A YouTube site called “Oh the Urbanity!” challenges the “myth” that five-stories is the “optimal” height for residential buildings. I would agree, except Oh the Urbanity! thinks that taller, not shorter, is better and criticizes other urbanists who are satisfied with “only” mid-rise buildings.
I’ve got news for Oh the Urbanity! Most Americans (surveys say 80 percent) wouldn’t want to live in your towers even if they cost no more than a similarly sized single-family home. They especially don’t want to live in mid-rise or high-rise buildings that cost a lot more, per square foot, than single-family homes.
That fact that self-described urbanists are arguing over whether five stories or ten stories is “optimal” just shows they are completely out of touch with reality. Imagine if some group calling themselves “New Nutritionists” got into a debate over whether Americans should regularly eat more Beluga caviar or foie gras. Forget about debating the health benefits: not only would regular consumption of these foods be beyond the budgets of most people, if Americans were given a menu with these two items, the typical responses would range from “eww! Fish eggs!” to “goose liver — yuch!”
It is notable that one of the greatest advocates for density on the West Coast, architect Peter Calthorpe, lives in a 4,800-square-foot single-family home on a 0.39-acre lot in Berkeley. Meanwhile, one of the greatest advocates for density on the East Coast, economist Edward Glaeser, lives on a 4,792-square-foot single-family home on a 6.32-acre lot in Weston, Massachusetts. These people want others to live in mid-rise or high-rise apartments but don’t practice what they preach.
The United States has plenty of land and doesn’t need to pack people into mid-rise, high-rise, or even dense low-rise housing. If every one of the nation’s 132 million households lived on a quarter-acre lot, they would occupy just 33 million acres, or less than 1.5 percent of the nation’s land area, and still spend less on housing than if they were in mid-rise or high-rise buildings.
I have no problem if someone wants to live in a five-story, ten-story, or fifty-story building and are willing to pay the cost of doing so. I do have a problem when people advocate using urban-growth boundaries and other rural land-use restrictions to create an artificial shortage of single-family homes, and then try to make up for that shortage but heavily subsidizing the construction of mid-rise or high-rise residential buildings that many people don’t want to live in even at the subsidized prices. It is probably too much to hope that the squabble between the mid-rise and high-rise advocates will take up so much of their time that they will leave the rest of us alone.
