80 Comments
Oct 10, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

This is basically Arlington, VA, where I live (or at least a lot of it). And it's one of the safest, most affluent, most diverse, and physically healthiest places in the country. I like this future!

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Oct 10, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

One element you left out: I think we're a few years out from the beginning of pressure for the state to enable Accessory Commercial Units in the way that it has enabled ADUs. For many of the R1 zones, 80+% of the people living in them are an unreasonable walking distance from any commercial hub. The only way you turn those into 15-minute neighborhoods is to allow corner stores and cafés to be opened by residents on formerly-exclusively-residential parcels, where it is presently illegal to operate a business.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/15/accessory-commercial-units

When I was a kid, I remember my family got our hair cut in the basement studio of a walking-distance neighbor. I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the future.

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Wow! Moderate optimism, what an unusual stance for a blog. One quibble. You suggest that the newly densified inner suburbs will have shopping areas with mixed retail. I'm not sure bricks and mortar retail is likely to expand in any conceivable future. Lately, I've been confronting some age related incapacities. My shopping has become almost exclusively on-line. This is not because I want to make Jeff Bezos the first trillionaire. Trying to walk to and through a retail store is the equivalent of torture these days, hence my aversion to physical shopping. Of course, I also share many economists incomprehension regarding the notion that shopping is entertainment.

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Oct 10, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

The future: I like it.

1. Growth needs to be, and will be, organic and incremental. I've read some anti-NIMBY screeds (often East Coasters) promoting some nutty ideas; e.g., single-family city neighborhoods (like mine in L.A.) need to be replaced with 40-story complexes. No! For many reasons, it cannot, and will not, work that way. A mix of single-family homes, some with ADUs, and low-rise apartments is a much, much better way to go.

2. Not sure cost of car ownership in future goes up. Looking at TCO, EVs are more affordable than ICE cars. Not only fuel costs, but maintenance (no engine, transmission, etc.). Our EV expenses: <$20/month fuel, $0 maintenance.

3. Political ramifications of denser cities/suburbs may become more challenging that they already are today. We're about 80/20 urban/rural now, and political power of the less-dense areas are able to thwart the will of the majority. What if the split goes to 90/10? Will that flip some red states and make progress more possible, or will the stalemate continue, raising frustrations?

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Oct 10, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

post, Noah. I’ve seen you mention micro-mobility as real game changer for how we will get around in this denser America. I’m an electric scooter owner myself in the suburbs of Boston and I think you are a bit too optimistic. Electric scooters still can’t ride in the rain and are basically unrideable in sub 40 degree weather. In Boston that means I can only ride mine 7 months of the year and when you subtract days that it rains it’s closer to 5 months out of 12. It’s still not practical for most people. Only reason I do it is because I don’t have my license yet; once I get that in November I’ll have a car.

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1. The issue with suburbs isn’t just zoning that allows denser housing, of equal importance is zoning that prevents businesses and commercial properties. The reason that some suburbs are unwalkable is because there is no place to walk to.

I lived in Europe for 12-years. Most of the time in smaller villages or cities. The great thing about Europe was there was always a little shop, bakery or pub within walking distance. Pittsburg suburbs and surrounding cities are like this. At least the older established ones.

If you really want to change the landscape, then this zoning issue needs to be addressed as well.

2. Commuter trains just aren’t going to be a thing across the United States. Sure they are established in some cities in the North East and a few big west coast cities, but across the US they are just non-existent. At best bus service will fill in some of the gaps, but I doubt it.

3. I’m surprised you didn’t mention self-driving cars. Now… let me say up front… self-driving taxis will never be a thing. People are nasty. They would quickly become disgusting. I’ve seen some people say that they could have automated cleaning, but that would mean they would have to have hard surfaces which would basically be uncomfortable. Think about your average bus, and they have a bus driver present.

4. I think the scooters and the bikes or an interesting proposition/idea. To tell the truth I never really thought of them as a commuter item. It’s partially limited by the weather, especially in winter. But it actually has potential, but only if you can at the same time increase bike paths which I assume they will use as well.

5. I’ve traveled the world, except for Asia. I need to get to Japan to check out how these Japanese cities you talk about really are. In someways what you described it sounds like parts of South America. I’m in Argentina right now. I know ironically, a lot of cities in urgent Tina and other parts of South America, high-rise apartments are more upper class, where the poor working class people tend to live in smaller single-family houses, even if they are densely packed together. I asked one of my engineers why this is, and he says it’s because of security. A high-rise apartment usually has a gate and enclosed area and a full-time security guard to watch.

6. Anyway. Great post. I wish you had some more photos, but aerial shots showing a few blocks. It would help me visualize better.

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Oct 10, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Brussels might be an existing prototype of this! Europeans think it is quite American in that the desirable neighborhoods are suburban, but they're fairly dense and full of e scooters and streetcars.

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I was wondering why you didn't mention the changing climate, need for lower energy intensive housing etc? It is as if the recent IPCC report "Code Red for humanity" was never written....

https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1097362

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Oct 10, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Sounds like America will be where Melbourne is now. Hopefully by then Melbourne will be further along in the fight against nimbyism

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Most all of these types of articles seem to concentrate, look at, what might happen in the densely populated areas of the coasts etc. What about the vast majority of the counties and cities in the middle of the country with low density and plenty of land? Do you see those changing? If not, do you see the differences in lifestyle exacerbating political differences? As in why should someone in Iowa etc want to spend billions on Amtrak or Bart improvements, entities that will always run at huge losses and need to be forever funded by the federal government?

Do the housing bills like SB9 etc just mandate density or do they look at construction codes also- that is do they also facilitate modular and off site and more mechanized forms of home/housing construction?

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I think it was Alon Levy who made the argument that this kind of missing middle housing is a bad equilibrium since it is dense enough to cause bad traffic but not dense enough to support frequent transit. I gather the counter argument here is that battery based e-bikes, scooters, etc. change that calculus?

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Need to see some more thought on carless grocery shopping. How does this work in big cities now? My family goes shopping for once a week, and I have a hard time believing most people are going to carry a week's worth of food on a scooter. Do you fill up your backpack with canned goods or are people doing their shopping more often than once a week?

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Noah,

In terms of transit, it seems to me that we are missing a real use case for existing AI technologies. I live in Philly which has a large commuter train system that is relatively little used. The trains don’t run very often and if you end up waiting a long time for a ride. But the tracks are there. It seems to me that it would be pretty simple to add small bus sized trains that run with no crew at frequent intervals. If we can have cars that “nearly” drive themselves…driving on a track should be pretty easy. This is AI driving that is achievable today…not an ever receding “few years”.

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I think you have a couple of plain mistakes here, but I'll also add some editorial comments.

1. "Around the commuter rail stations, larger shopping complexes will be common — big-box stores and malls. This is because the rail stations will be centrally located, zoning rules will likely be relaxed, and high-density housing will be located nearby." I don't think this is in the cards at all. Big-box stores and malls are not compatible with public transit of any kind, people go to big-box stores and malls to load up their pickup trucks and SUV's with large and voluminous products that are purchased rarely. Add to that that commuter rail stations are almost exclusively located in older, already built-out areas, making it near-impossible to meet the parking needs of big-box store or mall. There is another model of the urban big-box store or mall on top of a heavy rail station in the downtown zone that seems to sometimes work, but there are still and will continue to always be 100 of the suburban-type to every one of those for the simple reason that people go there to buy large and voluminous items. Even if people don't own cars, they'll rent them to do those trips, which are generally once a week at most, usually way more occasional than that.

2. The "suburban" neighborhoods in all of your pictures are not suburban neighborhoods at all, they are moderate (by American standards) West Coast urban neighborhoods. Putting aside San Francisco, the other big pre-war cities in the West (basically, Seattle, Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Deigo) all have neighborhoods that have a mix of two/three-story detached single family homes, similary-sized duplexes with the occasional 3-4-5 story apartment building over ground floor retail mixed in, usually along the arterial streets. They're usually pretty nice, sometimes gentrifying, sometimes they've always been nice, occasionally tattered, and they offer that mix of a bit of space to live but also easy to walk, bike, ride transit for daily needs. But these are not suburbs. They "were" suburbs in the 1920's and 1930's., but not now. Maybe it's because these new laws are actually "new" (!) and so we haven't really seen what it looks like when a single-family, cul-de-sac neighborhood densifies, and the only photos are from neighborhoods that have gone through this kind of transition decades ago.

But densifying a true, one story, sprawling, single family suburb, where everyone has a 2-3 car garage, ample space in the front and back yard, etc., etc., is different. I've lived most of my life in these above-mentioned big city medium density neighborhoods and now live on a street full of single family homes and so I have some perspectives maybe to offer. For nearly everyone who moves to "the 'burbs", there is really one and only one reason: kids. The kids on my street and throughout my neighborhood have endless opportunities for outdoor play: they take over the street itself all day every day, but everyone also has backyard play structures and trampolines. Nearly every weekend someone is setting up a jumper, or a pool, or a slip n slide in the front yard. The nearby schoolyard is not locked outside of school hours, so kids are constantly over there playing as well, not to mention that it hosts the local Little League and AYSO. And wherever they go, it's all the same group of kids who all know each other and whose parents all know each other.

Thinking back to the medium-density urban neighborhoods I've lived in, it's not like that at all. There's always traffic on even the side streets, so kids cannot commandeer those streets. Very few have enough yard space to really do much with, and the local schools were gated, fenced and locked outside of school hours. Parks can be popular, but few parents are willing to let their under 10's go to a city park unsupervised, so kids can only go there to the extent that they have an adult to take them there, and city parks are also more anonymous than frontyards, backyards, streets and schoolyards, so it's not obvious that all their friends will be there any given time.

Density has long been proved to inversely correlated with "getting to know your neighbors". The fact that you might live 100 feet instead of 200 feet away from someone doesn't really increase the likelihood that you'll know that as much as the greater volume of people in a given space increases the likelihood that the standard of interaction will be more anonymous. This is a basic reality of human interaction that is seen in everything from small colleges to small towns, if you limit the universe of people, you're more likely to get to know those who are there.

Again, however, the logic of social interaction is highly variable between young singles and families. If you're single and "looking" obviously, there's an interest in running into as many people as possible in your local environment, increasing the odds of finding a mate. If you have a spouse and kids, your interest is much more in the quality of the people, in trust built over time, in the kind of deep multifaceted connections that involved when one is allowing others to influence the growth and development of your progeny.

But it's undeniable that density is coming to those kinds of single-family neighorhoods, and I think you're generally right that those neighborhoods will start to look like the pre-war medium density neighborhoods pictured. But I don't think that will really be a change in the general trend, all that will happen is that more territories within these big coastal metro areas will be dense and urban, but the population growth in the United States will continue to be shift to the Sunbelt, where new family-oriented exclusively single family neighborhoods will continue to be constructed and protected. The shift to remote work will intensify this trend, as fewer people are required to live in the big metros in order find work. It will look like the flight to the suburbs always has, except now increasingly at the scale of the nation, rather than region.

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This is basically Hillsboro, OR and quickly becoming Beaverton, OR, as well. This isn't far from my house:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orenco_Station,_Hillsboro,_Oregon#/media/File:Orenco_Station_Plaza_and_Rowlock_Apartments_(2016).jpg

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The future vision for the US seems very similar to what Australia is now

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