> Plenty of people live quite well in denser environments
Very few do.
> and in any event, it should be a choice.
It is a choice, if you can afford not to. That's why the people in those environments are disproportionately both the very poor who can't afford to choose and the very rich who can afford the expense of mitigating the harms; the people who aren't super rich but can afford to choose just tend to choose not to live in dense environments.
You’re basically supporting OP. OP is saying it’s not a reasonable choice right now because it’s not a good choice, and then you’re confirming his point by saying that it’s not a good choice.
OP is asking for it to become a good choice by fixing the problems that lead it to be a poor choice right now.
The main way of mitigating it is spending lots of money to make your own living conditions not dense, despite living in an area that is otherwise dense.
That is, it is convenient to live in an area where services and amenities and the people needed to staff them are dense, so long as you personally can afford not to be packed in a tin like the rest of the sardines.
No, Density is not the thing that makes it bad. Tokyo and plenty of other highly dense cities are perfectly livable.
The issue at hand is that many economic centers like San Francisco are adding several times more residents than housing units. There's onerous zoning and processes by which existing residents can block new housing. There's also price controls that disincentivize housing. These factors cause a chronic undersupply of housing, making housing very expensive even though San Francisco isn't all that dense. That's why almost all the YIMBY attention is on urban areas like these experiencing housing shortages.
Why would they push for more housing in suburban and rural areas that aren't experiencing chronic housing shortages? Most rural areas have shrinking populations.
>> Plenty of people live quite well in denser environments
> Very few do.
So the people living in NYC, LA, Chicago, etc are not living well? That's news. Tell me how else I'm not living.
Outside of the very core of these cities, you can live, and live well while benefitting off of all the things large urban centers provide (culturally, financially, etc).
> So the people living in NYC, LA, Chicago, etc are not living well?
Not the ones that aren't making significantly above national median income, no. High income work (and even more so large acal5 capital ownership) makes it possible for people to afford to mitigate the downsides of dense living, which is why the presence of high wage work and capital returns leads to more people voluntarily accepting sense living conditions.
Eliminating the choice of low-density living by reducing availability will force more people who can’t afford to mitigate the downsides of dense living into it.
(We need more dense housing in places where it will relieve the problem of people being unhoused; those people already typically experience dense conditions with added downsides; but forcing people who would otherwise choose to be housed in lense-dense conditions into dense conditions is reducing the quality of life.)
How will people be 'forced' to live in dense conditions? What's happening now is that people who would like to live in, say, Silicon Valley, where their job is, are forced to live far away and experience a very long commute every day. Many of them would choose to live closer at the tradeoff of having fewer square feet to live in. How is giving them this choice reducing anyone's quality of life?
When people talk about density, everyone has a different idea what it means. That said, you can have density without having crowding. Crowding is something that everyone agrees is bad, but density is neither bad nor good--it totally depends on so many factors. You can have enough population density to have a lot of walkable amenities and viable public transport and still have large living spaces and even personal gardens/yards.
Very few do.
> and in any event, it should be a choice.
It is a choice, if you can afford not to. That's why the people in those environments are disproportionately both the very poor who can't afford to choose and the very rich who can afford the expense of mitigating the harms; the people who aren't super rich but can afford to choose just tend to choose not to live in dense environments.