Single-Family Zoning: Just “Giving People What They Want”?
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- Опубліковано 27 лип 2024
- There’s a common refrain we hear often regarding people who rent or own apartment-sized units-that they secretly, deep down, want a single family detached house, and they would buy one if they could afford it. We take a look at that theory in this video through the lens of costs and trade-offs, and explain why, while many people do aspire to single family homes, that’s not the case for everyone, and there really are good reasons to prefer a smaller living space for all the advantages you gain from living in a vibrant urban centre.
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References:
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#zoning #singlefamilyhouse #urbanism
Also if 'that's what people want', why would you make non-single family housing illegal? Why do you 'need' to make something everybody wants required?!
Because such a person eother hasn't thought it through, or is not being honest.
Good point.
Because what the video doesn’t really touch on is that these laws almost always come from demands by the residents. Most suburbanites vehemently oppose building multifamily in their area, because they think it will lower the value of their home (which it usually does). It’s a small minority getting screwed over by the majority, not the other way around.
These laws don’t happen by executive order from the High Council, people.
@@julianrosas9134 And that's really the key. The issue isn't what people want to live in, it's what people want to live near. Without exclusionary zoning, people can just choose to live in whatever type of housing they want as long as they can afford it but they have no way of forcing other people near them who don't want or can't afford SFHs to chose the same thing.
@@julianrosas9134
Which is why it needs to be solved on a national level, even a Referendum which means Singapore-like Policies, or other polices can come in after this generation is dead. At least the problem will not be passed down & made worse.
I think the obvious argument against "It's giving people what they want!" is that "If it's what people want, it wouldn't need a law mandating it."
Amazingly enough, there is no law against self-flagellation.
People want to control what their neighbors are doing.
"If it's what people want, we wouldn't need a law mandating it." Not quite. People don't want to live under slumlords, but we still need laws about it. The real rebuttal is that, suburbanites are factually wrong. People do want housing more dense than detached single-family homes. That's why the price is so high, even though construction costs are low. It's artificial scarcity.
@@Nukepositive Yes, there are many examples of this. For example, housing costs in the car-free city of Venice are much, much higher than on the immediately adjacent car-infested Italian mainland. And people who own property next to the car-free zone of pretty much every Dutch city lobby for the car-free zone to be expanded to include their property. Because that will sharply increase its property value. And there is a 26-year-long waiting list for housing on the car-free Toronto Islands.
Surprise, Surprise! People do not like the noise and danger of living with private automobiles on their street.
I guess this would be my argument:
Some zoning laws and government incentives are still necessary. If we just left the decision in the US up to the developers, they'd probably just continue maximizing the amount of money they can get from developments like they already do by prioritizing more expensive developments which would exacerbate the housing gap between the upper and lower classes. If the balance of single family detached vs. dense accessible houses reflected the actual demand more accurately, more people would be able to find and afford the housing they want to live in, but the current zoning laws skew that balance completely out of wack, so maybe we should change them.
The shorter an argument is the more people will actually listen and remember it. Most people don't actually give a shit about nuance, so op's argument is still probably the best one to use in a public scenario, but if someone was actually committed to finding a better solution, this is what I'd say to try to convince them.
The ironic thing is that so many people who do live in these single-family detached homes don't actually use the space they so passionately say they need. They end up with basements stuffed with old junk, front yards that never so much as get walked on unless someone's mowing the grass, and lots of empty nesters stay in these houses once their kids move out, with one or more spare guest rooms that get used maybe once a year.
I think a lot of these folks feel they need so much space because they exist in a culture where they never leave the house. Maybe if we built walkable neighbourhoods with things to do, people would realize that there's even more space outside, and they don't need to sit around a bunch of empty rooms all day.
I love it when I see cars parked in the driveway because the garage is a junk-filled storage space.
YES. No garden, no trees, no outdoor entertaining area, no pool, just masses of lawn. The mind boggles.
My parents renovated their house when I was young and the way they laid out the upstairs essentially squandered an entire bedrooms worth of space on a wide, dead end hallway.
Though it is handy during holidays where its basically a loading zone for decorations from the attic, most of the time it serves literally no purpose
Preach
That's kind of an inversion. People want to feel they are free and independent and have personal space. The lawn is just a placeholder that keeps neighbors at arms length.
You explain it perfectly. For 15 years we had large Texas home in the sprawling suburbs and it was horrible. The week went like this. Get up super early to fight traffic to get to work. Same thing to get home at anywhere between 4 and 7 pm. The massive roads are all clogged because everyone is trying to get back out far away from the city to their massive homes. Saturday comes and everyone drives on small single lane roads to the super strip mall zones to shop for groceries and furnishings to fill up the large homes. Then there is maintnance, upgrades and landscaping on these massive spaces. Mix in a deep freeze, hurricane, bugs and it never ends.
We recently moved to Las Vegas and live in a high rise. It is just as expensive as a urban home but the cost is so worth it. I have back my time that I used to spend taking care of all that stuff. Now we can enjoy the community and outside activities, not taking care of a massive space.
Growing up, my mom always described the purchase of our house in Texas as having been "tricked".
It took me a long time to realize why, I just enjoyed basically having the entire second floor be my "room"
And then there are those of us who want more land _and_ smaller homes.
But the current system screws us too, dividing up so much land to people who don't necessarily want it, driving up land prices and simultaneously legislating to make small, efficient homes difficult to get permission to build
Glad to hear!
Living in Hong Kong, I would trade anything for a little bit more space.
Why didn’t you higher out the help a lawn service, a trusted maintenance person probably because like most people don’t think to have a contingency fund for the house 🏡 for all of the if’s of having a home and maintaining it 👀👀💁🏽♀️🤷🏽♀️🤷🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️!!!! People usually just jump into home ownership because of the rhetoric around renting and don’t really really consider maybe I should think about the long haul of being a homeowner and saving towards those windows that will need replacing in 10 years, or the roof that might nearing the end of its lifetime or the heating and cooling unit might be ready to quit in the middle of a freezing winter 🥶 or blazing summer🥵!!!! Nope people just jump right in and deal with things as they come!!!
We also can't avoid the issue entirely that sometimes the policy goal of city planners is to make their area as expensive as possible to live in, very much on purpose, in an effort to keep certain kinds of people out.
They are not, you can pack more people on a multiple story building, you'd make more money as it's more cost efficient.
+ they showed that single familly homes cost more to the authorities, than they get in taxes...
@@xmtxx the point is not actually making a lot of money, the point is using the high cost of homes as a way to keep the "wrong sort of people " out. Racism without APEARING racist.
And that's a good thing. You can go live next to the crack house if you want. The money you'll save will come in handy to replace what you lose to armed robbery.
Boomers are now literally making HOAs that *EXPLICITLY BAN* people younger than 55. They are increasing the supply of housing for them, but not us.
@@andreaslind6338 Ye, it's not racism, bud, when in Canada most of the expensive places are bought up by Indian and Chinese investors or tech workers anyways, locals underperform in the BIG $$$ budget category. I don't care if the homeless crackhead is Chinese, German, or American. I don't want the homeless crackhead around, period.
Friend of mine was talking to me about his school recently, and told me in both his elementary and high school in MTL, they had garbage bins in the toilet for safe needle disposal, otherwise people left them all over the floor or in the toilet. Meanwhile in my area, we only had 1 kid who smoked cigarettes, and I leave my car running in the winter so it stays warm while I'm shopping. Yeah, it's just rACism. Clearly.
Kudos for pointing out in the most polite way that single-family zoning is a not the result of some sort of homogenous demand from the public, but rather the outcome of a deliberate policy choice. As you show, it really isn't giving people what they want, but rather not giving them the option to wanting anything else.
Yes, and as a corollary, people are forced to be car centric
@@night6724 nationalism is a force for good
See, we can all say wrong and stupid things on the internet, you're not special
Here’s the thing: those policy choices are overwhelmingly pushed by the residents of suburban areas, because they don’t want low-income housing decreasing their home’s value. And these laws get perpetuated because of the simple fact that the vast majority of people really, really do prefer to live in their own house, with a car, space, and peace and quiet.
These laws ain’t happening through executive order, people.
@@julianrosas9134 Exactly.
Most people want a house with space. Not being crammed in some apartment building. That's why when Chinese immigrants come here they buy up all those houses, because back home they don't have that. You see students and retirees in condos. With work from home becoming the norm, we want a house with space. Sorry!!!!
It's _frighteningly_ easy to fall into the "I want X and I'm a person, therefore all people want X" logical fallacy.
Then there's also the question of availability: if growing up you were only given hamburgers and you were unaware that other foods existed, then if someone asked you what do you want to eat, your only preferences would be the number of pickle slices in the burger but you'd definitely say a hamburger. Even if you'd actually like a pizza or a chocolate cake more.
(Or a salad. By Horus' beak, if you were only fed hamburgers in all your life, you definitely need to start eating salads, stat. Boy, did that analogy run away from me...)
That actually literally happened to my friend. She grew up eating white bread sandwiches. When she grew up and discovered more foods she became a vegan.
Now imagine this, and think of political ideologies.
@@night6724 tell me you didn't watch the video without telling me you didn't watch the video
@@night6724 Then you just didn't understand it. Relaxing zoning regulations doesn't mean banning single family detached houses.
@@night6724 Who the hell wants to do that? That's a strawman and you know it.
I'm a single guy, I like my 1 bed 1 bath apartment. A single family home with like 4 bedrooms would just be too big for me. I've also pretty much always lived with shared walls, And it really isn't all that bad, as long as they're soundproofed walls. And it also saves in the heating bill, because in total there's less wall exposed to the outside.
Sure, if I had a ton of money, and a family, a detached home on a large piece of land sounds great. But currently? Hell no.
EDIT: and one day, my bones will start to creak, and the stairs will become challange. Then it'll be good to downsize to something with like 2-3 bedrooms incase the (grand) children come by, but a complete single family home would again be too much.
Right? My parents (early 70s and mid 60s) are stuck in a 4-bed with all the beds upstairs. It's nice for me to visit and have an office to work remotely in, but they basically just use the other room for junk storage and I only visit a couple times a year. It's felt so overwhelming for them to clean the whole place that they've been talking about moving for over a decade and are now just waiting until both are fully retired. Both have knee issues and would have loved a single-story place for the last decade. The finished basement is basically never used because it's yet another flight of stairs...
It's such an absurd use of space but all their friends and family are in the same part of town and there are only two developments of town homes with duplexes in the area, which are the only options for 2 beds and one is three stories tall! It's really unfortunate.
As someone who recently bought their first house, I can tell you we felt forced to buy more house than what we wanted because that's simply what was available. It seems the missing middle also bleeds into smaller single family homes. We would have loved a smaller bungalow with a modest sized yard but ended up in a much less dense suburb because all new developments have minimum setback requirements. We would have been fine with an older post war neighborhood, but the demand was clearly there for these smaller single family homes and quickly priced us out. We ironically ended up with a bigger newer home at a lower cost.
For a lot of the developers building neighborhoods of cookie-cutter single-family detached houses it's easier for them to just start to govern what size of houses become available. All the new houses I see propping up around the GTA and elsewhere in Southwestern Ontario are monstrosities that are not suited for a new young family of the average size of 4-5 people, but that's just what is being built because bigger means more money for the developers and they know the demand is there to buy it and keep it competitive nevertheless.
That's ridiculous and frustrating.
If you had the option for a row house or duplex unit in a more walkable neighborhood for the same price would you have taken it?
I personally recently bought a 2 bed 2 bath 120yo home in one of the most neglected neighborhoods in Chinatown. It's older than wartime and it cost me half a million. However, I refused to live in the suburbs, and i refused to be beholden to condo fees that often end up as high as $600 a month (not including property taxes!), so I only had one option.
While I was shopping, each month, between 1 and 3 new houses would show up on the map given my budget and most of them would either disappear the next month [bought] or be dilapitated and torn down many months later.
My house, and all of the single family homes in my area... SHOULD NOT EXIST. I would have gladly taken an attached row house or part of a triplex, or condo in a mixed use, but that don't exist. Just condos and million dollar war time houses. [oh and some OBNOXIOUS multi-million dollar single family homes in fairmont park, dows Lake, Rockcliffe, and Manor Park. Honestly, I'd love to force those rich assholes out of their homes, so we could build denser residential]
Cheers from germany. I bought my first flat for 4 head family and would also have gone with about 10m2 less easily. Now we have 123m2 for us ( just 100year old building) and I'm feeling a bit decadent - I guess we'll manage too use most of the space at some point. Shared walls are great for energy costs.
@@Jacksparrow4986 And to think that in Canada and the US that is a relatively small- to medium-sized house.
We managed to get our little 3 bdrm 60's split-level in 2009. Prices didn't come down by much but we went with the house that looked in rough shape. It wasn't actually that bad. The kitchen and bathroom needed renovating. We needed a new roof and the roof needed new insulation. The dishwasher needed a proper cap in the basement because it was causing the flooding in the basement. We've done the work slowly over time.
When we moved in, it was a lot of elderly living here who were the same people who bought the houses when they were first built. We were 28 when we bought and today the people buying in our neighbourhood are still older than us. In their late 40's and in their 50's and 60's. These houses were designed for young families but instead baby boomers and gen z are downsizing into our neighbourhood. The two families I've met with young children are renting their houses. It feels wrong.
From a supply and demand perspective, the increasing price of rent and property in walkable urban areas implies that the demand is exceeding the supply. What that means is that people want walkable urban areas and we should be building vastly more of it.
I mean… we are? In pretty much every city in the US?
But why are higher density neighborhoods more expensive?
@@julianrosas9134 No we're not. It seems that way if you pass a construction site, but statistically the amount being built is pathetic. And most of our urban land still bans anything other than a detached house on big lots, because Americans hate freedom and love government control.
@@mindstalk You seem to be confusing “American” zoning laws with New York/Seattle/Californian zoning laws. In the other 75% of America, that’s not the reality. But don’t let reality get in the way of your feelings!
@@julianrosas9134 You're wrong. I've looked at zoning laws across the country, they're all pretty similar. Apartment bans, large lot sizes, parking requirements.
A person could also want different types of housing at different stages of life. A college kid is ok with a dorm on campus, a single professional would be cool with a small studio close to work and nightlife. Later they may want a house if when they have a family. Theres a diversity of wants, there should be a diversity of housing options.
Having less homogenous housing would help in that regard. You could buy a smaller home or condo when starting your career, buy a larger home in the same neighborhood when you have children, and go back to something smaller when they move out. As it is in many cities in NA, such as my own, you have to move to a completely different area for each of those, _and_ make a choice based on what facilities are in your neighborhood and which require driving.
I've never seen a lot of people advocating for some mass ban of suburbs. I think the ideology is more-so that suburbs and car centrism belong outside of the city and medium and high density neighborhoods with more restricted car access belong in the city. I'm totally fine with the suburbs being the suburbs as long as the city can be the city. The problem is many suburbs rely on the city for work and thus feel that the cities must become their giant car pits to facilitate their commutes.
Also this idea of encouraging different housing uses for different stages of life culturally is kind of bullshit. Families can be compatible with the city. The concerns about living urban for families comes from the traffic threatening the children, affordability as larger units are more expensive, and poorer schools, all of which can be combated. I know tons of families who for example originally wanted to stay in the city and raise their kids there, but where specifically pushed out due to affordability or the quality of local schools. Especially as American families are getting drastically smaller, we are going to continue to see these large demographic changes considering many families too are opting for one child if they are to have any, and single child families can be more compatible with city life.
@@benw3864 "Also this idea of encouraging different housing uses for different stages of life culturally is kind of bullshit."
How is this bullshit? Besides, no one is encouraging anything. The free market does it automatically.
As you go through life, the size of your household changes - first your a kid, then you live independently from your family, have roommates, relationships, get married, have kids of your own, maybe take care of your parents when they retire or can't take care of themselves. Kids grow up and have their own families, now you need less space. Your income changes through out life which determines what you can afford.
Not everybody does this, but many do. So how is it bullshit?
@@Basta11 He believes it’s “bullshit” because he doesn’t quite get that not everyone is a single 27-year-old, and may therefore have different needs and wants
@@night6724 why do yoy hate this so much? Are you right-wing? You don't care about environment and the healthy lifestyle of walking? You want to be stuck in congestion?
my city recently abolished single family zoning and the area has become so much better ever since. i’m hoping we can go even further in the direction of livable city planning by introducing more public transportation and possibly even superblocks down the line
What I don't like about single family homes with yards, driveways, and garages is all the unused space that goes to waste. Most of the homes in my childhood neighbourhood could accommodate a small shop or restaurant on their front lawn and driveway, and many driveways are so long and wide they could reasonably fit a small low-rise/midrise apartment building. Unfortunately incremental improvements to residential properties and lot splitting aren't allowed because of zoning regulations.
Exactly it's extremely wasteful and this is coming from some one who grew up in a single family home I hate sprawling suburbs
@@night6724 i can see where your coming from but people can have both
Facts
Not to mention how most (like 80% of people at the least) don't really care about their yard and just have a field of neatly trimmed grass (which looks disgusting to me) because that is easier to maintain/mandated by the fascist HOA.
Zoning laws are usually not fine grained enough and tend to blanket ban *everything* to avoid *some things*. You don't want a cement factory, slum, smelly restaurant or wind farm as a neighbor; but you can't exhaustively list all the things you don't want. Instead zoning laws tend to be inverted, listing only what is allowed, which is a non-exhaustive list of the things you want.
Things like HOAs are simultaneously hated and liked. You give up the freedom to be a jackass; but you also prevent your neighbors from being jackasses and painting their houses pink or letting their dog shit on the side walk. They also tend to attract Karens.
It's really quite simple: people with lots of money don't want people with less money moving into their neighborhoods. That's it; that's why they fight it every chance they get.
I love it. As someone who lives in an Ottawa "suburb" that is very anti-intensification, I can definitely say that I would much prefer non detached housing, which just isn't built. Living in an apartment, house, or townhouse all cost about the same despite the difference in size because they're all equally unavailable.
if we create a city with the same population density as Tin Shui Wai , Hong Kong, the west virginia panhandle (farmland area) can house 40M people. The city is full of high rises, parks, schools, and shops.
@@JohnDoe-rg4tl what of we do London, UK density? Or Paris, France? Or Amsterdam, Netherlands?
@@موسى_7 we need the same density as Tin Shui Wai , Hong Kong
@@JohnDoe-rg4tl really? How many people and children do we have?
London and Amsterdam and Paris seem enough to me. Those cities have bicycles and transit. Hong Kong is overkill to me.
@@موسى_7 London and Amsterdam are expensive af. US is a lot cheaper
Detached houses aren't that bad if they're made to be reasonably space efficient. Two or Three stories, minimal front yard and space between houses with a moderately sized backyard, ideally with no garage. You can build a spacious property in terms of flooring area on a 3500-4000 square foot of land. In Laval-sur-le-Lac, which you've shown footage of in your video, some of those properties have 80,000 square foot of land or more! That's insane!
What does the "space between houses" accomplish other than wasted land? All those little five foot side yards on each side of each house that just collect junk and moss.
If the builder gets a acoustical engineer on board, they can design it so the neighbor on one side can have their stereo booming and the neighbor on the other doesn't hear it, and the cost of the upgraded construction is MUCH less than the cost of ten feet of wasted land. You can then get three houses in the space of two, and 50% more density supports better transit, more interesting little shops, and other amenities.
@@blubaughmr I meant "minimal space between houses", meaning as little as possible, probably just enough for someone to pass through. No space is fine too, but having some space has some advantages, like additional sound insulation and being able to get away with a different exterior design as your neighbour.
@@alexseguin5245 Yes i think its more for sound insulation but cant the same be achieved with better building materials to sound insulate the home?
@@alexseguin5245 air really isn't a good isolator. Build walls with materials that do have proper sound isolation and it solves a lot of the issues. There will always be some leakage of sound and heat.
In the Netherlands a corner house is generally spoken less preferred by consumers than a house squashed in between because the energy bills for a corner house are just a bit higher.
I don't think anything is bad (as long as it's safe and affordable) until it's used in excess/exclusively.
It's not just that they're single family homes, but all the other rules (setbacks etc) that go along with it. Tokyo has plenty of single family homes, but everything about them is designed differently. For example, they might have large sliding glass doors on the sides of houses so the narrow 1.5metre gap between houses becomes a viewing garden, or the roof might be sharply pitched on one side so as not to cause shadows on the neighbour's. They are also usually much smaller (more similar to the inner city Victorian homes) but still often have 3 bedrooms and balconies on the second floor. We could learn a lot from their designs.
Great video, and I know that this is suppose to be the "tipping point" video to persuade people but you guys went easy on them haha. From a climate change perspective single family housing is objectively terrible and definitely should be a cost factored into new and even older taxes now.
Love your channel man. Keep up the educational contents. These zoning laws are bad in every metric. Financial, environmental, cultural, social. Lots of American cities are basically bankrupt because of the cash negative nature of low density subarbia. Kids are locked up at their house until they can drive a car or move for University. Neighbours are so isolated and empty. I can seriously be stabbed at night walking home and nobody would even be in a close proximity to see or hear it. Heck even businesses suffer too. No mom and Pop stores, lack of customers due to low density, high cost of building due to ridiculous minimum parking space requirements etc etc.
Shh, we're trying to convince naysayers, not scare them 😂
Where are farmers going to live?
@@kevinlove4356 On the farm! Don't turn the farms into miles of suburban houses.
@@blubaughmr If we turned farms into miles of suburban houses, then there would be no more farmers there.
I think a lot of people have a hard time imagining an alternative to American suburbia. I grew up in a McMansion in typical suburbia and it wasn't until I moved to a city that I realized how much I love urban life. When I first moved to the city, I still lived as if I was in the suburbs. I owned a car, and I drove everywhere because that's how I was raised. At first I was frustrated that parking in the city and I was intimidated by biking on the city streets.
One day it occurred to me that I *could* just bike places and slowly I've been realizing that I can just bike everywhere (yes, even in the winter) if I had the right kind of clothes/bike/accessories. It's a mindset shift and I think most people simply do not spend the time to imagine a better way of living. I do not miss cars, not even a little bit.
Count me among those that love having large, detached homes, but is still in favor of abandoning R1 zoning.
Same here.
As it stands where I currently live, i would love to see more nondetatched housing built. The biggest problems down south in the States are cultural (seeing dense housing as "crime infested"), and legal (simply making it illegal to expand nondetatched properties, or build new ones). Great job explaining the issue with SFH, I look forward to seeing more of your content in the future!
Its an extremely unfortunate cultural/policy cycle. It's hard to sell the idea condos, apartments, townhouses, duplexes, and other multiunits when all that many people in the US and Canada know are mediocre multiunit development, often with shoddily built buildings and the least desirable locations. In NA suburbs (and often cities too), these developments have poorly designed units, are still car dependent, and lack anything resembling public space. To top that off, they are then placed next to undesirable uses such as car-infested stroads and highways. As you note, this is almost completely a result of our zoning regulations. If that was all I knew, I would be against building and living in multiunit housing too. Alas, more North Americans need to travel both domestically and abroad to see the possibilities when it comes to housing and transportation...
Seems I'm an outlier, for I definitely _don't_ want a yard - no matter if front or back. Because if I had one, I'd have to take care of it, which consumes time I could otherwise waste playing pointless video games.
I kinda agree, and I think a lot of younger people these days probably do too, house work and garden work just isn’t what people want to do a whole lot anymore (maybe that’s also the reason single family homes often have entirely empty yards with nothing but grass and maybe a small tree)
@@martiandeath I do like gardening herbs, because fresh herbs lift my cooking up to an entirely different level and good food is a definite quality of life feature. But that can be done way better on a balcony or even a windowsill, no extra confined space of pseudo-nature required.
I think lots of people would be in a similar position to you if they gave more thought to how much they actually used the space. Instead it's just our cultural default-"of course I want more space, space is good".
@@OhTheUrbanity Pragmatism isn't that popular in North America, is it?
But I totally understand the struggle arguing against those cultural defaults. So many people automatically assume you try to take something from them and thus react accordingly.
I guess it's called "talking sense _into_ someone" for a reason. Because, measured in terms of the resistance one encounters, it can really feel like an invasive process sometimes.
My first floor apartment has a tiny backyard, just enough for an outdoor grill and some lawn chairs. Literally takes 10 minutes every 1-2 weeks to maintain. Don't see the point of having a huge lawn that's mostly empty and unused, but it's nice to have somewhere to relax outside that isn't a public space. A balcony would work almost as well, though (but no BBQ, obviously).
I want a single-family home, but I don't want the typical picturesque suburban home with a two-car garage and a yard with a larger footprint than the building itself. I feel like that middle ground is never discussed anymore.
We almost had a segment in the video on the denser style of detached homes that you can find in Japan, which are very interesting. We'd love to see more experimentation with different housing configurations to balance space and privacy with density, sustainability, and amenities.
Much of Europe is full of row housing. All single family homes with backyards, two or three stories tall, but with shared walls.
It gives a nice calm green area behind the houses (they act like a big wall to keep traffic noise away) and the shared walls act as insulated walls.
@@Robbedem My old neighborhood in the city I lived in had a great mixture of homes, including row housing, low-rises, & single-family homes that were densely-packed, but still large & spacious enough to provide my ideal living space. Maybe a one-car driveway here and there, but nothing crazy like you see in the suburbs, and definitely no houses yards away from the sidewalk. Many of them had basement apartments that home owners rented out to people as well.
@@OhTheUrbanity I'm in the UK and we have some detached housing that has only 3 or 4 foot separation from the neighbouring houses. Some have more of course - maybe a garage between the houses. Still fairly dense in comparison to the US style of detached homes - they aren't typically setback massively from the road. We also have plenty of semi-detached houses - which have only one shared wall. But the thing is you can probably find all 3 styles detached, semis and terrace (row) housing on a short 10 min walk.
@@Robbedem yeah, until I moved out for college, I had always lived in rowhouses. You can really make some lovely neighbourhoods with them. One of the places I lived was a rowhouse where you had a 2 grass fields, 2 playgrounds, 1 elementary school, and various types of rowhouses (including a couple rows with homes for seniors) without crossing a single road. There were tons of children to grow up with. When I'm getting ready to have a family of my own, I'd absolutely love to live in a place like that.
There's a simpler response to people who say law X is just what people want: "well then let the market do its work." If it truly is what people want, people will all buy it and the law is redundant. If not, the law is obstructing the market from providing the optimal allocation. Adam Smith laid this all 3 centuries ago and it's as valid now as it was then.
That's a hard sell in Canada because most people here are afraid of free markets
@@carfreeneoliberalgeorgisty5102 i've had people in the USA tell me that all the single family homes IS the free market speaking. Lol.
@@bobbycrosby9765 Yep.
Maybe I'm weird. I've always loved apartments. Big old pre-WWII downtown mid-rise apartments. I'm finally living in one in Toronto and I love it. Mowing the grass and driving to the mall just aren't my idea of having fun, I guess.
This is a fantastic video. Another point to add to this is that it doesn't really matter if they think that most people want suburban detached homes with large lawns - those homes are simply unsustainable and if we're to live on this planet for longer than the next 100 years then something has to change
It's great that you explored this hypothetical situation. You brought up so many points that most people wouldn't think about normally
To protect "muh neighbourhood character". That's usually the rationale for keeping single family zoning provided by cities across Ontario. My hometown of fake London has a "smart growth" oriented official plan known as the London plan but if you look at the document it's clear that it's in favour of keeping most single family neighbourhoods, single family neighbourhoods.
The one point I might have made is that it's not an either-or choice; planners need not choose between McMansions and high-rise apartments. Duplexes, triplexes can have shared amenities of the kind that drives some to SFD dwellings, like gardens, areas for pets to play, pools, and the like. The other point worth making is that this isn't really a choice about what new developments to build on the outskirts of town; it's really about when and how to revise zoning in areas already developed with SFD dwellings. I live in a SFD dwelling but would gladly support duplexes and triplexes in my neighborhood... provided that there is improved off-street parking and/or improved car-free transportation options and expansion of local schools and daycare options. Higher-density living is great but planners need to transition organically (in a Strong Towns sort of way) into that higher density. I think that defining a sensible glide path to higher density housing will calm the anxieties of those in SFD developments that their investment will be devalued overnight by construction of huge high-rise apartments next door, worsened local traffic, and schools overwhelmed by more students. These fears naturally arise when the choice presented is between the two extremes, but the missing middle can be better than either extreme both in terms of quality of life and political viability, and especially when the transition is gradual and well-orchestrated.
In my hometown in Germany the suburbs consists of a mixture of detached homes, duplexes, row houses and the odd apartment building with eight apartments. Small apartment buildings can be the next step to increase density but it is probably best to start with duplexes and rowhouses to avoid scaring people.
I wouldn't live in a single family home even if I could.
Right now I can walk to the park, barbershop, restaurants, 2 subway stations, corner stores.
For me this is a quality of life. Loving your neighbourhood and having access to everything it can offer and other parts of the city as oppose to having a private backyard that I would maybe use just once in a summertime
that sounds amazing
@@basedmuscleman6539i concur!
I moved from a condo to a single family house in Montreal last year. And I really miss the free time I had in the condo. Now all I do is take care of the house and fix things up... Owning a house is definitely not for everyone. Especially an old house that will always need work.
I do not live in the US but I certainly do not want space. I prefer more free time (no yard work, not cleaning a large house, not driving far for everything,...) and not having to own a car (supermarket just a few hundred meters away on foot, work is just half an hour away on foot, public transport nearby,...).
Front Yards are a total waste of space, delete (or strongly downsize) those and you've already got hugely increased density ...
I hope one day it becomes common to allow people to build in their front yard. Additional dwelling units, small shops or businesses.
@@MATT-qu7pl no. That would be hideous.
There's definitely some interesting laws on the books. Buying my first house and just talking to the neighbors is interesting. Apparently if you live along a major street here, you can build up to 3 stories pretty easily. If you don't, you're maxed out at 2; to keep your neighbors happy. When you face a main street, you have no neighbors behind you, so you don't impact them.
What's interesting is that I'm in a 'suburb' in Ontario and there's actually a lot of older development that is that 'missing middle'. I never really paid attention to it until I started watching these kinds of videos. 5 story condo/apartments (I really don't know what they are) are actually around. It's kind of a shame this pattern wasn't continued in some of the newer areas where it's just single family homes. What multi-story development now goes in is big condos. Probably the biggest reason I think is just the work involved to get approval. Anytime a development proposal comes up and I've seen a few mid rise proposals come up, there's a lot of opposition. If you're a developer and have to face this kind of opposition, it's probably only worth it if you can build a high rise condo.
A lot of people's concerns are also around increases in traffic. On this point I'm pretty sympathetic. It's a chicken and egg problem. You won't get better transit until you have a lot of density. So the idea is you pile on density and then for the next 20 years, you just live in traffic hell; which is a long time in terms of people's lives. Then they finally build transit. I really think there needs to be far better coordination between city planning and transit. People need to be shown the transit is there before you start massive intensification. Then you get the other problem of people angry that you're spending transit dollars on areas with nothing there yet. It's a big political mess.
I was writing a comment about how I agree with the traffic argument, but I'm realizing that's not entirely true. Both public transit and roads deal with the same problems: gradual growth with large up front costs. They both have the chicken-and-egg problem, and in both scenarios cities usually deal with them by taking out loans (to match payment with growth). People might say that transit costs more (and depending on the exact form of transit, that might be true), but growth will also be faster to offset that.
Personally I'm not remotely sympathetic to the traffic point. The reason for this is that low density is the driver of traffic. Whether people promoting low density development know it or not they are promoting higher traffic, just not in my back yard. They're absolutely fine to have highways running through poorer, typically denser areas drastically reducing quality of life for the people in those areas who are overall far less likely to use it in order to cut out their own slice of what they consider to be desirable.
I'd take the tiniest little dorm room with single-board walls I've ever lived in over living in the middle of nowhere with a massive yard and neighbors I've never even seen any day. People think they want things, or even just somewhere to put things eventually but they really want community that only comes with density and being "forced" to interact with others.
Community is what the internet is for. :-)
I spent most of my youth in my bedroom reading books because they were far more enjoyable than being around people. Even as an adult, I hate being around people. Community? So long as I have a means to obtain food, water, electricity, etc., I could do without the people. Machines could easily take the place of people and I wouldn't care.
@@jimzecca3961facts… up until the eyes burn or the internet dies (i.e. natural disaster, can’t pay bills)
@@laurie7689that’s a valid preference!
When I can afford it I do hope to buy a quiet detached home with a garage that I can do my hobby’s in (I have a car that I like to wrench on and upgrade) but I understand that not everyone thinks like me and even more so that enforcing that sort of lifestyle everywhere is neither sustainable nor preferable. I think living in an apartment comes with more convenience than living in a suburb but I unfortunately did not have very good neighbors and often heard stomping above me which got very annoying after some time
A lot of people's concerns with apartments could easily be solved with government mandated soundproofing and cleanliness standards to be honest. In an apartment that's soundproofed you cannot hear a single peep. The tech is good enough in some places where buildings directly in front of freeways remain silent.
@@benw3864 sure. And you can explain to poor people across the country why their rent went up by 20% after “mandatory soundproofing”.
@@benw3864 But if people want it free market will do it! Didn't you the video?
It's not enforced. There are plenty of apartments in the US, contrary to what you may have been told.
@@plasticpalacei respect you for watching the video (:
Great video with many great points(as always)! I often talk with people about why I prefer as a young adult not to live in a single family home, and I often find myself explaining the unnoticed drawbacks of our single family residential zoning. This certainly sums a lot of points up nicely!
I'm really glad I grew up in the south shore suburbs of Montreal. Unlike American burbs, there's a mix of single family homes, apartments, townhouses. And that means that everyone can at least afford to live there. This was reflected in my high school. Kids from single parent homes that lived in apartments were best friends with kids who had indoor pools and also hung out with the kids who lived in a townhouse. The street across from my school had townhouses and single homes. It's one of the things I liked about my school that you met and were friends with people from different classes and it broadened your ideas beyond the typical suburban dwellers. And at least there was that because Holy Hell did I hate high school....😛
How it works in most of America, outside of the largest metro areas. That’s where you see the bureaucratic insanity
You have to keep in mind that one of the main reasons people would rather chose a house in the suburbs over living in urban areas is very poor build quality and soundproofing in the city (everywhere in North America)! I hate driving and love my city, but it took me years to find decently built condo in MTL to allow me some privacy.
Single family zoning does not only often a requires a back yard but a front lawn and two massiv side yards.
sharing walls is actually not that bad at all. I lived all my live in houses with shared walls and never had any issues with neighbours. You can barely hear them. Only when they drill in or hammer on the shared wall it's noticeable.
But shared walls are not only much cheaper to build, it's also easier to keep warm. (you don't need thermal isolation on a shared wall, because both sides are at more or less the same temperature)
You really just make the best videos. This channel is criminally underrated.
Here in Portland the high density housing downtown is MASSIVELY overpriced, because it's so desired. People who think that kind of housing is not wanted are detached from reality.
Do they really want the high density housing or do they really want to be downtown? They don't have to be one and the same. I do suspect a lot of people do want both things of those that are looking to be downtown.
@@jimzecca3961 They kind of go together, don't they? It wouldn't be "downtown" if it was low density housing. But I guess you could have a high density housing area that wasn't downtown. I'd personally be interested in that as long as it was walkable the way high density zones are supposed to be.
Portland might not be the best example for urbanism my guy.
the one simple question that destroys the "it's what people want" fallacy is asking "then why are apartment rents so high? shouldn't low demand mean low prices?"
Great video. To add to it: even if you insist on
1. Detached
2. Backyard
3. Lots of space
4. garage
You can have those in a better way than a typical suburb. Many older cities have three story’s homes with a garage opening to a back alley and are located on side streets that join to walkable commercial/mixed use streets.
You don’t need acres of front and side yard and furlongs of driveway to have the benefits that the suburbs offer.
Hahaha yeah, a house that opens into an alley is exactly the same as a backyard. Have fun marketing that one to a family of three, doofus
@@julianrosas9134 the garage is detached. You have a front lawn, a house, then a backyard with 6 foot walls on both sides that run ALLLLL the way to the back of the plot, and then a garage that has a door that you can use to get inside and then the garage opens up on the back side of the plot to a drive. In some cases, people even build little granny flats or guest suites over them. At 25 foot wide and 125 feet deep, it’s larger than many suburban lots, the house is three stories and 5-6 bedrooms, large trees out front, completely private backyard, space for 3 cars. Still only a few minutes walk from rapid transit.
Try selling that to a family of 3? Don’t need to try. in-fact so many families are trying to buy these, that they are extremely expensive because they are rare. People with enough money are even reconverting mini 2-3 unit apartment buildings to be single family homes. Sometimes the garage is at the back but there’s a drive around the side of the house to the front… either way.
It doesn’t need to float your boat man. There are already plenty of suburban salt-box homes. That’s why they’re dirt cheap. It’s the townhomes and city houses people are desperate for. The row houses of Boston of New York and the two-flat. three-flat, townhomes, bungalows, and even worker’s cottages of Chicago that are in short supply.
@@zaydansari4408 In like, downtown Chicago, New York, and Boston? Sure. The other 97% of the country? Take a reality check little guy.
The idea that an actual house is “dirt cheap” is laughable. Like, delusion-level concerning. Do you honestly believe that the average person/family prefers a “granny flat” to a house, with price, location, etc being equal?
“Oh yeah? Well a condo in Manhattan is more expensive than a 2-story in Knoxville. Therefore, everybody wants to rent!” Good god.
Desired housing also depends strongly on the period of life a person is in. Most people who start a family would like to live in a big house for sure, but someone single, a student or old person will often prefer a small apartment because it's easy to clean and has no yard to maintain.
People want a lot of different things, which is the problem with zoning everywhere R1. I personally don't want to ever share a wall again, but I recognize that a lot of people still do, and maybe they can't afford to own, or don't want to maintain a house. There's no reason to just build one type of neighborhood out in the burbs, especially as they keep pushing further and further away from downtown areas, and commutes get longer and longer.
‘We’re not arguing detached homes are inherently bad’
You guys are more polite than I am. I would make that argument. Detached homes are absolutely bad.
Good video :)
0:45 Those houses are so close to eachother... Why not have a shared wall?
Does that even qualify as a 'detached' home?
Detached homes with large private yards are great, if you can afford one. I’ve owned two, and lived in many, and it’s definitely my preference.
Kind of hard to have a farmhouse that is not detached.
Detached homes aren't neccessarilly bad, they only become bad when used in bad ways like how a gun isn't necessarilly bad but can be used badly i.e. with a detached house, it should not be used en-mass in an urban environment as the only option like how a gun should not be used en-mass to put down lots of innocent people who did nothing wrong.
so TL:DR, Detached homes should only be used ideally in the countryside and on the rural-urban fringe and not further inside of urban areas, these should either be flats/apartments/masonettes or terraced/semi-detached housing and ideally not as a bungalow...
Then I’ve got great news- you don’t have to live in one!
Unfortunately for you, many people find them quite nice. I’d recommend learning to cope with this fact.
Here is my (provisional) theory. People have been brainwashed to believe that multi-family housing will lower property values. Ditto allowing any kind of businesses near their house. Thus, we end up with neighborhoods that fail to provide for ageing in place, fail at real walkability, provide limited options for kids, help to further the climate crisis, etc etc. The prettiness of SFZ comes with a heavy cost.
This is the most important video on the internet right now. Everyone in North America needs to watch this.
The argument "is just what people want" is so low-quality as an argument because no one saying single family homes shouldn't exist, just there should be more options
In Detroit, they are actually tearing down that segment of I-375 on the north east edge of that highway outline. This will allow the urban center of Detroit to expand organically. You folks should check out Detroit, and what's going on with downtown construction. A lot of formerly blighted urban prairie that was once single family homes is being replaced with low to mid rise mixed use. Major renovations in historic buildings, and a new mixed use residential high rise tower. There is a long way to go, and the QLine has some problems (that can be fixed), but building density is keeping the city solvent.
One argument that my city makes is that if they don't zone for low-density single-family detached homes is that *developers* will take advantage of this, to the detriment of potential home buyers. E.g. Even if there is a low demand for medium density, a developer will virtually always build medium density if they are allowed to, simply because they get to sell the plot multiple times, and therefore make more money.
I get this argument too: Businesses will generally do whatever makes them the most money, even if the housing is less desirable (but more profitable). And protecting the public's interests is one of the main purposes of zoning.
I'm not really sure how to argue against this: I think that there's too much low density zoning, but (at least from the city's perspective), they can't just allow medium density everywhere, because then they are going to get only medium density when there are still people who want low density. How should a city know how much medium density is enough?
ua-cam.com/video/-sA2LeHTIUI/v-deo.html give some good example what space is needed for higher density.
That argument is ridiculous. If people really want single-family detached homes, then they will be willing to pay enough so that the developer makes a profit. What that argument REALLY is saying is that people do not want single-family detached homes. To answer your question, the city should not know how much medium density is enough. A free market will answer that question all on its own.
I would also prefer to have my own jet airplane. Just that there is no way that I am willing to pay for it.
I have friends in Toronto forced to shared a detached home with strangers because they can't afford to pay for all that space just for themself. And since zoning makes it illegal for better fitted options to exists, they don't really have any other choice.
The irony is that it is the same with SUV/Trucks - "I need it to be this big because..." And then it gets used to haul or actually being full like 5-10% of the time or 1-2 times per year.
Great video! I'm very dismayed at the results of SFZ and how restrictive it has ended up being over time. It allows for less diversity of lifestyles and is very wasteful in terms of carbon footprint, space, and adds to reliance on a car. I don't hate SF homes themselves but rather that they are forced to exist everywhere. The limited density really makes supply/demand imbalanced too. My parents bought a house decades ago but I am too priced out to afford the same neighborhood because no more homes can be built anywhere near it. Just feels like one type of lifestyle is valorized so much because there do exist some people who can afford it (who have more money of course) instead of allowing for a diverse range of lifestyles and income levels.
it’s sad but a lesson can be learned;
there’s good in bad
Thanks for this video. I was talking to someone about the single family zoning and this will be useful to send as a resource.
Thank you for putting in the work to make such informative videos like this!
This is amazing. And I'm so happy that it's two people who live in my home city who made it, with examples from my home city! Ottawa obviously doesn't get as much attention as other places, and for good reason, but it's nice every once in a while to have videos on urbanism that speak to my own neighbourhoods and not cities halfway around the world. Thank you so much for this!
Oh, and needless to say the arguments, data, and examples provided in this video are phenomenal.
You should do a video on property taxes vs taxes on the unimproved value of land.
Georgism is super interesting from an urbanist perspective but we haven't explored it enough to have the deeper understanding we'd want before making a video on it. Perhaps that'll be a future project.
@@OhTheUrbanity One subject I'd like more urbanist UA-camrs to cover is the concept of placemaking and what makes a street, neighbourhood, and/or city an interesting place to be in/live in. Not Just Bikes covered this briefly in his first video but he didn't dive too heavily into it.
The problem I have with current residential zoning laws is that they require to large of a home on to large of a lot. I don’t need a 5 bedroom home with 3-1/2 bathrooms and a 3 car garage on several acres of land. A smaller 2 bedroom home with 1-1/2 bathrooms and a car and a half garage would do me fine. Most communities have zoning regulations that would make the home I desire illegal to build.
Could you please do an episode on the lack of options to charge an electric vehicle when living in an apartment? This is one of the main things driving me towards a single family home in the future. I simply cannot wait for my condo board to 'get with the times' when that will take *decades*.
location is importan, in an european city you could easily live car free. in the NA it's harder but not impossible depending on where you live, opportunity charging is becoming quite prevalent in many cities so while overnight charging might not always be available to you there would be other options if the infrastructure is there.
but generally speaking most people overestimate how much they actually need their car once they move out of the suburb, especially in Europe. (add to that my personal opinion of EVs being developed mostly for suburb inhabitance as they suit such lifestyle extremely well, and you see why i would strive for a car free solution over an electric vehicle)
@@herlescraft Having a car is important if you live in an area prone to natural disasters. If you're told to evacuate and you're car-free you're in trouble.
@@MrBirdnose But then, oh no the highway is clogged full of people trying to leave. Trains lines when built right can withstand a lot while taking drivers off the road, can can move lots more people. Japan is very prone to disasters and a lot of their infra withstands it, their bullet trains move faster and have detection systems for earthquakes.
@@DavMovis_ Whenever it rains here in SoCal the train tracks end up closed due to landslides or cliff erosion, and the tracks are one of the most common places for wildfires to start. It's just not a reliable mode of transportation here.
I grew up in suburbs and even I despise them yes I like having a house with a large yard yes but I'd trade it any day to live in walkable neighborhood being able to actually explore my area with out the fear of cars having walking access to shops and parks would be a dream come true
You've earned a subscriber! We need more smart urbanism! We need MORE HOUSING!!!
Very well said. I really appreciate the work you are doing :)
This was such a great video! This channel is so underrated :)
I'll take walkability, bikeability, and easy access to transit over having a yard. If the city doesn't require a car in order to function, I'm happy to forego a garage. But yes, having a bonus room is nice. This is especially true if you work from home or need space for an at-home gym, etc. Of course, building amenities can help with some needs.
Good video, I am actually very interested in walkability and good public transport. For example, I’m a really big fan of Japan’s high speed rail and commuter rail infrastructure. But I still want a single family home. To me, apartments and other buildings where you have to share space with others aside from your family feels claustrophobic and like a prison. It’s one of the reasons I hated school, all those people in a small space. I need the space for gardening and I need the privacy and silence of my own four walls. I just wish we could make suburbs more walkable and have good public transport without needing to “densify” everything. I live in a suburban “city” of less than 30,000 people and for me that’s already too many people. I get nervous just being out in public, especially on the days off I have which is coincidentally the day all of town seems to be out and about. I think we could start by allowing for small businesses that don’t disturb the noise level to be in “residential” areas. Who wouldn’t want to be able to leave their house and go right down the road to the grocery store for a few things without driving? I have to drive an hour to work and back (2 hours total) every day so a high speed rail would work great!
A good question to ask is whether it's the density itself that you don't like, or the cars. Cars ruin many areas. Particularly cities. Push cars to the periphery, and the density becomes quite pleasant. Hence the pleasure of walking through outdoor pedestrian markets.
@@meganmccrossan5670i don’t know about their case but I like extra space but would love more options than the current suburban neighborhoods have. For me, traffic noise isn’t really an issue. Lack of options is.
Great video! I was talking recently about how I feel the desire for single-family homes is in large part prescriptive, because when cities are zoned as they are in North America, obviously it's what people feel like they should want. Yes, single family homes do have features that are genuinely desirable, but it's not a coincidence that that's considered the most desirable form of housing overall.
same conversations we were having in the 70's Vancouver is a good example of people living close together and making it work well, as is Montreal.
80% of Vancouver is zoned exclusively for Single family housing as has horrendous housing prices as a result. Vancouver is complete opposite of Montreal which is mostly multi-family housing.
We share a wall with our neighbour, I'd look at a smaller place but I need a garage to use as a workshop. Both for pleasure and for my job. I've not found an alternative workshop yet, except a storage unit which would eat up the cost difference.
Great job at showing the basic economics of housing density. People need to understand there are trade offs with housing.
Thank you for the wonderful videos. The correct way we can make a change to these policies is by proper education. Due to the crazy housing crisis in the past few years ive been already subbed to more than 5 Canadian urbanist channels which i would have never even thought. I'm super thankful for all the educational contents you guys have been pushing. It will make huge steps towards pushing better city policies. Toronto city recently announced their removing minimum parking requirements for building downtown. That is huge.
I just clicked on the video, and I already know I’m going to enjoy it and yall will put forth a thorough and informed argument. Keep up the great work !!!
hearted awwwww
As far as I can tell you often get these zoning decisions not because people all want to live in single-family houses, but because the people who _already_ live in single-family houses don't want any other kind of housing near them.
So you're effectively forcing one group's preferences on everyone else who's looking to live in that area.
I don’t even really want a detached home either way. Living closer to other people just seems a lot more interesting and compelling.
30-odd years ago, I advocated that R-1 zoning should be abolished in Santa Cruz, California. I wanted it to be replaced with R-1.5 zoning, i.e., allowing each parcel to have a "granny unit" in addition to the house. This granny unit could be a small apartment divided from the house itself or it could be a mini-home (say, 500 sq ft , or less) built on the parcel separate from the house. This allows lots of options: for a granny, or for renting to a university student (or low-income person), or for the property owner who could then rent the house. Flexibility and low-impact densification! People rejected my proposal for fear of losing parking to additional residents. Parking is the highest priority!! Gawd.
@@somad6997 Yes, class prejudice is surely a part of the mix. Parking, however, always at the top of the list of the concerns of the opponents of the mild densification that you and I advocate. Santa Cruz is a university town; the neighborhoods are accustomed to student-renters, many renting rooms in the homeowners' houses. At the time that I was arguing for R1.5 zoning, central Santa Cruz was a lively mix of middle-income and low income. Plus, Santa Cruz is a hard place to earn a living; lots of homeowners like myself would have been delighted to live in the granny-unit while renting out the house (the mayor, having a crisis at his business, was living in his illegal granny unit at the time).
@@somad6997 Perhaps you do not have experience with a city like Santa Cruz, a left-wing university town. Yes, I agree that there is a whole lot of class bigotry in this country. There is also a whole lot of irrational fear.
Your assumption that when folks raise the issue of parking, they are veiling their class bigotry...well, that's rather simplistic. To many (most?) people, it is an unendurable hardship to walk a block or two. I've never understood it. And these people do cherish the delusion that they own the parking space in front of their house. You do not seem to recognize the American obsession with convenience. Convenience as the highest good. Even in a lefty town like Santa Cruz.
I'm actually very happy living in an 85 square meter apartment which to Americans I guess would be considered small. We're a family of 4, two adults and two young children. I've got plenty of work around the house anyway and can't imagine having to take care of a larger house, plus the temperature is better because it's better insulated and we don't usually need ac. I don't want a yard to take care of, when my kids want to play outside we walk to the park just two minutes away, and they can play with their friends and I can talk with other parents who have become my friends. I can't imagine having to drive everywhere just so I can have a basement to fill with junk and lots of space to clean and heat and cool. Absolutely not for me.
That’s a lot of empty rooms in Ottawa. I know in California, our property tax laws discourage people from trading down to smaller, more appropriately sized homes when their kids move out. But, on the other hand, the high cost of maintenance large homes are motivating these people to move to rural areas or exurbs.
That ending remark was really good. If a highway from the suburbs to downtown exists, the suburbs don't feel the true distance from downtown
The housing market is the single most manipulated market in North America. We're subsidizing housing that literally can't pay for itself by building MORE housing that can't pay for itself. All to keep propping up a market that is grossly inflated by artificial scarcity. We're staring in the face of an economic disaster that will make 2008 look like a joke
I agree that single-family zoning and detached houses aren't for everyone, but for me, it's absolutely the best. It's worth the extra cost, maintenance, and upkeep just to have the living space I want and to customize it as I see fit.
I think a lot of this boils down to. People not being able to afford a house vs apartment. Less and less people in relationships and starting families, so no need for a family home. So many people just live alone or with one other. So no need for houses with space for more people. Typically people want a type of home based on the stage of their life and if they are single with no family why would they want or need a family home.
I live in a semi-detached urban townhouse (called locally a "Twin") in Philadelphia near the city center. It suits me fine. I love walking to the supermarket, the shops, restaurants and cafes and the local trolley stop is on my corner ... not being dependent on a car. I grew up in the sprawling suburbs of Broward County Florida and quite frankly I think the suburbs are soulless.
Massachusetts has recently passed some kind of bill requiring higher density around transit locations in all of our mbta communities (mbta is our local transport authority btw). Its receiving heavy push back from locals but as someone whos studied these topics for years now and is also a lifelong resident of the state i think it will actually be a good thing. U should do a video on it id be very interested to hear ur opinion on the matter.
That commercial-broadway skytrain station looks like a twisted multilevel mess and I think it's awesome :D I love compact designs like this.
I feel a sudden urge to play cities:skylines ^^
Great video! In much of Asia it's common to own an apartment and even costomize the layout and finishes within the apartment shell. You may actually own a piece of the land your apartment sits on or just leased for a set number of years based on the projected life of the building. Local taxes are less dependent property value.
Good video, and I agree. But I'd note that half the problem isn't detached housing per se, but minimum lot sizes and other limits. A lot of Osaka and Tokyo are detached houses but still high density, because they'll be a 2 story house on maybe 80% of a lot. A 100 m2 house built that way might require 60-70 m2 of land. (And 100 m2 would be big for a Japanese house.) The US commonly requires at least 1/8 acre per house, or 500 m2. Many areas require 1000 m2 or more.
Some people are so unable to imagine that not everyone is like them (or wants the same things like them) that they have to enforce their lifestyle on other people.
I find that when a lot of urbanist-mindset people hear 'single-family home', their immediate thought is of a 3500 sq ft home on a massive lot with an enormous front yard.
It doesn't have to be that way. My wife and I live in a 1250 sq ft two-storey home with a rear detached double garage on a 30'x120' lot. It's more than we truly 'need', but we like the extra space. We have had many family members come to stay with us, sometimes for long visits, or temporarily while they were looking for their own place to live. The yard is a breeze to take care of.
These narrow lot homes boost the density of our neighbourhood, which also has a lot of McMansions. Our neighbourhood (built in the early 2000s) density is 4250 ppl/sq km, while my sister's neighbourhood nearby, built in the 1970s has a density of 2860 ppl/sq km.
Of course, it ain't perfect. One thing I'd change is the front set-backs, which are ridiculously long (20 feet). And, it is after all, a typical car-oriented development, meaning it isn't very walkable for shopping and other every day activities. And the bicycle infrastructure and transit pretty much suck.
But my point is that single family homes can also be included within neighbourhoods, along with other types of housing.
The push right now isn't to ban single family homes (at least not from most proponents of ending single-family only zoning). It is to allow other types of housing in areas that have been reserved as single-family only.
I agree that single family detached housing can still done at a healthy density if done right. The problem is that the argument for single-family only zoning starts to evaporate once you start trimming down setback, lot size, and off-street parking requirements to get to that density. One gets so close to one's neighbors that allowing duplexes, townhomes, ADUs, etc. becomes a negligible change.
As cities grow, there should be flexibility to allow older properties, particularly mid-20th century properties on larger lots that are reaching the age where they will need major renovation or could be torn down and redeveloped, to have flexibility to increase the intensity of use of the property.
I lived in Montreal for 12 years. I never thought that we had it better than elsewhere, because I was aware of disputes within certain borough to increase the maximum height of buildings. Indeed, some streets are zoned for 3 stories max, but some real estate developpers were pushing for more. In any case, denser is better, if it can be done in a way that properly accomodate the increased density (public transport, parks, stores, etc.).
What’s really funny, is that here in the Knoxville, TN area, almost all new housing developments pack the houses in. Sometimes, they even resemble dense urban development, but these are way out in the exurbs, away from everything. In some ways, that is actually worse low density development. You have urban-like housing, but to get anywhere, you still gotta drive long distances on congested stroads to ugly strip malls. At that point, that’s just an insult.
It's been like this in much of California for a while now, and increasingly in large metros across the US (and presumably Canada) it seems. At a certain point, you begin to get this worst of both worlds...auto-oriented density that offers all the drawbacks of multi-unit housing (even if they are technically single-family homes) and all the inconvenience and negative externalities of classic, suburban development. It drives me bonkers to see three story single-family homes 5 ft or less from each other without any yard. At that point, you'd have more privacy in a semi-detached or townhouse, and could reallocate the extra space for shared outdoor space, etc.
6:57 That graphic RIGHT THERE pisses me off to no end. It is more proof that our cities were not "built for the car" they were DEMOLISHED for the car. Absolutely disgusting.
6:35 The CBC article, which is nicely included in the description as a reference, says that updated figures show that both surburban development and urbsn infill produce tax revenue for a city:
"Brought up to date, its figures suggest high-density infill development benefits the city by $831 per person per year, while homes on former fields provide $189."
If low wage workers are being forced to live far from work and have miserable commutes, then housing policy is hurting those less well off and should be changed. But a better solution is to restrict an urban area's office space so that density doesn't get out of hand. The government should subsidize and incentivize the creation of new cities so that urban density is capped to maintain a good quality of life for everyone, but the economy can still grow by overflowing into new cities.
I love when people act like every apartment is a goddamn Commie block. In Microsoft flight simulator, I did a fly-by of Berlin, where there were many buildings with an internal courtyard, where kids could play and stuff. Some guys don’t understand there’s a difference between the dull commie block, and the dull LA neighborhood.
And there's even something to be said for those blocks: ua-cam.com/video/1eIxUuuJX7Y/v-deo.html
The only real rebuttal you need is that if people really want detached homes, then there's no need to make everything else illegal, the market should provide them in its own, even if zoning was a free for all.
The only rebuttal I need is that “everything else is illegal” is the dumbest statement you could possibly make.
One thing you didn't even mention is getting on the property ladder. It's better to buy a small flat as a single 20 something then waste a lot of money making another man rich by renting. And then you can sell your flat and use the money to buy a bigger house when you start having children
Where would you find a small flat, affordable to a single 20 something? Somewhere in the outskirts of Kansas, 10 miles from the next busstop?
According to IMF, the average buying price in the US is about 115 rents worth. And the average DOES include rural outskirts with little job opportunities. In actual cities it can go as high as 600 rents in San Francisco
If you have a hard time paying your rent, just pay it for a few decades in advance to save money in the long run?
Right at the start of your career?
@@stefanb6539 it's normal in my country, I'm buying a flat soon at the age of 24, many of my friends do that as well
@@Jakub777J what country would that be? There are a few countries, where the price-to-rent ratio is unusually low.
@@stefanb6539 Poland
@@Jakub777J Well, you may not make another man rich by paying rent, but you won't avoid making your bank richer by paying interest on your mortgage. And you have the risk, that you can lose a lot of money if housing prices crash or the interest on you mortgage spikes. I don't assume your bank offered you a fixed interest mortgage, did they?
Privacy and lots of space are really nice things to have but I think we take it to the extreme here in the US. Houses are just way too big, especially front yards.
Great video!
Every time I see these American suburbs, it amazes me how close the houses are built and how small the backyards are. I'd bloody rather break my arm lengthwise than live in a place like that.
I agree if I want a backyard and a lot of space a few acres /hectares then I will go all out and buy a rural property instead of this tiny little American suburban house.
The thing I find stupid about this argument is, if this is really what the people want then why make it obligatory? You wouldn't need regulations to force urban planning to look like this if there's demand for it. And I'm sure there's demand for it, but there's demand for other things too! Let people build whatever they want and live wherever they want! This is such a simple "issue" to solve.
absolutely! if the public truly desired only SFZ and nothing else, the "free market" that a lot of NIMBYs champion for would, in theory, automatically solve the problem by accommodating consumer demand. you wouldn't need a government mandate to force housing of a specific density because it would happen on its own accord. in fact, by legislating single family zoning you reduce the market's autonomy and consumer choice. it makes no sense.