There is no part of New York City that is over crowded.

Sure, people have different preferences.  That’s why I think cities shouldn’t force certain kinds of development.  Let people choose for themselves.  The problem is that in the vast majority of the country the only housing that can legally be built is McMansion sprawl.  Let’s not tell someone who owns a factory or…

But that’s the conflict: if you never allow old buildings to be replaced, the city can only grow with sprawl.  And remember, that existing housing will just get more expensive on its own without new housing to meet demand.  Plenty of objectively shitty apartments in the village that used to be cheap, and are still…

More density means more things close together, which is a huge help for all non-car transit.  For biking specifically, the more bikes on the road the safer it is, and that justifies more of the best separated bike lanes.

Well, it’s both.  Suburbs are worse, but NIMBYs in every big city still do their thing to block housing.

Then that’s what they’ll get.  Everyone should be able to make their own choices.  The problem is when sprawl is mandatory.  I like urban living, but others don’t and that’s totally fine.

I don’t know, because they want to?  There’s no shortage of space to build.  Near me are a bunch of short, old buildings.  There’s also a defunct hospital that will be replaced with apartments (that the neighborhood successfully sued to ensure that it would be small and lack affordable units).  Seriously, there’s no…

Sometimes that happens, but the alternative is never allowing anything to change, which is worse.  You can’t freeze a city in amber.  The West Village looks pretty much the same as it did in the 70s, but it sure as hell didn’t stay cheap.  All you can do is keep making enough new housing to keep up.  Keeping one…

People move all the time.  If the rule is “nothing should ever change,” then nothing would ever change.  People can decide what to do.  If the lady I was renting from sold her house and I had to move out at the end of my lease, I’d understand.

We don’t need more firehouses or cops (and policing costs don’t go up by much with more people), hospitals have been closing because they haven’t filled their beds (St. Vincents, for one), and the city can easily use the money they get from construction to build schools and improve the subways. Plus, with more density…

If only we had the technology to build multiple housing units on top of each other on the same plot of land.

Property taxes in NYC are actually low. The issue is 100% supply and demand, with supply artificially constrained by dumb regulations.

There are actually some good NFP developers in Portland, I recall, but even they point out how dumb regulations spike their costs.  Fixing developers seems like a tougher approach; might as well just loosen zoning and parking minimums first.  That way the city makes money instead of spends it, and can then decide what…

That’s why the city should let people build. It’s exactly what Nolan is saying. Get rid of the regulations that block construction and you’ll get more construction. If the city only allows a few projects, though, they’ll all be super-lux. How many cheap Kias would be sold if the US capped new car sales at 1000 a year?

What’s your actual complaint?

You don’t have to eat up any green space.  Just let people build taller buildings with less parking.

They can stop preventing its construction, though.  The reason it’s not getting build is that the developers aren’t allowed.

It’s absolutely a choice.  The problem is that almost every city in America has laws that make it illegal to build apartments and instead mandate sprawl.  Give people more choice and a big part of the problem will get solved on its own.

The thing is, market pressure is so in favor of small-scale urban living and walkable neighborhoods that if we just allowed them to be built there’d be a huge shift in construction away from sprawl and towards those denser types.

It’s a housing crisis. People pay above market for fancy new units, which leaves older/cheaper units available for less rich people. It’s that simple. It doesn’t solve the entire problem, since even in a better political world it would be hard to build enough, but the silver lining is that allowing more construction…