To actually answer your question if anyone is wondering in good faith, many YIMBYs believe the market alone will fix housing issues if enough private housing is built. Left YIMBYs believe that supply is important but cannot solve the housing crisis alone. We support increased private building and improved/expanded government programs (subsidized housing, affordable housing, better shelter programs, etc.). In broad strokes.
Eh...we're at a 1%/y growth rate, and still on track for 10b total by 2050.
Putin would only hit the launch button if he was cornered and out of options, he ain't gonna risk global stone age just for a slice of land in the southern steppes.
Yes, but vacant doesn't generally mean what people think it means. Those figures include apartments that are going on the market at the moment but which will be quickly filled. It's a myth that there are tens of thousands of apartments just sitting empty all the time. Although there are companies that hold apartments for occasional use and a lot of rich people with pied a terres, so there's inefficiency there.
It is good and important for a housing market to have some amount of vacant stock. It would be extremely difficult to move into an area, or move within an area, if you had to coordinate that move with another individual who wanted to move out of the home you were looking to rent/buy. Others have done the analysis to determine what a healthy % of stock should be vacant, I'm sure. I'm also quite sure most American cities are below that healthy %.
"I find resistance to such new building misguided, those of us who want to build more have to acknowledge that it’s an ugly thing if rich white people can keep new developments off their block but poor people of color can’t."
The emphasis on the whole piece was on market power of wealth, and then you somehow stealth identity into it. Do you think that rich people are going to act fundamentally differently based on race?
... I think that race and class are inherently and deeply intertwined and that we have special responsibility to observe and respond to racial inequities as well as inequities of class
Right, because a lot of things that currently present (rightly) as class based, have their origins in race-based policies. See: where they decided to put the town dump in my little southern college town 50 years ago. Continues to affect economics of different neighborhoods all these years later.
I went to college in Vancouver Canada in the late 70s/ early 80s when a middle class family still had some hope of buying a condo or home and my rent for a one bedroom was $310 per month. Now nearing retirement, I can't afford to go back as average rents of one bedroom units are north of $2,000 and average house prices are well north of a million bucks. There is no way i could afford to live there! People have just pushed too much of their income into housing as an "investment" for it to be affordable as a place to live...
A family member just moved to Vancouver (from the Bay Area, lucky for them that means they already had an astronomically expensive place), and paid millions for their little condo. Who can do that, unless they are coming from another expensive location where they were able to buy something long ago?
I sure can't. I'm in small town Ohio now with a great fully paid off 4 bedroom house. However, it's full price wouldn't cover a down payment on a small condo in Vancouver...
I live in a Philly rowhome on a block of rowhomes. Personally I love living in a rowhome and enjoy having my own private outdoor space, and I love passing my neighbors sitting on the steps. A block over, there are three apartment/condo buildings. All 3 of them were built after I moved in. The density doesn't affect the character of the neighborhood at all, imo. It makes parking harder, but I rarely drive. The added population adds amenities to the area. Likewise that block pictured would be just as idyllic imo if there were an apartment building right out of frame.
In my experience, when neighbors lament the change of "neighborhood character", they're just resentful that new people are moving in, period. Younger, different politics, more or less affluent, etc. And of course the parking issue which is behind like 90% of politics in this city. I don't really think it's an argument worth engaging with. But I do wish there were more of a left-YIMBY movement. We exist but many of the most prominent voices are pretty moderate.
Reliable, frequent, and safe buses, subways, trolleys, plus a car share program and we're talking. I'll allow taxis but taxis and ubers contribute a ton to congestion and air pollution.
"And we have to find ways to build that aren’t purely free market solutions, as I’m simply not convinced market forces in and of themselves will compel building at the scale that we need."
10000%. YIMBYism is insufficient on its own; we need to create massive amounts of new social housing (in mixed-income buildings to avoid the creation of slums).
Toronto is doing it too, for the minimal amount of new social housing it's building. The problem is that the scale isn't nearly enough to match the need.
New social housing builds in Canada fell off a cliff in the mid-90s (see this graph: https://twitter.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969) because the federal government, who is the most able to financially bear the costs of building, didn't want to be responsible for it anymore, and made it the provinces' problem, who then made it the municipalities' problem, who have the least ability to raise money.
Most YIMBYs I know would see the Brownstones as high density housing. The comparator is not high rise blocks but single family houses. Terraced (in UK terms don't know US term here) 6 story buildings are high density.
Look at the Eixample district of Barcelona - very high density (highest in Europe I think?) but a desirable walkable place to live. I would argue that the very fact the brownstones are walkable neighbourhoods shows they are high density.
I cannot find it now, but I have seen some claims that 6-8 story buildings offer the best density as they do not need the space around them or support services high rises do.
Absolutely right. In a nation that claims to hate density, Brooklyn's brownstone neighborhoods are almost universally beloved. A peerless living example of how density can be great. Just as Barcelona is. They are the perfect advertisement for why the US should revive all of its historic row house cities and build new ones. How short sighted to tear them down for supposedly being not dense enough.
Brooklyn's brownstones are most definitely not "universally beloved", in that a large fraction of the population would like to live there if they could. Most of us who live in single-family homes in suburban neighborhoods actually like it! There is literally not enough money on the planet to get me to live in a townhouse in any city anywhere.
I said "almost universally beloved." And by that I did not mean that everyone wants to live there, I meant most people can appreciate them on some level or other. Even if just to visit and stroll through.
Sure, it's a nice place to stroll through, but I thought we were discussing it as a place to live. Plenty of people don't like high density, no matter how nice it is, that's why suburbs exist in the first place.
I never said anything disparaging about single-family housing. I'm happy for there to be enough of that for people who want it. The country is full of it. I do think there should also be enough denser housing for people who want townhouse living to get that too.
Also, it's not just living in the house it is doing things at the house like parking a truck, building things in the garage, making a garden, making accessible space for aging relatives. Most of the people I know in SFH are working class & multi-generational.
The modern suburb exists because there was a lot of money to be made selling postwar consumers cars, not because of any inherent preference for the suburbs. 95% of what people say they like about the suburbs can be found at the level of row house density.
One of my favorite facts to pull out is that if San Francisco had the density of that famous hellhole Paris, San Francisco's population would be nearly 2.5 million.
Indeed! The problem with New York on the whole is not Manhattan or the inner parts of Brooklyn and Queens, but the rest of the city. There are vast tracts of single family housing that should be done away with.
This is disingenuous. Park Slope is significantly less dense than, say, the Upper East Side. The question is dense relative to what. Also, YIMBYs constantly use Park Slope as their specific example of a place where existing residents use vetos to prevent new building. And I think you know that.
And yes, Park Slope has some annoying NIMBYs who try to block good projects - that's separate from whether or not Park Slope is, as a neighborhood, a great example of dense urban development, which I think would be the view of the vast majority of market YIMBYs. It's wrong to push the idea that being YIMBY means you'll settle at nothing but skyscrapers. Most of us would be plenty content with Park Slope and Paris.
I don't know anything about Park Slope, but I used to live in Europe. Europe has plenty of wonderful, walkable, public transit cities, very few of which look anything like Manhattan. You can have excellent walkability/density combined with a "human" scale by having 3-4 story high brownstones - that's what most European cities look like.
I can't speak for other environmentalists, but if I were Queen of America, I would turn single family housing into brownstones, not brownstones into ginormous residential towers.
Left YIMBY here. There is a whole other thing that California YIMBYs are doing, which is forcing neighborhoods zoned single family to upzone to allow at least three and sometimes six units per lot. This is at least a start to redress the redlining which historically de jure and now de facto segregated neighborhoods.
There is no way that just more market rate housing in severely housing restricted areas like the Bay Area can make housing affordable for poor and working class people. It *does* help reduce displacement though, which is a good thing, and it helps us in many other ways. Denser housing means less driving, which reduces our carbon footprint. It also lowers housing costs for middle class people, which is pretty important.
Just building more market rate housing won't solve all of our problems, but it will help solve some of them. Here we have inclusionary zoning, so building new housing funds more affordable housing. This is of course a double edged sword, as it builds more affordable housing at the cost of making new construction even more expensive. YIMBYs (Scott Wiener really) have tried to counter this by making new construction that builds more affordable housing get a "density bonus" but it doesn't totally offset the cost.
We are also doing other things to rally for more construction at all price points: we sued various suburbs for illegally trying to block apartment buildings, we came out in force for a homeless shelter in a poor neighborhood and other things. We aren't 100% a neoliberal organization, which is often how we are characterized by our Progressive NIMBY opponents. It's a "big tent" with members all across the political spectrum. 32,000 members and counting. It's a real grass roots movement, albeit with big funding from developers and unions.
Edit: "Progressive" in San Francisco has a different meaning than the usual definition.
The housing crisis in California is a complex problem that has many factors and it’s going to take more than one solution. Market rate housing is one piece of the puzzle. Density and upzoning and subsidized units are also needed. I argue that repealing prop 13 is also a piece. I also think that the university of California should build some new campuses instead of trying to cram more and more kids into the most sought after urban campuses. It’s cruel to admit someone to a place like UCSC or UC Berkeley when there is literally nowhere for them to live, and in turn the students make it nearly impossible for families to find places to live. Either house your students or build more colleges.
Yes and they should do it again somewhere else. And they should stop expanding enrollment, especially at the rate they are doing it, at some of the other campuses. I know how desirable getting into Cal is, heck it’s what I want for my own kids, but if it makes it harder to get in so be it. It will drive up the prestige and the exclusivity of the lower tier UCs and allow the UC system to fulfill its mission of offering an affordable world class education to a broad range of students without trying to do magical math that makes adding tens of thousands of students who need a place to live in cities with an already existing housing deficit add up.
Don't get me wrong, in my perfect world we would tax the hell out of the rich and use it to build mixed income social housing democratically run by the residents.
But this is America and that isn't going to happen.
Brownstone neighborhoods are actually very high-density. You'd be surprised. Certainly by the standards of almost anywhere else in the US. It isn't really close.
"Rich people will pay a whole lot to keep other people out."
This one sentence of yours sums it up pretty well. But I thought your other point about the role the free-market plays in all of this is an important one.
The free-market system is always defended with the same few ideas: maximizes innovation and opportunity, serves the hard rules of supply and demand better than anything else, and is a beast of an engine for wealth generation. But the giant flip side of it is that the free market is completely amoral in nature - it doesn't care about people per say, only in profit. This is the precise reason we have all those zoning and regulation statutes. Obviously they can get wildly out of hand, but they are supposed to keep things honest and fair in an otherwise chaotic and cruel world.
I would agree with you that the free-market is one of the major factors that is making the housing market so lopsided towards low density. If developers can make more money with a handful of wealthy clients than they can with an army of poor...that's a no-brainer in terms of making money. In fact, the free-market system encourages such hard truths. I see this even in my own small town of 50K, affordable housing is rapidly becoming like Tasmanian Devil sightings.
I'm not sure how we got here, it wasn't like this even a few decades ago. But I would guess that America's infatuation with the suburb lifestyle, with all of it's roomy green buffers between every single home, is part of the problem. Because whenever I see video footage of the 'suburbs' in almost every other country, I almost never see the same wide-open spacing betwixt housing like I do here. And this is not even bothering to mention the increasingly large size of our suburban homes, but that is another matter.
Dense metropolitan housing probably has a lot of other issues too, but I don't live there so I can't reliably remark on that.
If you don't like the way the free market distributes housing, we can always turn to the socialist plan, which is thoroughly and thoughtfully worked out here: https://www.____________
Ha ha, no, just kidding! Actually the socialists have no plan at all for how to distribute housing (or do much of anything else). Kind of incredible, 150 years after Marx, but nevertheless true.
The socialist side is the zoning and regulations, and things like low-income housing assistance and public school districting (because that affects housing).
And just like free market capitalism has the potential for insanity, so too does socialism. Neither do well when left to their own devices.
Ah, yes, the old "but who gets to live in Manhattan?" question. The most equitable solution I could come up with involves a lottery, but that starts to sound pretty Soviet. How do you prevent that from being tampered with? I wouldn't explicitly say I'm much of a capitalist, but I do think having to compete for housing with the resources you have is more equitable than some sort of centralized, top-down, planned system. I just wish we had more housing to work with (everywhere, not just in NYC).
> I would agree with you that the free-market is one of the major factors that is making the housing market so lopsided towards low density.
Then why does so much anti-market political power have to be applied in order to keep low density areas as they are? NIMBYism is primarily a political phenomenon, not a market problem. It's nothing new, either. It's just good-old regulatory capture. It's the instinct of every incumbent capitalist to lobby the government to prevent new capital from competing with him. That's all NIMBYism is.
I don't know what anti-market political power you are referring to here, can you elaborate on that for me?
NIMBYism is primarily a human problem. It rests almost entirely on the very human notion that people like to have their nicely spaced mini-estate neighborhoods stay that way. Because it's nicer to live there...nice tree-lined walks at dusk, nice neighborhood parks where your kids can play, nice corner bistro, and nice open skyline with lots of trees around.
In other words, it's a lovely place to live. I really don't know what capitalism itself has to do with that, unless you're strictly talking about resale values. Okay...but you do realize that most people don't just judge a home by its monetary value right? Some people, crazy as it sounds, actually value it on whether or not it's a nice house in a nice neighborhood with a good school district.
I mean, when you look at a random neighborhood, do you really only see capital?
> I don't know what anti-market political power you are referring to here, can you elaborate on that for me?
The main example is the entire concept of use-based zoning. These are regulations (a political construct) that restrict what a market participant would do with a property. Changes to these regulations are of course a political process, and impeded by nimby political power.
I loosely agree with the rest of your comment, but it's neither here nor there. I don't think it's relevant to what I'm saying. All I'm saying is there's economic will and capability to build more housing, and the main reason more doesn't get built is that politics interferes, and interferes in such a way as to help existing capital owners, but hurt consumers and new would-be capital owners.
I have to say it's really weird to read you refer to people as 'capital owners'.
I don't see regulations as a political construct, they are simply rules for fair play...not unlike your typical sports regulations really. I mean, when an neighborhood comes up with some kind of regulation for their area, isn't that just people who live next to each other agreeing to do or not do certain things? Isn't that normal behavior for people living together?
Just because something restricts a market participant does not automatically make that a bad thing. There are all sorts of reasons for restrictions on things, a lot of them good reasons.
> I have to say it's really weird to read you refer to people as 'capital owners'.
Why? A house or any property in general is capital. property owner ==> capital owner.
> I mean, when an neighborhood comes up with some kind of regulation for their area, isn't that just people who live next to each other agreeing to do or not do certain things? Isn't that normal behavior for people living together?
It's completely normal behavior, but it's also politics.
> Just because something restricts a market participant does not automatically make that a bad thing. There are all sorts of reasons for restrictions on things, a lot of them good reasons.
Yeah, I completely agree. I'm not trying to make some generalized argument against all regulations or in favor of any and all free market results.
I think my point with 'capital owners' is that it's not really the least common denominator for households anymore. Most Americans under 50 rent now, and that's only increasing. Whatever capital they have is not in housing.
First, I don't think any kind of real zoning reform is coming to New York. Look at what happened with Hochul's ADU/accessory apartment proposal. It was the weakest of teas and people out here on Long Island freaked the fuck out.
Second, apart from neighborhood character, the majority of people would prefer not to live in a concrete box in the sky. I really enjoy the luxury of twenty feet of air between my walls and my closest neighbors.
> Look at what happened with Hochul's ADU/accessory apartment proposal. It was the weakest of teas and people out here on Long Island freaked the fuck out.
True but a few years ago Hochul wouldn't even have considered putting that on the agenda. NY YIMBY is like 3-5 years behind California YIMBY, but these political movements are growing because the housing shortage is a nationwide crisis at this point. So things will come to a head, one way or the other
Sooooooo...I haven't really dipped into the NIMBY wars because the whole thing seems among the most toxic debates available right now, but...
...do the YIMBYs have any rebuttal or attempts to lessen to how unattractive most people apparently find high-density living? Because that seems to be the crux of the issue: everyone hates it, but everyone also wants to keep living in Brooklyn or wherever. Those who have bought or lucked into property desperately protect it, while those who don't have it want it--but want more of what already exists, not high-density.
Like, even in these piece you seem to be implying that high-density building would impact certain poorer neighborhoods in detrimental ways. Of course people don't want their neighborhoods to be worsened! Why isn't the argument "here's all the way high-density housing will make your life better"?
(I hate cities so much that I find even sprawling Minneapolis grotesque, but most people seem to have at least some aversion to apartment or converted living)
Many European cities are significantly denser and significantly more beautiful than most places in the US or Canada. I think the sweet spot is probably between 3-6 stories to achieve a mix of density and the "human scale". Though I visited New York a few years ago and thought it was stunningly beautiful.
I personally find the North American suburbs to be rather ugly: strip malls! big box stores! new developments that are all inexplicably brown and look mostly the same! endless amounts of parking lots and driveways! Not to mention, having to live my life chained to a car to get most places seems like hell.
I don't mind driving in certain cases where it makes sense. I just don't want to HAVE to drive to work, the grocery store, the gym, the pharmacy, the restaurant, etc. That's the life I grew up with and it sucked. My grandma currently lives that life but can't drive, so she's basically housebound unless one of her kids drives her to the store.
1. Is housing appreciably more affordable in Europe? I've seen articles about lack of housing from European sources too, and some quick googling is showing me $500k one-bedroom apartments. Looking at housing overburden rates, it looks like the US is worse off than most of Europe, but not by very much
2. Will we get beautiful, architectural stone buildings...or more concrete and steel rectangles? Because at least some of the charm of Europe is the artistry of those old buildings. The low-income housing where I live isn't winning any prizes for beauty
1. I have no idea what the housing market is like in Europe. But if the growth of your housing stock is outpaced by demand, then sure, it's going to become more expensive.
2. I think new builds of all kinds in North America are pretty ugly, regardless of whether they're low or high density. My parents have a lot of new development where they live in the suburbs and it's all hideous. Not sure what to do about that, but if you're going to build an ugly building anyway, might as well fit more people in it.
I can only really comment from my own experience. We lived in an apartment in London NW3 that was a converted 1890s four-story Queen Anne. The neighborhood was a mix of properties that were converted to multi-family, properties that were not converted, and terrible concrete mid-century apartment buildings that filled holes created by the blitz. The conversion of of some of these mansions to multi-family allowed young professionals access to neighborhoods we otherwise would not be able to ever afford. We should allow more of that in cities in the US. Eliminating single-family zoning like my current city of Minneapolis recently did would help those builds.
All that said, really no where in London Z1 (or even a lot of Z2) is that affordable these days and from what I could tell they were having a lot of the same NIBY fights we see in the states.
Yes. The aesthetics of the architecture is an X factor. For example, the beauty of the average Parisian apartment building is one of the marvels of the western world, and I’m only exaggerating slightly.
I live in downtown Toronto and hike and camp semi-regularly, I also own a folding canoe that I keep in my apartment to paddle the rivers in the city and the harbour near where my parents live in the suburbs. I either take public transit, bike, rent a car, carpool with friends, borrow my sister's car, take a cab, or a mix, depending on where I'm going.
Even when I was in Vancouver recently, I could get up to some of the mountain hikes via public transit. There's a bus that takes campers from downtown Toronto to Algonquin Park (a huge provincial park about 200 km away); back in the 50s, when Toronto's population was about 1/6th of what it is now, there used to be a train that took you there. Building up public transit even further so natural spaces are more accessible to those who can't or don't want to drive would be great.
That's an issue in and of itself. Almost by definition anything that is accessible via public transit is going to be crowded compared to locations that are only reachable by a long car ride. I can't speak for others but when I want to camp one of my primary goals is to get away from other people and experience some peace and quiet.
Plus any halfway serious hiker has an inherent interest in trekking on a wide variety of trails, not the handful that are available with limited transport options.
I mean, the trails I went to in Vancouver were pretty deserted, but possibly that was because they were experiencing an "atmospheric river" at the time, haha. Algonquin Park is roughly the size of the country of Lebanon, so it would be a challenge for it to be overcrowded. And canoe camping (the most predominant form of backcountry camping in Ontario) means you can be be easily dropped off at the launch point by a bus with your gear, pick up a canoe from the outfitters, and then paddle for 5 hours (+ some portaging) so you're really in the middle of nowhere, no car necessary.
And if you create many more bus or train routes to the backcountry, then you can disperse people to more places, thus making the previously "easy to access" places less crowded.
And moreover, my point was not "ban cars." Yes, it's impractical for everyone to always transit/walk/bike to every place. But I personally prefer to not have to use a car to get to 95% of my destinations, for reasons of convenience, health, and the environment. Unfortunately, living that lifestyle in North America apparently means I have to pay up the nose for housing, thanks to sprawl and underbuilt public transit.
The park may be the size of Lebanon but how do you get to the interior? By bus? And public transit is fine if you want to visit the same place over and over again but for a lot of hikers/campers and what not the point is to visit new trails and new camp sites.
And if you hunt what are you supposed to do with that deer carcass? Lug it onto the bus?
Plus what makes mass transit work is density. There's a reason that big cities tend to have more successful bus/subway/train networks and suburbs don't. For wilderness recreation high density is the exact opposite of what's there and what's desired.
I mentioned elsewhere that I used to work in Manhattan. For me the relevant question is: would you rather commute 30 minutes one way by car, which is typical for the suburbs, or two hours by train, which is what a lot of my co-workers who lived in LI/NJ/CT ended up doing.
There's a big difference, in terms of both lifestyle and environmental impact, between driving your car on weekends to get to a nearby campsite/wilderness area/ski resort vs. driving it to/from work every single day plus every time you run an errand.
I don't think most people hate high density living. In America, a lot of the dense parts of cities are poor and full of crime and homelessness, and on top of that there's the racial difference to the suburbs. If you're idea of dense city living is Baltimore projects than yeah you'll think dense living is terrible. But nobody thinks this when they go to Park Slope. American tourists don't go to Paris or Barcelona and think "that was awful". And there are plenty of places in Europe that are dense of enough to be walkable but still feel like a small town. If people hated density so much in America the few places that actually have dense city life would not be so overpriced.
Yep. In most US cities, high density + affordable housing comes with problems you really can't escape. Even if the majority of the residents are lovely, these are the neighborhoods where gangs, drugs, crime, burglary etc. impact residents on a regular basis. If public transportation sucks (as it does in most cities) parking and traffic will be awful too.
I enjoyed high density life despite these problems, but once we had a baby we left. Our current suburban neighborhood is 100% rental townhouses and small apartment buildings, owned and operated by a big company. There are plenty of poor people here, but no social problems. I went from encountering crime and street harassment regularly to never.
I get the impression that people live in cities *despite* the density, not because of it. My sample is likely skewed since I'm friends with quite a few people who fled the East Coast for the Midwest, but I've yet to hear anyone speak fondly of how crowded the various cities are. Every single one, without fail, calls their city of origin "hellish".
That's exactly right. People live in dense cities because that's where the jobs are, not because that's where they like living. Overwhelmingly people say they would prefer to live somewhere else:
Yeah people who moved from the east coast to the west coast are a very biased sample. In many of these cities the suburbs are way cheaper than the city in terms of sq feet but people live there anyway. Most people in Nyc don't consider it hellish. If they did they'd move.
Please don't pelt me with rotten eggs and tomatoes, but I love density. I absolutely adore sleek downtown high rise living, and can't wait to go back to it after I'm finished with the suburban soccer mom thingy.
I find it shocking how many density-haters there are in the comments! I love nearly every aspect of city living so much. The only thing I don't like is how goddamn expensive it is (and the extent to which the expense is making my beloved city appreciably worse).
I don’t know about east coast cities but what people hate most about California cities’ density is generally the traffic because we have extremely poor public transportation and cities that were planned around automobiles. Changing that culture is a very difficult problem, but the level of density of California cities is quite low and unsustainable both environmentally and in the sense of housing economics. The answer is changing transportation not artificially limiting housing supply.
> ...do the YIMBYs have any rebuttal or attempts to lessen to how unattractive most people apparently find high-density living? Because that seems to be the crux of the issue: everyone hates it, but everyone also wants to keep living in Brooklyn or wherever.
This is a bizarre argument. If it were even remotely true, Manhattan prices would drop on their own, because people would move. Literally the opposite happens
Even before the pandemic the population of the city as a whole dropped from 2018-2019. There's a reason both CA and NY are each losing a seat in the House of Representatives.
It would be very hard to disentangle that from the housing crisis those places are experiencing and suggesting it is proof of OP's assertion is kind of ridiculous
I think you have to look at churn. Plenty of people move in but even more move out. For years the only thing keeping New York's population stable was international immigration because in terms of domestic migration the dominant trend is people moving away from the coasts into the interior of the country.
Lots of people like pretty dense living, not for the density per se, but because it enables other things they value. I live in a medium-dense mixed neighborhood of SFRs (many 19th C) and MFRs (20th C) and there are annoyances, but it is a five minute walk from our large SFR to a great bougie grocery store, 5 restaurants on that corner, dozens more along the town center drag, a movie theater, walkable/bikeable schools, friends at the park, daycares, bus lines to SF, etc etc etc. Those are enabled by density.
But yeah I don’t really think the YIMBY line is “upzone townhome neighborhoods”. It is “allow infill in SFR neighborhoods”, which does have a cost to existing residents (parking, noise) but also brings benefits (affordability of small apartments, demand for services). Some people don’t like that tradeoff, but I think it’s pretty great. And nobody is turfing us out of our big SFR with a big yard and parking. Worst case someone builds a tower that overlooks it. Oh well, that’s life.
No, worst case is crime increases, your neighbors are poor and the quality of schools decreases, your traffic becomes unthinkable, and your property value plummets.
The main "rebuttal" I think is that however "attractive" people do or don't find high-density living to be, it doesn't matter because the laws allow "NIMBY's" to prevent it from being offered. I think the purest version of the argument would be to make zoning codes agnostic with respect to density, and let the market decide.
yeah, and it's not like this would make everywhere Manhattan. It would just turn places into more like early 20th century suburbs, where there were houses with gardens but you didn't have to drive 20 minutes to get a loaf of bread.
To add to my previous comment, from my experience living in a major city and seeing the same arguments over and over, it's not exactly that people who live there already "hate" high density living (or at least not always).
In Toronto, a lot of beloved, unique places are getting bought up and replaced by condo buildings, and the street facing retail seems to always be a chain store or something where the windows are blocked off so there's no real streetlife at all. It seems the way to maximize profit is to squeeze as many bachelor apts into them as possible, so the housing stock for a family is becoming increasingly non-existent. Due to various incentives, very little purpose-built rental is created anymore, it's always condos, which are often bought up by investors and somehow way more expensive to rent than apartment buildings. The construction quality on new builds is often shit; you have to be super careful to not buy somewhere where the windows fall out. The pace of new transit is not keeping up with the pace of development, so naturally there are concerns about traffic. We are also not building schools, daycares, etc fast enough, so new builds = people competing with you for a spot in your neighbourhood school.
The City of Toronto also, very stupidly, has made a plan where most of the city is zoned for single-family housing and it's a regulatory struggle to even do infill, and concentrates almost all new development along "avenues" (aka major roads). This results in 70 storey condos beside single family homes, like in this ridiculous image: https://images.app.goo.gl/ZAZMnUKGiE8rGyux6 -- we are desperately in need of the much more pleasant "missing middle", aka stuff that looks like https://mobile.twitter.com/urbaneer/status/1501383334030626818
And then there are the shitheads who are against building anything, even a garden suite, for reasons of "I don't like people who rent" or "I don't like poor people" or "this will harm my property values" or "I will no longer have an unobstructed view of the lake anymore!"
Why, exactly, do "we have to build"? Because lots of people want to live in New York? I just don't see that as sufficient reason (and I live in California, not New York).
So how about: don't destroy New York's nice neighborhoods, the very things that make people want to live there. Move to Akron (or a zillion other places like it) instead, where there is plenty of existing housing at far more reasonable prices.
The reason we have to build is that the escalating cost of housing is having some pretty bad consequences. Those include the inability of young families or people on fixed incomes to afford housing, pushing the working poor to live in distant areas and endure massive commutes to work, and the breaking of social bonds that define neighborhood relationships when long-time residents are pushed out. Also, so long as housing costs rise faster than wages, social groups including racial minorities get pushed out of neighborhoods where they had built communities. That accelerates residential segregation. If you build more, you allow people to keep living in their neighborhoods by lowering the rate of housing cost increases.
That's not going to fix it; it may even push prices up higher. If X people want to live in a city, and the number of houses can hold Y<X people, all the redistribution in the world isn't going to fix that
I have to agree. Redistributive taxes might be good for other reasons, but they're not going to help the housing crunch in high-demand areas. For that you really need to increase the supply, or induce competing demand in other areas.
I’m assuming people in New York still want medical assistants to give their kids shots, delivery drivers to bring them food and packages, preschool teachers to watch their kids while they’re at work, caregivers to care for elderly and disabled people, service workers to make their leisure and vacation time enjoyable etc etc etc. Where are those people supposed to live, or are they just supposed to keep paying 60-80% of their incomes on rent so that people who got theirs in the last round of development don’t have to experience one iota of change?
If service-providing working people can't afford to live there, then the rich people won't want to live there either (because they can't get the services they want), and will move out.
Or, the service providers will raise their prices enough to pay their workers enough to allow them to live there, and the rich will pay those prices.
The problem always solves itself one way or another. That's economics.
How is it subsidizing to remove barriers to build housing for people who already exist and want to live somewhere? Instead we are subsidizing the housing value and lifestyle of wealthy people by specifically prohibiting the building of housing.
It's subsidizing the lifestyle of the rich to build housing for their servant class. If the rich want people to stock the grocery stores and walk their poodles amid the most expensive real estate in the country, they can pay them a living wage for that environment.
This is ridiculously simplified. Often the rich people paying the wages of the servant class are faceless executives in a conglomerate that has no real ties to the community, and the rich people living in the community are either middle class people who were lucky enough to have bought a property before the housing crisis or if they could afford a property in the current climate are remote tech workers that have nothing to do with paying the people in the community (especially when talking about the California crisis).
If you really remove all barriers, it will make things worse, because it's almost always more profitable to build upscale housing than downscale housing, and even to buy up existing downscale housing and replace it with upscale. New downscale housing moslty only gets built when it's required by zoning regulations.
I believe that studies have shown that even upscale housing has some effect on prices because of the reshuffling effect it causes. Regardless, I don’t see government investment as subsidizing a servant class because I don’t see lower income community members as existing only in relationship to the healthy. Yes, I believe the wealthy obviously benefit from having a workforce that enables their lifestyle, but these workers are self motivated people who have their own reasons for desiring to be part of a given community, usually because they’ve been there just as long or longer. Showing them tough love by refusing to proactively take measures to easing the housing crunch doesn’t make them move to Ohio, it makes them move to a satellite or suburb where they will have to commute long hours. So essentially you are just asking for a sacrifice peoples well-being and the environment to subsidize the “servant class”.
No it doesn’t work itself out and it’s not working itself out. There are lots of reasons people can’t move from divorce decrees to jobs to family obligations.
That's a totally fair point. Many people can't leave. That's why people live in ugly, crowded large cities to begin with. But you can incentivize the people who CAN leave to do so, and you can disincentivize people who might be considering a move to New York from Akron.
By the way I almost always agree with your posts so it’s kind of weird and fun to be at odds! I don’t really understand why we would be using resources to incentivize people into moving so where they have no real desire to be rather than using resources to create dynamic communities that work. Functioning cities need a people in a range of professions and when you lose the middle and lower working classes you create extreme inequality and chaos. Making home values the holy grail of successful housing policy is as dumb as basing all corporate goals on maximizing shareholder value.
"By the way I almost always agree with your posts so it’s kind of weird and fun to be at odds!"
Same here!
I guess I resist this idea that you can build your way out of overpopulation because it seems like it's just going to create induced demand. Say you build 300,000 new units in New York over the next decade. What prevents 300,000 new families from moving in, or 300,000 families that might otherwise have left from staying? Part of me feels very strongly that city planning should be about liveability, and when a city sort of reaches its maximum density ("I'm not fat!" "No, but I can tell you're really pushing maximum density."), maybe we should resist the urge to make it less liveable just so we can pack in more people... which will only lead to a vicious circle of ever less liveability and ever more people.
But maybe I'm hysterical on this point. I've spent many years in some of the densest neighborhoods in America, and at this point the idea of increased density just gives me a really visceral reaction. (And I don't even live there anymore!) I guess it seems to me like the way to have functioning cities with a range of professions and classes is to get the hell out of those places and live in places where the extremes are not so great.
(But I do get your point that many people are stuck where they are for economic reasons, or are rooted by relationships.)
We will simply invent teleporters so the maids who clean the houses of the wealthy in New York can live in Akron and don't have to worry about the commute.
Yes. You have it’s exactly right. Lots of people want to live there so we should build housing for them. The same reason the houses that are already there and the house you live in was built. It’s pretty simple.
The situation in Canada right now is that it's just become so ridiculously unaffordable to live in Toronto or Vancouver that lots of people (especially those who can do remote work) are moving elsewhere. They've saved up enough to afford a $800k home, but that doesn't go very far in Toronto anymore.
So they move an hour outside of Toronto to somewhere like my hometown (previously a manufacturing town but that well stopped a while ago, really high rates of welfare). They end up in bidding wars and push up the price of modest houses to $800k and suddenly the people who grew up there and work at the casino can no longer afford to buy a house there. And the Toronto transplants got a notice from their office saying, "pandemic is over, time to return to the office" and now they have to drive an hour to work.
And so more people get discouraged and decide that they'll rent in Ontario and maybe buy one of those super-affordable houses in Nova Scotia that are going for $150k and just rent it out as an investment property while they work in Toronto, except everyone had the same idea and now those prices are going up too. And now the poor fishermen who are unemployed for months at a time also can't afford a house.
a) Living in a city is good and desirable for the people doing it. It is good to maximize access to desirable things.
b) On a population level, people living in cities tend to walk or take transit and use less energy to maintain their homes, which is good for climate and public health. They also get better matched with the most productive jobs for them, which is good for the economy. It is good for society when people who want to urbanize are able to do so.
c) Slots to live in cities in America are extremely scarce, and really don't exist at all in most metro areas since they are concatenations of suburbs, with the "city" part either not existing or being basically irrelevant for residential purposes.
The idea that we were done creating opportunities for urban lifestyles 100 years ago, and now it's just a question of who gets the slots that remain, is an onerous one. We need to make more slots. The most practical way to do that is to intensify and expand from the base of urbanism we have, however small.
To actually answer your question if anyone is wondering in good faith, many YIMBYs believe the market alone will fix housing issues if enough private housing is built. Left YIMBYs believe that supply is important but cannot solve the housing crisis alone. We support increased private building and improved/expanded government programs (subsidized housing, affordable housing, better shelter programs, etc.). In broad strokes.
So...there's just too many people then?
Eh...we're at a 1%/y growth rate, and still on track for 10b total by 2050.
Putin would only hit the launch button if he was cornered and out of options, he ain't gonna risk global stone age just for a slice of land in the southern steppes.
Am I wrong or are there not tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of vacant apartments in NYC?
Yes, but vacant doesn't generally mean what people think it means. Those figures include apartments that are going on the market at the moment but which will be quickly filled. It's a myth that there are tens of thousands of apartments just sitting empty all the time. Although there are companies that hold apartments for occasional use and a lot of rich people with pied a terres, so there's inefficiency there.
It is good and important for a housing market to have some amount of vacant stock. It would be extremely difficult to move into an area, or move within an area, if you had to coordinate that move with another individual who wanted to move out of the home you were looking to rent/buy. Others have done the analysis to determine what a healthy % of stock should be vacant, I'm sure. I'm also quite sure most American cities are below that healthy %.
you are wrong. NY vacancy rates are relatively low
Whoa how did this happen:
"I find resistance to such new building misguided, those of us who want to build more have to acknowledge that it’s an ugly thing if rich white people can keep new developments off their block but poor people of color can’t."
The emphasis on the whole piece was on market power of wealth, and then you somehow stealth identity into it. Do you think that rich people are going to act fundamentally differently based on race?
... I think that race and class are inherently and deeply intertwined and that we have special responsibility to observe and respond to racial inequities as well as inequities of class
Right, because a lot of things that currently present (rightly) as class based, have their origins in race-based policies. See: where they decided to put the town dump in my little southern college town 50 years ago. Continues to affect economics of different neighborhoods all these years later.
I went to college in Vancouver Canada in the late 70s/ early 80s when a middle class family still had some hope of buying a condo or home and my rent for a one bedroom was $310 per month. Now nearing retirement, I can't afford to go back as average rents of one bedroom units are north of $2,000 and average house prices are well north of a million bucks. There is no way i could afford to live there! People have just pushed too much of their income into housing as an "investment" for it to be affordable as a place to live...
https://canadaimmigrants.com/average-house-price-in-vancouver/
https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/vancouver-bc
A family member just moved to Vancouver (from the Bay Area, lucky for them that means they already had an astronomically expensive place), and paid millions for their little condo. Who can do that, unless they are coming from another expensive location where they were able to buy something long ago?
I sure can't. I'm in small town Ohio now with a great fully paid off 4 bedroom house. However, it's full price wouldn't cover a down payment on a small condo in Vancouver...
"We have to build. But “just build” is never sufficient analysis."
Then I guess it's great that that is not the YIMBY analysis then.
I live in a Philly rowhome on a block of rowhomes. Personally I love living in a rowhome and enjoy having my own private outdoor space, and I love passing my neighbors sitting on the steps. A block over, there are three apartment/condo buildings. All 3 of them were built after I moved in. The density doesn't affect the character of the neighborhood at all, imo. It makes parking harder, but I rarely drive. The added population adds amenities to the area. Likewise that block pictured would be just as idyllic imo if there were an apartment building right out of frame.
In my experience, when neighbors lament the change of "neighborhood character", they're just resentful that new people are moving in, period. Younger, different politics, more or less affluent, etc. And of course the parking issue which is behind like 90% of politics in this city. I don't really think it's an argument worth engaging with. But I do wish there were more of a left-YIMBY movement. We exist but many of the most prominent voices are pretty moderate.
Solve the parking with autonomous cars, Uber, taxis, buses.
Reliable, frequent, and safe buses, subways, trolleys, plus a car share program and we're talking. I'll allow taxis but taxis and ubers contribute a ton to congestion and air pollution.
All electric, of course. You have a source for the "congestion?"
I don't feel like googling but they spend a lot of time circling around or idling when they're between passengers
Electric cars don't idle. Uber, Lyft etc are actually pretty efficient at scheduling.
Google:https://econbrowser.com/archives/2016/03/uber-efficiency
"And we have to find ways to build that aren’t purely free market solutions, as I’m simply not convinced market forces in and of themselves will compel building at the scale that we need."
10000%. YIMBYism is insufficient on its own; we need to create massive amounts of new social housing (in mixed-income buildings to avoid the creation of slums).
This has been done well in Vancouver where mixed income housing is the rule in almost all new developments.
However, costs! See my post below...
Toronto is doing it too, for the minimal amount of new social housing it's building. The problem is that the scale isn't nearly enough to match the need.
New social housing builds in Canada fell off a cliff in the mid-90s (see this graph: https://twitter.com/g_meslin/status/1373689001866067969) because the federal government, who is the most able to financially bear the costs of building, didn't want to be responsible for it anymore, and made it the provinces' problem, who then made it the municipalities' problem, who have the least ability to raise money.
Most YIMBYs I know would see the Brownstones as high density housing. The comparator is not high rise blocks but single family houses. Terraced (in UK terms don't know US term here) 6 story buildings are high density.
Look at the Eixample district of Barcelona - very high density (highest in Europe I think?) but a desirable walkable place to live. I would argue that the very fact the brownstones are walkable neighbourhoods shows they are high density.
I cannot find it now, but I have seen some claims that 6-8 story buildings offer the best density as they do not need the space around them or support services high rises do.
Absolutely right. In a nation that claims to hate density, Brooklyn's brownstone neighborhoods are almost universally beloved. A peerless living example of how density can be great. Just as Barcelona is. They are the perfect advertisement for why the US should revive all of its historic row house cities and build new ones. How short sighted to tear them down for supposedly being not dense enough.
Brooklyn's brownstones are most definitely not "universally beloved", in that a large fraction of the population would like to live there if they could. Most of us who live in single-family homes in suburban neighborhoods actually like it! There is literally not enough money on the planet to get me to live in a townhouse in any city anywhere.
I said "almost universally beloved." And by that I did not mean that everyone wants to live there, I meant most people can appreciate them on some level or other. Even if just to visit and stroll through.
Sure, it's a nice place to stroll through, but I thought we were discussing it as a place to live. Plenty of people don't like high density, no matter how nice it is, that's why suburbs exist in the first place.
I never said anything disparaging about single-family housing. I'm happy for there to be enough of that for people who want it. The country is full of it. I do think there should also be enough denser housing for people who want townhouse living to get that too.
Also, it's not just living in the house it is doing things at the house like parking a truck, building things in the garage, making a garden, making accessible space for aging relatives. Most of the people I know in SFH are working class & multi-generational.
The modern suburb exists because there was a lot of money to be made selling postwar consumers cars, not because of any inherent preference for the suburbs. 95% of what people say they like about the suburbs can be found at the level of row house density.
Good god, I wish I could give you ten upvotes for this.
One of my favorite facts to pull out is that if San Francisco had the density of that famous hellhole Paris, San Francisco's population would be nearly 2.5 million.
Yeah and a quick google search confirms my intuition, Park Slope is denser than Paris.
https://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Park-Slope-Brooklyn-NY.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_population_density
Indeed! The problem with New York on the whole is not Manhattan or the inner parts of Brooklyn and Queens, but the rest of the city. There are vast tracts of single family housing that should be done away with.
Subway tunnel to Staten Island. Problem solved.
Totally agree. Of course you’d also have to get SI rezoned.
Also that Hoboken's density matches almost exactly Paris's, and Hoboken is a really nice place to live!
This is disingenuous. Park Slope is significantly less dense than, say, the Upper East Side. The question is dense relative to what. Also, YIMBYs constantly use Park Slope as their specific example of a place where existing residents use vetos to prevent new building. And I think you know that.
Well, the first part isn't really true, they're fairly similar: https://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Upper-East-Side-New-York-NY.html
And yes, Park Slope has some annoying NIMBYs who try to block good projects - that's separate from whether or not Park Slope is, as a neighborhood, a great example of dense urban development, which I think would be the view of the vast majority of market YIMBYs. It's wrong to push the idea that being YIMBY means you'll settle at nothing but skyscrapers. Most of us would be plenty content with Park Slope and Paris.
Pave over Prospect Park, put up high-density subsidized housing, that'll fix things.
I don't know anything about Park Slope, but I used to live in Europe. Europe has plenty of wonderful, walkable, public transit cities, very few of which look anything like Manhattan. You can have excellent walkability/density combined with a "human" scale by having 3-4 story high brownstones - that's what most European cities look like.
I can't speak for other environmentalists, but if I were Queen of America, I would turn single family housing into brownstones, not brownstones into ginormous residential towers.
And all it really takes is five story buildings to get it done. That's what people don't often understand
Paris is a hellhole for sure: I lived there as a student.
Came across this today and feel it's an under appreciated point:
https://twitter.com/arch_crimes/status/1521573099694559232
Left YIMBY here. There is a whole other thing that California YIMBYs are doing, which is forcing neighborhoods zoned single family to upzone to allow at least three and sometimes six units per lot. This is at least a start to redress the redlining which historically de jure and now de facto segregated neighborhoods.
There is no way that just more market rate housing in severely housing restricted areas like the Bay Area can make housing affordable for poor and working class people. It *does* help reduce displacement though, which is a good thing, and it helps us in many other ways. Denser housing means less driving, which reduces our carbon footprint. It also lowers housing costs for middle class people, which is pretty important.
Just building more market rate housing won't solve all of our problems, but it will help solve some of them. Here we have inclusionary zoning, so building new housing funds more affordable housing. This is of course a double edged sword, as it builds more affordable housing at the cost of making new construction even more expensive. YIMBYs (Scott Wiener really) have tried to counter this by making new construction that builds more affordable housing get a "density bonus" but it doesn't totally offset the cost.
We are also doing other things to rally for more construction at all price points: we sued various suburbs for illegally trying to block apartment buildings, we came out in force for a homeless shelter in a poor neighborhood and other things. We aren't 100% a neoliberal organization, which is often how we are characterized by our Progressive NIMBY opponents. It's a "big tent" with members all across the political spectrum. 32,000 members and counting. It's a real grass roots movement, albeit with big funding from developers and unions.
Edit: "Progressive" in San Francisco has a different meaning than the usual definition.
The housing crisis in California is a complex problem that has many factors and it’s going to take more than one solution. Market rate housing is one piece of the puzzle. Density and upzoning and subsidized units are also needed. I argue that repealing prop 13 is also a piece. I also think that the university of California should build some new campuses instead of trying to cram more and more kids into the most sought after urban campuses. It’s cruel to admit someone to a place like UCSC or UC Berkeley when there is literally nowhere for them to live, and in turn the students make it nearly impossible for families to find places to live. Either house your students or build more colleges.
UC built UC Merced. Pretty open there.
Yes and they should do it again somewhere else. And they should stop expanding enrollment, especially at the rate they are doing it, at some of the other campuses. I know how desirable getting into Cal is, heck it’s what I want for my own kids, but if it makes it harder to get in so be it. It will drive up the prestige and the exclusivity of the lower tier UCs and allow the UC system to fulfill its mission of offering an affordable world class education to a broad range of students without trying to do magical math that makes adding tens of thousands of students who need a place to live in cities with an already existing housing deficit add up.
Don't get me wrong, in my perfect world we would tax the hell out of the rich and use it to build mixed income social housing democratically run by the residents.
But this is America and that isn't going to happen.
Brownstone neighborhoods are actually very high-density. You'd be surprised. Certainly by the standards of almost anywhere else in the US. It isn't really close.
I'm not from NY - does each door on a brownstone lead to one home, or three?
Originally they were single family homes, but most are one unit per floor now.
I’d never heard of YIMBY and NIMBY, but I’m glad we have another point to divide us. Society needs that.
Consider yourself lucky to have gone this far without engaging in this particular little corner of polarization and controversy!
"Rich people will pay a whole lot to keep other people out."
This one sentence of yours sums it up pretty well. But I thought your other point about the role the free-market plays in all of this is an important one.
The free-market system is always defended with the same few ideas: maximizes innovation and opportunity, serves the hard rules of supply and demand better than anything else, and is a beast of an engine for wealth generation. But the giant flip side of it is that the free market is completely amoral in nature - it doesn't care about people per say, only in profit. This is the precise reason we have all those zoning and regulation statutes. Obviously they can get wildly out of hand, but they are supposed to keep things honest and fair in an otherwise chaotic and cruel world.
I would agree with you that the free-market is one of the major factors that is making the housing market so lopsided towards low density. If developers can make more money with a handful of wealthy clients than they can with an army of poor...that's a no-brainer in terms of making money. In fact, the free-market system encourages such hard truths. I see this even in my own small town of 50K, affordable housing is rapidly becoming like Tasmanian Devil sightings.
I'm not sure how we got here, it wasn't like this even a few decades ago. But I would guess that America's infatuation with the suburb lifestyle, with all of it's roomy green buffers between every single home, is part of the problem. Because whenever I see video footage of the 'suburbs' in almost every other country, I almost never see the same wide-open spacing betwixt housing like I do here. And this is not even bothering to mention the increasingly large size of our suburban homes, but that is another matter.
Dense metropolitan housing probably has a lot of other issues too, but I don't live there so I can't reliably remark on that.
If you don't like the way the free market distributes housing, we can always turn to the socialist plan, which is thoroughly and thoughtfully worked out here: https://www.____________
Ha ha, no, just kidding! Actually the socialists have no plan at all for how to distribute housing (or do much of anything else). Kind of incredible, 150 years after Marx, but nevertheless true.
As with most things in life, it doesn't have to be all one way or all the other. A good plan would use the best of both worlds.
Even so, it doesn't have to be a strictly binary choice either; there are usually more than just two ways to go about it.
Balance is the key. It's where you decide to draw that line that is important.
I still have no idea what the socialist side of that balance looks like.
The socialist side is the zoning and regulations, and things like low-income housing assistance and public school districting (because that affects housing).
And just like free market capitalism has the potential for insanity, so too does socialism. Neither do well when left to their own devices.
Ah, yes, the old "but who gets to live in Manhattan?" question. The most equitable solution I could come up with involves a lottery, but that starts to sound pretty Soviet. How do you prevent that from being tampered with? I wouldn't explicitly say I'm much of a capitalist, but I do think having to compete for housing with the resources you have is more equitable than some sort of centralized, top-down, planned system. I just wish we had more housing to work with (everywhere, not just in NYC).
> I would agree with you that the free-market is one of the major factors that is making the housing market so lopsided towards low density.
Then why does so much anti-market political power have to be applied in order to keep low density areas as they are? NIMBYism is primarily a political phenomenon, not a market problem. It's nothing new, either. It's just good-old regulatory capture. It's the instinct of every incumbent capitalist to lobby the government to prevent new capital from competing with him. That's all NIMBYism is.
I don't know what anti-market political power you are referring to here, can you elaborate on that for me?
NIMBYism is primarily a human problem. It rests almost entirely on the very human notion that people like to have their nicely spaced mini-estate neighborhoods stay that way. Because it's nicer to live there...nice tree-lined walks at dusk, nice neighborhood parks where your kids can play, nice corner bistro, and nice open skyline with lots of trees around.
In other words, it's a lovely place to live. I really don't know what capitalism itself has to do with that, unless you're strictly talking about resale values. Okay...but you do realize that most people don't just judge a home by its monetary value right? Some people, crazy as it sounds, actually value it on whether or not it's a nice house in a nice neighborhood with a good school district.
I mean, when you look at a random neighborhood, do you really only see capital?
> I don't know what anti-market political power you are referring to here, can you elaborate on that for me?
The main example is the entire concept of use-based zoning. These are regulations (a political construct) that restrict what a market participant would do with a property. Changes to these regulations are of course a political process, and impeded by nimby political power.
I loosely agree with the rest of your comment, but it's neither here nor there. I don't think it's relevant to what I'm saying. All I'm saying is there's economic will and capability to build more housing, and the main reason more doesn't get built is that politics interferes, and interferes in such a way as to help existing capital owners, but hurt consumers and new would-be capital owners.
I have to say it's really weird to read you refer to people as 'capital owners'.
I don't see regulations as a political construct, they are simply rules for fair play...not unlike your typical sports regulations really. I mean, when an neighborhood comes up with some kind of regulation for their area, isn't that just people who live next to each other agreeing to do or not do certain things? Isn't that normal behavior for people living together?
Just because something restricts a market participant does not automatically make that a bad thing. There are all sorts of reasons for restrictions on things, a lot of them good reasons.
> I have to say it's really weird to read you refer to people as 'capital owners'.
Why? A house or any property in general is capital. property owner ==> capital owner.
> I mean, when an neighborhood comes up with some kind of regulation for their area, isn't that just people who live next to each other agreeing to do or not do certain things? Isn't that normal behavior for people living together?
It's completely normal behavior, but it's also politics.
> Just because something restricts a market participant does not automatically make that a bad thing. There are all sorts of reasons for restrictions on things, a lot of them good reasons.
Yeah, I completely agree. I'm not trying to make some generalized argument against all regulations or in favor of any and all free market results.
You have a very wide definition of politics then.
I think my point with 'capital owners' is that it's not really the least common denominator for households anymore. Most Americans under 50 rent now, and that's only increasing. Whatever capital they have is not in housing.
Two things here.
First, I don't think any kind of real zoning reform is coming to New York. Look at what happened with Hochul's ADU/accessory apartment proposal. It was the weakest of teas and people out here on Long Island freaked the fuck out.
Second, apart from neighborhood character, the majority of people would prefer not to live in a concrete box in the sky. I really enjoy the luxury of twenty feet of air between my walls and my closest neighbors.
> Look at what happened with Hochul's ADU/accessory apartment proposal. It was the weakest of teas and people out here on Long Island freaked the fuck out.
True but a few years ago Hochul wouldn't even have considered putting that on the agenda. NY YIMBY is like 3-5 years behind California YIMBY, but these political movements are growing because the housing shortage is a nationwide crisis at this point. So things will come to a head, one way or the other
“ the majority of people would prefer not to live in a concrete box in the sky. ”
Which is why they are so expensive… no one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.
A lot of people want to live in the city. There a lot of great things about living in the city.
For the majority of people, the only way to do that semi-affordably is to live in a small, concrete box in the sky. Hence the demand and high prices.
“ small, concrete box in the sky”
You say it like it’s a bad thing.
I don't kink shame
lol
Sooooooo...I haven't really dipped into the NIMBY wars because the whole thing seems among the most toxic debates available right now, but...
...do the YIMBYs have any rebuttal or attempts to lessen to how unattractive most people apparently find high-density living? Because that seems to be the crux of the issue: everyone hates it, but everyone also wants to keep living in Brooklyn or wherever. Those who have bought or lucked into property desperately protect it, while those who don't have it want it--but want more of what already exists, not high-density.
Like, even in these piece you seem to be implying that high-density building would impact certain poorer neighborhoods in detrimental ways. Of course people don't want their neighborhoods to be worsened! Why isn't the argument "here's all the way high-density housing will make your life better"?
(I hate cities so much that I find even sprawling Minneapolis grotesque, but most people seem to have at least some aversion to apartment or converted living)
Many European cities are significantly denser and significantly more beautiful than most places in the US or Canada. I think the sweet spot is probably between 3-6 stories to achieve a mix of density and the "human scale". Though I visited New York a few years ago and thought it was stunningly beautiful.
I personally find the North American suburbs to be rather ugly: strip malls! big box stores! new developments that are all inexplicably brown and look mostly the same! endless amounts of parking lots and driveways! Not to mention, having to live my life chained to a car to get most places seems like hell.
no we should all wear the same underwear
Like... at the same time, or...?
Narrator voice: “Only after the [Send] key was pressed did awareness of the disturbing ambiguity dawn.”
I don't mind driving in certain cases where it makes sense. I just don't want to HAVE to drive to work, the grocery store, the gym, the pharmacy, the restaurant, etc. That's the life I grew up with and it sucked. My grandma currently lives that life but can't drive, so she's basically housebound unless one of her kids drives her to the store.
My questions would be:
1. Is housing appreciably more affordable in Europe? I've seen articles about lack of housing from European sources too, and some quick googling is showing me $500k one-bedroom apartments. Looking at housing overburden rates, it looks like the US is worse off than most of Europe, but not by very much
2. Will we get beautiful, architectural stone buildings...or more concrete and steel rectangles? Because at least some of the charm of Europe is the artistry of those old buildings. The low-income housing where I live isn't winning any prizes for beauty
1. I have no idea what the housing market is like in Europe. But if the growth of your housing stock is outpaced by demand, then sure, it's going to become more expensive.
2. I think new builds of all kinds in North America are pretty ugly, regardless of whether they're low or high density. My parents have a lot of new development where they live in the suburbs and it's all hideous. Not sure what to do about that, but if you're going to build an ugly building anyway, might as well fit more people in it.
Some of the ugliest houses in the world are those build by rich people with too much money.
https://mcmansionhell.com/post/148619538551/mcmansions-101-front-entries
Truth. The most expensive private residence in Vancouver, BC belongs to the owner of Lululemon and looks like a Cold War-era concrete bunker.
That's because contractors think they are architects these days. A giant metal shed is good 'nuff. Who needs eaves, amiright??
Hard to blame them though, most architects are so damn arrogant these days they can't be bothered with designing for the peasant folk.
I can only really comment from my own experience. We lived in an apartment in London NW3 that was a converted 1890s four-story Queen Anne. The neighborhood was a mix of properties that were converted to multi-family, properties that were not converted, and terrible concrete mid-century apartment buildings that filled holes created by the blitz. The conversion of of some of these mansions to multi-family allowed young professionals access to neighborhoods we otherwise would not be able to ever afford. We should allow more of that in cities in the US. Eliminating single-family zoning like my current city of Minneapolis recently did would help those builds.
All that said, really no where in London Z1 (or even a lot of Z2) is that affordable these days and from what I could tell they were having a lot of the same NIBY fights we see in the states.
Yes. The aesthetics of the architecture is an X factor. For example, the beauty of the average Parisian apartment building is one of the marvels of the western world, and I’m only exaggerating slightly.
If you ski/hike/hunt/mountain bike/camp on the weekends a car is pretty much a requirement. It's either that or give up your hobby.
I live in downtown Toronto and hike and camp semi-regularly, I also own a folding canoe that I keep in my apartment to paddle the rivers in the city and the harbour near where my parents live in the suburbs. I either take public transit, bike, rent a car, carpool with friends, borrow my sister's car, take a cab, or a mix, depending on where I'm going.
Even when I was in Vancouver recently, I could get up to some of the mountain hikes via public transit. There's a bus that takes campers from downtown Toronto to Algonquin Park (a huge provincial park about 200 km away); back in the 50s, when Toronto's population was about 1/6th of what it is now, there used to be a train that took you there. Building up public transit even further so natural spaces are more accessible to those who can't or don't want to drive would be great.
"...some of the mountain hikes..."
That's an issue in and of itself. Almost by definition anything that is accessible via public transit is going to be crowded compared to locations that are only reachable by a long car ride. I can't speak for others but when I want to camp one of my primary goals is to get away from other people and experience some peace and quiet.
Plus any halfway serious hiker has an inherent interest in trekking on a wide variety of trails, not the handful that are available with limited transport options.
I mean, the trails I went to in Vancouver were pretty deserted, but possibly that was because they were experiencing an "atmospheric river" at the time, haha. Algonquin Park is roughly the size of the country of Lebanon, so it would be a challenge for it to be overcrowded. And canoe camping (the most predominant form of backcountry camping in Ontario) means you can be be easily dropped off at the launch point by a bus with your gear, pick up a canoe from the outfitters, and then paddle for 5 hours (+ some portaging) so you're really in the middle of nowhere, no car necessary.
And if you create many more bus or train routes to the backcountry, then you can disperse people to more places, thus making the previously "easy to access" places less crowded.
And moreover, my point was not "ban cars." Yes, it's impractical for everyone to always transit/walk/bike to every place. But I personally prefer to not have to use a car to get to 95% of my destinations, for reasons of convenience, health, and the environment. Unfortunately, living that lifestyle in North America apparently means I have to pay up the nose for housing, thanks to sprawl and underbuilt public transit.
The park may be the size of Lebanon but how do you get to the interior? By bus? And public transit is fine if you want to visit the same place over and over again but for a lot of hikers/campers and what not the point is to visit new trails and new camp sites.
And if you hunt what are you supposed to do with that deer carcass? Lug it onto the bus?
Plus what makes mass transit work is density. There's a reason that big cities tend to have more successful bus/subway/train networks and suburbs don't. For wilderness recreation high density is the exact opposite of what's there and what's desired.
I mentioned elsewhere that I used to work in Manhattan. For me the relevant question is: would you rather commute 30 minutes one way by car, which is typical for the suburbs, or two hours by train, which is what a lot of my co-workers who lived in LI/NJ/CT ended up doing.
There's a big difference, in terms of both lifestyle and environmental impact, between driving your car on weekends to get to a nearby campsite/wilderness area/ski resort vs. driving it to/from work every single day plus every time you run an errand.
I don't think most people hate high density living. In America, a lot of the dense parts of cities are poor and full of crime and homelessness, and on top of that there's the racial difference to the suburbs. If you're idea of dense city living is Baltimore projects than yeah you'll think dense living is terrible. But nobody thinks this when they go to Park Slope. American tourists don't go to Paris or Barcelona and think "that was awful". And there are plenty of places in Europe that are dense of enough to be walkable but still feel like a small town. If people hated density so much in America the few places that actually have dense city life would not be so overpriced.
Yep. In most US cities, high density + affordable housing comes with problems you really can't escape. Even if the majority of the residents are lovely, these are the neighborhoods where gangs, drugs, crime, burglary etc. impact residents on a regular basis. If public transportation sucks (as it does in most cities) parking and traffic will be awful too.
I enjoyed high density life despite these problems, but once we had a baby we left. Our current suburban neighborhood is 100% rental townhouses and small apartment buildings, owned and operated by a big company. There are plenty of poor people here, but no social problems. I went from encountering crime and street harassment regularly to never.
I get the impression that people live in cities *despite* the density, not because of it. My sample is likely skewed since I'm friends with quite a few people who fled the East Coast for the Midwest, but I've yet to hear anyone speak fondly of how crowded the various cities are. Every single one, without fail, calls their city of origin "hellish".
That's exactly right. People live in dense cities because that's where the jobs are, not because that's where they like living. Overwhelmingly people say they would prefer to live somewhere else:
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/12/16/americans-are-less-likely-than-before-covid-19-to-want-to-live-in-cities-more-likely-to-prefer-suburbs/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/245249/americans-big-idea-living-country.aspx
Yeah people who moved from the east coast to the west coast are a very biased sample. In many of these cities the suburbs are way cheaper than the city in terms of sq feet but people live there anyway. Most people in Nyc don't consider it hellish. If they did they'd move.
Please don't pelt me with rotten eggs and tomatoes, but I love density. I absolutely adore sleek downtown high rise living, and can't wait to go back to it after I'm finished with the suburban soccer mom thingy.
I find it shocking how many density-haters there are in the comments! I love nearly every aspect of city living so much. The only thing I don't like is how goddamn expensive it is (and the extent to which the expense is making my beloved city appreciably worse).
Internet commenters are probably more introverted than average so the idea of always having some social activity available has no appeal.
I'm an introvert, and I love densely populated, walkable cities! I love being able to walk to a grocery store, a park, a cafe, etc.
Oh, fine...
*throws perfectly good eggs and beets*
Just kidding. I loathe dense areas for myself, but I'm glad people have different preferences. It makes everything work.
I don’t know about east coast cities but what people hate most about California cities’ density is generally the traffic because we have extremely poor public transportation and cities that were planned around automobiles. Changing that culture is a very difficult problem, but the level of density of California cities is quite low and unsustainable both environmentally and in the sense of housing economics. The answer is changing transportation not artificially limiting housing supply.
The main reason people don't like it is because of the traffic congestion that comes with it. It has to go hand in hand with investments in transit.
> ...do the YIMBYs have any rebuttal or attempts to lessen to how unattractive most people apparently find high-density living? Because that seems to be the crux of the issue: everyone hates it, but everyone also wants to keep living in Brooklyn or wherever.
This is a bizarre argument. If it were even remotely true, Manhattan prices would drop on their own, because people would move. Literally the opposite happens
Even before the pandemic the population of the city as a whole dropped from 2018-2019. There's a reason both CA and NY are each losing a seat in the House of Representatives.
It would be very hard to disentangle that from the housing crisis those places are experiencing and suggesting it is proof of OP's assertion is kind of ridiculous
I think you have to look at churn. Plenty of people move in but even more move out. For years the only thing keeping New York's population stable was international immigration because in terms of domestic migration the dominant trend is people moving away from the coasts into the interior of the country.
Lots of people like pretty dense living, not for the density per se, but because it enables other things they value. I live in a medium-dense mixed neighborhood of SFRs (many 19th C) and MFRs (20th C) and there are annoyances, but it is a five minute walk from our large SFR to a great bougie grocery store, 5 restaurants on that corner, dozens more along the town center drag, a movie theater, walkable/bikeable schools, friends at the park, daycares, bus lines to SF, etc etc etc. Those are enabled by density.
But yeah I don’t really think the YIMBY line is “upzone townhome neighborhoods”. It is “allow infill in SFR neighborhoods”, which does have a cost to existing residents (parking, noise) but also brings benefits (affordability of small apartments, demand for services). Some people don’t like that tradeoff, but I think it’s pretty great. And nobody is turfing us out of our big SFR with a big yard and parking. Worst case someone builds a tower that overlooks it. Oh well, that’s life.
No, worst case is crime increases, your neighbors are poor and the quality of schools decreases, your traffic becomes unthinkable, and your property value plummets.
The main "rebuttal" I think is that however "attractive" people do or don't find high-density living to be, it doesn't matter because the laws allow "NIMBY's" to prevent it from being offered. I think the purest version of the argument would be to make zoning codes agnostic with respect to density, and let the market decide.
yeah, and it's not like this would make everywhere Manhattan. It would just turn places into more like early 20th century suburbs, where there were houses with gardens but you didn't have to drive 20 minutes to get a loaf of bread.
“ how unattractive most people apparently find high-density living”
Again, which is why NYC is so cheap.
To add to my previous comment, from my experience living in a major city and seeing the same arguments over and over, it's not exactly that people who live there already "hate" high density living (or at least not always).
In Toronto, a lot of beloved, unique places are getting bought up and replaced by condo buildings, and the street facing retail seems to always be a chain store or something where the windows are blocked off so there's no real streetlife at all. It seems the way to maximize profit is to squeeze as many bachelor apts into them as possible, so the housing stock for a family is becoming increasingly non-existent. Due to various incentives, very little purpose-built rental is created anymore, it's always condos, which are often bought up by investors and somehow way more expensive to rent than apartment buildings. The construction quality on new builds is often shit; you have to be super careful to not buy somewhere where the windows fall out. The pace of new transit is not keeping up with the pace of development, so naturally there are concerns about traffic. We are also not building schools, daycares, etc fast enough, so new builds = people competing with you for a spot in your neighbourhood school.
The City of Toronto also, very stupidly, has made a plan where most of the city is zoned for single-family housing and it's a regulatory struggle to even do infill, and concentrates almost all new development along "avenues" (aka major roads). This results in 70 storey condos beside single family homes, like in this ridiculous image: https://images.app.goo.gl/ZAZMnUKGiE8rGyux6 -- we are desperately in need of the much more pleasant "missing middle", aka stuff that looks like https://mobile.twitter.com/urbaneer/status/1501383334030626818
And then there are the shitheads who are against building anything, even a garden suite, for reasons of "I don't like people who rent" or "I don't like poor people" or "this will harm my property values" or "I will no longer have an unobstructed view of the lake anymore!"
Why, exactly, do "we have to build"? Because lots of people want to live in New York? I just don't see that as sufficient reason (and I live in California, not New York).
Per this 2021 article about the "hot" housing market in my hometown of Akron, Ohio, the median listing price was $180K: https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/business/2021/04/16/akron-ohio-realtor-com-list-housing-markets-march-2021/7238183002/
So how about: don't destroy New York's nice neighborhoods, the very things that make people want to live there. Move to Akron (or a zillion other places like it) instead, where there is plenty of existing housing at far more reasonable prices.
Sooner or later, I will
So why do "we have to build" in New York?
The reason we have to build is that the escalating cost of housing is having some pretty bad consequences. Those include the inability of young families or people on fixed incomes to afford housing, pushing the working poor to live in distant areas and endure massive commutes to work, and the breaking of social bonds that define neighborhood relationships when long-time residents are pushed out. Also, so long as housing costs rise faster than wages, social groups including racial minorities get pushed out of neighborhoods where they had built communities. That accelerates residential segregation. If you build more, you allow people to keep living in their neighborhoods by lowering the rate of housing cost increases.
Another fix would be to pay those people more. I'm for that, through redistributive taxation of the rich.
That's not going to fix it; it may even push prices up higher. If X people want to live in a city, and the number of houses can hold Y<X people, all the redistribution in the world isn't going to fix that
I have to agree. Redistributive taxes might be good for other reasons, but they're not going to help the housing crunch in high-demand areas. For that you really need to increase the supply, or induce competing demand in other areas.
Ditmas Park is a nice way station while you’re Akron-bound. Sorry (not sorry) to repeat myself.
I guess I’m becoming a booster.
No! Not Akron. Move to Detroit and be my workout buddy. :)
People have families, jobs, and networks in the places they live. The housing crisis isn't limited to yuppies moving to New York.
In fact, the yuppies are the ones with means to navigate it. They're the least harmed
New York needs an anti-immigration law. Require Wall Street to hire only locals. Kick out the newcomers like Freddie.
should we build a wall?
Absolutely!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYYZFcvQfRg
I’m assuming people in New York still want medical assistants to give their kids shots, delivery drivers to bring them food and packages, preschool teachers to watch their kids while they’re at work, caregivers to care for elderly and disabled people, service workers to make their leisure and vacation time enjoyable etc etc etc. Where are those people supposed to live, or are they just supposed to keep paying 60-80% of their incomes on rent so that people who got theirs in the last round of development don’t have to experience one iota of change?
If service-providing working people can't afford to live there, then the rich people won't want to live there either (because they can't get the services they want), and will move out.
Or, the service providers will raise their prices enough to pay their workers enough to allow them to live there, and the rich will pay those prices.
The problem always solves itself one way or another. That's economics.
Exactly right. Why on earth should it be social policy to subsidize the presence of a servant class so the rich don't have to pay them more?
Yeah, it's a really weird notion that I don't understand at all.
How is it subsidizing to remove barriers to build housing for people who already exist and want to live somewhere? Instead we are subsidizing the housing value and lifestyle of wealthy people by specifically prohibiting the building of housing.
It's subsidizing the lifestyle of the rich to build housing for their servant class. If the rich want people to stock the grocery stores and walk their poodles amid the most expensive real estate in the country, they can pay them a living wage for that environment.
This is ridiculously simplified. Often the rich people paying the wages of the servant class are faceless executives in a conglomerate that has no real ties to the community, and the rich people living in the community are either middle class people who were lucky enough to have bought a property before the housing crisis or if they could afford a property in the current climate are remote tech workers that have nothing to do with paying the people in the community (especially when talking about the California crisis).
If you really remove all barriers, it will make things worse, because it's almost always more profitable to build upscale housing than downscale housing, and even to buy up existing downscale housing and replace it with upscale. New downscale housing moslty only gets built when it's required by zoning regulations.
I believe that studies have shown that even upscale housing has some effect on prices because of the reshuffling effect it causes. Regardless, I don’t see government investment as subsidizing a servant class because I don’t see lower income community members as existing only in relationship to the healthy. Yes, I believe the wealthy obviously benefit from having a workforce that enables their lifestyle, but these workers are self motivated people who have their own reasons for desiring to be part of a given community, usually because they’ve been there just as long or longer. Showing them tough love by refusing to proactively take measures to easing the housing crunch doesn’t make them move to Ohio, it makes them move to a satellite or suburb where they will have to commute long hours. So essentially you are just asking for a sacrifice peoples well-being and the environment to subsidize the “servant class”.
No it doesn’t work itself out and it’s not working itself out. There are lots of reasons people can’t move from divorce decrees to jobs to family obligations.
That's a totally fair point. Many people can't leave. That's why people live in ugly, crowded large cities to begin with. But you can incentivize the people who CAN leave to do so, and you can disincentivize people who might be considering a move to New York from Akron.
By the way I almost always agree with your posts so it’s kind of weird and fun to be at odds! I don’t really understand why we would be using resources to incentivize people into moving so where they have no real desire to be rather than using resources to create dynamic communities that work. Functioning cities need a people in a range of professions and when you lose the middle and lower working classes you create extreme inequality and chaos. Making home values the holy grail of successful housing policy is as dumb as basing all corporate goals on maximizing shareholder value.
"By the way I almost always agree with your posts so it’s kind of weird and fun to be at odds!"
Same here!
I guess I resist this idea that you can build your way out of overpopulation because it seems like it's just going to create induced demand. Say you build 300,000 new units in New York over the next decade. What prevents 300,000 new families from moving in, or 300,000 families that might otherwise have left from staying? Part of me feels very strongly that city planning should be about liveability, and when a city sort of reaches its maximum density ("I'm not fat!" "No, but I can tell you're really pushing maximum density."), maybe we should resist the urge to make it less liveable just so we can pack in more people... which will only lead to a vicious circle of ever less liveability and ever more people.
But maybe I'm hysterical on this point. I've spent many years in some of the densest neighborhoods in America, and at this point the idea of increased density just gives me a really visceral reaction. (And I don't even live there anymore!) I guess it seems to me like the way to have functioning cities with a range of professions and classes is to get the hell out of those places and live in places where the extremes are not so great.
(But I do get your point that many people are stuck where they are for economic reasons, or are rooted by relationships.)
We will simply invent teleporters so the maids who clean the houses of the wealthy in New York can live in Akron and don't have to worry about the commute.
If you get precise enough with the teleporters, you could just teleport the dust to Akron, and then you don't have to worry about the maids at all.
This is, perhaps, the dumbest argument on the planet.
Yes. You have it’s exactly right. Lots of people want to live there so we should build housing for them. The same reason the houses that are already there and the house you live in was built. It’s pretty simple.
The situation in Canada right now is that it's just become so ridiculously unaffordable to live in Toronto or Vancouver that lots of people (especially those who can do remote work) are moving elsewhere. They've saved up enough to afford a $800k home, but that doesn't go very far in Toronto anymore.
So they move an hour outside of Toronto to somewhere like my hometown (previously a manufacturing town but that well stopped a while ago, really high rates of welfare). They end up in bidding wars and push up the price of modest houses to $800k and suddenly the people who grew up there and work at the casino can no longer afford to buy a house there. And the Toronto transplants got a notice from their office saying, "pandemic is over, time to return to the office" and now they have to drive an hour to work.
And so more people get discouraged and decide that they'll rent in Ontario and maybe buy one of those super-affordable houses in Nova Scotia that are going for $150k and just rent it out as an investment property while they work in Toronto, except everyone had the same idea and now those prices are going up too. And now the poor fishermen who are unemployed for months at a time also can't afford a house.
I'm jealous of your hometown. I live in a town a quarter of your size, yet our average home is $240K. And that's with a $20K medium income.
Makes no god damn sense.
a) Living in a city is good and desirable for the people doing it. It is good to maximize access to desirable things.
b) On a population level, people living in cities tend to walk or take transit and use less energy to maintain their homes, which is good for climate and public health. They also get better matched with the most productive jobs for them, which is good for the economy. It is good for society when people who want to urbanize are able to do so.
c) Slots to live in cities in America are extremely scarce, and really don't exist at all in most metro areas since they are concatenations of suburbs, with the "city" part either not existing or being basically irrelevant for residential purposes.
The idea that we were done creating opportunities for urban lifestyles 100 years ago, and now it's just a question of who gets the slots that remain, is an onerous one. We need to make more slots. The most practical way to do that is to intensify and expand from the base of urbanism we have, however small.
> Why, exactly, do "we have to build"? Because lots of people want to live in New York?
Yes, this is exactly how every other good on the planet works. More demand for a thing almost always means that more gets built.