Strong Towns

> the economy diversifies, and services improve

Pure wishful thinking. Is there any empirical reason to believe this would be more true with everyone living in a couple of dozen large cities (as if that can even happen - see later) instead of in a greater number of more self-sufficient smaller cities and towns within a region? It's not like every company even in your own metropolitan area wants to be in "Seattle proper" is it? I used to work at a large one that basically moved out and they're not the only one. Investors didn't seem to mind one bit.

> Why do any more suburbs need to be built at all

I never said that they should. They need to be rebuilt, not built anew. More precisely, they need to be reconfigured to avoid the waste and ecological damage of tearing down one place and then building somewhere else.

> Fix the cities and there will be plenty of space.

Fix the suburbs and you'll have plenty of space too. Consolidation can happen as easily in each town as in the central city, and without some of the downsides - increased prices and decreasing affordability (already a major problem in Seattle), power distribution, waste disposal, what traffic still (and necessarily) remains, etc. I've been to Seattle. Consolidating most of the region's population into Seattle city limits would not be a utopia; it would be a nightmare even from a new-urbanist perspective. Ditto for the many other cities I've been to. A certain level of geographic expansion is inevitable, but not…

I _highly_ recommend consuming more of the content put out by Strong Towns [1]. If I were to summarize their message, it's that in the past 100 years, we've engaged in a large-scale experiment to design our places around cars. This is bad for safety, bad for the economy, and (most importantly!) bad for us people that live in these places! Content and education-wise, they are my favorite non-profit :)

If you're looking for audio: their podcast [2] is great (this article came out yesterday as a podcast, and I listened to it while I was biking... and then got angry at all the cars driving around me, lol).

If you're looking for something longer-form, I'd recommend reading Confessions of a Recovering Engineer [3]. It's literally fantastic, and changed the entire way I think about the suburbs and cities. I grew up in a suburb and recently moved to the city, and had this deep, under-thought feeling that the walking/biking (and the livability that came from it) was why I loved cities so much. This book helped me understand why I felt that way, what specifically is wrong with how we build place currently - and also practical things I could do about it!

Not to be dramatic, but that book took me from pretty much _never_ thinking about place to: volunteering for a local bike advocacy group, biking twice as much, and literally being a more friendly neighbor. Effects not guaranteed, but I can't recommend this book highly enough if you're interested in this sort of thing.

P.S. I am…

There is this position in politics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_Party_(United_States)

which has a mismatch in supply and demand much like Libertarianism.

The New York Times would like to be Whiggish (e.g. "how am I going to afford to send my kids to college if cancel culture stops me from getting paid $50,000 to give a college commencement address?") and so would the people in California.

For various reasons the "left" in America can't quite throw the poor, blacks, and brown people under the bus, but the political establishment would love to do so if it could: but a bird with two right wings can't really fly.

History treats the whigs so badly because the whigs tried to "split the difference" between the north and the south in the civil war so you wind up with characters like Daniel Webster, the US secretary of state from New Hampshire, who was imploring activists to stop resisting efforts to repatriate escaped slaves from New York to the the south.

Today "split the difference" comes in the form of symbolic activities like the ones mentioned here in the context of California where saying that a certain population is "15% white" could well mean that it is "70% asian", not "70% black". (e.g. even in the American South today it seems that white people are taking their kids out of the public schools to get them away from asians, not to get them away from blacks) Asians break the "race theory" enshrined in American law by being both successful (higher than…

> If anyone has a suggestion on how to deal with that problem, I'd love to hear about it...

My knee-jerk reaction is to call you an anti-development NIMBY, but that's not actually solving any problem. So let's set that aside.

Your neighbourhoods have benefited from the existence of this vacant land. The city, meanwhile, has costs to maintain that land, police it, etc and have even more costs to maintain the infrastructure of low-density housing in such neighbourhoods. Cities need to increase density, and they need to be able to afford to maintain themselves[0].

Selling vacant land removes a cost and creates desperately needed income in times where all a politician is allowed to do is lower taxes (or else their opponent next election will say that they will lower taxes and get elected).

If you want to have low-density residential areas with lots of green space, you need to petition your government to raise your taxes so that you can pay for it. Campaign for politicians willing to invest rather than lower taxes. Have them convert the land into a local park, using your increased taxes to maintain it.

[0] See everything on https://www.strongtowns.org/

I find it amusing that many folks here are ready to clap back at this comment about how "but people want single family homes" as if that weren't why we are in a housing crisis. Yes... people want single family homes, it's just not feasible to put 3M people into single family homes in a metro area without absorbing an unsustainable amount of costs.

Here we are talking literally the cost of construction, but there is also the cost of infrastructure, and the cost of transport. The reason we have a housing crisis is because as much as we all love single family homes, they aren't universalizable. If everyone were to live in a single family home, then after the transportation infrastructure reaches capacity, there is a cascade of issues that leads a region becoming totally unaffordable and ultimately unsustainable.

I would recommend the Strong Towns organization for anyone more interested in the interaction between long-term affordability issues and surburban infrastructure problems: https://www.strongtowns.org

I'm very interested to see how this goes, especially since I was not aware of Ireland's particular housing shortage.

I'm a big fan of infill/increased urban density in general, as long as it is ~equally beautiful to the surroundings. (Ex. live-work units can be much more beautiful than single-family homes, but 5-over-1s are usually not)

Some other topical sites I've been reading recently that I'd recommend:

https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

https://www.strongtowns.org/ (North America specific)

One quote I'm unsure about:

> [Popular housing reform] means having strict rules on parking and driving, ensuring congestion doesn’t increase.

I'm unsure whether to read this as strict rules to increase car infrastructure as housing is increased to make way for more people's vehicles, or to make sure new housing development holds steady car flow / implements alternative transportation so as not to increase the number of cars.

The first interpretation would make me concerned about induced demand.