If you want fiber internet, a number of local shops, medical facilities, “third places”, communal pools, libraries, schools at walkable distance, that’s not how you get them.
Ironically low density neighborhoods such as the Sunset District are the few places you can actually get fiber in San Francisco. The grid streets of single family homes and above ground utilities make for an easy permitting process with little challenges. This is changing; but for years I’ve looked at my Westside friends’ Sonic.net Gigabit service with envy. I generally agree with your statement though.
I am not judging, just saying there are obvious trade-offs as well as different common visions of a “good life”. People live in different places brcause they enjoy different things.
For schools, in my experience (outside of the US if it matters) primary to middle school are easy to have close. High-school is tougher to get in the neighborhood, university will usually mean moving far far away.
Except if you live in a megacity, where you’ll have better chances to get top level universities at commutable distance.
I have young kids. Until recently I lived in the East Village, and now in a proper house on 1/3 acre in Colorado. Life in Manhattan is fun but damn is it hard. Especially with young kids. And that was lower Manhattan, probably the richest, most charming high-density place in the world. I can completely understand why the residents of Vancouver wouldn't want to see their quaint little neighborhood demolished for the sake of stacking more people into the city in a bunch of glass-and-concrete trash cans.
Then just move. After years of living downtown (Chicago, Baltimore, etc.) I moved to the suburb of Annapolis. It has its charms, but if Annapolis suddenly explodes in population, I don't see myself as having a right to freeze it in time circa 2018. You have no right to tell people what they can do with their own property, unless it's harming you. (And your snowflake aesthetic sensibilities do not count as harm.)
>You have no right to tell people what they can do with their own property, unless it's harming you.
The definition of "harming you" in CA is far more inclusive than it is on the east coast and that is reflected in the local laws that restrict what people can do on their own property.
And I as well, would tell those who are unhappy with the cost of housing in SF to just move to a cheaper area. By your argument, they have no right to tell people living there what they can do with their property.
That's obviously not how it works though. By voting and electing people who want to change the status quo, they can tell people what to do with their property.
> By your argument, they have no right to tell people living their what they can do with their property.
That's a false equivalence. People moving in aren't telling people in San Francisco what to do with their property. There is a mutual transaction (between a developer in San Francisco that wants to build say a high-rise apartment and people who want to rent it), that is being blocked by NIMBYs who have no property interest in the land on which the apartment would sit.
> By voting and electing people who want to change the status quo, they can tell people what to do with their property.
Tax policy and zoning is clearly telling people what they can do with their property. Eminent domain is clearly telling people what they can do with their property. The problem is that those who want cheaper housing don't have the votes to win on that issue.
And if building a high rise damages the value of an adjacent property with no compensation, that's a taking, no?
Even granting the premise for argument, this says nothing about the tradeoffs involved in zoning some of the highest-demand real estate in the world as singe-family.
Not to mention that many, many people (including me) disagree with that notion, and the US is hardly wanting for 'burbclaves, if you like that sort of thing. Dense urban housing, on the other hand, is a relative rarity.
I've been thinking about this a lot as someone who recently bought into a condo building.
I think SFR neighborhoods do tend to be better on average, than renter-dominated ones. Alameda (city next to Oakland) is instructive. Walk across the bridge from Oakland to Alameda, it's like you're stepping into a different world: the streets are cleaner, people drive with more civility, it really is noticeably nicer.
Condos are a bit of a wildcard. They can be better in theory but most probably aren't. As someone on my HOA board, I put a lot of time into making sure my condo is a good place to live. (328 units, 1000+ residents). Just yesterday, we invited Monkeybrains over for a chat about getting fiber in the building. We'll do it soon.
I think it's just that the challenges are different. In a SFR neighborhood, you get a lot of very invested people, which is good but also can be bad (NIMBY). Apartments people don't care as much. Condos have "ownership" but also governance problems; they can be the best when run well, but horrible when they aren't, which seems depressingly common
If you like it quieter, with vastly fewer people around you, no vagrants, and you enjoy your own little bit of green space, then by those metrics a single-family dwelling is certainly better.
It's really not an easy issue. It seems like objectively there are benefits to high density. But it's more expensive (to individuals, if not society as a whole), louder, more polluted, etc. It's easy to understand why plenty of people want to live in their own little castle, and it's also easy to understand why they would vote to preserve the status quo.
> I used to live in American suburbia; it was full of vagrants. I had to call the police on several occasions.
I've never seen a vagrant within several miles of my neighborhood. It would be such a terrible place to be vagrant, with a relatively low population density and mediocre public transit. There's a reason they don't hang out in my neighborhood, they do much better in the city.
> I used to loath cutting the grass.
Yeah, I'm not a fan either. However, I pay someone about 1/8th of the HOA fee for the place in the city to have my yard kept tidy for me.
> Is it really vs the costs of maintaining a single-family home and having to own and maintain a vehicle(s) for commuting?
I don't drive a particularly expensive car, and my house is still pretty new so just the HOA fee alone for the place in the city is quite a lot more expensive.
> The city I live in now is cleaner than the suburb that I lived in (trash cleanup is more frequent) and generally quieter.
I'm guessing you lived in a very different sort of suburb than I do, based on how you describe it. I live in a residential area of a very small city ("oldest west of the Rockies" is our only real claim to fame) on the edge of a mid-size metro in a liberal state. It's very clean, low traffic, there are several parks in easy walking distance (not just my yard ;-)), the school my kids go to is about a hundred yards away, etc. I'd have to pay twice as much for half as much if I wanted to live in the city, and I'd be irritated all the time by noisy people. Maybe I am a little antisocial ;-).
