Ah, a rag totally dedicated to harping the virtues of "urbanism" is unloading on actually liveable houses. Shocking. News at 11.
Reality: McMansions are popular because they are comfortable and provide living space for an actual family. While being NOT more expensive on a per-unit basis than tiny condos in major urban centers.
I get it, millenials got screwed by the unfortunate confluence of 2008 and by the economy finally transforming from manufacturing economy into a service-based one. They can't afford large houses, so the psychological defense mechanism kicks in: "Hey, these McMansions are bad anyway. It's good to downsize into a shoebox".
But at this point we perhaps should start answering the question: do we want cities to continue being densified into Manhattan-style concrete canyons, or should we make sure that our children can live in nice houses that our generation was not able to afford?
> Reality: McMansions are popular because they are comfortable and provide living space for an actual family. While being NOT more expensive on a per-unit basis than tiny condos in major urban centers.
> I get it, millenials got screwed by the unfortunate confluence of 2008 and by the economy finally transforming from manufacturing economy into a service-based one. They can't afford large houses, so the psychological defense mechanism kicks in: "Hey, these McMansions are bad anyway. It's good to downsize into a shoebox".
So they're popular because they're affordable, but they're hated because they're expensive? Which is it?
> But at this point we perhaps should start answering the question: do we want cities to continue being densified into Manhattan-style concrete canyons, or should we make sure that our children can live in nice houses that our generation was not able to afford?
Manhattan is popular, aspirational even, for a reason. Every generation before the 1950s was built by gradual densification. The wrongheaded decision to try to pickle cities in aspic via zoning laws is what creates housing unaffordability. A "nice" lifestyle is far more about being able to live somewhere you can work and socialize than about having zillions of sterile square feet to yourself.
Most Millenials who can afford to rent an apartment can afford to buy a condo in a city - maybe not SF or NY, but a studio condo on Chicago's North Side, or in older buildings in the Loop, can be had under $150k. A newer studio or older one-bedroom can be had under $200k. Sure, there's a HOA, but it usually includes some amenities; the key difference in affordability is the dramatically lower down payment (the largest barrier to home ownership for most young people) than a large suburban house. A mid-six-figure McMansion is in a completely different price class - especially when accounting for the heating, cooling, and insurance costs of the much larger home.
> 1. Have shorter commutes than Europeans. This _still_ holds true!
> 2. Be able to access more businesses within the "reasonable commute" range.
Citation? That's the opposite of everything I've seen here and elsewhere; Americans seem to see an hour-or-more commute as normal. Car-based cities give you great commute times until those pesky other cars start commuting and filling up the roads.
For 1980 the US average commute time was 21 minutes. For Paris that was 38 minutes. For London it was 40 minutes.
For the current state of affairs:
Commute time in Paris: 32 minutes, commute time in Berlin: 31 minutes, commute time in London: 47 minutes. US average: 27 minutes.
> Car-based cities give you great commute times until those pesky other cars start commuting and filling up the roads.
Even bad car-based cities are generally _better_ than the best transit-oriented cities. Even with congestion and decades of neglect, forced by anti-people pro-urbanism crowd.
Just look up commute times and think. I suggest looking up Houston, TX (so-called "car hell") and comparing it with major European cities.
> For 1980 the US average commute time was 21 minutes. For Paris that was 38 minutes. For London it was 40 minutes.
> For the current state of affairs: Commute time in Paris: 32 minutes, commute time in Berlin: 31 minutes, commute time in London: 47 minutes. US average: 27 minutes.
As the other reply said, misleading to compare a city average with a national average.
As far as I can see that's showing reachability, including by car, is much better in transit-oriented cities in Europe and China than in the US? Why do you think that supports your argument?
Paris commute times are much higher than in the rest of the country. France's average commute time is currently at 25 min, which lower than US average. Ergo… Also excellent transit-oriented cities are just that, excellent. Had a 20 min commute in Singapore a while, it was just terrific – excellent flow, perfectly convenient, great selection of hawkers to start the day with a curry puff or whatever suits your fancy before popping into the ultrareliable and silent MRT… Beats driving any day, and especially what you get in a bad car-based city like Jakarta with its average driving speed on weekday mornings of 5 km/h…
No offense intended, but the second leg of cyberax’ point still stands — quoted below — higher percentages of the total jobs in a metro area are within the average range of an average US metro dwelling household also, as long as they don’t have to worry about costs of car repair and insurance.
If Paris’ airport built two new runways and they both filled up with international flights immediately, would this be taken as evidence that their construction was an irresponsible waste of scarce public investment? It would rather be celebrated as a validation of forecast utility to the public and to the economy. Same for urban condo buildings filling up. Yet American traffic jams are gross and different from runways? How so?
> Affluence definitely followed [as well as preceded; but, in any case, a set of feedback loops, not simply affluence preceding networks’ construction —-Ed.] the conscious policy decision to build a network of freeways and highways, with a focus on suburban lifestyle.
> To expand a bit on that, car-oriented cities allowed US citizens to:
> 1. Have shorter commutes than Europeans. This _still_ holds true!
> 2. Be able to access more businesses within the "reasonable commute" range.
> No offense intended, but the second leg of cyberax’ point still stands — quoted below — higher percentages of the total jobs in a metro area are within the average range of an average US metro dwelling household also, as long as they don’t have to worry about costs of car repair and insurance.
I don't think it does though? Figure 4 on their link shows the transit-oriented cities in Europe and China doing a lot better on that metric than US cities.
> I don't think it does though? Figure 4 on their link shows the transit-oriented cities in Europe and China doing a lot better on that metric than US cities.
The axes have different scales, look again. The Figure 4 shows that the US cities cluster around 500000 jobs accessible by car. And cars are the main mode of transportation in the US.
Figure 3 shows that European cities cluster around 100000-200000 jobs accessible by public transit.
It's also true that many European cities are actually competitive when you do use a car. But we're looking at transit vs. car use.
Within each graph the scale is the same, and the European/Chinese cities do significantly better (are higher up the graph) than the US cities. (I do wonder why London and Paris are missing from Figure 4).
> It's also true that many European cities are actually competitive when you do use a car. But we're looking at transit vs. car use.
They're better than competitive; their trendline for job accessibility is 2x or more better than the US one. Car-oriented city design results in much worse job accessibility, even for car users.
> Paris commute times are much higher than in the rest of the country.
Do you think urbanization cancer will spare you, if you have an Eiffel Tower in your country? Paris metro area is about 1/6-th of France in population, and it's growing. That's why commute times will keep getting worse, while commutes themselves are going to get more and more miserable.
The US average commute time is weighted down by large coastal cities, that are growing like a cancer, following anti-human urbanist policies. If you look at smaller cities in the US, then it's basically a commute heaven. E.g. Salt Lake City is at 20 minutes, Boise ID is at 15 minutes.
The definition of McMansion I’m familiar with, at least in Los Angeles, is demolishing a 2bd/2ba bungalow to build a 5bd/4ba house, usually by getting rid of all fertile backyard/frontyard in the first place. They have another pejorative name, too— “Boxy Moderns”
This is super common in Santa Monica or Beverly Hills, for example. Even San Francisco!
And yet, for some reason, this is completely fine to build without any zoning meetings but the second you propose a 5-unit 1bd/1ba apartment building with the same profile in a “single family neighborhood” it’s ruining the entire “character” of the place and requires 3-5 years of bureaucracy and, depending on the neighbors, litigation.
The number of family units to hold responsible (and to hold each other responsible) accounts for all of the resistance, and quite frankly, there should be more.
You can have a house with a family with kids or you can have a box with a half dozen losers in it, and statistically one of them is a felon. Sane people choose the former.
In these neighborhoods a 1bd condo would still sell for above $800k, minimum. More than likely $1.2-1.5m, looking at Zillow. They’d rent for at least $7k/mo.
If we’re generalizing, like you are, then they’d allow the well-off professional class to live and work in their neighborhood and send their kids to the same schools as the investor-class and trust fund kids-turned-homeowners who haven’t done anything in decades other than be born to the right family.
Unless you’re talking about white-collar convicted felons? Which I can guarantee you, once again, they already live in these neighborhoods and aren’t the ones trying to move into it.
If that sounds like hyperbole, then sure— but so is yours.
It can be, for some people. Rural lifestyles work, urban lifestyles work; suburbia gets the worst of both worlds, even with the messed up economics that subsidise it it's still not a pleasant way of living (AIUI there's an established bias that people naturally underestimate how long they'll be stuck in traffic commuting and how miserable it will make them).
> AIUI there's an established bias that people naturally underestimate how long they'll be stuck in traffic commuting and how miserable it will make them
Grew up in the burbs of southern California so I had 22 years of experience with the traffic there. Turned me into an urban or rural dweller. Nothing in between. It's just not worth it.
Yes but to many it is a relaxing form of work, just like a better form of mental and physical workout combined with “forest bath” or “bird song bathing” — depending on the local biome and season of course
The _vast majority_ of land in the US, urban centers included, including NYC, is zoned for low density single family homes. Manhattan is only 1 of 5 boroughs in NYC, remember.
There is NO shortage of single family homes.
There IS a shortage of absolute number of units in urbanized areas.
This is because, contrary to what you claim, the only thing allowed to be built in many areas is exclusively single family homes.
> Should we make sure that our children can live in nice houses that our generation was not able to afford
I say this as a relatively fortunate homeowner in Los Angeles who is part of “this generation”: if we do not allow more homes to be built, the next generation will not be able to live in the city at all.
I myself would not have been able to afford my home in the city and neighborhood I love had the recent state zoning changes (sb9) which allowed me to convert my single family home into to a duplex not occurred.
I think people are even indifferent to single-family homes. Many people would be happy living in a duplex or any of the various structures of the missing middle. You can raise a family under those conditions. What difference does it make if your child plays soccer with their friends in the shared courtyard or your own private backyard?
Even embracing for a second the notion that spreading municipalities out over vast tracts of land connected by cars is ethical and sustainable (which I don't)... the stereotypical midwestern suburb I grew up in had a lot of modest single family homes. The developers kept large stands of original trees. Homes backed up into forests, parks, and (natural) ponds.
The houses were generously proportioned for four people.
Then the wave of McMansions hit. The contrast was night and day. Same families, but the houses were twice as large, adorned with like... Fake columns and endless unnecessary fake architectural flourishes and ugly facade exteriors. The houses were jammed into tiny lots with no trees and no yards. The developers cut down all of the natural landscape and installed ridiculous fountain jets in drainage ponds. Side by side with the rest of the neighbourhood it was (and remains) ugly, excessive and soulless.
That's what a McMansion means to me. It's the white collar commuter's Ford F150 of a house.
And to be clear people have hated McMansions since long before the "millenials," what a weird "fuck you, got mine" take.
I think what the article is trying to say is more affordable/modest new construction is needed to improve current housing issues in many areas. Cheaply built giants, made to maximize contractor profits, only serve a small income demographic at the end of the day.
That is a lot of words to just say “cope+seethe”. Are macMansion suburbs even sustainable (i.e can cover infrastructure cost via taxes)? Do children who have no freedom and have to be driven everywhere turn out to be better adults? How does this additional work affect women and their place in the work force? Low density suburbs have quite a lot to prove in order to justify their existence.
With you until the last sentence. The high prices for small condos in urban centers are an indication that there are fewer of them in supply relative to what the market demands. There's nothing wrong with letting urban centers densify and serve as a containment zone for childless 20-somethings (in fact, this would mean more affordable single family homes for those that need them). And who knows, if there's enough dense urban housing to meet demand, then those residents could have an easier saving up money themselves, with which to later purchase some more space in which to raise a family
> The high prices for small condos in urban centers are an indication that there are fewer of them in supply relative to what the market demands.
Be careful trying to apply ECON101 micro principles when looking at property markets: property markets are neither efficient, nor rational.
> those residents could have an easier saving up money themselves
In desirable property markets, people bid against each other as much as they can afford to pay for a mortgage - so your cause and effect is wrong - most people don’t get to save. Same analyses if renting, because landlords and renters do much the same behaviour. You get to save if (a) you are an undesirable market or time, or (b) your wages are enough to beat the majority, or (c) you stay in a lower status home compared to your peers.
People bidding whatever they can afford is largely a lack-of-supply problem, is it not? If more housing of a given status level were available, eventually it wouldn't be necessary for everyone to spend everything they can on bidding wars. And sure, then you might say "well then the relative status of that housing has shifted and your peers still aren't saving, they're just spending their money on nicer housing", but I still see that as an absolute win. I have much more empathy for a person not saving money when saving money means "living in a dump and commuting 90 minutes each way" than when it means "living more than half an hour away from Central Park".
> People bidding whatever they can afford is largely a lack-of-supply problem, is it not?
ECON101 thinking. Tokyo is given as an example of enough supply, but something like 25% of the nation lives there, and Tokyo doesn’t have the same pressure of young working age people moving as other countries due to their aging population. Imagine even 10% of the USA moving to New York, and say 20% of all 2x year olds per year. How does NY double or triple the number of residences?
And as you say, status drives prices. In Christchurch we have a desirable suburb Merivale, where people bid rediculous prices because it has money status. The exact same house in another suburb, closer to town, can be a lot cheaper.
In NZ people want their kids to go to high decile schools. A high decile school is one where the parents are in the top 10% of earners. There is natural price discrimination working in the housing market to keep prices just barely affordable at every wage.
In New Zealand and Australia we have major cities where houses are 10x earnings, bigger multiples than most of the USA, and you will be surprised how much more US house prices can go up. New York doesn’t make the top ten list for unaffordability in the world: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/least-affordable-cities-to-...
New Zealand’s major city has 20% of the country’s population, and is also ridiculously expensive compared to household earnings. I wonder how many more houses it needs before prices would drop?
We are building new houses at a fucking insane rate in Christchurch (lag from Earthquakes a decade ago) - yet prices are still chronically hiking.
NY is very dense, yet prices are very high, so it breaks ECON101 assumptions since prices must have gone up as density went up. One theory is that houses are Veblen goods - which totally fucks with supply/demand curves.
> The high prices for small condos in urban centers are an indication that there are fewer of them in supply relative to what the market demands.
Here's a simple fact. Densification never leads to lower prices. As you build more housing, it _always_ becomes more expensive faster than you can build it.
I analyzed the database of all real estate sales in the US for the last 25 years, and I have not found a single example where densification led to price drops. Other scholarly literature found similar results, at most you can expect single-digit percentage drops on rents from new construction.
> There's nothing wrong with letting urban centers densify
Yes, there is. Densification forces jobs to migrate to urban centers, because companies in dense cores have a competitive advantage in the access to a larger pool of talent.
So your choices are:
1. Densify to hell and then in a couple of generations your children will live in apartments where you can shit into your toilet, while cooking food at the same time. See: microapartments in Tokyo.
2. Limit density and promote suburban lifestyle.
That's it. It's not a false dilemma, there are really no in-between choices that are stable long-term.
You have the cause and effect reversed. Areas densify because they become more expensive. This is the classic “more medicine causes higher mortality” Simpson's paradox.
Edit: Also, looking at one country for less than a generation is not conclusive enough to make a general rule.
> You have the cause and effect reversed. Areas densify because they become more expensive.
The thing is, with Simpson's paradox you'd expect at least _some_ inversions. You'll have at least _some_ people who are eating a lot of medicine and not dying.
There are _no_ examples of higher density leading to lower prices in the US. This strongly suggests a causal relationship.
And some examples are rather extreme. The number of units in Seattle has been growing by about 2.2% YoY for the last ~12 years. This is already at the upper range of the possible construction rate. Yet Seattle's price growth curve has been basically mirroring SF.
> Edit: Also, looking at one country for less than a generation is not conclusive enough to make a general rule.
I don't have data for more than 25 years and for other countries. And probably you can find counterexamples somewhere in Brazil.
Urbanism is unnatural, i.e. it's an anti-nature lifestyle. Rather than squashing people into concrete hives, the gov should be promoting small minimum-footprint houses on large lots. Brutalistic master-trucks as personal commute vehicles should go away for the same reason.
Amitermes meridionalis and many other insects build huge urban environments that house hundreds of thousands to millions of their fellows (and farmed "animals").
Hunter gathers in Australia didn't see hookworm until colonists arrived with free ranging sheep and cattle.
Pre colonialism people were healthy and spent approx four hours a day gathering food from known managed resources.
The (North) American South was rife with hookworm in the 1910's prompting John D. Rockefeller to fund a massive public health and education program [1].
Great! Let's go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle then. To make it work, since the ecosystem can't support very many people living that way, we'll have to trim the global population down to about 1 million, so we'll have to set up some big death camps to eliminate billions of excess people. You're volunteering to be first in the gas chamber, right?
Where I live I grew up mingled with hunter gathers and to this day a large number are still there .. so I don't see any need for death camps and slaughtering billions.
I'm not that bright, obviously, perhaps you can explain how you made the journey from a comment about hookworm not being a feature of pre colonial huneter gather existence and termites building urban structure to your claim about my thoughts on the planet and 8 billion people.
I look forward to your reply so that I may become less ignorant.
Reality: McMansions are popular because they are comfortable and provide living space for an actual family. While being NOT more expensive on a per-unit basis than tiny condos in major urban centers.
I get it, millenials got screwed by the unfortunate confluence of 2008 and by the economy finally transforming from manufacturing economy into a service-based one. They can't afford large houses, so the psychological defense mechanism kicks in: "Hey, these McMansions are bad anyway. It's good to downsize into a shoebox".
But at this point we perhaps should start answering the question: do we want cities to continue being densified into Manhattan-style concrete canyons, or should we make sure that our children can live in nice houses that our generation was not able to afford?