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One interesting aspect of how many people view urban planning is that a lot of urbanists like to point to the like of Jane Jacobs who (correctly IMO) opposed a lot of centralized planning, especially with respect to roads. At the same time, she favored organic and community-oriented development which I suspect a lot of people today would consider NIMBY and would mostly be opposed to large-scale housing developments. She did live in the West Village after all.

Large-scale housing developments exist largely because of the regulatory burden. If you need to spend years, if not decades, shepherding a project through a bureaucracy, then you need that economy of scale in units of housing per unit of regulation to make a project financially viable.

The lesser the regulatory burden, the more organic development you'd see, including a much larger proportion of smaller projects and smaller buildings. Large steel or steel + concrete structures are grossly inefficient in terms of construction costs per square footage, except where property values are incredibly high. (Wherever you see such structures in areas without extremely expensive property prices, you can be sure there are other factors at play--regulation, government funding, etc.) That's why 5-over-1 (wood framing over concrete) is so common where possible. Some people might complain that many 5-over-1 buildings have too large of a footprint, but that's also largely due to the same regulatory economics.

Anyhow, if communities simply made a laundry list of things they don't want--e.g. no more than 4 stories, ground footprint smaller than N square feet, etc--and then provided for approval by-right (i.e. if your project meets those restrictions, you're automatically approved), then most areas suffering from severe housing supply issues would be in a dramatically better situation than they are now, California especially.

But NIMBYs won't accept approval by-right; they want every project, no matter how small, to go through the same endless gauntlet where every interest group or interested party effectively gets a veto based on whatever imaginary impact they can think of ([insert comparison to security theater and fantastical terrorist threats]), with predictable and deliberate results.

> But NIMBYs won't accept approval by-right; they want every project, no matter how small, to go through the same endless gauntlet where every interest group or interested party effectively gets a veto based on whatever imaginary impact they can think of ([insert comparison to security theater and fantastical terrorist threats]), with predictable and deliberate results.

Just because a project was approved by right doesn't mean that NIMBYs won't file a lawsuit against you anyways to find some reason to get the project canned.

Fair enough. In my head I'm implicitly assuming that in a state like California approval by-right would necessarily require as a practical matter reform to, for example, CEQA so EIS reports couldn't be so trivially challenged. But in the abstract it's the same pathology--the opposition abusing legal procedures to hold up projects indefinitely, rather than advocating for and relying on substantive law. The problem with the latter is that it makes the opposition uncomfortably accountable; it becomes much more transparent that requirement X is responsible for Y costs, which allows the public to make more informed decisions about the utility of X.

Even with approval by right many buildings that exist could not be built today. Sometimes for good reasons like fire code but often not.

https://la.urbanize.city/post/forbidden-city-how-los-angeles...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-... (archive of same without paywall: https://archive.ph/mvLpO )

Six stories is probably my preferred urban scale, but the 5 over 1 buildings we get in the US are just terrible. A six story apartment in Berlin has windows front and back while the US version has windows only on one side due to the long central corridor to connect to the two stairwells required by US regulations (a result of the wood construction?)

2 fire escapes is a good thing, redundancy also helps in cases of unforeseen failure and disasters.

As an alternative, a 1.5 level (per apartment, a ramp, stair, or interior elevator) design where one side has 2 floors and the other just one, such that three floors are split among 2 floors of buildings. I'd still want enough acoustic insulation and isolation to enjoy silence, and an airflow design for the whole building that keeps all the exhausts and smells away from all residences.

Or just do what other developed countries with far lower fire death rates do and build single access apartments out of less combustible materials. They provide far more pleasant layouts.

https://slate.com/business/2021/12/staircases-floor-plan-twi...

Yeah, having two fire escape routes in a large apartment building is not some sort of mistaken regulation.

Also I very much doubt your characterization of properties in Germany. I'm sure there's a wide variety that broadly resembles what we see in all developed urban areas.

The US uses wood construction a lot because it's a cost effective local material. Fire safety standards in the US are generally quite high. Building with wood is not some sort of problematic thing as you imply.

Seriously, the weird chip on the shoulder some people get about the US is tiresome. Sure we have some stupid laws and bureaucracy like anywhere, but we're not aliens with pokadot skin or anything. I assure you people are pretty much the same everywhere.

I like the US a lot (enough to emigrate here and become a citizen) but having seen other parts of the world it is impossible not to see the things that are wrong with it too. I guess I struggle to understand why Americans are so sensitive to even very mild criticism of this country, the richest and most powerful in the world by a long way.

Most of Europe allows single stairway buildings. Germany has half the fire death rate of the US. It’s the US (along with Canada) which is the outlier in multi family building design here. They could be so much better!

https://slate.com/business/2021/12/staircases-floor-plan-twi...

Generally speaking Americans criticize our country far more than anyone else.

The annoyances I'm talking about aren't substantial criticisms, they're just stupid. "Oh no, the US makes buildings out of wood, how silly of them" is just people being both ignorant and shitty.

I’m agnostic on the construction materials used but dual staircase regulations subject us to far worse apartment design than other countries. Having lived in both I really hope I never have to live in one of these dual staircase apartments again. It felt like a deep dark cave.

I don't buy the failure narrative at all. In a lot of Eastern European and also to an extent Western European cities large housing projects work reasonably well especially for lower income households, they've kept rents affordable, they're energy efficient and they aided in rapid urbanisation.

Many of them don't look great but they pretty much did their job given the limited resources that a lot of cities had available.

If you look at modernist cities around the world, in India for example as well, cities that took inspiration from this kind of planning have generally good standards of living, costs, little homelessness and decent environmental footprints.

On the other hand, they(TM) have an interest in the failure narrative being perpetuated. The housing shortfall in the US is severe, somewhere around 5 million units, depending on where you look. A good chunk of the electorate cannot afford starting their own household, they live with roommates or their parents. Imagine they pointed to 1960s Lisbon or late 1950s Soviet Russia and insisted the government implement a sensible housing policy. It would be a bloodbath for investors and consequently cannot be allowed to happen.

> Imagine they pointed to 1960s Lisbon or late 1950s Soviet Russia and insisted the government implement a sensible housing policy. It would be a bloodbath for investors and consequently cannot be allowed to happen.

Those buildings would be illegal in most of the US. If similar quality and floor space per inhabitant was legal to build you could indeed solve housing problems in short order. No need to have the state do it. If flophouses/SROs were legal developers would build them.

>It would be a bloodbath for investors and consequently cannot be allowed to happen.

If it will be a bloodbath for investors it's not a matter of not allowing it, people just won't invest and it won't happen anyway. Or the government will massively subsidise it and under-wright it to make it happen, and the public purse will carry the can. If it were financially viable on it's own, the private sector would most likely do it anyway, but if you're starting from the point of financial non-viability of your housing scheme as a starting assumption, blaming investors seems a bit silly.

That's assuming the current prices are reflective of the actual value rather than a degenerate speculative market.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by a degenerate speculative market, but if you've got some special way to perceive value others haven't, watch out Warren Buffett.

I mean a market selling houses that will never be lived in and exist solely as a speculative investment for foreign buyers, one where corporations and funds behave like feudal lords while people remain renters their whole lives and get evicted at will.

I'm not surprised you don't understand what I mean when I speak of the value of housing if your first thought is Warren Buffet. The value of a house is the stability, safety and shelter it gives to the citizenry, it's allowing people who live in it to prosper and to build families.

The thinking at the time was driven by greenery: you take the early industrial urban density that was a lifeless (except for humans) city of stone, but stack the humans a few times higher to open up room for trees and birds and perhaps a little pond. Everybody gets their own window to nature, as if they had a cabin in the woods! That's how their reasoning went, but humans aren't that easy to fool.

> No single design team organized by some maestro can come close to anticipating and designing around all the needs of an urban neighborhood.

This is also true about people who designed american urban sprawl.