Tiny homes reduce housing density and effectively necessitate car usage to connect people to services which is already unaffordable and will only become more unaffordable. Electric golf carts and public transit do not solve this problem.
Sounds like an awful plan to me. Increasing energy costs mean we need to densify instead of sprawl. I’d be thinking apartments, townhouses, vertical mixed use developments. Things which generally make commuting on foot or light transit more viable.
Compared to say townhouses or low rise apartments, which is the level of density I believe is needed for suburban living without a car to not be miserable.
I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good, so if a town can be convinced to replace larger lots with smaller lots of tiny homes, I guess that’s an improvement but calling it a solution is a bridge too far.
"Tiny homes reduce housing density and effectively necessitate car usage . . . "
Compared to what? Most of the USA, and ESPECIALLY Texas, is full of single-family homes at 4-7 per acre. Tiny homes can easily be 20-24 per acre. Zoning and banking prevents building tiny home communities. We are awash in suburbia and you claim tiny homes reduce housing density?!?
you need to do both but I think it's better for the smaller homes thing to come second because that has lots of negative outcomes if you implement that when there is a shortage (i.e. you supply a lot of tiny units that noone will want once supply and demand come back into balance from higher density and then you end up spending a lot of unnecessary resources demolishing/rebuiling/combining).
My bigger concern around this higher density is uneven reconfiguration of the transportation corridors to accommodate more walking/cycling/non stupid transit (i.e. subway/lrt/trams and other forms that aren't sharing the road and therefore getting stuck in the car congestion). If you build much higher density and still expect everyone to get around by car, that's a disaster in itself.
The sustainable solution is transport-oriented development. Replace suburban with a sustainable urban that puts retail, office, and even agriculture very close to modest but comfortable homes.
Even if they're all electric cars? This is why I live in the suburbs. You can't champion density as the solution on the one hand, and then say, "you have to drastically change your lifestyle to support density!".
Just let people who don't want to live in density pay for the externalities of low density living (require EVs, higher cost for infra, etc).
There's a much, much better case for apartment buildings, but those increasingly can't be built in places people want to live, so I guess the US is going to have to figure out how to make the cheapest possible low-density detached housing. Trailers and RVs and other manner of tiny-house shantytowns fit that bill.
Shame there can't be population density growth in cities.
One thing I wish was brought up more is the missing middle [1]. Having denser neighbourhoods is good for a ton of reasons, and having more available housing units would be super helpful for this. Of course, zoning laws restrict this heavily, and car dependent infrastructure also encourages single-family homes with space for multiple vehicles easily accessible in a driveway/garage.
Obviously this wouldn't be a silver bullet, but I really wish North American urban planning would allow for more freedom in housing structures, and put more emphasis on public transportation. Hard to have faith though.
You would have to somehow transform 50+ years of suburban sprawl into a higher-density, less car dependent living arrangement, that's also _cheaper_ than the current one, and affordable to e.g. restaurant and retail workers.
There's NOTHING good in building dense housing. It always (ALWAYS) leads to more misery down the road: higher housing costs, smaller units, more congestion, etc.
Want truly affordable housing? Bring jobs to smaller cities. You don't have ANY other option.
No, "transit-enabled" housing won't help you. No, banning cars and forcing people to bike won't help you. No, screaming at the "end stage capitalism" won't help you.
Annnnnd why is it that cities aren't building denser housing?
(it's because it's illegal. Because of parking minimums, density maximums, and level of service rules. Which exist because of cars. Which you need to go 10 miles because everything is so far apart. Because of those rules. Because of cars.)
I'm not sure I follow. Low density housing is much worse for the environment than high density housing. Lower density means more transportation burden, larger energy costs to deliver utilities, greater risk of those utilities breaking, and more wildernesses being paved for roads and housing.
There's nothing environmentalist about low density sprawl.
All these debates about housing and transportation in the USA seem to never even approach the idea that high density would solve the problem. Build vertically, build tightly - that is where urban happiness lies... Not in an individual house at the end of some suburb where no one can go anywhere without a car !
I'm going to hazard a guess that the OP agress here but I'll at least chime in with my own take on that which is our building habits of desertification of the planet (grass and a few trees is a biological desert) based on a mistaken belief of cheap, infinite oil to power cars happily down roads unimpeded by traffic, building cheap houses that won't last at out of plastic, composite materials which are needed because of poor architecture and a negative heating feedback loop were a bit unsustainable.
We're both under-building (in terms of volume, and quality) and over-building in terms of spreading things out too much.
This does not mean pack everyone into skyscrapers like Hong Kong. It means building medium density neighborhoods like we used to (ya know all of the most expensive places in America? Wonder why they're so expensive...) where most of your daily activity would involve walking or biking somewhere, you have some yard in the back of your home and you probably own a single car but can certainly own more than one if needed. But transit isn't 99% (literally) car-based infrastructure.
EVs won't solve these problems. The root problem is car-based infrastructure so more efficient cars just puts more people on the road and uses more resources. The only solution is changing architecture and neighborhood design.
This is a fantasy and completely regressive. How do you plan on dealing with the ensuing riots? Housing supply doesn't appear overnight, especially in the US where building, worker safety and environmental standards slow the process down to a crawl. Most of the new urban housing is 4 story wood construction because of the above reason, not nearly the density needed to eliminate cars without massive mixed rezoning efforts that are politically unfeasible or massive mass transit infrastructure investments that would also suffer the same issues as higher density housing developments listed above, also throw into the mix that there is a cultural aversion to mass transit in the US that won't likely get resolved in time to fight climate change effectively.
You will be displacing 10s if not 100s of millions of people with such a policy, you need a place for them to go if you don't want severe civil unrest.
That's only due to the density of development and the cheap materials/ designs used for housing. In theory a town could be both small and dense with energy efficient designs.
Sounds like an awful plan to me. Increasing energy costs mean we need to densify instead of sprawl. I’d be thinking apartments, townhouses, vertical mixed use developments. Things which generally make commuting on foot or light transit more viable.
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