Anyone who wants to live in apartments can do so. Nobody is forced to live in single-family homes -- on the contrary, we work long and hard to afford the money to get into them because they are better than listening to our neighbors all the time.
Apartments are fun when you are young and want to live downtown and enjoy the restaurants and the night life. When you get older and want your home to be a refuge and raise a family, apartments really suck.
People do not prefer sharing a house with roommates to having their own apartment.
Also the idea that people's preferences should be encoded into bans on certain housing types is completely absurd to begin with.
Also please see the price increases in single family homes also historically outpacing inflation in major metros.
Build more of something, and dare I say it, maybe let's let the market decide what and where.
And there your argument falls apart; vast majority can’t afford it. Policy you advocate has caused a housing shortage.
The suburbs got built because people wanted them! The zoning laws exist because the voters wanted them! It's a big mistake to think that most Americans secretly want denser housing arrangements and the zoning laws are preventing it.
and of course it is possible to have a refuge while being in shared housing. Like big apartments do get built! Not for everyone and like you said people want a nice refuge. But it’s possible to build large apartments with good insulation where people have their privacy, while simultaneously offering (for example) huge shared parks and close access to commerce or schools. every shared housing thing doesn’t turn into Manhattan.
What I remember most about living in a flat was my wife and I being able to walk to work and our son being able to walk to school. Didn't hear the neighbours and we had access to really nice private gardens.
There is nothing fundamentally sucky about apartments/flats.
Edit: Of course, a lot of flats/apartments suck - but then again so do many houses. If you have flats built with proper construction and sensibly planned then they can be very pleasant.
Re "apartments really suck" - I beg to differ. I live in a 1920s apartment block in an inner-city neighbourhood, it's 50m from a school where my neighbours kids walk every day (high school is further, but they'll take the trolley or tram), there's a cafe on the corner, a couple of local pubs on my street, and a supermarket 5 mins walk away. I don't hear neighbours through the walls, we have a shared garden with an apple tree and grape vines. I walk ~10 minutes to meet friends at my local cinema, and walk my dog in a handful of different parks which are between 5 and 15 minutes walk away. Can you please explain what part of any of this "sucks" because I am personally struggling to see it.
I suspect you'll suggest that my situation is exceptional (it's not, this describes most accommodation where I live) and counter that it's possible to make a bad apartment. But really it's possible to fuck up any kind of housing development - the UK has some spectacular examples of both shit tower blocks and shit single-family dwellings last century for starters. So the difference is that those single home developments also incur a pretty stiff cost to cities, society and the environment that you cannot handwave away unless you just want to say “well I don’t mind if the rest of the world sucks, as long as I get to have a big garden”
- significantly higher cost (absent widespread R1 zoning, which drives the cost of apartments up),
- locations in the middle of desolate suburbia,
- dead neighbourhoods because almost no one lives there,
- very few nearby stores and restaurants,
- no or limited public transit because it costs far too much to run in sprawling suburbia,
- utter dependence on personal automobiles, and the complete lack of independence for children, young adults, and other non-driving members of society,
- the necessity of maintaining the grounds of your own personal park,
- poorly maintained or missing public infrastructure because everything is so spread out,
- having to endure endless traffic because of your 1hr commute to work,
and I could go on.
Given the above, if apartment living wasn't so heavily restricted by law, so many more people would choose to live in them rather than SFH. You only need to look at cities like Montreal or entire countries like the Netherlands to see that this is true.
In Montreal, housing is still cheap and most people live in multiplexes (walk-up two-to-four storey buildings with private front doors and small back yards) and live very close to where they work, but there are still a lot of different styles of SFH that people can choose to live in if they want, and many do. Again, look at the video I linked above for examples.
I love the constant description of suburbia as being desolate.
My suburban neighborhood is pretty typical and we have a vibrant community, including little free libraries, bike trails, conservation clubs, birdwatching orgs, garden clubs, needlecraft clubs, kids running lemonade stands, teens hustling to shovel driveways in the winter, a community pool, bake sales, plant sales, strawberry festivals, and more.
We even all banded together and got rid of a lot of the streetlights so now I live in a Bortle 3 (or VERY low Bortle 4) dark sky. And because I have a yard I have a huge-ass amateur radio antenna farm and a fire pit where people come over to chill out.
I raised three daughters here and they turned out fantastic, and spent their youth doing some real Stranger Things stuff without all of the upside-down bits.
If I want to feel hip and urbane I drive the 20 minutes to the train station and go into town, pay my $20 for a cocktail, see an overpriced show, and then retire to my awesome house.
I'm beginning to think that people who think suburbia is desolate are miserable shitheads who a: people don't want to be around, or b: don't want to be around other people.
Also significantly higher return on investment. Homeowners build equity, renters don't. Houses increase in value faster than owned condos/apartments/townhouses.
> - locations in the middle of desolate suburbia,
It's not desolate. We have everything -- parks, stores, restaurants, schools, nearby downtown areas...
> - dead neighbourhoods because almost no one lives there,
Not dead at all. Plenty of kids playing all the time, people walking their dogs, etc.
> - very few nearby stores and restaurants,
Not true at all. There are hundreds of stores and restaurants where I live. They just aren't jammed between people's houses.
> - no or limited public transit because it costs far too much to run in sprawling suburbia,
Plenty of transit in my suburb.
> - utter dependence on personal automobiles, and the complete lack of independence for children, young adults, and other non-driving members of society,
Not true at all. People have ways to get around. Kids ride bikes. There are buses and trains not all that far away.
> - the necessity of maintaining the grounds of your own personal park,
It's not usually a big deal to maintain your yards. Most people seem to manage. Some hire gardeners, but many also take care of it themselves.
> - poorly maintained or missing public infrastructure because everything is so spread out,
All the infrastructure in most suburbs is fine. It's not like we all live in the 1800s or something. The roads are even paved!
> - having to endure endless traffic because of your 1hr commute to work,
A 1-hour commute is an outlier. It just is. The US average, last I checked, is something like 30 or 35 minutes.
Nonetheless, NONE of what you say justifies single family home MANDATES (as well as minimum parking mandates, minimum setbacks, maximum heights, etc.). Let people build what they want to, at the price they want to, and everyone will be happier. This is the United States we're talking about, supposedly the "land of the free"—why not make it actually true?
The restrictions exist because people want to ruin neighborhoods like mine. We made laws to prevent it.
For every sane YIMBY who wants to build livable density, there seems to also be an unhinged person who thinks everyone should be forced to live in tower blocks.
Many such people are in this thread. I used to think it was a strawman argument, but those people really do exist, they really want to take my home from me and turn my whole block into a high rise, and that’s not going to happen without a fight. That’s why the mandates exist.
The biggest obstacle the YIMBY crowd faces is the insane people in their own camp: The crazy utopian socialist weirdos who think it’s morally wrong to live in a house in a suburb and drive a car. Force those people out, denounce them, and you’ll see a lot of the opposition to new housing go away.
There's a big difference between high-rise and mid-rise, and all three can peacefully coexist. If you had watched the video I linked earlier you would have seen many examples of this. I will link it here again for convenience.
Population Density 101: A Visual Guide to Suburbs and Skyscrapers by Oh The Urbanity!: https://youtu.be/y3XoUBzfXps