A lot to unpack here — why do we continue to conflate housing with houses? — and the reluctance to accept that other people also want a place of their own, even if it means density.
“As a 30-something-year-old who is fully employed, my family and I have spent 18 of the last 24 months living in my in-laws’ basement. Not because we wanted to, but because we couldn’t find a house to buy.”
If a house is out of reach, is there no other option? People do raise families in multi-family buildings, some in very desirable locations. Not that his neighbors will accept a multi-family development:
Eskic went on to read a letter from a concerned citizen to a local Utah city council, in which the resident opposed a proposed townhome development and said they didn’t want to “live next to the kind of low-income people who typically reside in high-density housing.”
“I do not want their delinquent children attending the schools that my children attend. I do not want to deal with the increase in crime and drug use that inevitably accompanies such high-density housing units,” Eskic read from the letter. “I do not want my home values to decrease.”
We’ve already seen that density drives values up, as one would expect. But racism, xenophobia, whatever afflicts people like that isn’t amenable to reason.
The subject of the piece is a researcher but I wonder how many housing options they have seen, let alone researched. Are there no benefits to density and reduced car use, shorter distances between services? How would cities have grown without the car, in an alternate timeline? I get it, people want their private park and distance from their neighbors. They want a place to park a couple of extra cars or plant a garden or build a play structure for their kids or whatever. But doing that within a city comes with a cost. Not just to buy the land itself, but the opportunity cost of a city that allows more people to access it, to invest in it. It becomes a club, in other words.
This is all depressingly familiar, just another example of failure of imagination. “I want a house with a decent fraction of an acre and mature trees and good neighbors who look like me and drive nice cars and keep their lawns mowed and go to bed early” is not an urban planning strategy.
What if you lived in a building with people, some of whom look like you but many of whom are similarly educated, perhaps also work as researchers or knowledge workers, who have also decided they have better things to do with their time than commute to work by car or cut their grass for the approval of their neighbors? Is there nothing to gain from that set of choices? The 1950s are long gone. But they seem to linger in people’s minds, as some kind of dream world no one really wants to return to, if they had to.