U.S. just doesn't do regional planning, except in a few select areas, like Portland, OR (and even there the state line means Washington is free to sprawl). So I'm not sure what method exists to link densification of cities with controlling suburban sprawl boundaries.
That said, it's important to note that the classic super-low density exurban sprawl doesn't happen everywhere. In areas like metro NYC it's basically dead, since you have to go all the way out to the Poconos to find undeveloped land where NIMBYs haven't locked it into perpetual backcountry. I'd even argue that in cases like the Inland Empire aerial you posted, it's not the worst case, since even though it's unwalkable car-dependent SFH, it's still pretty dense, and probably has some semi-attached units thrown in as well. The worst sprawl tends to happen in the Midwest, where there's perpetually cheap rural land available on the fringes of cities, along with always being another tranche of homeowners who are uncomfortable with the percentage of black children rising to an unacceptable X% in the local schools.
A Housing Abundance Movement Can Help Save America's Wild Spaces
I study urban ecology, and one of the fascinating but poorly understood phenomena in my field is deurbanization. There are dozens of medium-sized cities in the US and hundreds of smaller cities that have declined in population in the last several decades, with previously-thriving downtowns and nearby neighborhoods that are in dire condition. If we could make these places desirable with a diversity of housing types, then it could really change the situation. A win-win is building dense or dense-ish housing but not just in NYC, Seattle, and SF. I read Matt Yglesias' "One Billion Americans" and thought it was weakly argued and flippant about obvious criticisms of its central thesis. However, two ideas stuck out as potentially beneficial: 1) relocating national agencies (USDA, FDA, etc etc) out of the DC area and scattering them around the country in smaller cities, and perhaps regionalizing them much more than is currently done; and 2) granting visas to immigrants that are region specific (i.e. you get a visa to live in Rochester, NY for 10 years and then can apply for citizenship). Trump tried #1 as kind of an anti-government punishment for the USDA, but done well it could work just fine. A version of #2 already exists for overseas physicians that are willing to work in rural hospitals. A new round of land-grant universities in struggling small- to medium-sized cities might also be useful. The regional rural campuses are struggling and will start to close or be combined with others, but might find new life in these forgotten cities. Revitalizing these pre-existing urban areas takes a lot of pressure off less-dense areas. Many people would love to have a nice Victorian single-family home in a cute downtown of a small thriving city rather than an ugly Toll Brothers piece of garbage built on a former farm field or clearcut area with no trees or amenities.
Aesthetics 100% matter, are these fools out of their minds? Homes are not just places you sleep and shower in, they are where you LIVE. People need places they can feel comfortable, secure and feel happy in. For many of us, we need green spaces. We need trees, grass, gardens etc. I don't care how cheap it was, you couldn't get me to live n a bare bones, concrete building with nothing to offer. With density there needs to be true neighborhood scaping and care. I lived in Philly for ten years, its remarkably dirty and entire neighborhoods have 0 trees. Its honestly a depressing and stark way to live.
If you want the kind of people who currently prefer to live in low-density suburbs or rural areas to want to live in denser urban areas (or at least accept the necessity of doing so), the biggest thing you'll have to address is the unpleasantness of living close to other people, a small but significant percentage of which are statistically guaranteed (in the US, anyway) to be antisocial jerks with little consideration for others. In other words, you'll have to address the perception among suburban types that cities are lawless shitholes. As far as I can tell, this will require the kind of aggressive broken-windows policing that the left currently sees as evil.
Many people have heard about the studies that show that conservatives tend to have a higher "disgust response" than liberals. I think it's entirely possible and likely that people who currently live in suburbs are choosing to do so because they find things like trash on the streets, graffiti, panhandlers, homeless encampments, human feces on the sidewalk, open-air drug use, etc. to be deeply disturbing phenomena (that progressive urbanites either don't care about, or somehow actually think makes a city have more "character" than suburbs). I also once heard somebody say that if a libertarian's primary axis of concern is freedom versus coercion, and a progressive's primary axis of concern is expression versus oppression, than a conservative's primary axis of concern is order versus chaos. Cities seem like chaos to suburbanites.
The most common response to almost every other objection in the other comments on this post has been "this isn't a problem in Europe", to which I say "Great! If you can figure out how to make Americans more like Europeans, I'll be happy to live close to more of them."
Also, none of this is racist dog-whistling. I live in the PNW and there's plenty of anti-social, mentally deranged white people openly smoking fentanyl on the sidewalks in downtown Portland I don't want to live next to either.
"And so often they say, 'that’s stupid, they shouldn’t care about crime.'"
Maybe it has to do with the stereotypical rural/suburban vs. urban political divide, but I think many leftists don't understand just how abnormal big-city crime seems to many centrists and conservatives. I grew up in a suburban-ish city where muggings and public gun violence basically didn't happen. I would read about people getting shot or robbed in broad daylight in places like NYC and Chicago, and it felt like civic order must have completely broken down in those places for such things to even be possible. The first time a teenager was arrested for bringing a gun to the park where I'd played as a kid, it was deeply unsettling, in part because it made me wonder if my town was about to go the same route as those bigger cities.
Now I live in a more urban area with much higher crime rates, and while I haven't exactly made my peace with kids bringing guns to school or killing each other in the street, it rolls off my back more than it used to. I understand that the people doing the shooting are mostly shooting at each other, and that I probably don't have much to worry about if I stay away from certain areas at certain times. I want to do something about it, and help the people affected by those cycles of violence, but high crime no longer feels like the ONLY thing we should be worried about in order to prevent complete civic breakdown.
I can almost feel some commenters gearing up to tell me that I was a sheltered, privileged snowflake for being so touchy about a few muggings, and they might even be right, but that's just shooting the messenger. The point is that Freddie is correct: many people really care about crime, on a much more visceral level than some leftists seem to understand. Rightly or wrongly, reading about high crime elsewhere (let alone in their own towns), and then hearing leftists say "Fuck the police. Only losers and racists worry about crime", makes those people--many of whom live in swing states!--less likely to join liberal/left coalitions. And, to bring it back around to Freddie's main point, it makes them more likely to go ultra-NIMBY with regard to low-income housing and higher population densities in their towns. They equate those urban characteristics with higher crime, and they think they're being asked to give up not just their "neighborhood character" but their safety as well.
When I encounter people who are dismissive of open spaces having value I immediately start to avoid them because they are sociopaths incapable of perceiving beauty or experiencing happiness. I think this is a pretty normal reaction in the USA.
Does this vision take into consideration people raising families? If your household is one or two people, that is a very different set of considerations from life with several kids (and even grandparents).
For example, grocery stores within walking distance mean little if you are shopping for the week for seven. If you need to buy more than you can carry home, then you are driving, and the difference between a two-minute drive and a ten-minute drive isn't going to factor in. For working parents, grocery shopping multiple times a week is incredibly costly when time is at a premium.
Even density itself is viewed differently depending on your household. A low density suburban neighborhood where you know almost all your neighbors and has very few random strangers walking around has much more intrinsic appeal when you have children. Likewise, easy access to a vibrant nightlife has less value when you have children.
FWIW, I think you have the hippie-punching thing backwards. YIMBYs are culturally aligned with the left but need to do the hippie-punching to build their coalition with the types of people who actually hold power in cities.
On the whole, the bigger problem for YIMBY is lots of YIMBYs want to put their effort into alleviating esoteric leftist concerns (public housing, free transit) rather than normie concerns like parking, traffic, and crime.
This doesn't work because if you get a good college degree you aren't allowed to leave liberal-approved blue cities or you're an apostate.
When I see that photo of Inland Empire, somewhere in the background, the rap hit "Developer's Paradise" is playing in the background...
More seriously, there's a subtle fallacy about density leading to wilder spaces remaining wild.
Of course it's entirely true, that for the same # of people, if some are diverted into denser places than they would otherwise, the less dense places will see smaller population increases and relatively less development.
The problem however is that for places to remain wild or to regain wilderness, virtually no one can develop there. This is a case where absolutes matter, and 'relative' is mostly irrelevant. We know this through studies that find that biodiversity drops just about everywhere within 10km of a road, even with no dwellings.
The best way to slow down the loss of wild places is not density, but decreasing human population (although both is even better). Absent a fall in population, to preserve biodiversity, among other things, we have to prohibit development across large tracts of land, and even de-populate some low-density rural areas.
Why do desirable neighborhoods have to be so scarce? When did we stop building places people actually like living? The most desirable and expensive places to live are usually walkable urban neighborhoods that urbanized organically before automobiles became common, that have a good intermingling of housing, commercial services, third spaces (cafes/pubs/libraries) and natural open space/parks. Not only are there very few of these neighborhoods in the US, we have virtually stopped creating any more of them. Now we prefer to build sprawling car-dependent socially-alienating exurban subdivisions that lock-in poor land use for decades. If these places do have any kind of mixed-use walkability, it is master planned and sterile. That makes the desirable neighborhoods an extremely scarce resource destined to get more and more expensive. We absolutely have to think about revitalizing the older neighborhoods in our secondary and tertiary cities, upzoning some of our suburbs, and, when we do build out new areas, think about building the kind of places that will become desirable neighborhoods down the road.
"Some people won’t be happy until Park Slope looks like Hudson Yards"
This is one thing that I find infuriating. Neighborhoods like PS are a magnificent showcase for how appealing density can be. If we made a lot more of them across the country we would be in great shape. And yet YIMBYs want to destroy it.
Most people do not want to live in high-density housing. It works for young people, but families need space. High density living isn't natural. It isn't good. Yes, smart designs can incorporate shared green space, but no private space is a problem for many people and can make a person go insane... literally.
We need more housing development of all types.
One point that we ignore is immigration. We have been flooded with 10-15 million new illegal immigrants over the last decade. Add that to the 20 million already here. The elite ruling class wants their cheap house cleaners... while they also agitate as the most aggressive NIMBYs. California, for example, is short about 2 million housing units... about the same number of recent illegal immigrants estimated to live in the state.
We keep allowing millions of new people in while making housing development more costly and impossible and then act surprised when our homeless population explodes.
I think that the most frustrating findings with YIMBY folks is that they see racism where it often doesn't exist. Calling a NIMBY racist just ends the conversation and all productive discussion is gone. I live in a nice suburb in a big house. Not wanting a 300 unit apartment complex in my backyard isn't about brown and black, but green ($$$). It would destroy my property value. I don't think I am wrong to care about that. As Freddie points out, if you can't meet me on that issue, then nothing productive can be accomplished. I have no qualms with building higher density housing downtown, and even seeing some government regulations loosened to allow this to happen.
You smuggle a huge idea into a throwaway parenthetical: "(I do think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to be picked in terms of broadening people’s idea of desirable housing.)" I think that fruit is much higher up in the tree than you do, though I do agree it's well worth the picking.
I grew up in the 60s in an LA suburb. We were a family of four living in a VA financed 1000 square foot, 3 bedroom house. I had a very fortunate neighborhood to grow up in, and while cars were a necessary part of that lifestyle, I can still remember the names and families of our neighbors there, as well as many of our adventures, not to mention my own formative experiences.
That was a normal house size then, but our expectations have grown exponentially. Today a family that size would expect 2-3,000 square feet or so, a two or three car garage, a generous yard, and much more than we could have dreamed of.
By contrast, my niece is now living in a Brooklyn apartment by herself that's a bit larger than the house her mother and I grew up in, and she was so glad to move there from her smaller, shared place in Chelsea. She doesn't have a car and doesn't want one, but boy is that space important to her.
Our expectations for the size of our homes is exactly the thing I think we'd want to broaden (as you say), but I think that's going to be a very heavy lift. Your experience in Brooklyn is a good example. I don't know how big your new house will be, but the picture of your current kitchen shows the problem. While my mom's kitchen wasn't much bigger, the house we next moved into had a much more comfortable kitchen (this was in the '70s), our bedrooms were bigger, and we had a fancy (for the time) living room apart from the family room.
That's closer to the homes most people then grew up in, and their kids couldn't imagine much less. It's going to be hard to get them to expect less space like that, which also includes walk-in closets and en suite bathrooms, practically necessities in new homes now.
I agree with just about everything else in the article, but I think the size and scope of current housing expectations is maybe a bigger problem than you do, and it will likely take a couple of generations or so to change.
I agree with almost everything you say here Freddie, except for one not-so-little thing: the uniquely American dream of having the suburban mini-estate as the ideal way of life.
Partly because of our history as a late-comer to populating their continent (only talking about non-natives here, the indigenous aspect is another matter), a transportation system overwhelmingly favoring cars, as well as massive post-WW2 suburban planning, a lot of Americans tend to have this insatiable desire for that suburban ideal. The 3-4 bedroom house, with attached garage, green grass and trees surrounding, and a nice backyard patio or even pool to top it off.
I think THAT is a major part of the problem, everyone wants their own mini-estate...even a lot of people living in cities, I would bet, would choose that if they could afford it. I mean, when everyone talks about the good ole' times of America's greatness (not Donald's version here!) it almost always involves images of those zero-crime picturesque suburbs for miles and miles. Granted they were mostly white, but that's a whole 'nother matter I'm not going to get into here.
I think America's infatuation with the suburban ideal is not something that can easily be excised from our own expectations of what it means to live the 'good life' in this country. I mean, we can't even get quality interstate rail in this country (or even poor quality in some cases). And since suburban sprawl goes hand in hand with automobile primacy, what makes us think we can ever fix our housing issues without a massive rethinking on what a good life is here in America?
Unfortunately, the U.S. just doesn't do regional planning, except in a few select areas, like Portland, OR (and even there the state line means Washington is free to sprawl). So I'm not sure what method exists to link densification of cities with controlling suburban sprawl boundaries.
That said, it's important to note that the classic super-low density exurban sprawl doesn't happen everywhere. In areas like metro NYC it's basically dead, since you have to go all the way out to the Poconos to find undeveloped land where NIMBYs haven't locked it into perpetual backcountry. I'd even argue that in cases like the Inland Empire aerial you posted, it's not the worst case, since even though it's unwalkable car-dependent SFH, it's still pretty dense, and probably has some semi-attached units thrown in as well. The worst sprawl tends to happen in the Midwest, where there's perpetually cheap rural land available on the fringes of cities, along with always being another tranche of homeowners who are uncomfortable with the percentage of black children rising to an unacceptable X% in the local schools.