
There is no such thing as a city that has run out of room - luu
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/06/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-city-that-has-run-out-of-room/
======
Jacqued
As a counterpoint to the comments about how very dense cities are unlivable,
I'd like to offer the example of Paris. I think many people will agree that
it's a really nice first-world city, with great culture, transportation, no
sanitation troubles, etc (as opposed to Dhaka, which many take issue with).

Well, that's a city with 55000 per square mile inside city limits. Some of the
suburbs (the richer ones, mind you) even have up to 65-69000 per sqmi. Dhaka
has about 50000. Of course, a lot of suburbs are less dense than this, but
those tend to be the impoverished & forsaken ones you definitely don't want to
live in.

High density does not necessarily mean Manhattan or Hong Kong, in fact,
closely built, dual use 7-story buildings with offices & shops & restaurants
on the ground floor are a more balanced and less costly way to achieve it. And
it offers a real opportunity to finally get rid of the cars, something that
will be impossible to achieve in low-density cities because those could not
support decent public transportation.

~~~
hugh4
Paris, as they say, is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live
there. Come to think of it, I'm not even that fond of visiting.

I am very grateful that my parents brought me up in a decent-size house with a
nice biggish backyard. I can't imagine growing up in an apartment.
Particularly in today's world where kids don't play in the park unsupervised.
It must be even worse for the parents, who can't say "go play outside!"
whenever the kids get rowdy and annoying. I don't think indoor living is good
for kids.

For people without children apartments are fine of course, which is why I
think the ideal city consists of a combination of a higher-density centre with
surrounding low density areas.

People need to quit it with the desire to make everyone else live like a
single twenty-something professional.

~~~
sampo
> People need to quit it with the desire to make everyone else live like a
> single twenty-something professional.

On the other hand, if all the twenty-something professionals were allowed to
live in the city center of their dreams, with Paris-like population density,
and hipster cafes and restaurants in each city block, there would be more room
for the suburban sprawl for the families to be closer to the city center.

When the "suburban party" denies the "city hipsters" the dense, walkable
neighborhoods, they also force the hipsters to compete for the same suburban
estate, which drives prices up and commutes longer, and everyone is worse off
as a result.

People who want X for themselves, would actually benefit and get their X
cheaper and better, if they allowed other people who want Y get and build
their Y, instead of forcing everyone to compete in the market for X.

I bit unintuitive, I understand.

~~~
tsotha
I don't think the "suburban party" is denying any such thing. In cities like
San Francisco people who paid a million plus for their townhouse don't want
new highrises blocking their view or their light. People who live in suburbs
don't care one way or the other.

------
tptacek
The numbers in this article are somewhat lazily assembled, which confuses the
analysis. The density numbers everyone's immediately going to fixate on are
those of SF and NYC. But they're using the numbers for the combined
statistical areas for SF-SJ and the NY metro area.

SF population density is something like 18k/sqmi. NYC's is 27k across all the
boroughs, ranging from ~10k in Brooklyn to ~20k in Queens to 66k(!) in
Manhattan.

The analysis is trickier in the midwest. Chicago has a citywide population
density of 12k, seemingly lower than that of SF. But Chicago dwarfs San
Francisco, and the average is brought way down by places like South Chicago
and Ashburn. Lakeview, for instance, has a density around 30k. You'd
presumably have even worse problems making comparisons to a place like
Detroit, which has large areas that are virtually depopulated within it's city
limits.

Communities like Lakeview and Lincoln Park in Chicago do not seem to have
taken a major quality of life hit despite being far more dense than San
Francisco. They consist of tree-lined streets and relatively capacious 2-flats
and 2-3-4bdr apartments. I would 1000x rather live in a vintage stone Lakeview
apartment, with an alley and a parking garage, than share a rickety wooden
apartment in the Mission.

You think of people with a fixation for low-density living as those wanting
lots of living space, a yard, plenty of parking, low crime, that sort of
thing. But the median San Francisco resident gets none of that. It really
seems like a worst-of-all-worlds situation, unless you've been grandfathered
in to a huge house that you bought in the 90s, or have struck it rich and
decided to plow all your winnings into real estate.

They certainly didn't do themselves any favors by comparing every city to
Dhaka.

~~~
sAuronas
I thought the point of the analysis was to think of a city as a whole (I.e.,
MSA) and not just a downtown with surrounding neighborhoods... Chicago, for
example, is very low density compared to CA cities despite having a downtown
that could swallow all of CA cities' downtowns. And yet, it has miles of
single-story homes, empty lots and abandoned factories. Comparing a city like
Chicago using only the city and not the entire MSA to any CA city like SF and
it still loses (if the game is density). I really appreciated the analysis
because th baby boomer generation and their "I got mine..." attitude is
keeping most urban places down: literally. Thank you prop 13, if you live in
CA, for destroying affordability.

~~~
tptacek
An MSA is not simply a city as a whole. It's the city and the surrounding
area. For instance, the statistical area this article uses for San Francisco
includes San Jose, a _wildly different_ and in fact _larger_ city than San
Francisco. Worse, it includes all the little towns between SF and SJ, from San
Mateo to Atherton.

------
abruzzi
Some of the comments in the article seems a bit disingenuous. The Dhaka vs DC
graph was kind of funny, because the quality of life in Dhaka is probably much
lower in large part due to that density. But more to the point, I agree that
no one has a right to the density they've become accustomed to, but that
doesn't mean that an increase in density won't amount to a drop in the quality
of life to them. Take for instance the comment where someone sad something to
the effect that without going all Hong Kong, SF could increase density by 30
or 40% by utilizing unused/undeveloped parcels, and adding a few floors to
existing buildings. Thats probably true, but that has no effect on the public
spaces. So you now have 30-40% more people on the sidewalks. 30-40% more cars
on the road. 30-40% higher density. For some people that is a positive thing,
but for those that think it is a negative thing, no amount of hand waving is
change that.

By hand waving, I mean assertion without argument. You may convince them that
more and better restaurants will open, and that may genuinely change their
mind, but many people I've talked to that prefer the high density lifestyle
have a hard time grasping that there are those of us that genuinely do not. I
live in a city of 120k in one of the least densely populated states in the US.
It was 50k when I first came here. It has been genuinely intolerable for me,
and I spend all my free time getting away to significantly less dense areas,
and I am actively looking for jobs in areas lower than 50k (hard to do in
technical fields). Of course I'm an extreme example, but the point being that
trying to portray the quality of life concerns of people that prefer lower
density as irrelevant is not an honest comeback. Disregard those concerns as
being counter to the larger good, but don't pretend that people that hold
those concerns will be happy about all the things they will gain at higher
densities.

~~~
sampo
> 30-40% more cars on the road

When the population density increases over a certain limit, it becomes more
economical (also faster and more efficient) to move people around by a
combination of walking, subway, and buses. Like in London, Paris, New York,
central Boston etc. After that, adding more people will not add more cars.

Of course, in the ultra-nimby San Francisco, building a subway would also get
more resistance than in most other cities of the world.

~~~
dragonwriter
> When the population density increases over a certain limit, it becomes more
> economical (also faster and more efficient) to move people around by a
> combination of walking, subway, and buses.

Only if the infrastructure for those things (particularly subway) exists.
Which has to be built -- in advance of the increase in population, if quality
of life isn't going to drop before it gets better.

So when we start seeing concrete proposals for infrastructure improvements
_first_ , it makes sense to start talking about density increases.

> Of course, in the ultra-nimby San Francisco, building a subway would also
> get more resistance than in most other cities of the world.

If true, this suggests that people who want to build a new high-density utopia
should find some other city to descend upon.

~~~
sampo
> this suggests that people who want to build a new high-density utopia should
> find some other city to descend upon.

Yes. As far as I understand the situation, of the first world cities of
similar size or larger, San Francisco was probably the worst possible choice
to base the tech boom in. As it has the most conservative attitude and least
desire towards growth and building new homes and infrastructure. And poor
quality houses and infrastructure to begin with.

Almost like a joke of history.

~~~
ghaff
What really happened (and this is true to some degree in the Boston area as
well), is that the tech boom(s) actually started in what was (at least then)
largely suburban or even semi-rural areas. Silicon Valley and Route 128. This
was, after all, a period when there was largely a migration away from cities.

When I was working in the Boston area tech industry (actually near 495) in the
80s/90s out of school, relatively few people I knew lived in the city proper
or had a particular interest in doing so.

But then this interest in migrating to at least a handful of specific dense
cities by young professionals blossomed and the nearby cities to these booms
aren't really prepared for it.

------
Someone1234
> "Economists reject absolutes like 'full' and 'need,'" says Joe Cortright

Economists might. Humans (of which I can only assume economists are not)
definitely do accept the concepts of full and "too crowded."

> Everything we know about cities suggests that, in fact, quality of life
> doesn't go down as more people crowd in — the opposite happens.

[Citation Needed]

~~~
randyrand
It's a very agreeable point you're making, but

you'd probably say Dhaka is too full at 112,000 per square mile, right? Well,
why do humans live there? Indians are as human as any of us. Why would humans
live in a city that's too full?

Because theyd still rather live there than the indian countryside. Even for
Indians in Dhaka it's all about tradeoffs.

~~~
abhiv
Dhaka is in Bangladesh, not India.

~~~
randyrand
TIL. Thanks.

------
SixSigma
I've recently been to Delft. What struck me was that much of the housing was
multiple dwellings on one plot divided by floor. e.g. three apartments atop
each other.

Wow, no real surprise there, people crowd together like that everywhere. But
take a look around :

[https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0099691,4.3485485,3a,75y,76....](https://www.google.com/maps/@52.0099691,4.3485485,3a,75y,76.17h,75.36t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sqeLcwDQO0xy9wXFwgPcA7w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656!6m1!1e1)

That street is a few minutes walk from the city centre.

The Google Street car can't even get to many house fronts and yet the place is
_immediately_ somewhere you'd want to live.

~~~
noir_lord
Yeah this is what annoys me so much here in the UK when the topic of high
density comes up, historically high density housing was used as cheap social
housing where very little thought or art was put into aesthetics/services or
providing for tenants then when the inevitable maintenance cost cutting makes
it slum-like everyone recoils at the idea of living there.

And yet The Barbican Estate in London is one example of just how beautiful
high density housing can be.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLgkDCoH14g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLgkDCoH14g)
of course now (and been central London) what was once affordable high density
housing is the preserve of the wealthy.

~~~
pjc50
The best way to do 'high' density IMO is 4-6 stories across most of the city,
like Edinburgh or Barcelona. If everyone lives in an apartment there's no
stigma.

~~~
lmm
To my mind as a Londoner the coolest places to live here are towers. But
that's because the modern ones are being built as luxury accommodation. The
'60s tower blocks were built to be cheap - and it showed, and coloured the
reputation of anything built in that shape.

------
kqr2
Another interesting data point was the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong. It no
longer exists, however, at one point it was considered the most densely
populated place on earth with an estimated population density of 3,250,000/sq
mi. [1]

The Wall Street Journal also made an interactive portrait of it recently:
[http://projects.wsj.com/kwc/#chapter=intro](http://projects.wsj.com/kwc/#chapter=intro)

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
KWC was an utterly dreadful place to live, but I suspect that has more to do
with its lawlessness than its density.

~~~
dragonwriter
> KWC was an utterly dreadful place to live, but I suspect that has more to do
> with its lawlessness than its density.

But I don't think those two things were unrelated.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
It being lawless made it a popular place to go. That made it dense.

It being lawless also meant there was no requirement to make it a _nice_
place.

So I suppose lawlessness is the thread linking everything.

(Of course, yes, density does make it awful in some ways. A lack of natural
light, for example. Though I do wonder if proper planning could have improved
that.)

------
alricb
The most densely populated part of Montréal is Côte-des-Neiges, at around 7500
people/sq. km. (edit: to be comparable to the examples in the article, that's
around 19500 people/sq. mi.) Typical street:

[https://www.google.ca/maps/place/C%C3%B4te-Des-
Neiges%E2%80%...](https://www.google.ca/maps/place/C%C3%B4te-Des-
Neiges%E2%80%94Notre-Dame-De-
Gr%C3%A2ce,+Montreal,+QC/@45.494832,-73.629338,3a,66.8y,80.35h,90.25t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1s2UD0C3Z6pOwmsA81vvaBSw!2e0!4m2!3m1!1s0x4cc91759130c26a3:0x3b11a28996f34e10)

I must admit that at rush hour, the walking traffic on Côte-des-Neiges road
can be a bit overwhelming, but it's mostly fine the rest of the day.

------
rayiner
Using Dhaka as the reference point is hilarious. Has the author ever _been_ to
Dhaka? It was full a long time ago.

~~~
suyash
Exactly, just because you can stuff millions of people in a city doesn't mean
you should. Dhaka has one of the worst pollution, sanitation, traffic that no
other city wants.

~~~
xixi77
Is that more of a function of poverty, rather than density though? HK has a
lot of density, yet if not for the shitty climate, would IMO have been the
most desirable place to live on earth (yeah I know this is subjective, but
there is no shortage of people who would agree with me here).

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It's a function of both. Pack enough people into a small enough area and the
support + infrastructure gets really, really expensive.

There are many stupidities in the original piece, but one significant one is
the apparent lack of understanding that cities have to be supported by
political, financial and physical infrastructures which extend far outside the
geographic boundaries.

The effective footprints of London, NY, and HK stretch across the world. So
you can make an argument for _effective_ economic and ecological density being
very much lower than the density you get from a naive division of population
by immediate area.

When the effective density is much more constrained, you don't just get
financial poverty, you get somewhere that's a shitty place to live in many
different ways.

And when there's no political understanding of what an effective footprint is,
you get disasters like the California drought - which is largely the result of
to appreciate that water is a limited resource that comes from elsewhere, and
has to flow into an area before anyone can use it.

~~~
yummyfajitas
Generally speaking, you don't get financial poverty at all as a result of
density. You get wealth. London is wealthier than the rest of the UK. NYC is
wealthier than the rest of the US. Hong Kong is the wealthiest city in China.
Mumbai is the wealthiest city in India, unless Delhi has surpassed it since I
last checked. I haven't checked, but I'd bet 5:1 odds that Dhaka is
significantly wealthier than the rest of Bangladesh.

The California drought is primarily caused by inefficient use of water in
agriculture. City usage of water is pretty much irrelevant.

------
6d0debc071
While some may not share this feeling, to me there's a constant sensation of
pressure from not having enough space; from being too closed in with too many
people. You go somewhere where there's a single building you own, in the
middle of a nice bit of land, and you can go to town and not have to ram your
way through the people, or go for a drive and not be sitting in traffic.
That's relaxing to me. That's a pressure coming off... it feels almost like
physically coming up from being at the bottom of a swimming pool.

I've even noticed I think worse in that sort of environment. Like I'll look at
things I wrote in a high-density area and they look like insane ramblings.

That doesn't seem to be a 'well, you just need to find a nice high-density
area' problem. I've lived in some very well-appointed flats in very nice areas
before, and didn't care for the experience in the slightest. I don't care
whether the flat's fantastically appointed with real oak furniture and good
lighting[1].

And what are we offered in return for that unpleasant sensation? I don't care
how many coffee shops or restaurants or whatever there are. I don't go to town
unless there's something I can't buy on the internet or I need to go to work.
There's little I'd value there. Rampant consumerism is not a society, nor is
it a community. The ability to shop in a hundred stores is not the same as a
high quality of life.

Ultimately, that is why I don't live in a high-density area despite being
offered several multiples of my current wage to do so. I make enough to be
comfortable here, it would be almost impossible for me to make enough to be
comfortable there.

\---

1\. Which, by the way, is very difficult in a high-density area. Good lighting
means light from multiple directions in at least some of the rooms. Quite how
you're supposed to do that when there's another building in the way I'm not
clear on - the general answer seems to be that one doesn't.

If you've lived in a property with good lighting angles some practices, such
as an open-plan setup seem rather like bad hacks.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
> I've even noticed I think worse in that sort of environment.

There have been many posts on HN in the past little while about interruptions
killing concentration. Well, in that environment, there's always a siren going
off outside, or a car alarm, or a car horn, or... You can't just _think_ there
unless you get a place that insulates you from all that. Even then, it takes
time for all the mental jarring that happened to you on your way to that place
to die away, so that you can think.

~~~
lagadu
This is a massive exaggeration. I'm aware this is anecdotal but I work close
to the centre of a large city with 18000/sqm density (according to wikipedia)
and I honestly can't recall the last time I heard a siren or car horn.

------
rmason
Just like there are people in Boulder who wish startups would leave and never
come back, there are also people in Detroit who wish Dan Gilbert had never
moved Quicken Loans downtown and started buying buildings.

Most of it is pure jealousy, because at the time no one wanted to bid against
him. Engineers have caused downtown rents to soar and pushed the poor
completely out. Sound familiar?

Even Gilbert's fabled security grid which has made a night and day difference
on crime in downtown has its enemies, one merchant got upset when his landlord
let Gilbert post cameras and demanded they be removed. There's even a protest
t-shirt:

[https://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/1986/3481/...](https://a.disquscdn.com/uploads/mediaembed/images/1986/3481/original.jpg)

Just for reference Detroit in 2014 had 2010 people per square mile and more
are welcome.

------
koenigdavidmj
Reddit's Seattle thread on this article pointed out that Istanbul has the kind
of density talked about in this article, at least in some neighborhoods. This
picture[1] was linked as a representative example, not too different from
Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood (that Amazon has essentially remodeled
in the past few years).

0:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3nqu2s/there_is_no...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3nqu2s/there_is_no_such_thing_as_a_city_that_has_run_out/)

1: [http://imgur.com/uCM6iiZ](http://imgur.com/uCM6iiZ)

------
nicholas_sailer
This is a fascinating article, thanks for posting.

It's unfortunate that so many U.S. cities (and some abroad) were designed and
built in a way that results in them being unwalkable. I'm really interested in
seeing how cities respond to this, and whether or not these cities will start
to become more dense in order to possibly improve efficiency, or whether
they'll just continue to sprawl because it's the easiest way to grow.

------
VLM
On one hand they propose dramatically increasing economic spending because if
only one thing is certain and in no dispute, its that denser design is more
expensive to construct AND maintain. On the other hand they dismiss property
rights and representative government as obsolete concepts to be scoffed at
because they stand in the way of "progress" where progress is curiously
defined as lowering standards of living due to higher density. The only
rational conclusion is they must be proposing socialized government owned and
operated and maintained ultra high density housing. AKA "the projects". And
nobody wanted to live there when we tried it.

Usually the WP has better written articles. The individual lines and
paragraphs are well organized written. It only fails are the higher
organizational writing levels where its wrong, and poorly organized. One
exception is the conclusion is completely wrong. Detroit never stopped
evolving. It just evolved in a direction most people hated, so everyone who
could, left. FUD along the lines of turn this place into the projects or else
it'll turn into the projects isn't very logical.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> denser design is more expensive to construct AND maintain

Really? Surely economies of scale would mean that building 10 flats is cheaper
than building 10 individual houses?

~~~
makomk
Really. It's important to remember that every floor in a building has to
support all of the floors above it - not just physically, but all the services
and access for the floors above too. Above three floors or so, you also need
extra infrastructure like pumps to get drinking water to the upper floors,
tanks to store it, and elevators so people near the top don't have to carry
their shopping and furniture up all the flights of stairs. At the same time,
you're losing economies of scale because rather than building the same house
10 times, you're building a one-off, with every floor having to be designed
and analysed separately because it's under different loading. And of course
that one building has the same transportation, power, water and sewerage needs
and generates the same amount of garbage as all 10 houses, but now you have
much less space at ground level to satisfy those needs with.

And this just gets worse as the building gets taller. Eventually, the
infrastructure required to add more floors removes so much usable space from
all the floors below that it's not ever economically viable to do so, which is
why all the tallest skyscrapers are built for bragging rights these days.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Ah, I see. Reminds me that the Burj Dubai and such have a lot of space in the
building used simply for elevator shafts.

------
mjevans
Greed is the problem.

~~~
ricksplat
Coupled with Debt. A very nasty mix indeed.

