this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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Simply approving more housing helps too https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/
Building more housing helps, but building new housing will remain expensive for as long as land is expensive, so it's vital that we avoid wasting land. Which means density.
Some people read "density" and think "ah, taller buildings!", but that's only half the picture - you can save tremendous amounts of space by improving horizontal density - look at how dense OP's one storey housing is, by shrinking the houses, and by ditching the front yard and dedicated sidewalks.
Except, most of the space is still empty! Those streets are oversized (take a look at traditional cities, most streets are under 20ft wide (6m wide) wall-to-wall), and the houses all have gaps next to them which look big enough to fit (or almost fit) another house. So you could easily more-than-double the density without even going up, assuming the housing isn't car-centric (I'm guessing those empty spots might be car parks, and the streets are overly wide because they're for cars).
If this sounds nitpicky, it's not: building one-storey houses is dirt cheap; imagine trying to make a portable two-storey tent. It even makes it realistically possible to remove developers from the equation, without too much going horribly wrong. It just needs to be efficient with the land it uses.
240sqft = 22.3sqm
What the actual fuck are these suggestions. This sounds a lot like the conservative members of my area that argue homeless people don't deserve anything. They want to cram the all into one building with no privacy, get rid of sidewalks and green spaces because people loiter, and generally make life as uncomfortable as possible for the destitute instead of treating them like normal human beings.
For reference, your standard wheelchair accessible hotel room will not be less than 20sqm.
approving more housing is like realizing that hey maybe i should stop actively hammering the splinter into my toe!
i mean yeah, you should do that, but if that's the point we're at maybe it's time to start screaming about it rather than going "man this situation is suboptimal"