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Comment by darthoctopus | Hacker News Reader

Why not both? Green spaces and buildings are necessities insofar as they provide important amenities for mental health, pollution/heat island management, and placemaking, and in this sense they are critical infrastructure. But many cities, even big ones, operate at scale without investing in important infrastructure, such as public transport, traffic engineering, third places, and affordable housing; it is unsurprising that the operators of such cities should see green spaces as luxuries in a similar fashion.

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Well, green spaces do involve tradeoffs. Someone living in Manhattan who is at least OK with the price of housing may wholeheartedly approve of Central Park (and all the smaller parks) while someone who might want to move there would rather some more apartment blocks were built in some of the space.

Of course there are other ways of making space not all of which are totally voluntary to current residents/owners of property. Cities (including NYC) used to be much more cavalier with remaking areas in this manner.

A city doesn't have space restrictions. It has transportation restrictions.

If you manage to make people travel around faster, you increase the housing supply by a much higher amount than you can by converting local land into housing.

So, everybody would be better by increasing the reach and area for train tracks, even if you convert a reasonable amount of nearby area into parks, if also, while you are at it, you provide some way for local transit to integrate with the long-distance one.

The dichotomy on the article is just plainly wrong. Transportation enables you to improve on both, and without transportation you will have neither.

Geography also matters of course. And many many companies are not actually located in a city.

Better commuter rail/light rail is desirable. On the other hand, a commute is still a commute. I'm actually quite convenient to a commuter rail station that ties into the city's subway quite well. But I pretty much hate commuting into the city on the few days I have to do it because it still takes a big chunk out of my day.

If the speed isn't actually fast, then transportation needs to be improved.

I'm about 45 miles outside of the city. Once you have 15 stops or so I'm not sure how much you can improve things?

I'm about 45 miles outside of the city. Once you have 15 stops or so I'm not sure how much you can improve things?

Express train line, which means fewer stops or no stops at all between destination.

There's probably various inefficiencies such as infrequent service and slowdown of the train due to track issue.

For me, it's the issue of the train not being local to where I live, and infrequency of service, which means I could be waiting up to 20 minutes for the train to arrive in some cases. Stops are not as unbearable for me which felt like a minute or shorter for each stop.

My train line eliminated semi-express service during the pandemic and it's still very clearly much below pre-pandemic ridership. The transit service did make improvements a number of years back but it's still clearly operating well below economic breakeven. (Which may be OK.)

The station is fairly convenient to me to go in for morning rush hour. It's unusable for an evening event. The train is basically empty if I even take it at the tail-end of rush hour. And trains are understandably infrequenty scheduled outside of rush.

Transit demand has a chicken and egg problem, in that demand will increase if the service quality is high but in a place like yours the service quality is low so demand remains low. I don’t think this improvement can happen without a clear vision and integrated plan for achieving it, initial low metrics be damned.

It's hard to make commuter rail work outside of commuting hours beyond a few locations like Manhattan that are so painful and expensive to drive in and park.

I'd have trouble justifying subsidizing every off-hour rider with a $100 bill given there are trains; it just will probably take you 2 or 3x the time relative to driving if you want to head home after a play or a dinner.

Tell that to every small city in the world not in the USA that has a commuter rail system, there are too many to count but Americans think it’s an impossibility anyway.

An easy way to improve things is to simply move closer. 72km is a really long way to commute; you need long-distance train service for that, and that's always going to be expensive, or slow, take your pick.

That's technically true. But it denies the entire point of the discussion up to here.

The GP isn't replying to people interested in making his particular commute better.

Why should I? No desire to drive into the city all the time. Most of the time I haven't been working in the city. Happy to be living on 5 acres or so. These days, only go into the city about once a month.

When I did commute semi-regularly there were regulars going into the city though I only did so a couple days a week; wouldn't have been sustainable.

Then why are you complaining about the commute time?

I didn't think I was complaining. Just, like lots of people, it takes a while to get in by whatever transportation mode so I don't do it often.

The greater metro area around where I live has far more jobs in many areas than the city itself does. I'm not sure there were any sizable tech-industry companies in the city proper for a long time although there are more now.

I was mostly responding to a comment way upthread somewhere that, even with a fairly good public transit system, going into a city can take a fair bit of time if you have to use multiple modes of transportation. So the answers are pretty suck it up, move closer, or don't go into the city much.

>going into a city can take a fair bit of time if you have to use multiple modes of transportation. So the answers are pretty suck it up, move closer, or don't go into the city much.

Well, yeah? Those answers are your alternatives if you choose to live far from the city, and I would think they should be obvious. You can't change the laws of physics. Or economics: I mean, you could build a bullet train between your rural town and whatever exact destination in the city you want, but obviously that's economically infeasible.

What about people who don’t want to live near train tracks? Or people who currently live on land that would be seized if train tracks were to be built? Not everyone wants to live in a city.

What about people who don’t want to live near train tracks? Or people who currently live on land that would be seized if train tracks were to be built? Not everyone wants to live in a city.

You see those gigantic parking lots and 4 way stroads? Many of the parking lots are empty for much of the day, and stroads are dangerous and inefficient.

For that matter, freeways and interstate highways are valuable resources we could repurpose for train tracks.

We have grossly inefficient transportation corridor that could easily be made more efficient.

Now, there will still be need to demolish homes and businesses for public benefit, but reducing traffic and making good use of land more efficiently means less homes will needed to be demolished.

The polled preferences of Americans look something like 60-40 in favor of single family homes. The actual land distribution in metropolitan areas looks more like 95-5.

To some degree, building more train tracks and allowing dense housing relieves pressure on the remaining areas.

or people don't tell the whole truth in polls?

we have no way of figuring that out. The land is not legally permissive to get to a true market-oriented distribution of housing.

Sure we do. We can investigate the living preferences of people with the means to choose between multiple options.

I don't want to live near cars yet it is virtually illegal for me to get that short of becoming a hermit in the mountains. What about me?

Then move out to a rural community and good luck trying to find a job there.

Plenty of us have no problem working from a mostly rural area.

Great! Then you can move out there and not worry about living in a city, and this discussion isn't relevant to you. Problem solved.

There are still plenty of four- or five-storey walkups in Manhattan. These can be razed and replaced with residential high-rises. Manhattan's ability to build up (as opposed to out) is essentially unlimited.

You need a lot more zoning capacity than housing demand because for various reasons buildings don’t turn over very quickly.

The real problem is that to be healthy, the housing market in New York needs a lot more capacity in recognizance of this fact. There is no such thing as full zoning capacity in the same way that zero unemployment is not realistic or good.

I guess if Manhattan had the density of Hong Kong, it would be as affordable as Hong Kong?

Hong Kong really does explore the limits of unlimited growth upward.

Hong Kong has the same problem as everyone else: refusal to build.

That is ridiculous considering the towering apartment blocks you can see anywhere that isn’t covered by a steep mountain in the region. And those get tunneled through by subways so all the places that can be built on are. The same is really true with any mainland Chinese city. And still people complain about the rent being too high.

Just because you have a lot of high skyscraper doesn't mean you have an adequate supply.

I have seen pictures of those high rise apartment buildings. What's clear to me is that they're frequently skinny and tall. The tallness of these structures can be misleading, because we're not accounting for total volume of a building.

You can have a lot of density with relatively low height and greater area of space occupied. These may be green spaces or parks. Filling in those area with more building volume doesn't mean green spaces are impossible, but it would be an engineering challenge to put green spaces on the roof.

If you wish to see truly insane population density. You should see images of Kowloon walled city and compare that to Hong Kong. They're not really comparable. Kowloon Walled City is only 10 to 14 of stories high. There are certainly buildings higher than that in Hong Kong.

In any case, housing cost is determined by demand and supply. If there's sufficient supply of housing, the price would go down. If there's insufficient housing, the cost would rise. It doesn't matter if your city is hyperdense or not.

Apartment buildings in Asia are around 30 stories tall, which is the limit where you can use low skill labor and cheaper materials (going higher requires more skill and cost). Each floor has around 4-5 units, they have to be like that due to window requirements. Even China isn’t going to let you build a fat deep building with many non window units, which are called death traps. I lived in these buildings for 9 years, they are about as dense as you can get until things get very expensive or very dangerous.

Kowloon walled city was torn down in the early 90s for good reasons.

That's simply a problem of engineering design and building code regulation, and the current assumption of how we design and construct buildings. You can double the volume of a flat area by adding a story height worth of flat area. Thrice, if you triple it.

The fact is, the world we live in isn't constructed in 3D, but rather 2.5D.

In any case, this is not an engineering problem, but a sociopolitical one.

Its an engineering/cost problem. Yes, you can create spansive narrow but long building that go up N stories and have long corridors of apartments with only one wall of windows (and you can go back and front on that). But you need to be able to get the people down in case of fire (and not have them jam), so more stairs, and elevators to handle the amount of traffic. It isn't because people are dumb that they don't do this by default, they run cost benefit and realize building towers works out to about the same economy as building walls, people also want some green, so courtyard complexes are common (towers surrounding a central courtyard, this is a very chinese design).

> In any case, this is not an engineering problem, but a sociopolitical one.

It turns out they not only have to fund the construction of these buildings, but also sell them when they are completed.

If it's really a fundamental engineering challenge, then reporting on the issue should have reflected that. They do not. It's basically broadly the same problem elsewhere. Hong Kong's challenges are political, not engineering, irrespective of the debate whether to build tall or wide(in my opinion, both).[1]

1. https://www.thinkchina.sg/whats-stopping-hong-kong-fixing-it...

Yes, you can of course just kick those people out from where they're living.

I'm not saying it would have to involve overnight evictions. It would happen over a multi-year span.

Historically, "urban renewal" has involved the city government just taking drastic action. If you want to turn low/mid-rises into high-rises at scale, that probably won't happen organically.

I concede that past efforts at urban renewal have usually neglected to take into account the needs of all (or even most) stakeholders. It's an intractable problem, but not impossible. Perhaps the perfect storm of a housing crisis, climate change, and lower property tax revenue from a collapse in commercial RE might force rational heads to come together.

>a collapse in commercial RE

Perhaps. But if jobs are not a reason to live in a city, I expect that will change the housing equation for many people and they'll just move somewhere that isn't as crowded.

Which is probably even a good result overall. Lower housing prices for people who want to live in a city for other reasons--albeit perhaps with reductions in services and other favored urban features overall.

You can't have something be a necessity and a luxury. An iPhone is one or the other, but not both.

Iphone is a luxury. The same way as a personal car is. Or automatic coffee machine for at home use.

Is coffee itself a luxury? Cause automatic coffee makers are just as cheap as any other method of making coffee these days.

Something can be neither luxury nor necessity. Coffee is one example.

Coffee is a luxury. It is a very carbon and labor intensive product of growing fruits in tropical areas, only using the seeds, throwing away the pulp of the fruit, transportation, roasting grinding and then the semi boiling of the seeds before it reaches your cup. White sugar might be cheap in price but it's unnatural and has many processes which are also very intensive in labor.

And then also think about carbon footprint of keeping animals in cruel tight cages and force then to eat only coffee fruits to gather coffee beans in their poo and sell for 100$ per kilo.

Aluminum moka is cheaper than machine. To pour boiling water into the cup with ground coffee is even cheaper. And we are not talking about beans itself, which are all sorts of quality.

I would have guessed you could get a coffee maker for $10 anywhere but it seems they cost $20 nowadays. Still even a $10 mocha pot would be a luxury by that definition when you can make folgers cowboy coffee and drink it out of the single pan that you use for everything.

Iphone is a commodity. Think different.

iPhones are only commodities to iPhones, which if you accept that definition means that everything is a commodity. An iPhone is not a commodity to most other phones.

A personal car is only a luxury as long as you feel good about mooching off your friends whenever you need one.

In the US, in Manhattan, you can probably make do. And there are other cities where you can probably manage with some combination of Uber and short-/longer-term rentals. And just foreclose on certain types of activities for the most part. But I suspect for a lot of people out of school, "I don't need a car" means the same thing I did as an undergrad, namely lean on people who had one.

You can get by in a lot of cities, like Seattle, without a car if you don’t have kids. You don’t even need to bum rides. Even in LA, I wouldn’t have bought a car if it wasn’t for my wife getting pregnant.

In Boston/Cambridge I could probably get by if I mostly didn't leave the city but I know lots of people outside the city and I do lots of activities that would be outside the city. Unlike Manhattan, the assumption is that you have a car as an adult if you aren't right out of school. There's one job I had (for about 1.5 years) that I could have managed without a car.

I think you're generally OK if most of your activities work via transit and Uber. As you suggest, as well, kids and pets probably make things more difficult.

In several parts of Seattle you genuinely don't need a car, with few compromises. Virtually everything is walkable. Even many of the popular trailheads in the mountains have seasonal bus service. Just about the only time I use public transportation is when I take light rail to the airport. I know quite a few people that live this way.

I do own a car but that is only ever used for traveling to another State or to get into more remote parts of the mountains. For anything else, using a car would be inconvenient.

I'd probably be similar if I lived in Boston/Cambridge these days without a need to commute. I wouldn't use a car day to day. But I'd use one to go to outdoor activities or to visit people outside the city. Even if the economics didn't quite work out, I'd want one customized for my liking just so I didn't need to think about it.

Why would you do this? You can use a bus. Or scooter. Or bycicle. Or walk. Or dismiss journey, maybe it is a luxury itself?

Why would I mooch off friends for car access when I can just rent one?

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