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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

A lot of housing politics from 'old school' environmentalist groups are a pretty big own goal as well.

Denser urban living is pretty energy efficient, and forcing lengthy commutes on people because of NIMBYism is a huge waste.

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People want houses. Planners can either yell and stomp their feet about this or adapt to circumstances. It's like electric cars. People want cars. Better they have the ability to have an electric SUV or pickup, because if you try to force them into little tiny econoboxes or lecture them about how they should really be using mass transit, they're just going to flip you the bird and walk away.

Similarly, better to have people be able to have reasonably energy-efficient houses than demanding they all live in apartments.

People want a place to call home. Those come in many shapes and sizes. Denser living does not mean a smaller living space. By building 'up', you can provide both.

The only ones demanding anything are those who show up to try and stop apartments.

Allowing people to live in apartments is not demanding that they do.

Reversing the downzoning of the 70s - 00s is about allowing construction in cities again.

"People want houses."

(Source needed. This probably depends on a lot of variables in play.)

Plenty of people in dense urban areas are happy with living in an apartment and, where I live, buying a condo in the city is at least as frequent as buying a house 20 km away from it for the same price.

Living in suburbia has its downsides - long commute, very limited entertainment and cultural possibilities, very limited choice in schools. Not everyone loves cutting the lawn etc. either, I surely don't. If any of your family members has any disease that could flare up, ambulance response time tends to grow worse with the growing distance.

Of course, a lot depends on factors such as "is the transport authority willing to make public transport actually safe and nice". That requires keeping raving drugged lunatics out of it, plus paying enough money for it. AFAIK in the US, Republicans have an ideological problem with the "paying money for it" part and the Democrats have an ideological problem with the "suppressing antisocial behavior in it" part.

People want a lot of things, many of them conflicting. I'd love a huge house on a large lot in a walkable area and it to be cheap, and also close to nature. Letting markets work is a good way of resolving people's revealed preferences. Some will prefer a condo in a walkable area, others a large lot outside a less expensive city, others will pay through the nose to have a single detached unit in a high cost of living area.

People want houses, but absolutely hate other people having houses.

Its funny how mass transit was once seen as a way out of the crisis of too many city horse carriages and all the manure they produce. Metro and rail was simply considered the natural solution, which combined with denser living space allowed for labor intensive industries to sprout up around cities. But then came the horseless carriage and suburbian sprawl became a thing and now we have too much of that. Too much hardened soil and flooding is becoming a much bigger problem, animal and insect populations wither, road networks have upkeep, transport and storage costs make everything imperceptably more expensive. In my scifi fantasy future vertical farming will become a thing which should allow a major shrinking of hinterlands around dense population areas, though preferably not replaced with suburbia. Maybe we could go live in the clouds too.

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