There is no shortage of land, there is a shortage of efficient transportation. All this talk of building up and creative ideas around housing is great but the ultimate problem is transportation. To solve the problem of housing in LA, a person should be able to live in Reno,Nevada and work somewhere in Santa Monica, CA. I'm not saying I have a solution, I'm just pointing out the problem domain.
The US does not have modern transportation infrastructure like similarly sized countries like China. Generally speaking, housing is built near bodies of water or alongside transportation towards bodies of water. Even issues like NIMBYism can be resolved by constructing underground bullet trains that won't affect appearances. This is a hard problem, but not an unsolvable problem. It isn't just economies of scale, government investment, clever economic strategies,etc.. that are needed but actual revolutions in construction technology and transportation. Timelines for construction that are only few years not decades. But alas, I fear the politics of these days would not allow for this.
It would be much more efficient to legalize apartments in LA than to run high speed trains to bedroom communities. Digging tunnels would blow out the cost by itself.
Dropping infinite resources into stretching commutes across vast distances is not realistic. Taken to its logical extreme everyone should commute by private jet. The larger the transportion network, the more it costs, or at the same cost the less convenient it becomes because intervals between vehicles increases.
The most efficient form of transportation is avoiding the trip in the first place through telecommuting. Then walking or biking. Then mass transit which works best with areas with lots of riders (dense cities). https://humantransit.org/basics/the-transit-ridership-recipe.
Think of train service like a pancake. For a given amount of batter you can make a normal pancake, or you can spread it thinly over a large area, or you could make a small and thick pancake. If you want great service over a huge area you must massively increase resource expenditure.
Buses aren’t that sexy but they are probably a good compromise for cities like LA. They don’t require a ton of infrastructure and can still remove lots of cars from the road. Make them convenient (better bus stop UX, wait time no more than 10 minutes, GPS track them, modernize them) and people will consider buses.
Send surveys to all the biggest companies in the city to figure out specifically the routes that need to be created.
This is exactly what LA is doing btw. LA has a few light rail networks but by far most of its network is buses and most of its riders use its buses. The problems that the LA Metro Bus network echo the problems with fixing housing costs in general:
* Lack of political will to create separate lanes. City council members are drivers and empathize with their auto driving constituents and would rather have driving lanes available to auto drivers than exclusive to buses
* Better bus stops require better funding which requires raising taxes. Nicer bus stops also tend to attract the homeless. The US has been funding auto driver amenities for almost a century via taxes but only started funding transit in a consistent way federally from the BBB act, and even then only at a fraction of auto improvements.
* A bus route that serves many stops is slow. A bus route that serves few stops is inconvenient for anyone not near those stops. You can run multiple buses along a route with differing levels of service to service both modes, but that requires running more buses, which requires purchasing more buses and hiring more drivers which costs more money.
Most of this comes down to a lack of political will and funding. Most politicians still see driving as the main way to move around and are loathe to fund transit as anything more than an equity initiative to help with the sad folks who cannot drive a car. Until this changes, progress is going to be slow. Likewise most politicians benefit from high housing costs because they themselves live in more expensive, exclusive areas with exclusionary zoning and are more sympathetic to that viewpoint and view housing accessibility as largely an equity initiative.
Buses are usually the cheaper inferior option. While bus service doesn't inherently suck, buses are usually chosen because of cost not because they want to run a good service. This results in cost cutting of every portion of a bus network until the experience suffers. Dedicated lanes are not provided so buses get stuck in traffic. Bus stops without rain shelters or even a bench (versus full stations). Operating budgets get cut and then the interval between buses goes to 30 min. Service after 10 p.m. gets cut. The bus networks that don't suck are usually called "shuttles" and are underwritten by tourism districts, airports, and theme park operators.
Buses are terrible because they get stuck in the traffic they're competing with. If the bus is the same speed as the cars, people are more likely to take a car.
This can be fixed - dedicated bus lanes mitigate this nicely - but doing so is politically unpopular. And frankly, if you have the political will then you should just build trains. They're more reliable, cheaper in the long run, and have higher capacity.
The main advantage of buses is that they're a great stopgap, and are good for niche/dynamic routes.
Los Angeles has been doing this and the BRT lines are a great way to get started since they’re so much cheaper to build. The last time I was visiting family they looked busy and outpaced the car traffic handily.
One game-changing technology is the way cameras are cheap now. You can put them on every bus and change drivers’ calculation of the risks of suffering consequences from blocking bus lanes or stops from “less likely than being struck by lightning” to “every time”. That requires political will but the technology makes the cost not only low but self-funding.
But who wants to live in apartments? It's better than being homeless but it's hardly a solution. People want single-family housing, and it is possible to build tens of millions of houses within practical commute distances of big cities. Also, we can build new cities!
What a weird argument. There are many, many apartments in New York that people want to live in so badly that they'll pay millions upon millions of dollars to do so.
and they want to live there because they don't like near-by houses? I'd imagine single family housing in manhattan would cost 10x what an apartment costs. Even brown stone housing in new york is more expensive than similarly sized/located apartments (if you call brown stones proper housing even).
> There is no shortage of land, there is a shortage of efficient transportation. All this talk of building up and creative ideas around housing is great but the ultimate problem is transportation. To solve the problem of housing in LA, a person should be able to live in Reno,Nevada and work somewhere in Santa Monica, CA.
Trying to present this in such absolute terms makes it wrong. There’s no feasible way that a 600 mile one-way commute is going to be desirable short of magic teleportation booths. Even if you have a personal jet and priority air traffic control that commute sucks and people want to be enjoy the areas where they live, not spend all of their time traveling somewhere else.
Transportation really is a big problem, but it works the other way around: we need transit and enough density so people don’t need to use cars on a daily basis, freeing up close to half of the land usage in American cities and making housing cheaper. What would help would be if there was a way to live in Burbank or Chatsworth and not need to spend an hour driving to go to Santa Monica, or paying many thousands of dollars per year for the privilege of doing so.
People don't like to live in dense environments. Apartments and condos suck, people want their back yard.
I presented it in absolute terms because we're talking high-level here. The possibility to commute from reno to santa monica and having lots of people actually doing that are different things. My point was, if that was a 1-2 hour commute, then housing along side that commute would make economic sense, as will many other economic activities. If it is a train, I personally won't mind a 2-3 hour total daily commute, since I can catch up with books,entertainment,etc.. but if it is a drive, that would be too much, and that in essence is one of the critical issues on how this is being thought about. Cars (EV or not) are one of the root causes of the housing problem.
Some people don’t, but many people do - for example, older people don’t want to do yard work - and everyone has to choose between a number of different related things. If you want to live somewhere with culture, interesting local businesses, a healthy walkable lifestyle, etc. the suburban model isn’t economically sustainable. If you want a detached single family house and a large yard, you might trade those amenities for the house you want but it’s definitely a choice with significant costs. The fact that America’s walkable neighborhoods have such price competition suggests that there is a significant underserved market for that even if the preference isn’t universal.
As for that scenario, 1-2 hour commutes are still misery class. Doing it on a train is better, but countless studies have found that a shorter commute increases happiness more than a big house (the amenities don’t matter, you don’t have time to use them!).
Just because you don’t yet understand why people are prioritizing walkable communities over anything else, doesn’t mean reality reflects that. The opposite is true; walkable neighborhoods are expensive because they are in demand. People live in single family housing in the suburbs because they can’t afford to live like Ted lasso.
who said I don't like walkable areas? Single family does not equal "typical american suburb" walkable SFH housing with subways/trains/buses are practical.
Are you saying they love living in apartments? I think most of them live there because of proximity to economic activity, not out of love for apartment living. If manhattan allowed for single-family housing for 1.6M people, how many do you think will refuse that?
I'm saying that the people there like the benefits of living in a high-density area more than they dislike the downsides of apartments.
> If manhattan allowed for single-family housing
If Manhattan allowed for single-family housing for 1.6M people, it wouldn't be Manhattan. It would be Austin or Los Angeles, and the people living in Manhattan clearly don't want that because they haven't moved to those places.
I'm sure there are such people, but doubt they are many. Most people don't like dealing with upstair-neighbor noises, waiting for elevators or walking up long flights of stairs, not being able to make music/tv noise whenever you want, not having space (indoor or outdoor),etc... Not once have I ever heard of a person complain how they wish they could live in an apartment instead of a house. I'm sure it happens, but seeing the topic is about housing strategies for the masses, the views of the majority should be taken into account.
You are in a bubble. People self sort according to their housing preferences in this country due to onerous zoning. People who like to walk around their neighborhood go to apartments, people that dont mind driving everywhere get SFH. Just because there isnt much overlap doesnt mean the other group doesnt exist. I know many people that have happily sold their SFH to move into a downtown condo.
I agree, so let's make it cheaper. Other countries build subways cheaper over longer distances. It isn't a practical limitation but one of politics and policy.
Absolutely. Or put another way, if you can imagine a map of a metro area distorted in terms of commute times between places rather than physical distance, the goal is to maximize the density of the city, putting as many people as possible within reasonable commute times.
This is possible via either dense housing or efficient transportation or both.
Unfortunately, the High-Speed Rail has become exorbitantly expensive, all publicly funded a.f.a.i.k. On the other hand, housing in general and the existing 19th-century railroad network were built with private money. As an aside, this is why the internet backbones from coast-to-coast are privately owned; these are on railroad land.
Even a rail line such as RER A only has a capacity of at most 40k people/h/direction. It cannot solve all, or even most, transportation problems of a large city. For that, you'd need tens of lines, as in China or Madrid.
A solution is to build transportation first and build housing afterwards. In Japan, rail companies are also real estate developers who buy the land around the stations and capture the increased land value. US rail companies used to do the same.
Good coverage, but it’s absolutely abysmal in terms of reliability, convenience, speed and cleanliness. I tried to survive a week without Uber/driving in LA, and gave up after 3rd day.
If your public transport is mostly used by low income residents, you’ve already failed. It just shows that it’s not good enough for anyone else and alternative methods are superior if you have money.
The US does not have modern transportation infrastructure like similarly sized countries like China. Generally speaking, housing is built near bodies of water or alongside transportation towards bodies of water. Even issues like NIMBYism can be resolved by constructing underground bullet trains that won't affect appearances. This is a hard problem, but not an unsolvable problem. It isn't just economies of scale, government investment, clever economic strategies,etc.. that are needed but actual revolutions in construction technology and transportation. Timelines for construction that are only few years not decades. But alas, I fear the politics of these days would not allow for this.