Suburbia and the housing theory of everything
Back home for the weekend.
A new M&S foodhall has opened up alongside an ALDI and a Costa coffee store near my house. It’s situated on a giant parking lot that gives access to all three stores, plonked in the middle of an urban sprawl.
The net result?
The Costa coffee at 06.30am on a Sunday, is half full. Apparently, it’s always busy. Even just this morning, I saw atleast 3/4 cars drive through in the 5 minutes I went to pick up the only half decent cup of coffee I could find within walking distance.
It’s nice! Human settlements need centres, and that is doubly true for suburbia, which can feel like a village of strangers.
It only makes sense that the centre becomes a giant parking lot with the amenities clustered around it.
I remember listening to a Tyler Cowen podcast where his guest pushes back on the concept of urban sprawl. “It’s ugly”. “Everyone is in cars”. “You have to drive everywhere”. You don’t see people around.
My gut reaction on listening to that was agreeing with the guest. I am against urban sprawl.
Tyler’s reaction was much more sanguine - what’s the problem if people drive? It’s convenient. You have more space. Better living conditions. He had no problem living in the middle of nowhere America and driving around.
Sure you sacrifice walkable cities, but you gain something in return and that can be valuable depending on what you want.
Against suburbia
The arguments against suburbia have been made time and time again. It’s banal and lacking culture, aesthetically homogenous, less dense, less sustainable, isolating when you divide public and private space so readily. It can lead to separation of social classes. The centrifugal movement of people to the edge of cities hollows out centres, leaving only tourists or crumbling high streets.
I agree with many of the above, but what I agree most with is : we need to build more housing. No NIMBY attitudes or stringent regulations. We just need to house people and treat it as a right rather than an investment.
I enjoyed this wonderful article in Works in Progress titled ’the housing theory of everything'.
In London that increases to 10.5. In 2000, when my parents bought a home, the price:earnings ratio was 3.6.
Housing is completely broken with huge downstream secondary and tertiary effects on society, which the article explains well. It’s the ’theory of everything’. It impacts fertility rates, productivity, buying of goods, social mobility, developmental patterns (extended adolescence), civil unrest, unhappiness of citizens and much more.
Meanwhile, older generations sit on housing property worth many times what they paid and, stuck in a zero-sum mindset, often prioritise the protection of their own neighbourhoods over the need to build more homes. Can you blame young people who resent older people, and the West’s economic system itself, when this is what it offers them?
I look at countries like Japan and cities like Tokyo that somehow have relatively affordable housing. Why? Because they build dense housing.
Japan has fairly lax building regulations with less NIMBY’ism (unlike the UK that likes blocking hospital expansion) It does result in ‘uglier cities’, but also creates denser cities where there is a sense of aliveness. You get weird businesses, jazz bars, izakayas, because you can actually afford to open up a business. Tokyo is 4x more densely populated than NY. More than 45% of the countries inhabitants live in Osaka and Tokyo. It accounts for more rail travel than any other nation..
The net result? A city that feels relatively liveable.
I will say, I love London. I really do. But the exorbitant costs of living here is unsustainable.
The average Londoner puts up with spending 50% of their income on rent. This might put with it for now, but it will undoubtedly create a less rich and bustling society when the locals are all forced out and replaced with students or only the rich.