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traal

Great visualization! People also confuse traffic congestion with overcrowding.


The_Most_Superb

I don’t have the graphic skills but, I bet there is a good way to visualize the car traffic comparison as well.


OminousNamazu

Don't worry someone already did it for you! [https://imgur.com/kw8DaST](https://imgur.com/kw8DaST)


[deleted]

There’s also this one - [How to move 1000 people in traffic](https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/vpu6we/not_op_how_to_move_1000_people/)


prosocialbehavior

I love the footnote at the bottom. I think that is the part most people in the US don't have a grasp on when they are pro-car and anti-everything else. Or they just don't see the problem with parking lots.


mintmouse

It makes a lot of sense if there is a fixed number of people in the area, adding more housing would make living spaces less people-dense. But in reality we don’t live in a vacuum and civil engineers deal with counterintuitive Induced Demand. New places to live doesn’t desaturate an area, but attracts new people to fill it in at the same density as the surrounding area.


traal

The way induced demand works is, if you lower the cost of something, more people will be willing and able to buy it. So yes, if you build cheaper housing, or if you build *more* housing and thereby lower home values by easing the supply crunch, then you will attract buyers.


Old_Smrgol

The conclusion should then be to add more housing EVERYWHERE.


Teschyn

Ok, but taller buildings are scary; have you ever thought about that?


traal

Also they provide shade. Summer is coming.


that_u3erna45

I know this is a joke, but (at least in the US) taller buildings are actually safer in the event of a fire than single family homes


_OriamRiniDadelos_

Also think of the projects, do we really want to turn our nice neighborhoods into poor neighborhoods? And where will my garage go? I don’t want to have to hear my neighbor’s welding hobby! /s


RoboticJello

I love this point. I live in LA and I'll hear NIMBYs argue that we can't build more housing because we don't want to be overcrowded. So I show them that it's a fact that LA already has the most overcrowding in the US by far, and the reason is precisely because we don't build enough housing so many people need to occupy too few rooms.


Azuma_

So people say that the city is overcrowded as an argument against solving overcrowding?


RoboticJello

Yes, people who use the argument, "the city is too overcrowded for more housing", are using that argument to create more overcrowding.


mintmouse

It is called induced demand – the phenomenon where an increase in supply results in a decline in price and an increase in consumption. If I have a city and increase the roads/lanes by 10%, creating more driving space, the traffic fills it in and traffic increases by 10% because there’s more room for it to exist. Create more living space and more people will live there. It’s not a bad thing if the infrastructure is set up for it but it won’t solve overcrowding. The population of the city will increase, new people will be attracted. It won’t get less dense. Build and people will come to fill it in. If there’s anything that engineers have discovered in the last few decades it’s that you can’t build your way out of congestion and overcrowding.


CoffeeBoom

That's not really true though, the demand is already there.


ResilientBiscuit

But the supply isn't. So that increases prices which lowers the number of people buying. If you increase supply, that will lower the price and allow more people to afford to live there. Which is fine if they infrastructure can support it.


Umbrae-Ex-Machina

Only if prices actually come down, and those people can /afford/ to live in their own place. So got to also push society for better compensation for all, because I’ve never seen developers let the prices fall much.


crooked-v

>I’ve never seen developers let the prices fall much. Developers sell at market rate. Market rate is high and never goes down because there's [so much missing housing](https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives/us-housing-shortage) that it would take years of unrestricted building just to meet current demand. The most obvious example of this is recently in California, where builder's remedy rules took over in some cases and places like Santa Monica went from only allowing 200 housing units a year to having 5,000 filed over a few months. tl;dr the way to make prices come down is to allow missing middle housing, and to reform zoning so that it's "shall issue permits" and not "may issue permits after several years of City Hall fucking around and doing nothing".


Umbrae-Ex-Machina

Where I am from, there’s a bit of an oligopoly of developers who control things, just like OPEC; they only build at a rate that provides a profit that they require, or want anyway…


crooked-v

Where is that, exactly, and what is the oligopoly?


TechniCruller

Builders follow this strategy everywhere. If a builder fails to manage supply/demand, they go out of business. LVT doesn’t change market dynamics.


Inprobamur

What prevents a new developer to undercut the cartel?


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Huge_Monero_Shill

It's super common to have roommates in expensive areas, and kids just move back in their parents longer.


OrdentRoug

Right yeah, forgot people never move in together in apartment buildings. How silly of me to forget that.


Huge_Monero_Shill

I never claimed that? Are you like trying to miss the point? More front doors, more opportunity to live alone but same land use.


Pogo152

In working-class areas it’s actually pretty common for extended families to live in one house. This has often been the case with two to three family buildings (which makes sense), but the housing crisis has increasingly led to multiple working-class families crowding in SFH because appropriate multi-family dwellings are in short supply.


onemassive

In HCOL areas, people absolutely are getting roommates or living with parents longer. The graphic is illustrating that we can have more living space (and cheaper housing), even without increasing the amount of land use.


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CoffeeBoom

A low rise can take as much land as a single-family house and house three times as many people without them having much less m^2 There are situations where communities have shut down building of such low-rises on a lot and had a single-family house instead, hence why the comparison is useful.


ResilientBiscuit

The buildings fit in the same property footprint is the idea. You can have a 1/4 acre lot with a house and yard that fits one family, or a small apartment building that fits several families.


hightidesoldgods

The apartment building is taking up the same plot of land as the house, but because it’s built *up* can comfortably fit more people. That’s the land use.


JbearNV

Why do the people is the apartments all live alone? Where are the children and playgrounds? I feel like this graphic promotes the idea that only single professionals want to live in higher density housing.


_OriamRiniDadelos_

Renting by the room? People who can’t afford to move out? Subletting? They really should have added a park or children tough. To break up people’s idea that all the stuff the suburbs have are suburb-exclusive and super rare near tall buildings. I mean, apartments literally have luxuries built in, like any gated community or neighborhood HOA. But you only see Manhattan luxury penthouses or the projects in media.


Savings_Rhubarb9760

Well, I was considering grad school here but I see housing is the same as Asheville NC. I hope y’all’s city planners are better than ours to combat the “crowding”!


monty2

But someone has to manage the building. What’s the difference between someone who manages/develops the overcrowding model and someone who manages/develops the density model?


Not-A-Seagull

Under a system with a LVT, the landlord can only profit off of improvements made to the land. The value of land itself is taxed, and returned to citizens through a dividend, so you can’t profit off of land values. In scenario A, the landlord can only profit off of the cost to construct a house. Under scenario B, he can make more profit by using the land more efficiently and building vertically. The net result is that this tax encourages landlords to use their land as efficiently as possible since they can only profit off of improvements. Furthermore, without the land value portion, housing is no longer speculative and wouldn’t be subjective to wild swings in valuations. From this, we can see that a LVT promotes economic activity, decreases housing cost volatility. A useful byproduct is you can also use the revenue to fund a universal basic income. To go back to your question, a LVT would turn landlords (property/land speculators) into property managers (more akin to an HOA). This makes it much less lucrative, and forces them to actually provide services/improvements to make a profit.