i appreciate the thoughtful response, and the fact that it’s rooted in a desire to maintain some element of diversity.
i’d play your observation back at you though: there’s more than just young renters and nuclear families in terms of household typologies, and nearly all of the other ones (childless couples, empty nesters, older singles aging in place) would also benefit from ownership (or “rooted”) housing opportunities that things like a quad would provide in these neighborhoods. household size across the US has been shrinking for decades, and there is truly a lot of demand for smaller homes at all stages of life. instead of looking at the quadplex in the SFH neighborhood as a way for “young renters” to displace families out of the neighborhood, it’s an opportunity for other households to take root or make a life transition without having to leave.
if quads in SFH neighborhoods are just being overrun with young transient renters, it probably means there’s not enough “amazon boxes”, and may be related to broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum.
also, this is all without saying… it is entirely possible for children to be raised in a home that is not a detached SFH! it is certainly a preference for a lot of people, but it is not a hard requirement. and missing middle buildings like the 2/4/6 plexes are some of the best non-SFH buildings for doing that, where you can more easily have 2-3 bedrooms and some sense of a yard.
I think we largely agree on the fact that SFHs should not be the only option for young families or empty nesters or aging couples. (As an aside, all of the above live in SFHs on my block, as well as young single renters in their 20s who share SFHs as roommates). I brought up Baltimore rowhouses for that reason. My Mom grew up in a duplex in LA with a backyard... my brother is raising his own kids in almost an exact copy of that duplex.
I'm not sure what you mean about the lack of new construction of that type coming from broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum. Maybe uou could elaborate. The upper end of the spectrum in Portland is... almost everyone with money moves to either the oldest exclusive homes in one of two very non-diverse neighborhoods (Laurelhurst or the West Hills), or else they move to the exurbs and build McMansions out in the farmland. Neither is really actively engaged in a community beyond a homeowner's association, and neither is walkable or a place where people of different economic and cultural backgrounds get to interact for everyone's benefit.
So maybe what I'm trying to say is that the high upper end (homes over $1M, let's say), is going to remove itself anyway, and that yes there should be more construction of 2-4-plexes which are not Amazon boxes... but there seems to be no incentive to build those things, and I don't even know how you could do so on a 1200 sqft lot.
In the interim, Portland has eased lots of rules on the use of ADUs and trailers in backyards and even yurts. I bought my home for $450k and the range in the area goes up to $800. This tells you that what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard.
But I do feel like the crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class, anti-family quality to it... and what I mean to say is that it is the working middle class families in the upper end of housing on those avenues who anchor those blocks and keep the neighborhoods livable and loved and who keep the businesses in business. I've seen what's happened to such inner city SFH neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and it turns into somewhere that no one would want to live if they didn't have to, with no community or neighborhood to speak of. Row houses and shared brownstones in East Coast cities have fared slightly better as an attractive living pattern.
Ultimately too, your argument is that not everyone should live where they live, because more people want to live in that spot, so if they want space they should move to the suburbs. My argument is that not everyone can afford to live exactly where they want, either way, but that doesn't logically imply that you should increase density as much as possible in a mixed and vibrant neighborhood just because people want to live there. At a certain point it will lose the very thing that makes people want to live there in the first place. Not even to get into the fact that no one actually works downtown anymore or commutes away from the neighborhood, so this is purely a choice for most people.
You still didn't address my point that every SFH torn down for a 4-plex just redistributes individual middle class ownership to financial corporations.
Many places have all of the single-family homes also owned by corporations. I think the problems you are concerned with here are predominantly increasing financialization of the economy and increasing wealth inequality rather than anything to do with zoning changes.
> what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard
If housing has gotten so expensive that the "working middle class" has to live somewhere else and commute in, the way to attack that is to increase the stock of available housing, not continue to sharply restrict it.
> crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class
To the contrary, relaxing zoning requirements most strongly benefits people who are less wealthy and currently end up overspending on housing or getting priced out.
I think this all depends on what time and place you're living in.
I'm definitely living in a very weird bubble in eastern Portland. It was a working-class, blue collar town of single-family homes. It was colonized in two separate waves, in the 90s and in the 2020s, by people who couldn't afford rents or homes in city areas of San Francisco or Seattle. But it never really took off economically as an international city, and it's still stagnant, and much more reminiscent of Seattle in the 1980s.
There's a lot to like about that pattern, and under Georgism it would make lots of sense for people to move here because the land value close to downtown isn't really that great. Or to move to Cincinnati, or Lexington, or Des Moines. If all people had to pay was fair rent on the land, new local communities and diverse downtown areas would be springing up all over America.
Not everywhere that people rush into and want to live because it was shown on the Real World needs to instantly resemble the same monocultural sort of housing that a big city like Los Angeles or Seattle has had to adopt.
Moreover, there's nothing inherently immoral about retaining the shape of a city when more people move into it; presumably, they are moving there because they like the city.
When I see working people being priced out of Seattle or LA, they're being priced out by financial groups and offshore investors, with the help of local boards that allow homes to be torn down and replaced with half-empty investment apartment blocks... destroying the very thing they're investing in.
We may be clinging on as homeowners and holding to a way of life that is incompatible with the kind of colonization other cities experienced, but: We take care of our parks. We know each other. I can't go 4, or 8 or 12 blocks that I don't see people I know. Up in the Amazon boxes, we meet the people who come for a year and go.
What equity is there for us in the plan to remove single family zoning? Not even as a parable:
10 miles west of Portland, Intel built a giant facility, and there is a commuter train stop out there which has Amazon boxes for miles around it. But no SFHs in their new construction, nor anything that would be attractive to anyone over the age of 29.
Why should I move out there and they move here, when in reality, that wouldn't even exist without the ancient core of SFHs that defines the character of the city they ostensibly want to live in?
The problem I have with your line of thinking is that it basically seems like the main reason you like your SFH neighborhood is that it's right next to one that's not SFH; if you were surrounded by multiple layers of SFH, you'd lose the ability to have the nearby businesses staffed people you're describing as not living in that type of zoning. It's not clear that the non-SFH home neighborhood with all of the businesses near you gets anywhere close to as much benefit from the proximity to your neighborhood (the closest thing to this I can find is that you mention you have well-maintained parks, but it's not clear why you think that this couldn't exist in a large cluster of non-SFH neighborhoods as well; I've lived within a few blocks of very large, well-maintained parks in separate neighborhoods where there were no SFH neighborhoods anywhere close by).
Combined with some kind of odd ways is describing things (cities being "colonized" in recent decades, people moving to LA because it was on The Real World, as if there hasn't been close to a century of tropes of people moving to Hollywood to pursue show business, implication that eliminating SFH zoning requires you to "move out" when it certainly does not require any individual homeowners to do anything different than what they're already doing), it's hard not to get the impression that you're basically trying to argue in favor of NIMBY without actually saying it.
An aside - I was talking about the wave of mostly white, young, single, affluent people colonizing and gentrifying Portland, not LA. The Amazon boxes are a form of gentrification that push out existing homeowners. Portland's historically Black neighborhood of Albina was a thriving mix of SFHs and medium density. Now those houses are torn down and it's a wall of condos and apartments that all look the same, each with a sushi restaurant or an organic market.
You're right, it is that there is denser zoning in close proximity that makes us want to live where we do, and makes it walkable. Which contradicts the idea that I'm making a NIMBY argument. I don't want to live in an all-SFH suburb or in a high density zone that's all rentals. I also don't want to live in the only SFH surrounded by condos. I think your point is that the SFHs don't contribute anything to the mixture, and are somehow parasitic on the higher density zones. I think that's not true. Both sides of the mix are important. It gives the neighborhood a character that doesn't exist in most American cities, which is: People of different backgrounds sit together outside cafes and talk. On any given day we hang out with other homeowners, their kids, young professionals, and also people who work in the service industry who live in the neighborhood and go to the same places they work on their days off. We go to concerts with them, they come over when we BBQ and hang out at our house.
My argument is that this arrangement is much better for society as a whole, and for individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum, than a division between all-SFH suburbia and all high-density inner city. Especially now that most people don't commute to an office, and most of the commuting is done by wage workers who have to commute out to the suburbs to work in a strip mall. The homeowners close to downtown provide an economic base for higher-end local businesses that renters would not be able to support. The people who work in those businesses earn enough to rent in the neighborhood where they work. With all high-density, families are essentially exiled to the burbs, there is little to no socializing between economic classes, and everyone has to commute.
Sure, re-zoning doesn't affect individual homeowners immediately, but the endpoint or goal of it is to ultimately get rid of SFHs in inner areas, not to leave a healthy mixture standing. That's what I see as the problem. And I think it's a politically motivated goal based on the idea that no one should really own a SFH (or if they do, as one poster put it, they can move somewhere far away from the city).
I've lived or spent significant time in a bunch of places around the US - rural NJ, suburban NJ, NYC, Philly, Orlando exurbs, San Diego, San Francisco, South Bay, and I now live in inner SE Portland. And I agree with you that there is something really special about it.
In some ways it's similar to the tourism or gentrification problem - the very things that make a place desirable lead to the destruction of those things. Some people view the world through a purely economic lens and treat individual people as abstracted production/consumption units. And unfortunately there's no real way to put a dollar value on "all the neighbors know each other and help each other out". And even if you could - you can't just BUY your way into that, no matter how much money you have! The only way to unlock that value is to live there and engage with the community. Obviously there will be turnover but what some people don't seem to grasp is that there is a tipping point, where enough newcomers overwhelm the "old timers" and destroy the culture of a place. And think about the game theory of it from the point of view of a resident - why invest time and resources in a community if you're just going to leave in a year or two? Or if the beneficiaries are future random people who are not going to give a shit about the community?
Nice to hear from a fellow Portlander who feels the same way! And your explanation is clearer than what I tried to describe as "character". There are a lot of people here of course who do just view residents as economic units, but there's just as much resistance.
"you can't just buy your way into that" is a great insight.
> Which contradicts the idea that I'm making a NIMBY argument. I don't want to live in an all-SFH suburb or in a high density zone that's all rentals.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here at all. If you're trying to argue against some sort of development or planning change that doesn't change anything about your own property due for reasons that are purely about how it would affect you personally, that seems like NIMBY to me. The fact that you happen to not be arguing for universal SFH doesn't somehow make it not NIMBY.
Independent of that, I don't really find the rest of what you're saying compelling. You're arguing against a change to eliminate something with concrete, known problems on the basis of wanting to preserve "character". I still maintain that this is indistinguishable from any NIMBY argument.
i’d play your observation back at you though: there’s more than just young renters and nuclear families in terms of household typologies, and nearly all of the other ones (childless couples, empty nesters, older singles aging in place) would also benefit from ownership (or “rooted”) housing opportunities that things like a quad would provide in these neighborhoods. household size across the US has been shrinking for decades, and there is truly a lot of demand for smaller homes at all stages of life. instead of looking at the quadplex in the SFH neighborhood as a way for “young renters” to displace families out of the neighborhood, it’s an opportunity for other households to take root or make a life transition without having to leave.
if quads in SFH neighborhoods are just being overrun with young transient renters, it probably means there’s not enough “amazon boxes”, and may be related to broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum.
also, this is all without saying… it is entirely possible for children to be raised in a home that is not a detached SFH! it is certainly a preference for a lot of people, but it is not a hard requirement. and missing middle buildings like the 2/4/6 plexes are some of the best non-SFH buildings for doing that, where you can more easily have 2-3 bedrooms and some sense of a yard.