This is a big issue that is facing many cities. Due to increasing population from immigration, many cities are dealing with housing shortages. There are people who cannot afford to live in the city, and there is a lack of open available land to build new housing developments. As a result, there is a push in many of these cities to implement a policy called "Missing Middle". This involves allowing high-density housing and changing the zoning. But this is controversial. High-density housing might be a good idea, except there are some big issues. Conventional high-density housing involving big buildings takes up a lot of space. Usually there do not exist a lot of big lot spaces in these cities that are available to build on. As a result, typically the cities and developers want to target single home lots. This means that what was once a single house with a big yard space gets turned into a two, or sometimes four home unit structure. Building upwards seems like it would be the obvious solution if there is a strain on the available land space to build. But what most people do not realize is, building up is expensive. Especially when going from two levels to three or four levels. That makes construction costs exponentially more expensive. The building structure requires stronger reinforcement, and there are all sorts of additional building code rules that come into play, which make it more expensive. What you will see in most apartment buildings is to compensate for this increased cost and try to keep the housing more affordable, they will make each unit inside the apartment building small. This means people are crammed into very small living spaces, without much room. But what happens more commonly is that the developer will build the structure wider, rather than upwards. This is much cheaper. But this means less open yard space surrounding the building structure. The building can end up being very close to the street or the neighboring properties, without much or any "buffer space". Many people feel this creates an undesirable feel in their community. Where open space becomes scarce, even the sight of open grass yard space in front of other people's homes. It can end up making the neighborhood feel very closed off, crowded and claustrophobic, and take away from natural green space and plants. There usually will not be many big majestic trees in these neighborhoods, because there is not enough space for them. As part of the policy push for "Missing Middle", they are pushing to get rid of "setback" requirements in the building codes and zoning. This is the green yard space buffer that surrounds each building, between the structure and the property line. While in some cases, allowing for a wider building is a pragmatic requirement for having a three or four level building, what more often happens is this is just used as an opportunity to convert yard space into housing space. Green open lawn is converted into housing space. This is clearly a trade-off. The other thing that these cities usually do not consider is the car parking situation and road traffic congestion that adding these additional housing units will create. In many of these higher density type suburban areas, available parking space can be very difficult to find and it can be very frustrating. I mean where someone might have to drive around, oftentimes in circles repeatedly, for 15 minutes to be able to find a parking space. And then when they are lucky enough to find one, sometimes it's another 10 to 20 minute walk to get from the parking space to where they were trying to go. The problem is, with so many people living, there are cars taking up most of the available parking on the street. People might even be reluctant to go anywhere at certain times because they cannot be sure they will be able to secure a parking space when they go back. Often in higher density housing, because they converted all the lot space into housing, there is not space for parking, so the people living there have to park their cars on the street. Many of these high-density housing units have driveways that are too short to park a car. Many do not even have a garage. Or there might only be one garage for each housing unit, which inevitably creates a problem because many people have more than one car, or often there end up being more than one adult resident living in each housing unit. And many people cannot park their car in their garage because they have converted it into storage space, something that is more likely when the area inside their home is very small and there is no space on the property for a big storage shed. All this is not surprising when you consider that a land space that was once designated for one household to live on now holds four separate households. Progressive proponents of higher density housing often point to improved public transportation as being the answer to deal with these parking and traffic congestion problems. But this simply is a deflection and platitude, because the issue of having adequate public transportation never gets addressed before these cities move forward with their plan for higher density housing. And most of the people living in these new housing units probably will not want to use public transportation, so it is unrealistic. One possible way of dealing with this might be to create a special stipulation so that people living in these new high density housing units have to agree not to have a car. But that type of city policy is very unlikely to ever be implemented. It would be too distasteful to the Left because it reeks of a type of "inequality" in privilege. Another big reason many suburbs are very resistant to wanting to allow high density housing is because they know it would bring in lower income groups. This can impact public schools, and bring crime and other social problems. In many cases one of the big reasons households chose to live in the suburbs was to get away from lower income groups. This is especially the case in the U.S., which has higher level of diversity than some other countries.
Proponents of "Missing Middle" housing will often argue that it used to, in the 1940s, be common for American cities to allow four-plexes (4 home units combined together in one building structure). And that these cities changed their zoning rules to ban four-plexes later. But what these proponents neglect to mention is that most of these cities required the four-plexes to be built on double lots. This ensured adequate open green space surrounding each building, and in fact the lots with four-plexes built on them often had more open space than lots with regular single family homes built on them. (This was because each unit was smaller, and separate units were stacked on top of each other, with the building having only one staircase) This type of design simply has some big differences from what the proponents of "Missing Middle" policy would allow today.
