My concern is whether owning a multi-family home would really give me the autonomy that leads me to want to own a home in the first place. It seems to me that non-single family homes are more similar to rental apartments than they are to true ownership.
For example:
- You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the neighbors.
- You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors.
- You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your ability to customize your home.
I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes. At least in the current system the middle class and the richer end of the working class can often afford single family homes.
where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes
This is the world right now, except that many are "stuck" not in multi-family, but instead are precariously housed, or not housed at all: https://www.evictedbook.com/
I think this is a particularly (North) American take on townhouses. In the UK, the majority of houses are terraced. Your ownership rights are exactly the same as with a detached house. Most have their own garden; you can build a shed or a shop in the back if you have room. You extend and modify as you like (within reason and planning consents). There is no HOA; you are entirely responsible for the bit of roof over your house and your yard/garden. The only shared responsibility is the shared wall, but that is made of brick and likely won't have any problems longer than you are alive.
I had these same concerns, so I bought a SFH. Going from always having rented, I wanted to try out full ownership.
I'm happy with it, but I've realized that all of those things come with downsides as well. Maintaining a yard is rewarding (assuming you like caring for plants and stuff), but also a hassle and a fair amount of work. Similar with all the other items. Of course you can pay people to do more of it, but it's not like that has zero cost, either.
As far as the workshop, I have a friend who does a ton of woodworking out of the garage of his townhouse. It does feel a little bit like luck of the draw with HOA, though.
Generally, I think we talk a lot about the benefits of SFH, but not enough about their downsides, or about the upsides of shared housing. When I lived in an apartment before, tons of things were taken care of for me that I now have to worry about. For now, that is a burden I am interested in taking on, but I think as a society we should stop acting like that should be the default, and all other options are inferior compromises.
> my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes.
I love to live in a city. I love to have access to museums, gardens, universities and good public transportation.
My fear is that people may end up killing the city in favor of single-family homes and making owning a car mandatory. That cities that I love like New York, London, Tokyo or Shanghai may disappear and become an endless shapeless blob of single-family homes without identity were people looks suspiciously to anyone that "do not belong to the neighborhood". It would be a loss to humanity to get rid of the creativity, the openness, the heterogeneity of the city. People has gathered in cities as long as civilization has existed. Cities are civilization.
I have lived in London, Barcelona and Stockholm. Great cities on their own, with good public transportation, services, restaurants, that feel safe, alive, and a bridge between past and future. But, your experience may vary depending on the quality of the cities you have lived in.
As someone who owns a townhome, I feel that this is a misinformed, but common, view of the situation.
> You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the neighbors.
We hear far more noise from the neighborhood in general than the neighbors we share a wall with. Granted they might just be particularly quiet people, but there is some significant sound-deadening in that wall.
I think this is partly because of fire code that says the wall needs to withstand a 30 minute fire before crossing over into the neighboring unit.
> You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors.
This is perhaps unique to our situation, but the area has never been fully built-out, so we have a 5 acre plot of land that the kids can play on as they please.
Since most of our neighbors never come outside, we actually have an enormous yard that we get basically to ourselves.
> You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your ability to customize your home
This is true to an extent, but there isn't really all that much worth customizing on the outside of a house.
I guess you could pick different colored siding, but that seems like an expense I wouldn't be motivated enough to take on.
> I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes.
Honestly this stigma is something I am benefiting from a ton.
I have 1200 feet of living space, plus an attached 2 car garage, plus a 5 acre yard. I paid $106k for all that. I pay $100 / month to the HOA and get lawn / snow taken care of. It's honestly great.
To get an equivalent standalone house in the area I'd be looking at 2-3x the cost.
There are approx 128.6 million US households so at most 4.2% of US households have someone who considers themselves a woodworker. There are numerous shared wood shops out there, so an even smaller percentage will have home woodshops.
I think the "missing middle" seems like a great option for the 95+% of US households who don't need a wood shop.
edit: I just realized you said "workshop" and not "woodshop" but I don't think it makes a huge difference to my argument.
In some regions of the world, multi-family homes are actually preferred compared with single family homes. In Korea, modern apartment highrises offer many benefits that make them a more popular choice, including: better energy efficiency, wired for high speed internet, spacious outdoor recreational areas (playgrounds and parks, often gyms (indoor and outdoor)), attached small businesses (e.g. 7-11 and restaurants on the 1st floor), security guard in the complex (and sometimes in the building), a view if on a high floor, high tech amenities such as keyless entry / video intercom / subfloor heating systems, and more modern design & aestetics. I see a similar trend starting in China as well. Single family homes are either the homes of the ultra-rich or the poor, or traditional country-side homes.
"True ownership" is not universally worshiped. Take, for example, Vienna, Austria. Fewer than 23% of this city lives in owner-occupied dwellings, yet they have a rewarding artistic, social, industrial, scientific society. Not everything hinges on the ability to park a boat in your yard.
To your last point, keep in mind that there is upward pressure on the price of single-family homes from people who want to live in a certain area but don't care about having a yard or a workshop or whatever. when you build a 4-plex on a SFH plot you've gotten rid of 1 SFH but reduced the pressure on the remaining stock by up to 3 buyers.
I don't know what you're picturing, but I'm in the process of buying a two-family home in Providence and it invalidates each of your objections:
- There is a detached garage and a basement, so you have workshop options similar to any homeowner's.
- There is a yard (and this is common in most U.S. cities where two-, three-, and four-flats are prevalent).
- Of course you can modify the outside of the house? I'm confused by this objection. You own the home. You can modify its appearance within the bounds of the law, just as you can with a SFH. (Edit: perhaps you're imagining owning a unit in the home and not the home itself? That makes more sense.)
Obviously, it's not exactly like living in a SFH; it's a multi-family building, after all. But I've lived in these kinds of two-flats both as a renter and a homeowner and it's much more like owning (even as a renter) than it is like living in an apartment "complex."
If some people are willing to live in those kinds of houses, it will decrease the cost of living in the kinds of houses you personally want to live in. This is an allocation problem, not a production problem. If you want or need those things, then building alternatives for people who don't will free up space for people who do want those things. This isn't a zero-sum game.
Most duplexes & triplexes allow #2 & 3. The owner occupies one unit and has full rights & responsibilities over the property: they can paint it, landscape it, put in solar panels, etc. Then they rent out the other unit(s) as a normal landlord/tenant relationship. It's extra income for them, and it's a normal apartment for the tenant (except often a bit nicer because many duplexes have yards and the owner has a stronger incentive to fix things quickly).
Townhomes/condos with an HOA are a different beast. That's a function of the ownership structure (SFH vs. condo vs. TIC vs. apartment) rather than the physical dwelling, though. At least in the Bay Area, it's not uncommon to find SFHs that have been converted into multi-family properties with the addition of an in-law unit or ADU. The vast majority of these use a traditional landlord/tenant relationship.
Townhomes, duplexes, triplexes, etc are substitutes for single family homes (not for everybody, but for some people... like me). You'd expect that allowing them to be built would make single family homes more accessible not less as the people who currently are forced to buy SFHs but would be happy in a townhome would stop competing for them.
More supply of a substitute (in this case, townhomes) should result in lowered demand/price of SFHs.
When you say 'multi-family home' do you mean a single house with lots of families sharing a kitchen and things?
Or do you mean like a terrace home? Like a town-house? Those are super common in many places and it doesn't cause any of the problems you're imagining in my experience.
My house shares one wall with another family. Not sure how you'd tell or what impact you think it'd have. I still have power tools in my garage.
> only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes
That's what we have now. Either you pay for the full detached single-family experience or you are in a high-rise with no autonomy. You don't have the option of with slightly less autonomy than a detached house but more than a high-rise for a lower price that you can get with townhouses or duplexes.
Others have said this in various forms here, but I don't think this is really a problem because the same logic that applies to multi-family homes applies to other aspects of your life, like a workshop or garden.
I have a garden at home, and I love it, but I miss my old apartment where I had to rent a community garden plot, and therefore got to know the community while I gardened. If I live in a co-op housing project and I'm a bit older and can't do repair work on my house, I have a neighbor who can do that for me. If I want a wood shop but wouldn't be able to afford a house big enough to build one even if I can afford to buy my own house, I can get together with a bunch of other people in my community and build that too, pooling resources and owning it jointly. If the internet options in my neighborhood are terrible (ie. I live in a place where my options are AT&T which goes out once a day and wants to charge me $100 before they'll even talk to me about it or Spectrum where I've gotten literally half of the advertised speed and just been told "sorry, our copper isn't very good in that area"), then the tech-knowledgeable neighbors can spin up a local wireless ISP and we can all share a bit of bandwidth depending on what we can chip in and have more reliable, faster, internet for everyone, etc. All of this makes me get to know the people in those communities, fostering neighborly cooperation and understanding. This is why any business I ever start will be a co-op, collective, or some similar model: everyone gets what they want cheaper than if they do it individually, and it builds community at the same time.
I sometimes think that the richer you are the harder it is to build real community because no one has to work together towards a common goal. Most (not all, of course) of the rich people I know if they host a party will have the single house that's hosting grill/buy beer and get catering and don't know their neighbors very well (or at all, in most cases). In a community I used to be a part of where most people weren't as privileged as me and didn't have great tech jobs, we'd all get together and throw a pot luck, each person contributing what they could and everyone knew each other because we'd had to work so much more closely to make the event happen.
TL;DR support your local co-ops and the co-op economy. Democratically run community owned businesses are hard, but well worth the effort.
The parent comment was edited considerably and is a much better jumping off point for discussion than I felt it was when I wrote what is below. Leaving it for posterity.
> The view that a human can only have autonomy and dignity through either a workshop or outdoor hobbies is absolutely wild. You should try to understand other people perspectives, interests, and value functions before you proclaim stuff like this.
Not having a workshop is a minor concern, I believe: plenty of people don't desire one.
I wouldn't buy an apartment in a multi-family home either though, simply because your money is tied for quite a while and it's essentially a lottery whether you have terrible neighbors or not. If they suck, you can't easily leave.
With a detached single-family home, you'll at least have a few meters and two walls between your neighbors and you, and if they can't sleep and walk about and start to sort their books, it won't keep you awake, researching the perfect crime on Google.
>> Often, you can find this in college towns. A monoculture of single-family homes is so obviously ill-suited for a population dominated by students
Not sure if that's a great example.
My aunt owned a home in Ann Arbor that she paid $45,000 for. Over the next 20 years, almost every other home around her turned into a rental units for students. Landlords made tons of money, who could blame them.
She was older and didn't like living in between parties and chaos, and let's not even get into Saturdays during football season.
She did sell the house for almost nine times what she paid for it, though. There's no more empty land there, and hasn't been in forever, so what do you do.
The neighborhoods makeup and appearance is very close to UW, you could swap the buildings in the article and never know the difference.
I'm not sure what alternative you're proposing given that she did in fact live in a college town? Some kind of "no students allowed" subdivision? Keep in mind the FHA requirements.
Madison is a strange example to hold up considering that there's a drastic, almost Boulder-esque shortfall in housing supply, mostly driven by NIMBYism. It's still an awesome city - I'm in the process of moving there - but I know lots of people who've gotten priced out of the city itself, despite (or maybe because of) the coolness of its eclectic combination of architecture.
I have a double and what I love about my double is that after it's paid off, one side will pay off property taxes, insurance, etc. All of that meta financial cruft that comes with owning a house is ameliorated. Cruft that can often add up to close to the price of rent.
Why does this strongtowns crap keep showing up on HN? All of their "evidence" is just anecdotal information, none of their claims are backed by any actual evidence, and their whole site is designed to get you to pay money to become a member and/or buy their books. It's not technical, and it's not even news.
What is it doing here? The same thing that everything else is doing here: someone submitted it. And enough people find it interesting that it makes the front page.
Some of us want to live, not just code. We care about how we live, not just what we write.
Mind you, I myself don't find these strongtowns articles particularly compelling. But enough people do for them to "keep showing up on HN". And I'm not going to say that those who find them interesting are wrong.
Strongtowns has been predicting the death of the 'burbs for as long as they've existed. That drumbeat continues even now, as people (rich, mostly) are flocking to the suburbs and the sun belt to escape overtaxed, overcrowded, and poorly run cities like NYC.
They are a bit like Zerohedge constantly talking about the economy imploding...soon.
The legislation followed popular opinion. The housing was built to satisfy market demand. If no one bought single family homes, fewer would be built. Every person was a kid, and raising kids is by far more comfortable in single family homes.
welcome to my town where you are legally only allowed to buy black beans. People keep buying them so there must be market demand. the legislation must have followed popular opinion. If people don't like black beans then why are they buying them?
Like food, you need housing to survive. housing will be built and purchased because it's necessary, even if legislation mandates a type of housing that isn't well suited to the population.
> The legislation followed popular opinion.
Agreed. The legislation followed the popular opinion that black people were inferior and dangerous and needed to be priced out of white neighborhoods through draconian zoning laws.
Most people don't vote in local elections. ~99.9% of the US (by land area) bans multi-family housing, and those laws mostly come from city councils and neighborhood committees dominated by wealthy, retired homeowners.
I grew up in the suburbs because my parents got priced out of the Bay Area. It was good as a little kid because I could play in the woods. It sucked as a teenager because there was absolutely nothing to do outside of stupid high school drama. I knew a lot of kids who got into opiates, mostly out of boredom.
This take is completely ignorant of the history around this. It is illegal to build anything other than single-family homes in many places in US cities. This is due to an (often-racist) history of homeowners creating laws to keep lower-income people out of their neighborhoods. This continues to this day, where many NIMBY homeowners will fight tooth and nail to prevent any kind of dense development being built in their neighborhood.
Your first two sentences directly contradict each other. There is in fact a lot of market demand for non-fully-detached-single-family-housing that the market is not allowed to satisfy solely because of the zoning legislation. If you actually let the market decide then you will see more density (and cheaper housing options on the lower end).
Hmm, interesting. I have this view that two things are prime determiners of a good life as a kid:
* Things to explore and do by yourself
* Lots of other kids to do these things with
But I don't know. I'm not a parent. I wonder if there are studies that show what happens. For what it's worth, this could just be personal bias. I grew up separately in the country when I was very young and then in a Barcelona-style superblock when I was a teenager, and enjoyed both experiences.
From my perspective as a free range kid in the 2000s, by far the most dangerous was crossing the 40 mph streets into other neighbourhood and getting a threat to call the police just because I briefly cycled in the neighbor's backyard.
In that era, I would want less dangerous streets to cross and actual interconnected bike trails.
If you're interested in learning why this is wrong, the book The Color of Law is an excellent history of the segregationist laws that made things as they are.
San Jose is the third most populous city in CA. 94% of the land in San Jose is restricted to single family homes. Is this because of popular opinion, or because people have no other choice?
> Every person was a kid, and raising kids is by far more comfortable in single family homes.
It is complicated, because distance to school, childcare and to work makes massive difference in child raising too. The distance to friends makes difference between "parent needs to drive the kid for each playdate" vs "the kid walks to play with the friend".
This all may mean that kids in flat are easier practically while kids in single family home mean the parent spends all the time driving them around.
[+] [-] harimau777|5 years ago|reply
For example:
- You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the neighbors.
- You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors.
- You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your ability to customize your home.
I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes. At least in the current system the middle class and the richer end of the working class can often afford single family homes.
[+] [-] jseliger|5 years ago|reply
This is the world right now, except that many are "stuck" not in multi-family, but instead are precariously housed, or not housed at all: https://www.evictedbook.com/
The big missing factor in your analysis is cost. Someone who might be able to afford a $200K home might not be able to at $400K. The goal is to give people a diversity of options. https://jamesjgleeson.wordpress.com/2018/02/19/how-tokyo-bui...
[+] [-] goodcanadian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notJim|5 years ago|reply
I'm happy with it, but I've realized that all of those things come with downsides as well. Maintaining a yard is rewarding (assuming you like caring for plants and stuff), but also a hassle and a fair amount of work. Similar with all the other items. Of course you can pay people to do more of it, but it's not like that has zero cost, either.
As far as the workshop, I have a friend who does a ton of woodworking out of the garage of his townhouse. It does feel a little bit like luck of the draw with HOA, though.
Generally, I think we talk a lot about the benefits of SFH, but not enough about their downsides, or about the upsides of shared housing. When I lived in an apartment before, tons of things were taken care of for me that I now have to worry about. For now, that is a burden I am interested in taking on, but I think as a society we should stop acting like that should be the default, and all other options are inferior compromises.
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
I love to live in a city. I love to have access to museums, gardens, universities and good public transportation.
My fear is that people may end up killing the city in favor of single-family homes and making owning a car mandatory. That cities that I love like New York, London, Tokyo or Shanghai may disappear and become an endless shapeless blob of single-family homes without identity were people looks suspiciously to anyone that "do not belong to the neighborhood". It would be a loss to humanity to get rid of the creativity, the openness, the heterogeneity of the city. People has gathered in cities as long as civilization has existed. Cities are civilization.
I have lived in London, Barcelona and Stockholm. Great cities on their own, with good public transportation, services, restaurants, that feel safe, alive, and a bridge between past and future. But, your experience may vary depending on the quality of the cities you have lived in.
[+] [-] war1025|5 years ago|reply
> You probably can't put in a workshop because the noise would bother the neighbors.
We hear far more noise from the neighborhood in general than the neighbors we share a wall with. Granted they might just be particularly quiet people, but there is some significant sound-deadening in that wall.
I think this is partly because of fire code that says the wall needs to withstand a 30 minute fire before crossing over into the neighboring unit.
> You often don't have any sort of yard or outside space so you can't pursue hobbies that can't reasonably be practiced indoors.
This is perhaps unique to our situation, but the area has never been fully built-out, so we have a 5 acre plot of land that the kids can play on as they please.
Since most of our neighbors never come outside, we actually have an enormous yard that we get basically to ourselves.
> You can't modify the outside of the house so you are limited in your ability to customize your home
This is true to an extent, but there isn't really all that much worth customizing on the outside of a house.
I guess you could pick different colored siding, but that seems like an expense I wouldn't be motivated enough to take on.
> I guess my concern is that this would lead to a world where only the rich can have homes that give true ownership and everyone else is stuck in multi-family homes.
Honestly this stigma is something I am benefiting from a ton.
I have 1200 feet of living space, plus an attached 2 car garage, plus a 5 acre yard. I paid $106k for all that. I pay $100 / month to the HOA and get lawn / snow taken care of. It's honestly great.
To get an equivalent standalone house in the area I'd be looking at 2-3x the cost.
[+] [-] guyzero|5 years ago|reply
There are approx 128.6 million US households so at most 4.2% of US households have someone who considers themselves a woodworker. There are numerous shared wood shops out there, so an even smaller percentage will have home woodshops.
I think the "missing middle" seems like a great option for the 95+% of US households who don't need a wood shop.
edit: I just realized you said "workshop" and not "woodshop" but I don't think it makes a huge difference to my argument.
[+] [-] shard|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enragedcacti|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionidium|5 years ago|reply
- There is a detached garage and a basement, so you have workshop options similar to any homeowner's.
- There is a yard (and this is common in most U.S. cities where two-, three-, and four-flats are prevalent).
- Of course you can modify the outside of the house? I'm confused by this objection. You own the home. You can modify its appearance within the bounds of the law, just as you can with a SFH. (Edit: perhaps you're imagining owning a unit in the home and not the home itself? That makes more sense.)
Obviously, it's not exactly like living in a SFH; it's a multi-family building, after all. But I've lived in these kinds of two-flats both as a renter and a homeowner and it's much more like owning (even as a renter) than it is like living in an apartment "complex."
[+] [-] c3534l|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|5 years ago|reply
Townhomes/condos with an HOA are a different beast. That's a function of the ownership structure (SFH vs. condo vs. TIC vs. apartment) rather than the physical dwelling, though. At least in the Bay Area, it's not uncommon to find SFHs that have been converted into multi-family properties with the addition of an in-law unit or ADU. The vast majority of these use a traditional landlord/tenant relationship.
[+] [-] zacherates|5 years ago|reply
More supply of a substitute (in this case, townhomes) should result in lowered demand/price of SFHs.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|5 years ago|reply
Or do you mean like a terrace home? Like a town-house? Those are super common in many places and it doesn't cause any of the problems you're imagining in my experience.
My house shares one wall with another family. Not sure how you'd tell or what impact you think it'd have. I still have power tools in my garage.
[+] [-] TheCoelacanth|5 years ago|reply
That's what we have now. Either you pay for the full detached single-family experience or you are in a high-rise with no autonomy. You don't have the option of with slightly less autonomy than a detached house but more than a high-rise for a lower price that you can get with townhouses or duplexes.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] SamWhited|5 years ago|reply
I have a garden at home, and I love it, but I miss my old apartment where I had to rent a community garden plot, and therefore got to know the community while I gardened. If I live in a co-op housing project and I'm a bit older and can't do repair work on my house, I have a neighbor who can do that for me. If I want a wood shop but wouldn't be able to afford a house big enough to build one even if I can afford to buy my own house, I can get together with a bunch of other people in my community and build that too, pooling resources and owning it jointly. If the internet options in my neighborhood are terrible (ie. I live in a place where my options are AT&T which goes out once a day and wants to charge me $100 before they'll even talk to me about it or Spectrum where I've gotten literally half of the advertised speed and just been told "sorry, our copper isn't very good in that area"), then the tech-knowledgeable neighbors can spin up a local wireless ISP and we can all share a bit of bandwidth depending on what we can chip in and have more reliable, faster, internet for everyone, etc. All of this makes me get to know the people in those communities, fostering neighborly cooperation and understanding. This is why any business I ever start will be a co-op, collective, or some similar model: everyone gets what they want cheaper than if they do it individually, and it builds community at the same time.
I sometimes think that the richer you are the harder it is to build real community because no one has to work together towards a common goal. Most (not all, of course) of the rich people I know if they host a party will have the single house that's hosting grill/buy beer and get catering and don't know their neighbors very well (or at all, in most cases). In a community I used to be a part of where most people weren't as privileged as me and didn't have great tech jobs, we'd all get together and throw a pot luck, each person contributing what they could and everyone knew each other because we'd had to work so much more closely to make the event happen.
TL;DR support your local co-ops and the co-op economy. Democratically run community owned businesses are hard, but well worth the effort.
[+] [-] enragedcacti|5 years ago|reply
> The view that a human can only have autonomy and dignity through either a workshop or outdoor hobbies is absolutely wild. You should try to understand other people perspectives, interests, and value functions before you proclaim stuff like this.
[+] [-] luckylion|5 years ago|reply
I wouldn't buy an apartment in a multi-family home either though, simply because your money is tied for quite a while and it's essentially a lottery whether you have terrible neighbors or not. If they suck, you can't easily leave.
With a detached single-family home, you'll at least have a few meters and two walls between your neighbors and you, and if they can't sleep and walk about and start to sort their books, it won't keep you awake, researching the perfect crime on Google.
[+] [-] bluedino|5 years ago|reply
Not sure if that's a great example.
My aunt owned a home in Ann Arbor that she paid $45,000 for. Over the next 20 years, almost every other home around her turned into a rental units for students. Landlords made tons of money, who could blame them.
She was older and didn't like living in between parties and chaos, and let's not even get into Saturdays during football season.
She did sell the house for almost nine times what she paid for it, though. There's no more empty land there, and hasn't been in forever, so what do you do.
The neighborhoods makeup and appearance is very close to UW, you could swap the buildings in the article and never know the difference.
[+] [-] nitwit005|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|5 years ago|reply
Don't the students get together in little groups of four to six and rent a family home? That's what they do in the UK.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tfehring|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickthemagicman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwhiz|5 years ago|reply
What is it doing here?
[+] [-] chrisseaton|5 years ago|reply
It's a magazine, not a peer-reviewed journal.
Sometimes that's fine. Sometimes a casual conversation about issues without a reproducible study is ok.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|5 years ago|reply
Some of us want to live, not just code. We care about how we live, not just what we write.
Mind you, I myself don't find these strongtowns articles particularly compelling. But enough people do for them to "keep showing up on HN". And I'm not going to say that those who find them interesting are wrong.
[+] [-] briHass|5 years ago|reply
They are a bit like Zerohedge constantly talking about the economy imploding...soon.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] flerchin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enragedcacti|5 years ago|reply
Like food, you need housing to survive. housing will be built and purchased because it's necessary, even if legislation mandates a type of housing that isn't well suited to the population.
> The legislation followed popular opinion.
Agreed. The legislation followed the popular opinion that black people were inferior and dangerous and needed to be priced out of white neighborhoods through draconian zoning laws.
[+] [-] apsec112|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notJim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CydeWeys|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|5 years ago|reply
* Things to explore and do by yourself
* Lots of other kids to do these things with
But I don't know. I'm not a parent. I wonder if there are studies that show what happens. For what it's worth, this could just be personal bias. I grew up separately in the country when I was very young and then in a Barcelona-style superblock when I was a teenager, and enjoyed both experiences.
[+] [-] kiba|5 years ago|reply
From my perspective as a free range kid in the 2000s, by far the most dangerous was crossing the 40 mph streets into other neighbourhood and getting a threat to call the police just because I briefly cycled in the neighbor's backyard.
In that era, I would want less dangerous streets to cross and actual interconnected bike trails.
[+] [-] dublinben|5 years ago|reply
https://wwnorton.com/books/The-Color-of-Law/
[+] [-] gnopgnip|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] watwut|5 years ago|reply
It is complicated, because distance to school, childcare and to work makes massive difference in child raising too. The distance to friends makes difference between "parent needs to drive the kid for each playdate" vs "the kid walks to play with the friend".
This all may mean that kids in flat are easier practically while kids in single family home mean the parent spends all the time driving them around.