When it comes to developing new housing, many people outright reject the idea of building density, but if you listen to what they actually say they fear, it is crowding. It’s understandable to confuse the two, density is a measure of the number of people (and sometimes jobs) per unit area of land. And crowding is related to how much space each person has. They sound like they are each other’s inverse–but they aren’t, density refers to people per land area, crowding is about space.
Crowding and density are related, and people can imagine crowding: an image of tenement housing, hundreds of people living in very close proximity, many people in a bedroom. And indeed, tenement housing also has very high density.
So how are crowding and density different? Crowding measures space: how much area there is for people to live and work in. It depends on how much land a person has but much more importantly, how that land is used. In North America, where the majority of the land is used to store and transport cars, and where homes are built in a space-inefficient manner, a lot of land is required in order to achieve low crowding, where people feel they have enough space.
But when people object to building denser housing, they describe crowding as the thing they reject. They talk about not having enough space. They describe feeling closed in. They express concern about being too close to other people. But dense housing reduces crowding, because dense housing gives more space per person for the same area of land. It can also reduce the need for land for storage and movement of cars.
To go back to our tenement housing example of crowding, a modern skyscraper has the same density, but each person has their own apartment, their own bedroom, a kitchen, they have space, they are not crowded. Not everyone will want to live in such a home, but the point is to illustrate the difference between density and crowding.
Crowding is what happens when there is not enough space for everyone. We find ourselves crowded for two main reasons:
Insufficient Housing
The first is insufficient housing. Indeed, many university districts (unlike many other aging neighborhoods) that have heavily restricted building new housing (often to appease NIMBYs who are afraid of crowding), are in fact very crowded. Unscrupulous landlords have modified small 3 bedroom family homes to have five or even seven bedrooms. And students, desperate for housing, will often even share bedrooms. In this way, you could easily have 10 students living in a very small family home. That same home may now have many cars parked in front, yard space consumed with cars. That is crowding.
The very thing that people feared has occurred as a direct result of those people’s fears: a self fulfilling prophecy.
Modern North American suburbs are extremely low density. They have a huge amount of land, but it is used extremely inefficiently. There is plenty of space to accommodate more people, but as a result of fear of crowding, this is often opposed by current residents, despite the fact there is plenty of space for more people.
If we instead redeveloped that land to be more efficient, so that there is more space for people, that land would hold far more people, at a higher density, without crowding.
Scale
The second major cause of crowding is far more insidious. Scale is a fundamental feature of our modern world, and one that has brought us enormous prosperity. By scaling things up, companies, manufacturing, buildings, we can do more with less. It is absolutely the case that scale has in many ways improved the lives of everyone in North America.
But scale is not without challenges. Scaling up teams of people for companies or organizations of any kind is extremely difficult. But when applied to public facilities, scale also contributes to a feeling of crowding.
Retail stores create larger and more centralized stores to increase their efficiency. It takes fewer resources (managers, repairmen, sales staff, forklifts, bailers, leases, realtors etc.) to service the same population in fewer larger stores than many smaller stores. This means that larger stores can lower their costs and hence lower their prices and therefore outcompete smaller stores. It is why we see (when not restricted by regulation) a strong trend towards ‘megamart’ retailers like Walmart and Costco. (Of course the ultimate scale is to monopolize the market completely, which has its own problems).
Larger stores feel more crowded than smaller stores. It sounds strange, there is more space, they are (or at least can be) less dense? Again, density isn’t the same as crowding. It depends on how the space is used. In any store people won’t be evenly distributed. People have to pass through the entrance. Shelves where everyday items and staples are sold will be visited more often than areas with niche items. Checkouts and service desks will also be choke points. The massive parking lot will often be congested with vehicles. But even leaving that aside, the scale of the place is detached from the human experience, you will simply see many more people when at a larger store. All these things together contribute to a feeling of crowding.
We can also look at this in terms of roads. Modern traffic engineering prioritizes driving to the exclusion of all other modes. Because of the disruption and danger that cars create, it also focuses all those cars onto a few major roads. This means that in a modern North American suburb you will have a few major large scale but heavily congested roads that are filled with cars, which themselves take up far more room than more efficient vehicles like buses or bikes.
The result of this is that scale directly drives a feeling of crowding to people. It is why when shown a video of a well used bike lane, people will often say it looks empty, despite carrying far more people than a congested vehicle lane.
This is simply a case where our endless drive for efficiency brings us to a suboptimal result. If you ask most people, no, they do not like the crowds at the megamart, but if you asked those same people if they’d shop at a more expensive store or a store which had fewer of the items they wanted, they would also answer no, despite the fact that it would fix their crowding problem.
Conclusion
People don’t like crowding: this is pretty uncontroversial. The challenge is in helping them understand that density reduces crowding, rather than encourages crowding. I’m not the first to suggest this either. Prominent urban academic Brent Toderian has recognized this conflation of density with crowding before.
Further Reading: Op-Ed: Dear Gov. Cuomo, The Problem Is Crowding, Not ‘Density’!
Housing is only the tip of the crowding iceberg. From mega sized schools to mega sized supermarkets, our capitalist, efficiency oriented society is constantly striving for solutions which increase crowding and congestion in our lives for the sake of reducing costs.
I think we need to do a better job understanding the costs of these decisions and to be more self directed as a society.
But for the moment, I’d simply be happy if we could build more density to alleviate the crowding that gen Z and millennials are experiencing in their housing situations.