@slowfallinward @Moon @animeirl @ageha The problem is there's a lingering stigma in most of America where people believe it's irresponsible to raise a family in an apartment. It's going away because single family housing is increasingly hard to come by, but I do think the pivot away from single family housing is somewhat responsible for demographic collapse in the US.

@mrsaturday @slowfallinward @Moon @animeirl
you wouldn't need apartments all crammed together if the non-living stuff was spread out among the living stuff

@ageha @slowfallinward @Moon @animeirl @mrsaturday not entirely true, you still need to avoid sprawl because it's very uneconomical in terms of public infrastructure. most cities here in sweden are densifying their cores and building new high-density neighborhoods just to cope with population increase (but they are european style multi-use neighborhoods, yes, with stores and such at the bottom floor and apartments above that, it's unthinkable to do it the american way here)

everywhere around my city in particular is private farmland and nature preserves, they've had to buy up farmland at great cost to be able to build new neighborhoods at all, densifying is cheaper

i've watched documentaries on this, and many US municipalities are apparently in the red just because they need to pay idiotic infrastructure bills due to urban sprawl

@whiteline @slowfallinward @Moon @animeirl @mrsaturday
you mean electricity and water and such? road maintenance? or efficiency of commercial interacting each other?

thinking of phoenix particularly, benefits of desert can implement functional solar spread out everywhere on rooftops and such, at least, so current grid could be made defunct in a little while, and expanding is just building on empty desert (though that's sad). roads are an issue, but could have fewer of those if fewer people driving around? (also could just build two-story houses and stores and things rather than every single building having one floor everywhere and massively reduce footprint that way but 😅

(and of course water use has been kept way down, so that wouldn't be an issue consumption-wise if not for having to subsidise LA etc...

@ageha @slowfallinward @Moon @animeirl @mrsaturday yeah i mean all the public infrastructure like gas mains, roads, water, electricity and so on. apparently it's a major problem financially? i guess if you disperse solar throughout the city then you need a lower-capacity power grid for it though, which could save on running costs?

personally i think three to five story mixed commercial/living is ideal, that's what the city core here is like (or commonly throughout sweden). there's also no private car traffic in the city core allowed (and we have real cobbled streets). one of the reasons we don't build tall buildings here is that the sun lies so low most of the time, that's not really a problem in phoenix though i guess?

one of the new neighborhoods here is actually a very american thing in that it's private money (just the schools and parking garages and roads and such are public) with lots of different architects, completely walkable with only the necessary roads. it's a bit sterile and expensive, but it's fit for purpose. if you could do that out of thin air and mostly private money here you could do it in phoenix

@whiteline@shitposter.club @ageha@tomo.airen-no-jikken.icu @slowfallinward@ihatebeinga.live @Moon@shitposter.club @animeirl@shitposter.club @mrsaturday@shitposter.club most cities in the us are financed like a ponzi scheme due to, you guessed it, federal funding
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason-your-city-has-no-money
you can literally map out these growth/debt cycles on maps of cities since they form rings a lot of the time, just look at some satellite photos of cities over decades