I don't know what to tell you. I just don't want to be surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings. I didn't buy a nice house in a nice suburb to stare at giant cement buildings. It's that simple.
The reality is that in a suburb far from infrastructure, investors won't want to build a 30 stories building.
But they might want to build a 3-4 units building, something 2-3 stories maximum. But this is currently ILLEGAL. Only a single house is possible and ANY densification is impossible.
You go to the downtown of older cities and you don't see giant cement buildings. But you do see livable neighbourhood with buildings that are just slightly higher than the norm and can house multiple families.
I'm not building a strawman at all. Let me make my position even more clear: I don't want to live near multi-family housing. I want it to remain illegal for it to be built near me.
Leave the suburbs alone. Every single place you people infect with your ideas turns to hell.
Maybe Im naive, but whats wrong with building entirely bew towns and cities? Last time I flew across the US, I saw vast wilderness with a few tiny populated places here and there.
There’s nothing broadly wrong with building entirely new cities, but it’s incredibly difficult to do for a variety of reasons. Most attempts to do this fail. Expecting new cities to absorb all of the increase in population is unrealistic.
If you’re talking new suburbs of existing cities, well, that’s basically the only expansion we’ve done in many places. Some problems with that:
- It leads to more driving needed to get to the city (and thus more emissions, exactly what we need to avoid right now).
- If the implication is that you’re building outward because the inner suburbs are getting more expensive to live in (which will happen if they don’t densify at all and the population grows), then you’re basically forcing most kids to move far away from their parents/grandparents/etc. Some people won’t want to live near their family but many do, and being able to maintain those close family ties feels important.
if you run electricity, water, sewage, fiber optics, and roads to it, absolutely! The problem with suburbs is that they demand the same utilities as dense areas without paying the increased cost of that infrastructure.
Who builds the roads and power grids for suburbia? Is it city dwellers or rural folks? Where do they get raw materials and construction equipment? Who produces food? Who makes furniture, cars and all other stuff? So what do city dwellers actually do to subsidise suburbia and rural country?
