It’s too bad that the potential to do the obvious thing - build trains to the transit deserts - is not an option even worth mentioning. This is the state of US infrastructure.
In a most of these cases, this land is in neighborhoods that already have a housing shortage. If you’re going to take the land of groups of people to build transit, you’ll displace many households at once and into a market with reduced supply and increased demand. Anyone want to wager whether those property owners will be truly properly compensated? Anyone want to wager whether tenants displaced will be compensated at all, let alone enough to find a comparable place?
But separately, as much as I respect the right for someone to their property, I think we as a society in the USA overindex on that personal right vs the public benefit and the health of the community as a whole, hobbling forward progress.
Just like the other commenter talked about Europe, I’m living in Japan currently - a far older country with far more people per sq foot who had to be relocated for the very thorough transit system here to be developed, with far less resources than the USA had when it was being built out.
The result is not that you end up with housing shortages, the effect is instead that transit dramatically increases the amount of viable land to live on within a reasonable commute to the city, creating cheap housing surpluses - provided that incentives are set up properly to encourage that housing production, as opposed to the USA’s hopelessly restrictive permitting/zoning + the incompetence of government to efficiently utilize land at transit stations + the unwillingness of the govt and electorate to allow private enterprise to do it instead (as it extremely profitably is done here in Japan).
That’s why I can get my current 1 bedroom apartment 15 minutes from the center of Tokyo for $600/mo here, a literal impossibility in even 2nd or 3rd tier American cities like the one I grew up in. And no, I’m not living in a shoebox or a soulless high rise, I live in a vibrant walkable neighborhood of low rises - since the combination of transit development, small (re: proper scale) streets and unrestrictive zoning means that a high quality of life is accessible to far more people.
Not to mention that if American cities were willing to deprioritize cars a bit you can probably get a pretty good system going almost entirely built on streets that are way wider than they need to be/evicting cars from those thoroughfares... glad to see baby steps in NYC and SF to do it a little, but at this rate it’ll be centuries before anything significant happens.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Subway_Extension
https://www.nj.com/traffic/2017/04/new_york_subway_extension...
The Hudson is a fjord, a flooded valley carved out by glaciers between the Palisades of New Jersey and the bedrock of Manhattan, and not an ordinary river. Transportation across it is expensive, both in terms of investment and energy costs, and should be minimized.
We want to increase mobility by mass transit. Ideally, you could live in Brooklyn and commute to New Jersey, for example.
That's the other problem that no one is talking about, everyone changing their job every three years. You can't live close to your job, instead you have your hour-long commute. It's exhausting and a waste of time and gasoline.
JPMorgan may move workers out of New York, here's where they may go -- https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/jpmorgan-shifting-worker...
But, you know, there are some passenger trains, and if you ride them and pay attention, you will see the big problem - the US has lots of rail and it's used for freight, which takes precedence.
So, maybe people should step back and ask whether this is actually a logical way for the country to be run, economically and environmentally.
High speed intercity rail needs a new railway system. There can't be any grade crossings with highways - a 200 mph train hitting a flatbed semi with a bulldozer on it is not something you want to have happen. The railway has to have curves of much larger radius that are banked correctly for high-speed operation. High-speed rail can have steeper grades, since the locomotives are powerful and the cars are light. High-speed rail is electrified with overhead catenaries, while freight is diesel with high clearance for double-stacked container cars.
In the past I've mentioned you could build a high speed rail from Chicago -> St Louis -> Kansas City -> Denver -> Colorado Spring for about $100 billion. Probably.