Your proposal flies in the face of what people actually want. Everyone wants a detached home with a yard. No one wants to live in a condo, an oct or a quad, or even a row house, as a permanent life-long dream. Not the people who currently own detached homes and not the people looking to buy homes. Everyone sees high-density housing as a stepping stone towards detached home ownership. Detached home ownership is the dream, the more land it comes with, the better.
If people actually wanted that, you wouldn't have to ban denser living.
Our choices are not the result of a free market, but one highly constrained by land use restrictions.
This is seen very clearly in housing prices. Dense living is hugely undersupplied, and therefore very expensive.
> Detached home ownership is the dream, the more land it comes with, the better.
Not everyone wants to live in the country or the suburbs. I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93oFXRedHy0
As a country dweller I feel the same about the city. The city is an ugly, noisy, filthy hive of madness.
How funny, having grown up in a rural area, I'd never live one again due to the madness, filth, and ugliness! I hope we both have ample choices for the ways we choose to live.
Noise in cities is mostly from cars, as is the dirt and death and destruction. Which is why I advocate so hard for allowing low car lifestyles and building, something that is largely banned in the US.
> How funny, having grown up in a rural area, I'd never live one again due to the madness, filth, and ugliness!
The only reason there would be madness, filth and ugliness in a rural area is if you left it there, because you are the only one living on your property.
Obviously, you have to sometimes go out into a hub of activity to get groceries or whatnot, but the onus is on you to provide evidence that those hubs are epicenters of madness and filth in a rural area, but not the urban area.
Your argument makes 0 sense without any evidence.
The only reason there would be madness, filth and ugliness in a rural area is if you left it there, because you are the only one living on your property.
Use of sulfur by farmers causes asthma: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5783654/
Stockyards smell awful.
My childhood friend's grandfather owned a silage plant. Ever smelled silage?
The local pig farm has created the worst smell I've ever directly experienced, and it's been a problem since the 90s.
These are just a few examples of filth and ugliness. As for madness, meth use and inattentive, drunk, or road-raging pickup truck drives with provide you that.
I see that you have the full experience. Has a person really lived until they have experienced the smell of a pig barn a mile away being cleaned out? Maybe "lived" is the wrong word but damn will it give you new nasal experiences that are beyond description. Around me, it was mostly the turkey barns, but I drove by enough pig barns that I know it's equally horrifying.
There's too much "trad life" larping on Instagram these days, and one of the many many parts of the experience that viewers miss is smell.
My experience from childhood in a quite rural area (500m from a large nature preservation area) is the same.
There was noise from constant tractors running around (for both cereal agriculture and cattle farming), even more noise from the nearby gigantic steel building company. People constantly driving around for any reason with stinky noisy vehicles (often poorly maintained). You would get bad smells from the cattle farmer muckspreading or the porc farmer cleaning out. Sometimes you would actually need to stay inside because the nearby cereal farmer thought it was a good idea to spray pesticide with a helicopter.
And that's before even talking about the "nature" part, like a swan chasing you because for some reason he thought you were a threat when you were just passing by, a random confused board wondering if he should charge you or just go about his life, gigantic carnivore fish that will bite you if you are not careful (silurid fish, they caught one over 2m in the river next to my house). You can add the random stray dog (or just common farmer dog) that may not be that friendly and agressive bulls that may catch you by surprise if you unknowingly walked on their territory (to take a shortcut or whatever).
I have learned the hard way that nature is a bitch and rather nasty most of the time. We built society/civilisation because otherwise we wouldn't fare very well alone or in small groups. And the parts of nature we exploit for civilisation are not better than cities, in fact they are often much nastier (you get the nature default, plus the crap humans put on top).
I think people who have some sort of fetish for nature are low IQ or weird excitement with unnecessary risks. My experience living with/around the people there taught me that indeed, most of them are quite dumb and that's probably the reason they are here.
You seem to be confusing living in the country with living "right in the middle of animal farming and agriculture farms".
There are plenty of small developments (e.g. 100-150 houses with 2-3 acre plots with some basic amenities like road clearing) that are far away from anything you describe.
> because you are the only one living on your property.
This makes me think you don't actually live in a rural area. It's not like you're pioneering, no connection to the rest of society. There's still school for the kids, church, stores, and yes, even neighbors.
Plus, most humans find having a social life to be one of the greatest joys in life.
I find it fascinating that you think it's acceptable to call cities centers of madness, filth, and ugliness, but think it's completely unacceptable to think that of rural areas. Have you actually lived in a city? Or are you just basing it off of perceptions you get from media?
Many people have romantic notions about the country. Reality is there are “good” areas and bad. Lots of helplessness and poverty, shitty agricultural and industrial operators destroying the environment.
The beautiful areas are breathtaking if you can afford to live there.
I experienced both. I grew up in a beautiful pastoral landscape with prosperous dairy operations and a mix of tourism and small business. Small scale dairy farming is dead, and that death caused a chain reaction. My old home is a rural ghetto at this point. Distribution centers are the big thing that was supposed to save the day, but they have high turnover and generate truck traffic and other issues.
So you traded trees for hard advocating.
Plenty of room for trees once there's fewer cars. Urban trees are great, and plentiful when they are planned for.
As someone who was a country dweller (born and raised) you couldn’t pay me any amount of money to return to it.
It’s nice we get the choice though, and I do like to visit it still. I could just never return to such isolation and poor services.
Mainly due to car industry friendly legislation and entitled suburbanites
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Sure, that's your personal preference and to each their own. The market speaks otherwise. Detached homes are the most desirable section of the real estate market based on consumer surveys, see the greatest growth in value compared to other real estate over the medium to long term and are basically recession proof. Even in the financial crisis of 2008-2009, the average loss was 10-15% in market value, which was recouped over the next five years.
The only consumer survey they actually reveals preferences is the price that people are willing to pay. Ask them questions in isolation and you miss all the implicit tradeoffs inherent to the questions.
And on that front, prices in dense areas are way way above suburban areas. Even if you subtract the lawn. People will pay far far more per sqft for a home in a dense urban area without a lawn! Which indicates that dense living is far undersupplied.
Not coincidentally, we don't have to ban suburban living, we only ban dense living. Literally anybody could buy an apartment building, tear it down and build a single family home, but how often do you ever see that happen? But you can't go the other direction, by law.
The market shows we do not have enough housing first and foremost. Many people care most of all about the cost, which is why people live in terrible buildings, so denser housing which can lower housing costs is the only real solution to increasingly unaffordable housing. Real estate is recession proof because we have effectively banned new housing which creates a massive rent seeking wealth transfer to those holding onto land simply by being there first
Single family homes have more sqft, so of course there is a higher price ceiling! That’s…very intuitive. There’s also less of them, because they take up so much space, so…doesn’t surprise me that they would be more at a “premium”. Assuming it’s in a desirable location.
One more thing to consider - no U.S. city has “excellent” infrastructure so it’s difficult to know what the demand would be like if that kind of city existed in the US. NYC doesn’t count, the subway is good by US standards but it’s junk compared to asia standards. Slow, loud, disgusting, lots of delays and maintenance on weekends.
For example how much would a nice apartment in manhattan be worth if i could easily hop on a bullet train and be in the Hamptons on Long Island within 50 minutes? Or in Mystic Connecticut within 45 minutes?? Suddenly commuting from the suburbs daily, so i can relax in nature on the weekends loses its appeal. Just one example.
With that said it’s good the market offers different housing “products” based on personal preference or life-stage (young, kids, older, etc)
I in fact want none of the things you claim. I have zero interest in living in the burbs, in maintaining a yard. It is in fact my long term dream to live in the city in my wonderful apartment until I cark it.
How bizarre you think you can talk for literally everyone in existence.
> Everyone wants a detached home with a yard. No one wants to live in a condo, an oct or a quad, or even a row house, as a permanent life-long dream.
This is easily disproven by the state of the real estate market and relative value of said urban condos to suburban sfh
OK. Since that's what people actually want, the market should work without single-family-home zoning laws and minimum parking requirements.
Glad to see different people want different things in life.
People want the single family, but they don’t want to pay for the externalities that come with sprawl.
Price in the full cost of that sprawl and it becomes less desirable.
Most people, even in the US, don’t live in detached homes with a yard. The amount of sprawl required to accomplish that “dream” of everyone living in a detached home with a huge yard would be a disaster for the environment and commutes.
In 2023, 54% of the housing units in the US were single family detached, https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/10/owner-occupied-single-famil.... I guess some of those could not have yards, but that is pretty rare to not have any sort of yard in a single family detached home.
2/3 of home buyers have single family detached as their preferred housing, so more people want to live in that type of housing than currently do so.
In the area with which I'm familiar it's a zoning/planning requirement to dedicate some proportion of lot area to yard. I forget the details -- it's been a while since I dug into this. I think that's also why mother in law units became popular in some jurisdictions: a workaround for yard area requirements since it piggy backs on the existing home yard arrangement.
Hear hear! Thank you. People are downvoting like mad because they want to drive their own agendas and are afraid of reality, except reality stands undefeated. Everyone wants a piece they call their own. Fighting against it is fighting against basic human nature. Give up your climate agenda. It's dead. Even Bill Gates said it.
No. You are being downvoted because observable facts support the opposite of your claims; and because you have apparently ignored many people who pointed out several things wrong with your claim — in a variety of ways — to cherry-pick someone who agrees with you; and because you propose to generalize the feelings of other people who are speaking up that they don't feel the way you imagine that "everyone" does; and because you are casting aspersions on others.
The only person who presented any evidence is the GP and it affirms my claim. Can you present the evidence you so speak of?
What you chose to argue against, by its nature, does not require evidence. The entire point is that you made a universal claim about what other people think. Others saying "I do not think that way" disproves your claim. It is not necessary for others to evidence that they don't think that way; saying so ipso facto establishes it.
Much of the rest of what is said here contra your viewpoint is also readily observable common knowledge.
I would suggest you read the Gates report. I'm not sure how much to engage here, except to say emphatically that Gates said nothing of the sort. TL;DR - health and development funding should be considered as a more marginally impactful form of foreign and domestic government investment, but only because of the rapid (and ongoing) progress already seen in emissions reduction.
Here's a quote:
> To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.
Reducing sprawl is plainly a good strategy to reduce transportation and infrastructure needs, and preserve wildlife.
Your comment would be a lot better if you didn't use words like "everyone" and "no one".
You'd be correct if you referred to some people, but acknowledged that for plenty of people, a detached home with a yard is the last thing they want. Lawn care and home maintenance, no thanks. Let me just pay a fee for my share of building maintenance, please.
This is some suburban delusion. Do you think the people who own multimillion dollar condos in NYC would rather live in a single family home? What's stopping them?
I want to be in the heart of a bustling city where I can walk to everything and do something different every night. That's not possible in suburbia.
> Do you think the people who own multimillion dollar condos in NYC would rather live in a single family home? What's stopping them?
They'd probably rather live in a single family home in NYC.
They have to choose between contradictory desires: single family home over condo, but NYC over suburbs or rural.
Has a lot to do with time of life too. I had similar feelings in 20s while single.
I want to live in a condo rather than detached home. Private home is too much of a hassle to maintain properly and also less likely to have many different shops/restaurants within 5 min walk
> Everyone wants...
Absolutely untrue. My own desires are quite the opposite of what you describe. Besides which, tiny downtown places can often be more expensive than considerably larger ones in the suburbs.
… Eh, I think maybe you’re taking what _you_ want and assuming it is what everyone wants? Personally I couldn’t face living in the middle of nowhere.