> (Ex. live-work units can be much more beautiful than single-family homes, but 5-over-1s are usually not)
I'm not sure why this is presented as fact. Most single-family homes in the US are humble midcentury boxes, or bland suburban copy/pastes, or hideously garish McMansions. None of these are any prettier to look at than a 5-over-1.
I would rather walk past a 5-over-1 than SFH populated by roommates-who-don’t-want-roommates and homeless people on the sidewalk.
If maintaining an “aesthetic” costs keeping people in bad conditions, it’s not worth it.
And I agree, it’s a false dichotomy anyway as the most attractive development targets in a given area are the less desirable (ie less expensive) plots.
It's moot anyway. You shouldn't be able to veto a building you neither own nor live in simply because it doesn't suit your aesthetic tastes (ostensibly. I'm not convinced the accusations of "it's ugly!" aren't just another convenient excuse to shout down new structures).
I'm pretty YIMBY, but I don't really have an issue with popularly mandated style guides for development. As long as they are A) set in advance, not in response to individual development plans and B) aren't deliberately prohibitive of varying types of development. If an area wants to, say, mandate that all buildings are Art Deco, that'd be pretty cool to live in and visit. An area that wants to ban anything but single family homes should go rot.
I agree, you shouldn't be able to single-handedly veto buildings that have nothing to do with you. And I'd vastly prefer ugly dense buildings over the current failure to build anything.
However, we can build dense housing that isn't awful to look at for only marginal price increases in many cases, and where possible, I think it makes sense to do so. No individual should have veto power, but I think it makes sense for a community to have a stake in building beautiful urban areas.
I'm not sure why this is presented as fact. Most single-family homes in the US are humble midcentury boxes, or bland suburban copy/pastes, or hideously garish McMansions. None of these are any prettier to look at than a 5-over-1.