Brisbane is nothing like America, where people can buy houses at 1/4 of the price we do and can buy everything they need at half the price, like furniture appliances and cars. American has 10x more cities than we do.
Brisbane is a shit area and peaked in about 1985-1995 according to my dad. He finished HS just before Expo88 and said it was probably the best time to live in Brisbane. He said that back then you could barely even see one person who was from India or Asia.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Zag’s reply summed it up pretty well, but yeah, building lots of car-centric sprawl and bringing the socio-economic and environmental issues that come with it is a bad idea
Medium density is absolutely essential for maintaining a high quality of life at affordable prices. It’s about more than just available land area.
It’s also about services to that area, like roads, public transportation, and delivery costs.
It’s about quality of life in the form of time taken to get into the city for work, as well as how easy it is to get to sporting clubs, social activities, etc.
It’s about the impact on the environment of sprawling inefficient low-density houses with large amounts of hard unnatural surfaces and exceptionally low amounts of natural shrubbery.
It’s about the ability of children to gain independence and not need to be driven everywhere because it’s unsafe for them to get on their bikes and ride to cricket practice or to a friend’s house.
It’s about the economics and physical & mental health for an individual household being able to live their life without needing to own one car per person and put up with the stressful hour-long daily commute.
Medium density housing is so much better than low density in almost every way, if the build quality is good. The only serious downside of it is noise, and modern high-quality materials and building practices basically eliminate that as a factor. We should absolutely be encouraging medium density.
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