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YIMBY sentiment on this forum has (I think) been mostly focused on increasing the density of existing residential zones. However, it may be worth noting that there is an alternative: converting existing agricultural or unused land to low-density residential use (i. e., continuing to "sprawl"). In this article, a former employee of the libertarian Cato Institute accuses that organization of focusing exclusively on high-density housing, and of smearing as racist people who are not interested in long-term high-density living and clamor for more single-family houses. (In his view, upzoning imposed from the top down is not libertarian, because the existing owners have a sort of property right in the zoning of their neighborhood as a substitute for deed restrictions that could or should have been used instead of zoning codes.)
Low density car focussed suburbs don't scale. You just can't widen the highways enough to keep up with demand as you build out. It leads to ever worsening gridlock.
Trying to increase the density later is extremely difficult due to the large lot sizes and strict commercial - residential segregation.
I'm in Ontario where there's a significant housing shortage. Toronto has 360 housing units per thousand residents. Ontario has 398. Canada has 440 nationally. G7 average is 470.
So at least in Ontario we need to build an entire new city in the style of older, denser suburbs like Riverdale: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
Actually, they're the only thing in America that is scaling. All the old cities are not growing, and all the car-dependent ones are growing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
Wrong again. Commute time in the mass transit focused cities (and LA, which is intentionally removing roads and replacing them with mass transit) is higher than car-focused cities. Jobs move out to the suburbs, following people.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/work-travel-time.html
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The solution to that is to break up the city centers, either by dispersing cities into smaller towns, or by moving things farther out of the central business district towards the suburbs.
That doesn't solve the problem.
A. Workers will simply commute between the small towns, wherever they can get a good job, and will use whatever roads allow them to do that. The number of people who do this will be high; the area will effectively be a big sprawled-out metro area with too small a tax base to support the highway network.
B. Businesses don't want to sprawl. They benefit from agglomeration. source 1, source 2
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They scale tolerably as long as the primary travel distances don't grow too large. The idea that a large fraction of the populace needs to commute downtown doesn't, but there are plenty of jobs (even office workers) that can find employment in suburbs.
I'm not going to say we actually build suburbs this way (in particular, people choose neighborhoods for things like schools that vary drastically in quality), but at least in principle it seems possible.
A central cluster, or clusters, of workplaces seems like the defining feature of cities everywhere and not a quirk of American urban planning. Are there cities of uniform density with workplaces scattered throughout and not some sort of central downtown cluster?
If you imagine a central downtown hub with residential space around it, then lots of workers have to commute but your commute time isn't going to change a lot of you switch firms. If you imagine a checkerboard of suburbs and office/industrial parks then workers might be able to live right next to their current workplace, but if they switched jobs they could end up far away from their new job. Plus any inputs one firm provides to another would have to travel much further.
I see this a lot in cities in Europe. The actual city center is often historical/tourist attraction where it is not very advantageous to be for most companies. Which is a general theme where you may see multiple "centers" often around certain industries often tied to certain infrastructure or even outright industrial parks. In that sense the city center is basically tourist industrial park with certain other related things such as government buildings, and related "businesses" that share infrastructure such as restaurants where lobbyists dining the politicians may share the space with tourists. Then you may have other industries centered around other infrastructure such as railways or universities or around major access by highway from certain part of the country depending on what supply comes from that way.
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LA gets pretty close to this. "Downtown" is a big cluster of jobs, but there are subsidiary clusters all over. It's a remarkably decentralized "big city"
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Right; it's the idea of a central business district that doesn't scale. As the CBD gets bigger the number of jobs within it grows quadratically (or worse if they start building upwards), but the number of people who can enter it in a given time only grows linearly.
But on the other hand, the attractiveness of a CBD also scales faster than the number of jobs it provides. Given two options:
move to the city of Caeliscalpium, where there's a hundred banks
move to the state of Rustica Perfecta, where there's a bank in every county capital
where would people prefer to live if advancing your career in banking meant changing your employer every few years? In Caeliscalpium this means commuting to skyscraper 27 instead of skyscraper 26. In Rustica Perfecta this means moving to another town, abandoning your community ties. All ambitious bankers would move to Caeliscalpium, and Rustica Perfecta would be left with those who don't really care either about either community ties or their career.
Yes, I am very interested in seeing how remote work changes this balance. On one hand, there should be some correction, as lockdowns meant not only the turn towards WFH, but also the closure of various services cities provided. As they reopened, they should have lured some of the people back to the cities.
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