Density or Sprawl? How To Solve the Urban Housing Crisis
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.พ. 2020
- Land use regulation is making cities unaffordable. In an unfettered market, how would Americans choose to live?
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The mass migration of human beings from the country to the city started with the Industrial Revolution. According to the U.N., 2007 was the tipping point when more of humanity lived in urban than rural areas. And the trend continues: A projected two-thirds of the global population will live in cities by 2050.
In the U.S., cities have become remarkably expensive because housing prices have outpaced wage growth. Developers don't build enough new supply to meet rising demand because a thicket of regulations artificially drive up building costs.
Is the solution more density in the core or more sprawl in the periphery-or both? If governments were to remove the artificial restrictions and incentives that shape the landscape of American cities, how would urban dwellers choose to live?
"There is a huge pent up demand for density and for urban living that simply is not being able to get met because of the restrictive zoning," says urban policy analyst Scott Beyer, founder of The Market Urbanism Report, which promotes market-based solutions to urban planning issues.
Beyer says that urban residents want to live close together in the center city, but that local and state governments are making that difficult with land-use regulations, citing onerous building codes and environmental and public review requirements.
"It really goes down the list of all the different ways that the government controls the pricing and use of land," says Beyer.
Libertarian urban policy analyst Randall O'Toole, who calls himself "the Antiplanner," agrees that many city governments overregulate land use but disagrees with Beyer's claim that more density is the answer to housing affordability.
"Truly affordable housing would be low-density housing built on the urban fringe," says O'Toole. He blames so-called "smart growth" policies meant to increase urban density for discouraging land outside of a city proper from being developed at all-a goal furthered by the passage of then California State Senator Darrell Steinberg's 2008 anti-greenhouse emissions law.
Eight years ago, Southern California's planners adopted a 23-year regional plan to help realize Steinberg's vision.
"The goal that urban planners have had for many years is not to make housing more affordable, but to pack people into higher-density urban areas," says O'Toole. "And that's a goal that I don't think Americans should support."
Beyer agrees that cities should loosen urban growth boundaries, but he argues that more density, not sprawl, would still be more likely in cities San Francisco, citing high land values as evidence of the pent-up demand.
Beyer also points out that homeowners typically don't pay the full cost required to get roads, electrical lines, and other city infrastructure out to the suburbs.
"And so I kind of view the suburbs as an outcome of social engineering and government planning to a degree. And I look at urban density as the outcome as a more organic market-based outcome," says Beyer.
The density question can only be answered if the government stops interfering with the housing market, allowing consumer preferences to shape the urban landscape.
And that's something O'Toole and Beyer would both like to see.
"The government control of land use and zoning has caused housing to be unaffordable," says Beyer. "And I think that market urbanism is a way to reverse those trends."
Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Jim Epstein, Andrew Hinton, John Osterhoudt, Justin Monticello, and Weissmueller. Graphics by Lex Villena.
Music: "Phase 2" by Xylo Ziko used under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons License; "Hallon" by Christian Bjoerklund used under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.
Photo Credits: "Jane Jacobs" by Ron Bull/ZUMA Press/Newscom; "Darrell Steinberg" by Joan Barnett Lee/ZUMA Press/Newscom; ID 101299198 © Gábor Kovács | Dreamstime.com ID 111434954 © Jim Roberts | Dreamstime.com ID 131696329 © Ricardo Vallejo | Dreamstime.com ID 12653034 © Georgii Dolgykh.
What do we want? MORE HOUSING!!
Where do we want it? NOT HERE!
Super Power The soultion is simple, larger roads, more houses, more suburbias, appartments are un-American, each with their own house and truck!
Bob Smith we could also jail more people so that more houses become available, and deport more people, why the f**k even build houses anymore
@Bob Smith immigration is only one piece of the problem. rent controls & dumb ass govt policies are the others.
Crazy but it turns out that when you tell the ones w the money who are willing to take the risk that after they get done working & investing all the $ they borrowed &/or saved up in a couple years that they just wasted their time & money it's crazy but they decide to build somewhere else where the local /state govt arent complete morons.
Why in the hell would anyone build homes if they cant profit & its pretty simple, more people than houses = more expensive houses.
Plenty of houses available & investors lower rents and prices to sell & fill them up.
Govt knows this but when your voters are dumb asses & need to someone to blame it's always easy
blaming the ones w more money.
Precisely, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with people wanting to protect our established residential neighborhoods from overcrowding and overdevelopment. With major shifts to online retail and telecommuting, there are plenty of underutilized shopping malls and sprawling business/commercial/industrial parks and car lots that can be redeveloped into affordable housing, without destroying our suburbs.
@@johne7345 The problem is that the nimby population does not want building anywhere. Thats the point. Suburbs or not. I have watched them fight tooth and nail against building apartment buildings in areas that are not near their precious houses. On one hand we realized we have a housing crisis and on the other we make it impossible for builders to put up housing anywhere. Lots of eye opening videos you can go through of people trying to create more housing only to have to spend years trying to get it done if at all.
"Will ruin the aesthetics of the city" did my man just argue that more affordable housing should be resisted because it wont look pretty?
@@RenzoIsHereYT I see three problems here.
1. Even if I agreed what you are stating, the individual in this video made no mention of that being the reason by which he is against more housing.
2. I find it very unlikely that unpleasant architecture is the main factor in the violence of those who reside in say the projects for instance. I also do not think it is easy to determine to what degree the environment either stimulates this behavior or those with said behavior are simply drawn to such environments.
3. I believe that ugly homes are better than no homes. If the time to get nicer housing is too long it is likely better to just create shite housing. Surely no housing at all creates a worse environment that ugly houses.
Kaisar so having no “ugly houses” is more important than the health and live hoods of people? Do you seriously think that people would prefer to have to pay huge amounts of money to rent a tiny cage like in Hong Kong because of zoning or live in a so called “box” because they feel that that is the best option for them?
@@RenzoIsHereYT Fancy words for avoiding 'Property Value' which is the real issue.
There is plenty of land in our world for far more massive cities in far more massive places. Its just where and how that matters.
China is not that much bigger in land size, but has 20 of the top 80 largest cities (US has 9, and they are on the smaller end). Of the largest in the world, the first one in the US is NYC at #11...the rest are ALL in Asia with exceptions of Mex City and Sao Paulo.
no he just argued that brown people will move in the neighborhood
What are the beautiful places people come to see? Places with large minimum lots? Places with smaller front yards, lots of trees, and narrow streets? Places with tall buildings?
"Density or Sprawl?" is the wrong question to ask.
There's an answer to this already, sprawl is financially unsound, so you can just outright cross that out. Low density, single family housing only look cheap to build at first, but this is only because it is borrowing from its own future. These neighbourhoods cannot generate enough taxes to maintain their own public infrastructures like roads, pipes, electricity, etc in the long run. The cost of building and maintaining infrastructures for low density neighbourhoods are much more expensive per capita than in higher density neighbourhoods, because they needed more pipes, more roads, more cables, etc to serve the same number of population. In about twenty five years or so, when many these pubic infrastructures start to need to be replaced, cities often either becomes insolvent and even bankrupt, or has to resort to other unsustainable methods of fundings, or more often than not they are just letting those infrastructure to crumble.
High density isn't really the answer either, high density neighbourhoods are financially sound, but if they're not designed the right way, they can become a depressing concrete jungle. And while it has much better track records than low density suburbs, if poorly designed, its fiscal soundness isn't necessarily guaranteed either.
What you want to build is a livable, walkable, mixed use neighbourhood, centred around a robust public transport. The key point here isn't density, but walkability, having a robust local economy allows the neighbourhood to generate the tax revenue to financially sustain itself, and are livable because of a thriving local economy powered by local residents visiting small businesses, like small shops, grocers, and restaurants. These kind of neighbourhoods are cheaper to live in, because building walkable neighbourhoods means you rely a lot less on cars.
A walkable neighbourhoods does usually also happens to be medium to high density, mixed use neighbourhood, because low density neighbourhood cannot generate enough foot traffic to sustain local businesses. Most low density residence would rather drive to big box store some distance away rather than support their local economy, because their local economy is just too far away to actually walk into.
Just getting high density neighbourhoods alone is not enough, if there's not a thriving local commercial sector within walking distance. Density is a red herring.
Low density sprawls don't get bad raps due to some obscure vision of urban planners of how humans should live. They get bad raps because it's a ticking time bomb when a city builds too much of these.
Bullshit. Look at Columbus Ohio. 14th largest city in the country. Where almost the entire city is urban sprawl. It has been one of the fastest growing cities for decades. 900,000 people and the skyline of a city about one tenth as large. I dont know where your claim that suburban sprawl is financially unsustainable comes from, but it obviously doesnt come from reality.
@@kronk358 You would need to look into the city's balance books on where the money funding those unsustainable growths are coming from. In pretty much all of these low density residentials that defines urban sprawl, they are running on long term deficits. They may have ok cashflow but they're not saving up enough to replace their public infrastructures when they're due, and have to supplement their tax revenue from elsewhere.
Where is "elsewhere"? Building of low density neighbourhoods are often funded by federal fundings and revenues that the city collected from constructions of new neighbourhoods. This is a fragile financing model, as it depends on ever increasing rate of growth which can't continue forever. It's just delaying the inevitable, and worsening its future impact. If the rate of growth slows down, the whole thing will start to unravel, and the impact of the fiscally unsustainable development practice is going to hurt a lot of people.
Strong Town has a great article titled "The Real Reason Your City Has No Money" accompanying their studies in city's budgets across North America. Other readings from there that might also be useful in understanding the issues are the series of articles in "The Growth Ponzi Scheme" and "The Density Question". They have published hundreds of articles that address these issues in much more details and finesse than I can ever provide.
As I said above though, density and sprawl is a red herring, they're the wrong question to ask. Low density can be made to work to be fiscally sound, but for it to work, they need to accept a significantly trimmed down infrastructure, passing off many modern conveniences that people have come to expect, or by collecting substantially higher taxes which would never work out for most people with the median income of the area. In other words, they need to become either rural areas (not suburbans) or stay as very small number of very upperclass neighbourhood, very premium real estate. These are compromises that most modern Americans just would never be able to accept.
You're absolutely right
@@kronk358 It's easy as hell for cities to go into debt and sprawl like mad. However that sprawl being made profitable is questionable at best.
@@kronk358 Suburbs are financially sound as long as they keep growing. However when they stop growing is when the problems start.
A sustainable city is one that can grow and shrink and grow and shrink with the times without going bankrupt.
A major issues with the sprawl approach that wasn't addressed by it's advocates in this video is increased commuting times, the need for the government to build additional infrastructure and also deforestation and destruction of the environment. Yes it is the cheapest way to build more housing but that is because much of the costs get externalized
The commute time argument is false. Lower density metro areas have shorter commute times than higher density ones. Not everyone works in the CBD.
Not with electric cars and work from home
Yes, and it costs millions to build and maintain those sprawling infrastructure
@@Jamcad01 But there aren't many job opportunities in the suburbs, right? So everyone would need to commute to the commercial areas. Also your commuting time argument only applicable for places with poor public transportation.
@@Earth098 This is false. Heaps of jobs in the suburbs now in many metro areas
Forcing to only build low density is what results in hour plus long commutes.
I'm a 25 year old, single, white-collar worker...and I tottaly prefer to live in a medium/high density mixed zoned neighborhood where I can walk and shop without the need to get a vehicle out of the garage. Maybe I'll live in a single-family home in the future when I have my own family, but until then, I like to be in the middle of a vibrant city.
Same for me
This is the solution.
Check out City Beautiful or Not Just Bikes.
I raise my family of 5 in a high density neighborhood, so do millions of others. It is a lot better for kids growing up
I'd like to make an edit to single-family home: (single-family row home) you can still stay in the middle of the city and have a family. And to be totally honest cities need this to be stable.
A mix of low, medium and high density housing is the solution. All tastes and budgets could then be accommodated easily. Not everyone wants to live in a high rise apartment. Similarly, not everyone is equipped to do the chores required to maintain a farm or other large piece of land. Also, there's people who prefer and can afford to live there communities with resort style amenities. And everything in between.
Thus, no one-size-fits-all solution can possibly exist!
We need a 3d print machine for houses, Henry Ford style, you can choose your color, but it's going to be black
@Bob Smith Overpopulated? There's enough land and resources to support several billion people in the USA. The real problem with mass immigration is an overburdened infrastructure and welfare system.
Suthin Anahkist Im surprised Houston has no zoning at all. It looks so neat and zoned. Must be the developers doing a good job then making it look like a well planned well zoned city instead
@@LucasFernandez-fk8se Houston is really the only major city in the USA that doesn't have zoning.
@Bob Smith overpopulated? You would have a heart attack if you visited cities in Asia. LA looks like a rural town next to NYC. NYC looks like a rural town next to Shanghai
6:03 “We would just ruin the aesthetics...”
My dude, how aesthetically pleasing is the homeless crisis? Things change and evolve, communities change and evolve, and it’s batshit crazy to place a particular aesthetic over the well-being and financial solvency of your constituents.
Like, people are going there either way.
And they call us conservatives.
Yes, the pods will bring total health and well-being to the humans trapped in them. Why not just release us from the huge land taxes on every freaking rural piece of property in the state and people will go back to the land, grow tomatoes and be healthy?
Katherine Chapman Don’t see why this is a binary choice. If people want to live in an apartment downtown, make that good. If people want to live out in the desert or mountains or plains, let them.
And truth be told, the people living in “pods” downtown might actually be healthier because they’re out walking more.
Life without aesthetics is worthless
Bob Smith well to be fair yes and no. It is the housing prices which is why they are on the street but also the mental illness and drugs. Drugs cost a lot and so when you can either pay for pricey drugs or pricey rent then they pay for pricey drugs. In places like Detroit their are very few homeless people because a burnt down crack house may be as cheap as a dollar. This is very affordable even for a homeless person so less of a homeless crisis
because its California you can't say the quiet part out loud. housing can't be both affordable and a good investment. more housing=lower rent
I have lived in Houston for the past 15 years. You can buy a mansion for the same price you'd pay for a matchbox in NYC.
Yes, because the mansion is in a bumfuck nowhere.
Dufffaaa93
Stay where you are, enjoy your "lifestyle."
We will just keep living. I personally live in a small apartment San Diego bc I am in the military, but I dream of returning to farm.
And if you think Houston is "nowhere" what would you think of my ideal place to live, coastal Alaska with no roads in or out (i have lived there and loved it, I've lived in Hong Kong, New York, Charleston, and a few small towns, give me LAND!)
@@Dufffaaa93 Houston has 2.3 million residents and is the 4th largest city in the US. I'm not sure can call that 'bumfuck nowhere'
Only downside is the affordable suburbs require a hefty commute into town so there are increased transportation costs to consider. And the "nice" neighborhoods I side 610 are pricier. My commute to the medical center from Cypress was like 35 minutes in and nearly am hour out. -_-
That's just big city life though I guess.
@@benjaminkesler5245 He's a typical case of the clueless New Yorker. They think they are cultured and educated when in reality they are nearly entirely ignorant of the world outside their mega-metropolitan bubble. They think Long Island is "the countryside"
The less restrictions there are on construction, the cheaper housing will be. The rest is for the consumer to decide.
China famously used more concrete in 3 year (2011- 13) than the US did in the whole of the 20thC, yet it hasn't made their housing cheaper. They have a huge credit bubble, credit invariably manifests in land speculation regardless of zoning. Upzoning and building is only part of the solution, the externalities must be captured via a land value tax.
@@schumanhuman the reasons behind China's housing situation are complex and multifaceted, but suffice it to say that China has moved more people out of poverty and into cities since Deng Xiaoping's reforms than the US had population in the entire 20th century. They would have insane housing shortages no matter what they did.
@@user-ld4qt6ci7b Yes China have achieved a lot, but they have failed to curb malinvestments. Ghost cities are no figment of the imagination. Xi himself recently said that housing should be for living in not for speculation, they have tacitly acknowledged that the land bubble is at a peak and are now trying to socialise the company and bank failures away to create a 'soft landing'.
China has no property tax at all, that allowed speculation to run riot. When property prices fall locals begin to riot so the state intervenes by banning sales below a certain price.
And this is not peculiar to China or EM's, my home city London according to the ONS data now has more housing units per family than it did 15 years ago, yet prices are higher. Land prices are intimately linked to aggregate bank credit, affordable housing will never result from the simplistic supply demand arguments of market urbanists.
@@schumanhuman meanwhile:
th-cam.com/video/2cjPgNBNeLU/w-d-xo.html
@@schumanhuman yeah bc China used housing for inflating their GDP.. Much different from the demand and supply of a free market.
It’s hilarious when a officials say things like ‘California shouldn’t house the entire country” simultaneously advocating open borders.
What's wrong with open borders? Just get rid of the welfare system.
Its's not Californians's fault that a lot of people want to move to California, is not theire fault they are cursed with Silicon Valley
@@Victor-my1hi No but it is there fault for implementing a state wide rent control scam.
Suck My Ass Californians? what fault do they have, when big companies like microsoft, dell, google and apple are lobying in the California administrative affairs. You think rent controll was voted by the people, think better
Sen holly Mitchell: “who will be my new neighbor “, a statement the KKK would be comfortable with.
@dskmb3 Source?
Yes Sen Mitchell,,, please answer your own question here,,,, Hmm,, interesting,,, diversity is this great thing that everybody preaches until you ,,, well,,, actually have to be diverse
I would LOVE to read her mind at that meeting. Chinese? Mexican? White millenials with man buns?
@dskmb3 thanks
Yeah really. Who the hell wouldn't want
a lot of people coming in and completely changing your culture & way of life & if you dont like it you're called an evil racist.
Worked out well for the native Americans
If you just reduce the regulations and let people decide where they want to live it will sort itself out. this is the perfect example of when you need to let market sort itself out and stop trying to social engineer society.
@@Rich-jk8ev Reduce immigration -> lower supply of labor -> higher cost of labour -> higher housing prices
Low-skilled immigrants are not going to be out buying 6-figure homes when they are likely to have to hop from city to city to find jobs where they'll look for something they can rent with roommates
@noah rogers youre a crazy person
I don't think everyone just gets to "decide" where they live. This comment section is just full of people ignorant of just how complicated this problem is. I'm not saying I have the answers, but supply and demand and simply "letting the market sort itself out" is not the solution. Mixed income neighborhoods seem like a good place to start (which certainly would not happen in letting the market sort itself out).
that would work if everyone starting on the same level on a new land. not a well established one. This suggestion will benefit big cooperate and Real estate giants to builds complexes over complexes and you'll be in a giant cube of a city. That's not housing, that's bee's kingdom.
@@jackmcslay The immigrants are high-skilled, jejune moron. Also, at least you admit you want to lower American wages.
From my observations in life so far, I feel that 3 story apartment buildings that take up about 2 city blocks max - with a decent distance from one complex to the next - can fit into single-family home neighborhoods the best and are not overbearing visually or traffic wise.
I live in a single story 2 bedroom unit with a garage on a large block with 7 other detached units. It suits my single lifestyle well and the block still fits in aesthetically with the rest of the middle class neighbourhood
Honestly I think town houses fit in as well especially if you give a courtyard. I would see no functional difference between this and a curl-de-sac.
It is actually.
living closest to work is the way to go. it saves 1-2 hours per day. Let that sink in!
ZeroZ
But growing food on your own property saves a ton of resources.
@@halasimov1362 assuming the person has time/energy/motivation to grow their own food
@@halasimov1362 Lmao who the hell is growing their own food in the suburbs? Sustenance farming sucks and is inefficient, hence why every country that materially develops ditches agrarian economies.
@@halasimov1362 You can do that in an apartment. It's not the 1930s anymore.
@@matthewbiehl3412 It's often illegal to grow your own food in the suburbs anyway. At least in your front yard, where if your house faces south, that's where your food would grow.
Japan keeps housing prices down by a myriad of policies, including mixed zoning (height-based zones rather than residential, commerical, etc) and urban exclusive zones. Great mostly private railways and bus lines.
Does Japan have private railroads or just privete trains & services? The US has privitley owned railroads and I think these monoplies are part of the reason our rails are so terrible. Ik Europe has alot of publicly owned lines with private trains.
@@trent6319
They own both the rails and the trains.
Here is a video about Japanese zoning regulations.
th-cam.com/video/wfm2xCKOCNk/w-d-xo.html
And yes @trent Japan has private rail companies. Lots of them.
@@trent6319 most public transport in the u.s. is government owned. if anyone is the monopoly, it is the government.
@@wade1391 yes the vast majority of local public transport in the US owns its own track but Amtrak mostly doesn't they pay freight companies that own the track to use it. These freight companies owning the only railroad in a region have an effect monopoly.
“property rights is like a bundle of sticks”
"fag•got" in old french))
@@Volodimar ..... root word fasces, latin.... guess where the term fascist comes from.....?
@@JamesThomas-pj2lx Fascists do not support property rights. All property was potentially seizable by the state if it wanted or needed it. Fascism is a racist form of socialism.
@@JamesThomas-pj2lx He used a pretty stupid metaphor.
@@freesk8 If I could like this twice I would.
So much misinformation.
People who misunderstand that housing would just be about housing... when it's about walkability, trust, parks, traffic, public transit, affordability, sustainability, amenities...
Low density is absolute trash. Only serves the car manufacturing and fossil fuel industries. Not the people.
You know what I always say when it comes to when it comes to urban planning, Amsterdam is one of the best cities to live in, Paris is the densest city in Europe yet you never hear any problems with trafic or it being too dense. We have amazing examples of massive cities preforming way way better than US/Canadian cities yet we seem to be unable to look outside of our own country. What a shame.
Amsterdam and Paris are both extremelly unnafordable city, and Paris traffic is horrendous. Not good examples at all.
Have you actually been to Paris? The traffic is *intense*.
Just returned from ten days in central Paris, with half a dozen journeys by car, bus and commuter rail to suburban areas. It is a model of intense density plus relative mobility: only auto access points to its periphery road was as crowded as nearly any in-town freeway in LA or Nashville. It is an excellent model for how we can accommodate many, many more people per square mile in a mixed-use environment that people clamor to be a part of. The single family cul de sacs? We shall always have them among us. But they should not be required by law where there’s a demand for mixed-use medium density.
@@harmonicarchipelgo9351 compared to LA? It isn't
Paris is a bad example. I like amsterdam but are Americans ready to ditch the car for a bicycle?
The advantages are obvious like living in the smack dab middle of the city will still be a pretty chill and calm vibe with very less noise.
How about both density AND sprawl? My friend for example LOVES to live in the middle of NYC, while i prefer to live in a suburb. it should be a CHOICE.
just let people build. developers will build what people want to buy. let the free market decide
@@jcgw2 However, people should pay for the cost of the services they receive (which are more expensive to provide in single family neighborhoods) and cars should be taxed for their externalities. Before this is done, you can't trust the free market to create the optimal outcome.
but your way of living shouldn't be subsidized by the city.
@@dudeman4184 the city shouldn't tax me then
“Who will be my neighbor” someone who can afford your neighbors house because it cost to much for them
It is literally illegal for a real estate agent to answer that question
actually not always. Sometimes your neighbor will be an illegal or a weed smoking non-working leech "asylee" who got in on a quota for low income housing.
@@anastasiab9506 .... Mary Jane got nothing to do with it, leave her out of it!
I know Steinberg from law school. He’s never had a job that wasn’t associated with California government. He doesn’t understand the private sector.
In a true free market suburbs don't exist because property taxes don't fully pay for needed services like city water, sewer, and roads. So you need debt financing to subsidize infrastructure for car centric sprawl.
This is all a facade: The rent seekers benefit from high demand and low supply. More supply forces rents and prices downward. No one who owns anything wants that. They all want to keep their wealth. Low density is not a solution. It simply creates unmanageable traffic problems and forces ever-expanding commuter infrastructure. Or it puts the burden of commuting costs on the people who work in the cities, which then increases the cost of living in those low-density areas. Not to mention that commuting is a health hazard, wasteful, and a major source of pollution. Density works, you just have convince the rent seekers that their property isn't worth as much as they think it is.
"Low density is not a solution" Most people don't want to live cheek by jowl in tiny apartments. I live on a 200m2 plot 40km from my city center, 2km from my office, and I still feel like i'm too close to my neighbours. Different people have different requirements, there is no one size fits all solution unfortunately.
@@francois853 I didn't mean to imply that high-density was the solution for everyone. Just that it's the solution to the problem presented in the video: Lots of people want to live in the city, but the rent seekers are getting wealthy off of the totally unbalanced supply and demand, and will ensure that local governments prevent an increase in density.
I've lived in rural and low-density areas almost my entire life. I did the hour-long-each-way commutes. Now I live in a huge city and I walk to work. I walk to buy groceries. I walk to the movie theater. It's a lifestyle most people can't afford, but I've been lucky enough to achieve. But, one of the main reasons I pay the premiums to live this close to everything is because I get 2+ hours of my day back. Where, previously, that would have been spent sitting in a car.
good to see you gots the new green religion. the urbanistas will let you in thier club.
I simultaneously agree and disagree with you.
Out here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we're subject to one of the 2 or 3 strictest urban growth boundaries in the country, a big contributor to our skyrocketing housing costs. It's great, because it keeps our regional parklands intact, it's also terrible because cities have been very slow to permit mid-rise housing fast enough to keep up with population demand. It's also obvious that many folks still want their single family dwellings, as evidenced by the tens of thousands who continue to move out to faraway exurbs like Stockton, Tracy, Modesto, Manteca, Lathrop, etc., and then commute 100-180 miles round trip per day to their jobs in San Jose and San Francisco to save $500,000 or more on a house.
Don't you think decanting jobs to places where people live will form dense pockets on the periphery. The one ingredient missing from their arguements is time. Growing pains are real, however, without them jobs/housing balance cannot be achieved. Hell some companies might event build worker housing into their office parks to convince transpants to work there. You already see cafeterias and cafes in large offices marketed as perks.
urban planners didn't "lose their minds" it's actually more consistent with many goals to increase density and walkability, mixed use TOD, preserving character of many but not all neighborhoods, increasing affordability and creating inclusionary zoning. the alternative is to build duplexes as far the eye can see and completely change cities for ever.
People can live in a wide variety of home types, and probably will throughout their lives; just don't artificially inflate the prices by regulating what you can do with private property.
Height restrictions ensure the proper reception of sunlight for everyone involved.
Don't fuck around with this "muh right to reduce your property value" bullshit.
Ire Min Mon “muh right to sunlight” lol
You have a say if you already live in a neighborhood
@@ireminmon just curious why the hell are Americans too fascinated with sunlight?
You want sunlight? Walk.
@@ianhomerpura8937 Im not even American. And its not like I rarely walk. Light is extremely important
The old guy is confusing the fact that high density house cost is high in areas with extremely high house cost with the idea that high density house has an underlying higher cost. If the land value is zero, home value because very low. We can see this with mobile home prices, $50K for 1,000 square feet, but you want to put that mobile home in the down town area of a city, the land will cost $500K or more, so the total cost is $550K. And what is this BS about building homes where land is cheap? If you work in downtown LA and want to have a house where land is cheap, you will be ~50 mile or more away have have 3 hours of driving or more, per day to get to work. Also, if you have two people driving 50 mile each way to work, that will cost you $2,000 per month in auto costs.
95% of jobs in LA are not downtown.
The point is, it's cheaper to build bigger homes on the outer fringe than in the middle of an already developed area. Preventing outer fringe development means there's less affordable places for people to live in, and it also further increases the cost of land in the dense area as it becomes the only option
Randal O'Toole's opinion is worth less than a grain of salt considering he works for the Cato Institute which is heavily funded by the oil & gas industry.
Yeah that guy is so pumped full of oil money. Fuck him
Best comment. Great to see more and more see his true colors
Houston absolutely has strict regulations on building higher density and mixed use neighborhoods. Just because there is no standard zoning does it mean there aren’t regulations and barriers. City Beautiful did a great video on this topic.
Extending cities outwards is not a bad idea, *sprawling* outwards is the problem. San Francisco is so expensive because there’s not enough supply to meet extremely high demand. People want to live there. However they want to live there because there are no other San Francisco’s- or at least, in the USA, very few like it. Go ahead and develop on the peripheral of San Francisco, just develop it’s the way people actually want so that they will choose that new development over trying to cram into San Francisco.
You simply cannot meet the demand of San Francisco by building a sprawling suburb. That’s precisely because a suburb cannot give the amenities and lifestyle that makes San Francisco so desirable. It’s a complete fucking myth that suburbia is affordable.
Check out Tracy, CA. It’s a commuter city with a population of nearly 100,000, and 1/5th the population density. It’s a boring ass city, very car dependent, and almost all SFH. It’s depressing to drive through. Yet, The houses out there are similarly priced to those in San Francisco when you compare unit to unit. Sure the houses and lots are larger, but so are the seas of asphalt and there are far less job opportunities and green space. What use is a giant front yard you will never spend your time in abs a backyard that’s just a pain to maintain? Why spend $1,000,000 for a hot, boring city when you could live in a $1,000,000 townhome-still keeping a private backyard, even-within an economically self sustaining city full of amenities? Is the extra space that you rarely ever use and just waste money on really worth it?
Easy answer: the market. Stop trying to "solve" problems and let people do as they please.
But sprawl tends not to breed as much poverty and crime as density does.
Actually statistically speaking density and sprawl both have the same crime rate and poverty. You shouldn't look at the overall stats but stats per capital. A city with 1 million people and 100 murders is safer than a town with 900 people and 1 murder. Also most crime stats only track populations of 100k plus which falsely makes smaller towns and cities look safer
The Chopping Block don’t allow the free market to create cities... we won’t get Paris, Vienna, bath, or Venice with the free market... we will get Dubai...
@@SofaSpy Look up the Kowloon Walled City.
@@burgerman101 what do a slum have to do with what we are talking about? Have you driving in rural west virginia and rural parts of Tennessee. Or rural/ suburban parts of North Dakota, those the only slums you will find in America. There are rural slums, suburbs also, urban slums. Slums have nothing to do with this topic.
Look at Boston, NYC or even Chicago and compare that to Memphis, st.lous and Detroit.
The narrator sounds like a kid mediating an argument between divorced parents.
"Mommy says that suburbs are socialist because of freeways."
"Well you tell 'mommy' that city centers are socialist because of growth boundaries and transit boondoggles!"
Beyer. O'Toole. Get a room. And by room I mean Soho Forum Debate.
JETZcorp US needs more highways and more sprawl. Milenials, get a f**king truck! and move to the suburbs
Senator Mitchell: “who will be my new neighbors?“
Michael Montero or racist
"Diversity for thee, but not for me [in this context people like Senator Mitchell]."
-Carson, Watson, probably some other conservatives as well as a small handful of centrists
@@ToddKeck98 and like that BLM founder who bought 4 homes in neighborhoods which were 90% white
'Mo centralization, 'mo problems
We Are Here a little known secret among Urban Planners ... they’re clueless.
Even though Houston doesn't have Zoning laws, there are a plethora of regulations and when combined, works just like zoning.
Get the government's hands out of housing, trust in the magic of the free market.
Polyester Avalanche the free market will turn Paris into Dubai. It will turn Vienna into Russia. Cheaper buildings built for function will not create beautiful cities that are meant for humans... but instead brutalist architecture meant to be as cheap as possible.
Function < Form
@@RenzoIsHereYT then convince people to not buy an ugly house. that way developers will have to build more beautiful housing
@@jcgw2 or make laws that say you can only build certain heights, styles, designs, etc. If I were to try and convince people this video would be it: th-cam.com/video/Hy4QjmKzF1c/w-d-xo.html
The free market is good when it comes to creating phones, medicines, TVs, and apps. But everyone knows the free market is here to make a profit not to create beauty. This is why you rarely see companies sponsor taking care of a garden or making sure a park looks good because they don't care. The gov HAS to come in and fund that. European cities are the envy of the world. What we need is a less free-market city planning and more centralized city planning with companies coming up with designs they want to create and the government sees if it works for the city and allows it. This is how Vienna was created, Paris was made, and London used to be. Trust me I hate government being involved in a lot of things but if they have to control something it has to be city design. Paris > Dubai. Vienna > Hong kong.
@@RenzoIsHereYT Russia and Dubai are not free market in the slightest. They are both incredibly autocratic with a few powerful people at the top deciding everything.
I'd like to see a more in depth video done on Houston and their covenants.
@noah rogers I just don't trust the idea that these covenants represent a real free market, and the government isn't involved somehow and creating problems.
@@coletrain5667 They absolutely don't represent a free market and are a terrible example. Cities before 1920 represent a free market.
It’s true that Houston doesn’t have “zoning” but Houston does indeed have ordinances that you would find in most city zoning regulations. So it’s really dishonest and lazy to point to Houston as the future of urban planning.
@@Aeyekay0 They do have restrictions (like parking requirements, minimum lot size, etc) but the restrictions become more and more relaxed every year and sometimes they even offer exemptions to these restrictions. Three story townhomes are popping up very quickly here in Houston and many other cities would not allow that at all.
Manufacturing Scarcity
Business regulations prop up giant corporations, giant corporations bring in masses of workers to one locale. Cut regulation, allow smaller businesses to compete, and populations will be able to decentralize better as their jobs become decentralized. Combined with modern logistics and the internet, a lot of businesses could set up shop just about anywhere they wanted
one paragraph cured the world of all problems!!! give this man a medal 😐
@@stuartdriedger9989 It solves problems only on paper and YT comments
And how will all the scattered populations be connected? How will they get internet
@@matrixman8582 The same ways they do in those places now. Nobody said anything about wandering out to the wilderness, however, Skylink is fixing that issue as we speak anyways at least in regards to internet.
@@SepticFuddy And you realize that currently rural infrastructure require billions in federal subsidization, as well as govt contractors like SpaceX.
A few arguments for what happens if you try to eternally increase sprawl to deal with housing shortage :
1) Where will you go next ? The space isn't unlimited you know, at some point you'll start to encroach with the neighboring city or with farmland, how do you keep up once that happens ?
2) If you keep building outwards, the people in the outer rings will have an exponentially longer time to drive to their workplace and you'll just worsen the traffic jams and at some point it becomes less and less viable to do so
3) Sprawl is economically suicidal, the infrastructure expenses of the suburbs are comparable to Downtown but with the density (and thus tax payers) barely superior to the countryside. American cities are hemorrhaging money like crazy because of that and there's a TON of them that are either bankrupt, on the path of bankruptcy or are not in bankruptcy because the State legislature doesn't allow them to be.
Solution ? Reduce the sprawl, stop acting like housing is supposed to be a Ponzi scheme and stop expanding constantly to "cover" the cost of the previous expansion. Then replace some of those single family homes with medium buildings to make them more efficient and denser (which is also a good step towards lessening the social isolation of a lot of places) ...... oh and severely loosen the zoning laws to allow local businesses to form, good for the local residents and good for the economy. And while you're at it, maybe make some public transit, it's actually proven to be useful at lessening traffic jams unlike building new lanes which is exactly the opposite, plus if people are not forced to have 2 cars for every family and use it constantly, their finances will improve and they would probably be more willing to buy more from local stores thus boosting the local economy. The American housing system needs a complete overhaul at this point because everything that was done for the last few decades was a mistake, but I trust in the American people to be able to reverse that if they set their mind to doing it, it would require some tough work but it would be beneficial for literally everyone involved (except probably car manufacturers and big store owners)
Living in dense areas makes you spend less money and time (time can be translated into money) on transportation. So the buildings might be more expensive per meter, but maybe it woth it financialy.
So? You still end up living like a sardine instead of living in a single family home
@@urbanistgod
Nobody's forcing _you_ to live in dense areas. Zoning is forcing detached single-family homes onto residents.
@@APaleDot Oh don’t come up with that crap. Homeowners have the right to have a low density environment
@@urbanistgod
First of all, no, they don't.
Secondly, we're talking about zoning. That is, homeowners forcing their city to be low density, not the other way around. If there is demand for low density, the market will meet that demand.
@@APaleDot Dude, again with your crap. The situation is that some entitled people wanna live where they can’t afford to live and therefore they ruin quiet neighborhoods with duplexes and condos and they also destroy the character and the soul of these neighborhoods. If there are zoning laws then that means that that’s what people want. Don’t come up with that “market” bullshit. Zoning laws exist for a reason.
6:54 I live in a country where this is actually often the case and I gotta tell you it isn't actually such a bad thing. Those apartment buildings can look just as nice as traditional houses and fit right in. Of course if you've never seen something like that you'd think it would never work but that isn't true.
Of course it's not a bad thing. It's how most of the world has built civilizations with the exception of the United States in the past 70 years
How about mixed zoning so each neighbourhood is self sufficient for the most part within a town, and towns within a city, and cities within a metropolis, as needed. Shouldn't have to drive miles away to go to work.
That's what naturally occured before it was regulated away.
@@chrissthrlnd And NOW most cities have a majority of SFZ, sometimes over 3/4s
No one owns property. Stop paying property tax and watch how fast "your" property is taken from you
In Singapore 80% of people live in public housing. It's not just for the poor. It's also for the middle class. Housing is dense and transit oriented.
lol, Singapore is a micro country island.
What's the obsession with keeping single family home neighborhoods exclusively single family? The most beautiful, liveable, and desirable neighborhoods are all mixed zoning.
That’s your opinion. I disagree. Single family homes represent perfection and housing at a human scale aesthetically.
@@urbanistgod I'm not talking about lining every street with skyscraping apartments. I'm talking about mixed use areas. A few single family homes here, a quiet Cafe in between under a canopy of trees with an apartment on the second floor there, and streets designed for bikes and foot traffic instead of streets designed for cars. That aesthetic you're talking about is better achieved by mixed zoning than suburban single use zoning.
Watch some videos from the channel "Not Just bikes" and tell me if you change your mind. Specifically his zoning and stroads videos.
@@0fficerIan Funny cuz a lot of times when I discuss this subject on TH-cam people recommend me watching this channel. This guy is basically sharing his opinions, his personal preferences, doing cherry picking, only talking about the disadvantages of suburbs. He never talks about the disadvantages of high urban density. You guys are really brainwashed by this channel.
@@urbanistgod Why do you assume the only two options are suburbs or high density?
I live in a rural American town. My neighborhood has a fantastic little grocery story and restaurant in between houses. I can also walk a short distance for anything else.
Mixed use is always better than strictly suburbs.
Why would you want it to be practically impossible to get anywhere without a car? It's not like giant ugly streets are adding to the beauty either.
@@0fficerIan We need walkable low density neighborhoods made of single family homes like Ville Mont-Royal in Canada (Mout-Royal city in English). High density is literally imperfection in terms of urbanism. People need space.
Stop moving to cities, leave them, move to nowhere, built your own house outside city bounds
Boycott cities?
People dont know how to build things anymore. Or how to cook (they have to live near restaurants) . Or how to take responsibility for their own actions or their future.
Brb no jobs 💀
It's simple run a freaking city budget! If utility and infrastructure costs can't be compensated by current tax revenue increase the tax revenue per acre by building up more medium or high density to get more efficiency out of your utilities per acre!!! City Budgeting 101! Keep your management costs under control! Otherwise limit city utilities and infrastructure for lower densities!
Tokyo Metropolitan Population: 38.14 million
Area: 5,419 mi²
No housing shortage; No homelessness
California Population: 39.56 million
Area: 163,696 mi²
Housing crisis and major homelessness issue
Democrats have failed California. Yes, they are responsible, it's a one party state.
Japan has decreasing population.
@@ligametis But Tokyo is not a decreasing population, which is the example OP used.
@@shorewall but it also doesn't have very quickly increasing population for its size.
@@ligametis yes it does, actually.
@@Polyglot_English wikipedia article shows that Tokyo population growth is really not that high.
The reason why we buy land to build our own house is to transition so that way, my parents house will become my HOUSE. So it’s a generational home.
I don’t like anyone living above me or right next door so strangers can hear me through the wall and complain that I’m “too noisy”. That’s why I hate living in apartments and condos.
You’re right
True. I have an apartment of my own, but constantly stay with my mom on her big ghouse ever since we lost my dad, so she's not alone. The testament already estipumates I will inherit the house. And in the future the house will belong to my daughters.
In my eyes, Tokyo is a city to aspire to. Bombed to hell in WW2, they built and modernized afterwards the same time we started building suburbia
Tokyo is way too dense. Perfection is great American suburbs.
A five story building next to a 2 story suburban home. That's literally super reasonable lol.
My parent's neighborhood has apartment buildings along the edges of the suburbs. So when you drive into their part of town, there are apartments and then it turns into single-family houses. There's open space separating them. This is the best solution for the suburbs.
@@cameronjournal On the contrary I think all apartment buildings should be as close to transit/shops as possible at the centre of town.
When my small town built a couple 4-5 story apartment buildings near our downtown it brought back our down town by having enough people in walkable distance and there so pleasant looking and offer ground level businesses. I have freinds who love living in them and I love having them as neighbors.
Ultimately, housing quantity will solve the urban housing shortage, not housing location. Cities need to build, and build fast, and I don't think it matters exactly where. When demand even comes close to meeting supply, people will go where they want, not where they have to.
I don’t think that. There’s more vacant apartments than homeless in NYC. Quantity isn’t the issue, inflation of our currencies and Chinese billionaires buying up every new house being put up are solvable issues.
@@BiscuitFever It's not just Chinese billionaires, virtually every family in China buys land in order to secure there families wealth for when a state collapses. This isn't exactly a new practice. That said there may be more vacant apartments, but that doesn't mean that the homeless population will be able to afford them even if they could find a job as 60% are mentally ill. I think a better solution is one similar to community first where you house the people in communities.
Link: mlf.org/community-first/
The reason I believe this method would work is because it tends toward how we naturally congregate, i.e. at the center is the "castle" or city center and on the periphery we have "suburbs" or lower density zones.
Yeah no. It does matter where....lol. top rule of real estate? Location, location, location.
Access to work, reduced traffic, schools and leisure areas... these all influence buying. "Just build more" is such an uninformed opinion...
I’m 42 married w kids in the suburbs. I’d love to live in a walkable community with bicycle lanes and public transportation. This video is so high level it barely touches on anything. The video never discussed why people really move to the suburbs. (Crime? Schools? Cost? Corruption? …). It just seems to assume it’s because we love mowing the grass once a week. I also think it may be misleading to say that Houston doesn’t have any city planning, but I’m not the person to ask about that so l’ll let you research yourself. Also the video never discusses economic implications of constant sprawl nor does it discuss the ecological implications. There are other reasons to do things beyond preference.
Well balanced, insightful, informative. We'll done.
Suburban yards just seem like a waste of space to me, especially front yards, which are mostly just a place to display some grass. People need to think more about convenience and enjoyment, rather than something to show off, and it seems like younger generations are shifting that way. Using the same space as a couple blocks of suburbs you could build an apartment and a nice park. With the amount of time people are spending indoors anyway, having so much grass just for yourself seems like a waste. And when people are outside, how much of that time is walking/jogging/biking? A park is better for that than a sidewalk or street. An apartment can have some individual reserved plots of land, too, if you want to have your own stuff set up, and give people plots in a garden, if they want to grow veggies.
I get where you're coming from, but I disagree. There is no way I would ever buy a home with little or no yard and only a plot in a communal garden. I, and many others, want space for my children and pets to be able to run around and play. I don't want to be restricted to just one garden box. And I want to have my friends and family over on a warm summer evening. A yard is about more than just esthetics, it's about the kind of life one leads. Besides, a major reason why we have front lawns is because houses must be a certain distance from the road to allow for sidewalks, power lines, etc..
@@azhrayharris8 no offense but kids rarely go out to play anymore. They aren't gonna go outside and throw a stick for 3 hours straight like if this was the 1950s. They are either going to go to the park where there are more kids playing, or they are gonna stay inside all day and play video games.
@@azhrayharris8 At least design your suburbs better. You come there for community right? Then allow for buildings that do exactly that. A community is more than some random houses packed in an area. At least allow for schools and grocery shops in close proximity, in addition to small kiosks, then the most important places to go to will be aviable without having to drive every day. You want healthy kids right? Then have your area designed for them to walk, walking is really healthy for them. Allow for important cultural buildings, like cinemas, theatres, book clubs, libraries, etc. In addition to local barbers, pharmacies, suuply shops. I get it if you fear that this will allow for high rises, if you vote for height and size restrictions it will prevent it (Which I doubt will be hard when looking at the sheer amount of zoning that prefers single-family zoning). In addition to parks and recreational areas, which I guess you already have in your suburbs? This will all allow for a suburb with a even better community feeling as you socialize more in your local area, less car traffick (safer for your kids), more areas for you kids to hang around in, generally a more practical life (less time used on driving), better air pollution (less traffick), more local job opportunities healthier kids, etc.
@@azhrayharris8 you can use a park for that lol.
O’Neal is wrong. He is looking at correlation and calling it causation.
I’ve lived in Houston my entire life. Yes, housing is considered much cheaper here and you can get a bit more bang for your buck. However, gentrifiers have noticed this and prices are going up pretty fast.
Meanwhile, the more sprawl there is, the worse flooding gets. We need to compact our city more and allow forests to grow around and through communities to soak up as much water as possible. Laying down cement everywhere is not only ugly as fuck but causes so much damage when hurricanes and other tropical storms hit us. (Harvey and the two Allisons being among the worst).
Single family homes use up more city resources than more densely populated areas. The amount of plumbing that stretches between lots, the length of roads, the energy costs to heat and cool a single family home vs an apartment (provided they have the same insulation rating). All these things are often subsidized by local government causing many of them to lose money because they can raise taxes high enough to really pay for the infrastructure.
My point is that more density is better for those who want to live in the city. If you want to live in the country, then go to the country. But this in-between system we have is not working. We should have denser cities with good public infrastructure that encourage people to walk instead of forcing people to drive. We should allow space for nature to be nature. We should allow space for people to live in the country instead of replacing farmland with suburbs.
Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.
Agreed. We need infrastructure that includes dedicated bike lanes to encourage people to cycle instead of driving. Cities can be made more compact if roads are made narrower and parking lots shrink because we have fewer cars on the road. Look into how the Denmark and the Netherlands is rebuilding its infrastructure with people and bicycles in mind.
"Houston has no zoning laws" Nope. Not true. Sure they don't call the laws that restrict zoning regulations as "zoning laws", but those laws still exist on their books.
The thing is if people grow out instead of up it doesn't increase the tax base of the city, or in some cases even the county. Cities don't want that. They want the money.
So the libertarian is okay for groups to restrict construction on their own land
Wanting and being able to afford it are 2 separate things. The infrastructure costs of suburban sprawl is unsustainable, regardless of how much you "prefer" it. Per capita, a suburban resident pays disproportionately lower property taxes than a high density resident. No easy solutions but logic would say halt all further sprawl immediately and allow incremental density (2, 3, 4 units in existing suburbs). Politics and financing of suburban sprawl has been a ponzi scheme for developers and municipalities since 1950 won't work anymore for US and similar countries (Canada/Australia).
It is sustainable as long as we do not have overpopulation
japan allows any type of building anywhere too. much more affordable there. even in tokyo
Tokyo has entire apartments the size of aa small living room.
@@kronk358 it also has town homes, single family homes, larger apartments, condos, courtyard apartments. Basically every kind of housing you can name in a variety of sizes and price points. Which is a good thing, it allows all kinds of people to access the goods, services, and opportunities found in their most vibrant cities.
1) Demand buildings inside cities house as many people as work there.
2) There is no need for a 2.
Yes, I recognize the corporate skyscrapers will make the absolute smallest box they can get away with. *But that's both better than tents, and something singles will voluntarily do for a few years* But the mere *presence* of the minimum will allow "single family homes" to drop in price. Added shocker: Would "solve" global warming too without forcing people in 100 different ways.
People that live in tents dont work in the city. They dont work at all.
The problem with thinking Houston is the free market is the infrastructure is enormously subsidized. Especially since it’s transportation is almost entirely automobile (the most expensive form of transit.)
Sprawl isn’t affordable without huge subsidies.
12:00 It’s true that Houston doesn’t have “zoning” but Houston does indeed have ordinances that you would find in most city zoning regulations. So it’s really dishonest and lazy to point to Houston as the future of urban planning.
Something that isn't immediately obvious is that these sorts of Zoning laws that spread people out more are also part of America's defense strategy. Having a lower population density makes us less vulnerable to nuclear attack.
All infrastructure is defense infrastructure, and cities are infrastructure. Further, with the impending explosion of decentralization of commerce that will be brought on by widespread adoption of the internet, I question whether there's a real need for these large, densely packed cities in our future.
Urban sprawl has been part the US long before nuclear weapons were even dreamed of.
@@kokofan50 Not really, the zoning regulations talked about in this video were implemented in the sixties as part of the great society initiative. Which has caused many problems, but the policy that probably has the most justification behind it and has created the least issues is probably zoning regulation. Because again, there are legitimate strategic reasons for wanting lower population density.
@@ketherga even before the zoning laws, US cities were very spread out. They just got more so after the rise of the car dominated suburbs.
Houstonian here, love the cost of living.
From someone who lives in Melbourne Australia, I'm insanely jealous. Even with my chronic health condition, the universal health care here does not come close to making up the difference, especially with the higher taxes and petrol costs
Why not both?
There is a clear question of if Houston's house cost is low because of a lack of regulations or if planning before growth meant Houston did not need housing regulations. The greater Houston's area reached 2 million people in ~2010 while places like LA reached that is the 1920s and NY in the 1880s. Houston's highway system looks the same as planned modern cities in China, where you effectively have a cobweb pattern around the city center. Mass trans in Houston's is very good, more "big government", the light rail system in Houston has over 5 times the ridership rate of LA per capita.
Traffic is one of the biggest factors that cause things like housing regulations and Houston is just starting to meet some bad traffic. Without traffic and a good highway system, you can easily live 30 miles away from work and get there in 30 mins so living in suburbia is not a problem. But what if you double the population and which halve the traffic speed and makes suburbia go out to 45 miles. Now the commute is 90 mins each way, with a 9 hour work way that is 12 hours away from home per day, brutal.
Once the city is there, the cost and pain of building new roads or expanding old ones because insane. Same is true for rail or subways.
You are right. The most important factor in consumer preferences for sprawl or high density would be traffic. That's why as long as there is socialist control of roads, no one knows the answer.
You're forgetting the fact that Houston's relaxed zoning would result in more businesses locating in the suburbs near where people live.
walkable european neighborhoods with public transport, storefronts, and parks combine comfort, community, and density.
That's never going to happen here in the Unites States.
@9:19 that one car and then van just screwed up traffic for the rest of the day.
Good job guys!
Amazingly well done video, Reason.
What I think people fail to realise is that after you expand so far and build less dense without business also sprawling you encounter infrastructure cost, tax flight and dead neighborhoods. Sprawl could in fact work if you left the land undisturbed in green belt veins where around a metro area the natural environment was allowed to cut threw and you evenly distributed business and services that way no neighborhood is too much more valuable. Though I would say density is preferable on a human centric scale single family housing is preferable on a free markets scale. On a free markets scale you can't immediately see the downside of low density housing so why not get more house, but on the density side its easy to identify the downsides especially if you don't like people. The long-term cost of suburbanism being traffic, pollution, tax flight, enviormental degredation, soaring consumer prices, unaffordable housing, just to name a few. The worst part is the only way to fix it is to inconviniece existing suburbanites with more density which only mildly makes things better.
all the few people that live in an apartment that i asked where they'd prefer to live in brazil if safety was not a concern said a house. even a guy who is quite rich and live in a great apartment in a great place said that. my guess is that if i asked thousands of people most of them would say a house. so all this concrete jungle that you see, for example, in são paulo, is not what people would like to have as housing. it's "just" that our economical, political, and psychological misery have been driving us into that miserable style of living. it makes sense for a young person who's still in college and/or just recently got employed but makes little money to want to or not mind living in an apartment, but it's a life phase.
These problems have been around for forty years. The problem in the Bay Area is that the market has reached an affordability limit.
So these politicians prefer to have homeless crisis to protect the aesthetic of single family home neighborhoods? They need to:
1. Build more medium and high density housing
2. Improve mass transit options to provide alternative to driving on roads.
My opinion is that American cities should take after British style density. The semi detatch or terraces. That kind of density while it gives people more freedom than a apartment, also affords the population better amenities as a result of the density.
To add something on the "demand" side. Im from buenos aires, and 3M people live here, but around 8M come here to work everyday.
Everyday there is less need to show up to the office if you can work from home. Also doing a lot of things that in the past you would do on person, that you can now do online (shopping, banks, etc). Its evident the demand will also fall back in a few years, when people start to prefer paying less for their house even though they could afford one in the city.
Randal O’Toole ... the Progressive Authoritarian Technocrat Urban Planner’s most hated man.
They devote SO much to debunking him (without actually debunking him).
Yeah, they want to cram us in cities, take away our cars, take away our guns, and feed us on powdered bugs.
Calls himself a libertarian and then defends suburbs and sprawl that is economically subsidized by tax revenue from dense urban environments. The future of housing is in cities, period. People can feel free to live in the suburbs if they want to foot the bill, just repeal some of the insane property tax protections offered by prop 13 and have cities demand that tax dollars are apportioned fairly to how much they put it. Most suburbs would fail. Fuck artificial constraints on the housing supply and subsidizing inefficient urban environments. Too bad plenty of "pro-market" conservatives and libertarians conveniently brush aside their ideology to defend sprawl
@@matthewbiehl3412 This is nonsense. Housing in cities is much more expensive, and it is much more expensive to cater for things like infrastructure in cities. Building a road in NYC is insanely expensive. Building a road in a suburb is very cheap. It is also nonsense that dense urban environments subsidise suburbs. Usually it is the other way around, that suburbs have to subsidise the incredibly expensive infrastructure that you find within cities....
@@91Durktheturk Housing in cities are expensive because people want to live there, and land is sparse, it's simple supply and demand. Building a road in NYC opposed to in the middle of the suburbs in more expensive because of multiple reasons, but a 500m road in the middle of NYC is going to provide multitudes more of wealth creation in the economy compared to a 500m road that stretches through an average neighborhood. If you're going by region, a handful of cities in the US make up half of GDP, despite covering a small percentage of land in the country. Suburbs only have a large tax base because well off people often commute into cities for work. Rural areas also tend to have a larger ratio of money they take from the federal government in comparison to the taxes that are applied to their residents and commerce.
@@matthewbiehl3412 Suburban growth is a ponzi scheme. The road only lasts 50 years, but property taxes would take 80 years to pay off. Only by new construction can the larger base pay for existing infrastructure. There's a reason cities stopped annexing. The couldn't afford to extend services to low density areas.
I like living in an apartment. Not everyone wants to take care of lawn
Time to revisit the Georgist/geolibertarian land value tax.
I DON'T want to live close together. I just want to be closer to employment so that all my time and money isn't consumed by commuting. It would be great to walk to work and keep money in my pocket.
Does it help when Los Angeles is a sanctuary City? I don't think so.
A lot of urban high rise areas of America are very limited because of the suburbs surrounding the rest of the city, so they can't expand, and that's when supply and demand comes in and drives the prices up. If all homes were in high rise buildings in LA, even with the same square footage, I'm sure prices would be much cheaper.
Great video. Thanks!
Now that cities have been hollowed out by covid we can see what people really want. They want to live in rural and sub urban areas. Politicians want you to live in the city so they can increase the tax revenue.
No, that's not want most people want, you don't get to speak for everyone. Most people I know would rather live in a mid rise in a city than a copy paste suburban hellscape.
Seems to me the biggest barrier is really minimum parking requirements. Without minimum parking requirements, developers with only a small piece of land can create a whole lot of productive human space - apartments, stores, offices, restaurants, etc. Too much of the land in the urban core is dedicated to car infrastructure.
Minimum parking requirements serve a purpose. We shouldn’t get rid of something used by the majority of people because some Portland leftists want bike lanes on it.
@@urbanistgod Minimum parking requirements is a massive government interference with the use of private property. It inhibits wealth creation (real estate is wealth) as it imposes huge costs on building. Who is the leftist here?
@@Basta11 “Wealth creation” like social housing or apartments? At the expense of parkings that are needed?
@@urbanistgod I do not mean that. I mean private property development. The free market would create more housing by itself if allowed. If a parking lot is needed, the free market will create that too, no need for governments mandates.
@@Basta11 Public parkings are owned by the city. The free market couldn’t create them.
The suburbs are getting intolerable as well. Now that my kid does not need the local schools I am moving rural. I want a place I can crank my stereo or bass amplifier up as loud as I want. Thanks to the Internet I only need drive to the grocery store. (And, technically, they can deliver as well.) Once I retire I will not be driving to work. I can finally be away from people, which are the real problem. No need to live in a dense wightwarren of crime and filth. I do not want to walk around and encounter people, I want to walk around and think to myself. Contemplation, not contention.
Unfortunately I live in California and everytime a business or housing development wants to come to our city they face fierce opposition from both the city council and old retired people.. The old retired people have been screaming down the possibility of a Costco being built a little bit outside town because they "don't want shoppers near our neighborhood", Costco offers good paying jobs and great prices for consumers.. It's their land they should be able to build whatever they want on it. The city council frequently denies permits to build any sort of housing, and constantly talks about how "housing isn't affordable" and "we need more affordable housing" but the affordable housing they did build requires that you make less than 12000 a year, that's right.. less than 12,000 dollars a year to qualify. Nobody working full time would ever qualify for it. The zoning here has gotten totally out of control and they wonder why it's so expensive here.
At the start of the video, I was thinking, "Just look at Houston. They're one of the largest cities in the country, highly industrialized with a major port, and they're still one of the most affordable cities in the country. As usual, the free market IS the answer! Just let people do what they want to do and the best ideas, the most efficient ideas, the most affordable ideas will win out in the market! Then at the end of the market, BOOM! They started talking about Houston. So ... yeah.
ZombieTex, a study done in about 1982 about how much zoning adds to housing costs compared Houston with Dallas. Controlling for everything researcher Bernard H. Siegan could, I think he found zoning alone increased costs 16%. An interesting and unexpected finding: With zoning he estimated Houston would occupy about twice as much land area. That would mean diminished farms, forests, and wetlands as well as more pollution, more wasted commuter time, higher infrastructure costs, and a bigger heat island. He and his colleagues published a book, Land Use Without Zoning.
How's Austin doing in prices?
You shouldn't overstate that Houston doesn't have zoning though. Zoning is only a part of the list of building restrictions and regulations.
The Invisible Hand IS the only way to properly allocate resources and set prices.
I used to think that way, until I looked into Singapore handled this.
th-cam.com/video/2cjPgNBNeLU/w-d-xo.html
The invisible hand is dead, ask renaissance technology how it's done
Excellent video, shows the two sides very well!
What has land use regulation done for my area in Minneapolis/St. Paul? Created an explosion of high-rise, ugly luxury apartments that sit empty for years, some more than a decade.
1. Regulations lead developers to determine the only economically sustainable option is to build a luxury complex, in hopes the higher rent prices will be matched by the extra amenities offered.
2. The supply of these buildings far outpaces the demand, consumes neighborhoods, while the variety of housing across the economic spectrum remains stagnant, not meeting demand.
3. The government determines the property value of a neighborhood is HIGHER once a luxury building is introduced, so raises the taxes for that entire area.
4. The luxury buildings might sit empty but the developers don't close them down, make a deal or go out of business. They let the buildings sit empty for years as an investment they plan to UPSELL later. Why can they even do this? Because the govt decided the buildings increase neighborhood value.
This is a fucking PONZI SCHEME created by the govt. The vast majority of people here despise these buildings. It's also festering class/culture tension and politicization. Antifa-Black Bloc and Marxist-influenced social justice are extremely popular and dominating here. We have groups of squatters acting as political revolutionaries that take over or attempt to take over these empty buildings.
In conclusion, land use regulation has done NOTHING to prevent the issues they claim, in fact is a CAUSE of dysfunctional housing developments, and the govt property valuation has been so damaging it's created a fucking ponzi scheme. Housing bubble 2.0
6:17 oh my god this guy is really lucky that stupidity doesn't hurt
O’Toole in his last comments has it exactly right. The current government “solutions” are only making the problem worse.
Good video but you could have also talked about mandated parking or the problems of having "free" parking.
Or how municipal governments frquently took over subway and streetcar systems that had been turning a profit, but refused to allow them to raise the fare and thus they couldnt keep pace with expenses.
And yes urban freeways were mentioned but I don't think it can be emphasized how much they subsidized sprawl, neighborhood destruction, commute time and pollution and increased demand for land wasting parking.
Does anyone else imagine what might have been if the government had paid for rail lines in place of all those roads?
I'd rather have a small apartment in a nice neighbourhood than a big ass house in the middle of endless suburbia.
Omg this guy needs to go. "The astetics of single family homes". The only two options are NOT single family homes and 10 story apartment complexes.
Yep! Townhouses are a thing
Open the market up and let people buy a home wherever they want
People CAN buy a house wherever they want. But a company cant put a steel mill 2 lots away from your moms 2 bedroom ranch.
Very informational. Thanks
Let the free market decide. However, people should pay for the cost of the services they receive (which are more expensive to provide in single family neighborhoods) and cars should be taxed for their externalities. Before this is done, you can't trust the free market to create the optimal outcome.