Housing Density Debate
Discussions focus on solving housing shortages by reforming zoning laws to allow mid-rise apartments, row houses, and denser construction instead of restricting to single-family homes or luxury high-rises.
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If you live in (or near) a city center, you'll live in a large apartment building. If you want a single family house, you move outside the city center. You cannot have an urban city environment, with restaurants, bars, stores and walkable streets if you only have single family buildings with yards there.There is a place for everything, houses and large buildings.Otherwise, I agree with the comment above, that such buildings seem impractical, and can be replaced with separate buildings
but what if they just build more 1000ft tall buildings with only 40 uber-luxury units? how does that help?
What problem is this really solving?In dense areas, large buildings with small apartments make sense. Otherwise, just build normal-sized homes.What am I missing?
Row houses and small apartments are quite livable and make neighbourhoods that have green spaces and character. You have to factor in that property developers do not want to build that sort of housing unless they are restricted from building massive condos. So property developers would rather build small apartments and houses on virgin land in the suburbs where the land is cheap and they can cut corners. There is nothing stopping Developers from building modern apartments in SF. They are just to
Many places (especially in Silicon valley) restrict the height of buildings, and the number of apartments, etc. When you can't build up, you have to build out.
why not increase density? it looks like single family home zoning. A denser core would surely be possible
hmmm... it's almost like they should build more dense housing or something
Yes. Especially since a big problem for Western cities is not "how do I build new megalopoli" but "how do I fill in density without acquiring a whole city block of houses in one go". For a single-stair walk-up you don't need a massive amount of property, you can plonk a pretty danged nice mid-rise building on the same acreage as one large detached house.
They could build more apartments.
We don't need high-rises to achieve a high supply of housing. We just need to allow six story buildings anywhere that someone wants to build one. These buildings are much cheaper per housing unit than high rises, but allow for much greater population density than the two to three stories that we allow in some of our most sought after locations.