The overcrowding you describe is endemic in California. Likely, nearly all you food is produced by people living in overcrowded housing, worse than you describe. What you describe is common for the people who serve you food in restaurants, and restock the shelves, and do pretty much all the stuff that makes society run these days in California.
And we got to that point without concrete boxes at all. Avoiding density isn't helping.
Let's imagine density, but with enough living space so that each person gets their own room. Let's imagine that we build so that we don't have to hear our neighbors' partying. Let's imagine that a full time wage lets somebody rent their own 1 bedroom apartment.
The only thing stopping us is an electorate that has your beliefs. We don't get crowding from building more housing, the idea is preposterous on its face. It doesn't pass a basic sniff test. We get overcrowding because we didn't build enough.
> Let's imagine that we build so that we don't have to hear our neighbors' partying.
I’ve heard (and been kept awake by) my neighbors in every single place I’ve lived that’s not a detached home. Even the fancy condo with super thick walls/floors/ceilings only made it rarer. If nothing else, this is why I want a single family home and hate the idea that this is the desirable future. Invest in remote work and let people have space.
You're welcome to your experience but my fancy London flat was dead quiet from neighbours. One time I met a lady at the lifts and she apologized for her kids making so much noise (they were adjacent to my flat) and to be honest, I hadn't heard a damn thing and I was just lying in bed in the room adjoining their flat the whole morning.
Of course, personally I don't think we should "invest in remote work" or "build flats". I think we should simply allow the market to flow to optima by deregulating.
Many people like single family homes in the suburbs. And clearly many people like a flat in the city. So let them have both by allowing them to sell their land to people who can build arbitrary density.
I've got to tell you that a lot of American construction is pretty shoddy in comparison. I don't know if it's a materials problem or just that America is so rich that $4k/mo flats aren't actually luxury.
Time has shown that the market optima reached by deregulation aren’t optimal for everyone. It’s why we have a minimum wage, for example. There’s a place for letting the market decide, but it’s no panacea.
It’s disingenuous to act like there are no externalities involved and what’s what regulation is needed for. Especially when government investment is needed for the essentials like utilities and transit.
I think we can allow for those things to follow people rather than prescribing it ahead of time.
The Command Economy style of "First build transit, then enable large buildings" just leads to nothing going anywhere and a lot of people complaining about prices while rent seekers eat all surplus.
Single family homes in cities will still exist. They're a luxury now -- SFH in desirable parts of SF start around $1300/sq ft -- and will likely remain so.
As has everyone. The parents comment is the residential version of champagne socialism.
Somebody advocating for something they've never experienced but demand that it be the future despite most people who have experienced it saying it can be soul destroying.
Grow your smaller cities and stop pumping everything in mega cities.
Parents comment reminds me of the people drooling at the mouth for Tokyo style housing despite being told the truth by westerners who have lived/live there.
> Grow your smaller cities and stop pumping everything in mega cities.
This is precisely what has resulted in lots of our overcrowding. We allow greenfield sprawl pretty much all over in the smaller cities, but modestly sized apartment buildings are banned nearly everywhere in the "mega cities." Yet, still, people still want to live in the mega cities.
You seem to be unable to comprehend that some people, even a huge number of people, want to live differently than you, in a bustling city, without cars, but surrounded by lots of people and experiences and culture. That's fine, you don't need to understand it! But what's not fine is saying that other people aren't allowed to want what they want, or to build what they want.
The shitty part is that a lot of people do try to allow people who want dense urbanization to urbanize and we go somewhere that isn’t dense. You get what you want and we get what we want.
And then more and more people move out where we are because of how nice it is and complain that we don’t want to urbanize the place we moved to escape density. I’m sick of people moving to where I live and blaming me because where they moved isn’t what they wanted so it needs to change to accommodate them. Instead of blaming their job for forcing them to live somewhere they don’t like.
Like if you went to a French restaurant and demanded the owners turn into a pizzeria because yeah there’s a pizzeria a few blocks over you could have gone to in the tenderloin but there aren’t enough pizzerias in general and you want this nice restaurant to be a pizzeria too.
The Right Answer of whether to focus on encouraging companies to spread out versus encouraging people to squeeze together probably depends on how many people want urbanization for job markets versus how many want it for lifestyle.
Do you have any links on what Tokyo style housing is actually like? I’ve heard that you can relatively easily afford single family housing there if you’re willing to put up with a long commute to work.
And we got to that point without concrete boxes at all. Avoiding density isn't helping.
Let's imagine density, but with enough living space so that each person gets their own room. Let's imagine that we build so that we don't have to hear our neighbors' partying. Let's imagine that a full time wage lets somebody rent their own 1 bedroom apartment.
The only thing stopping us is an electorate that has your beliefs. We don't get crowding from building more housing, the idea is preposterous on its face. It doesn't pass a basic sniff test. We get overcrowding because we didn't build enough.