I was walking past my mailbox the other day, clutching a bag of organic kale from the Co-op, when I noticed something peculiar. The vacant lot next to my property, which used to be home to a very nice, very quiet patch of dirt and three dandelions, is now sprouting a steel-and-glass structure that looks remarkably like a vertical shipping container. It is four stories tall and has an elevator that faces my kitchen window.

When I purchased my place back in 2006, I paid a normal amount of money for it. I remember the checkbook felt light, and the mortgage payment was roughly the price of a mid-sized sedan today. Back then, the most exciting development in town was a new stop sign on a residential street. We didn’t need verticality because we had plenty of horizontal space, and nobody seemed to be in a particular hurry to reach the M Trail before the sun came up.

My neighbor, a man named Gary who has lived in the valley since the glaciers receded, tells me that this is called “density.” Gary says we need more housing for all the people who want to live here, which is a lovely sentiment. It is very neighborly to want more people to experience the joy of paying two thousand dollars for a studio apartment with a view of a brick wall. But I cannot help but notice that these new buildings are significantly thinner than the ones I am used to.

They say these units are “luxury.” I suppose that is true if luxury means being able to high-five your neighbor through the drywall while they are brushing their teeth. It makes me wonder why we are working so hard to fit so many people into a space that, historically, only liked to hold one or two people at a time. It feels a bit like trying to put a Great Dane into a toaster.

I’m sure the math works out for the investors from out of state, but the math doesn’t seem to account for the fact that my street is now a permanent parking lot for delivery trucks. I’m not saying growth is bad. I’m just saying that in 2006, you could leave your car running in the middle of Main Street for twenty minutes to run inside a hardware store and nobody would even look up from their newspaper.

Perhaps we should just stop building things that have more than two stories. The mountains around us are high enough as it is. We don’t need the houses to try and compete with them.

Howard Benchpress owns a home he bought in 2006 for what he describes as ‘a normal amount of money.’ He brings this up frequently.