I tend to agree that density is the only real solution to the housing issues in the US, but man, now that we’ve got kids it would be rough moving into an apartment again. Our neighbors would fucking HATE us, kids are loud. And if one of my neighbors woke up my kid in the middle of the night after I spent the hour+ that it takes to get them down, I’d probably be ready to murder them too.
Apartment living would have to be DRAMATICALLY cheaper for me to give up my detached house.
But it isn't either-or. You can conceivably have a six story apartment building, some row houses (aka terraced houses), and single family detached houses on the same block. I mean, if there weren't laws against it.
EDITed to add: I've lived in a couple row houses. No complaints, would happily do it again.
Right, but wouldn’t people just choose the SFH option and make that the more profitable product for builders to produce? I think that’s the case in the US right now—people that can afford to buy a house want a SFH, so that’s what they buy and therefore, that’s what builders build. End result:sprawl.
But it's not, since 75% of land is zoned as SFH only! it's illegal to build anything else. People never have to option to choose something else, so we don't' actually know.
https://www.planetizen.com/definition/single-family-zoning
True. It would be interesting to bust up the zoning a bit and see what happens. I've heard that Houston has no zoning at all, has that made for more walkability than other big Texas cities? I've never been there.
One issue we have in the Greater Asheville Area is that the county government is very anti-infrastructure of any kind (they've got a "if you don't build it they won't come" philosophy) so bike lanes, sidewalks, non-dead end roads and turn lanes are not something they do here. The result is that any time there is an apartment complex built, there is a big bump in traffic because nobody has thought to try to make it easier for the 300 new people who now live there to get where they need to go. This pattern has been repeated over and over again in the last 10 years so the area south of Asheville is a nightmare to get around and now everyone protests when new apartments are going to be built.
I think the Houston issue is more complicated than just the lack of zoning. They do have other building codes that still contribute to sprawl, and a lot of walkability has to do with the streets as much as the buildings. Most of Houston's streets are too wide and have high speed limits, and many lack sidewalks. There are still random dead-ends and cul de sacs that don't have a through path for pedestrians. Along with a "car is king" culture, it can feel very alienating and dangerous to walk there. Then when you finally reach a destination, you likely have to cross a large parking lot.
That said, there are significant benefits to the lack of zoning. The city of Houston has only a marginally lower population density than the city of Dallas, but that obfuscates the fact that Houston has a far larger land area. I expect if you measured out a central portion of Houston of the same area as Dallas, the population density would be much higher. This abundance of housing, allowed by the lack of zoning, is a big part of what makes Houston housing relatively affordable compared to other Metro Areas of comparable economic productivity.
There are some walkable pockets of Houston, they're just hard to find amidst all the sprawl. The lack of zoning is crucial in allowing them to even exist. I don't know Houston well enough to cite specific neighborhoods, but I have a lot of friends who went to college in Houston and many of them are eager to jump to Houston's defense when people make fun of the car-centric sprawl.
That said, you have to zoom way in to see Houston's redeeming qualities. Even if Houston became the most enlightened urbanist city government on the planet tomorrow, the abundance of massive freeways split the city into disconnected fragments, and TxDOT isn't going to be open to any freeway removals any time soon. Culturally it may be more liberal than the rural parts of the state, but there are still tons of culture warriors who will cling to their lifted pickup trucks and free parking to their dying days. The population density isn't really there to support high quality transit. They've got a lot of problems that aren't fixed just by the lack of zoning.
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As to that second part: transportation and housing need to be tackled together in policy-making. Dense housing demands more space-efficient forms of transportation. If walkability is a priority, nothing should be up-zoned to just plain "high density residential." Mixed use is king—give the new residents their grocery store, their neighborhood bar/cafe/restaurant, their laundromat or dry cleaner
right there on the ground floor! Ideally, sprawling cities should coordinate upzoning with transit expansion, and a reduction or removal of minimum parking requirements on the development. The reduction of space used for parking can allow for more residences, which can then be profitable at lower rents. Mixture of uses enables walkability, and then transit can be thought of as a "pedestrian range extender," and since the neighborhood itself is walkable, it's a useful destination for other people arriving by transit.
So many American cities have this model where transit stops in the city are functional, walkable places, and then that train gets out towards the edge of the city or crosses city limits into a suburb and instead the stop is just surrounded by parking lots. Those stops surrounded by parking lots might be useful to a handful of commuters, but that is a complete waste of the
enormous infrastructure investment that went into putting a train there. For transit to be a useful two-way benefit to the city and to the commuters, the area around the train stop needs to be a place that people actually want to visit!
The housing shortage demands higher density construction with access to good city jobs. Higher density housing construction creates greater need for transportation. Trains and buses move more people in less space than private cars. The logic is really not hard, and yet action is just not being taken in way too many places.
