Less parking could mean more housing
pewtrusts.org
pewtrusts.org
Based on the track record of most of the demographics I see pushing for improvement I fear we'll wind up with some hellscape that combines the worst of both.
We don't have medieval cities, but saying cities were designed around the car is patently false.
Yes, the fifties and sixties caused huge redesigns, but we can undo those.
It's not. Cities have literally been created from nothing in the last few decades. Just because NYC, Atlanta, DC, etc. are old are have a history of redlining does not mean that every city does. Case in point: the cities around where I grew up were built in the last 3 decades. Those cities didn't have a choice but to have zoning laws and miles of road.
I live in Seattle, for instance, which used to have a network of rails. They've all been torn out and we're just now putting them back.
1. get rid of zoning laws that prevent building multi-family units.
2. invest heavily in public transit. Buses are great if they are widespread and arrive frequently.
3. in areas that have significant traffic, use trams/subways instead of buses. They carry way more people and don't sit in traffic.
4. make city centers dramatically more walkable. A 4 lane street is much harder to cross than a 2 lane street (or 2 one way 2 lane streets).
5. don't build new roads/highway exits that will encourage further sprawl.
I expect average household size to have decreased significantly, so it wouldn’t surprise me if at least 75% of inhabitants lived in post-war houses.
Because of that, I don’t see suburban construction as a major difference between the USA and the Netherlands.
A major difference likely is that the USA has room for sprawl, while the Netherlands doesn’t. Dutch suburbs likely are more dense than ones in the USA.
It was built to be replaced. We should try that!
Like the parent said, there was a big push all across europe for cars to be the norm[0]; the US just had more space to continue this deleterious activity.
But it can be reversed.
It just takes effort and deliberate will.
[0]: Jay Foreman has some fun videos on cycling in London, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gohSeOYheXg
Plus, you cannot “reboot” Atlanta to match your cute vision of a core city in the snap of a finger.
I am not saying nothing can be done. I am saying that it is a lot harder that books and papers and studies make it seem.
Unsure, people have really ingrained ideas about cars in the US, any attempt at discussing alternatives is met with emotional backlash and it's very difficult to talk passed this. It's actually very similar in the UK, though you can see a difference in cities with good public transport and those without, it's like we optimise for extremes in either direction.
Objectively if it was a good option (not arguing that it is right now) to have a solid public transport system; people are ideologically opposed because of the belief that public transport is inconvenient, unsafe, a loss of personal freedom etc; and it's hard to argue those points because they're coming from an emotional place, thus people cycle between those issues in an attempt to deflect direct refutation over each one of the points individually.
Cycling infrastructure (as per Amsterdam), a healthy rail network (also NL) and a semi-competent bus and tram system are all parts of a larger picture when referencing public transport.
The solutions are similar, even if they're not the same, there is a lot of research on public transportation and what makes sense where, if one only looks.
The same issue applies to most other large US cities.
Compare that to the nine county Bay Area. There's nearly one transit agency for each county and a few regional agencies (BART, Caltrain) to contend with. The constant bickering and infighting is exactly why nothing gets done.
The actual model of cities is optimized for profit, so all parts involved in building cities can take as much as money they can.
Things will only change when the alternatives to the actual model exceed the actual model in terms of profit.
Or when new players disrupt the market and divert the money flow to other model.
Another way to say this is a stubborn refusal to do things that do not "make sense" under the current model of economics (personal profit above all) because you revalue what is valuable in a society (eg social/corporate well being)
(corporate meaning groups of people, not LLCs)
Without viable mass transit in most American cities the "less cars" mentality falls flat. As a society ruled by "NIMBY" we just don't have the social will, nor seem to care enough about one another to move anything productive forward. As another comment said, the nations that reduced dependence on autos did no decades ago. These towns/cities/suburbs were literally built around a society where everyone has a car. Very difficult/impossible to change at this point without a major catastrophe or other externally influencing event.
I don't think a major catastrophe is required at all. We're already at the point where a huge chunk of our infrastructure is already in dire need of repair and/or replacement. This is a perfect opportunity for improvement.
The main issue working against this is that the public realm is completely degraded because it only accommodates car traffic. Other ways of getting around are bullied out by high speed, dangerous cars. It's a textbook example of a vicious circle. The fact that there are a few urban areas in the US where owning a car is a drag due to parking issues, should not hold back meaningful improvements and efforts to break out of it anywhere else.
So some critical threshold will occur where it becomes obvious that you have a vast unused road infrastructure, because the total urban fleet has consolidated into something that is physically smaller and literally less road-dependent, and nobody is there to prop up car ownership politically except a few enthusiasts and people living out of their cars. At that point downsizing is imminent everywhere.
It only took 20 years for cars to overtake horses in the industrialized world, and the bulk of it happened in 10. It'll happen faster this time.
It's not an "until the last home in rural Montana is near a subway stop we're not finished" kind of problem.
You don't need a car in NYC, so --- been there done that I guess! But the rest of the US is setup differently, and people like it that way.
People who want to live NYC move to NYC, people who don't, live in places with more space.
Even if that was true (which it does not seem to be, given that the real estate values in neighborhoods most closely resembling the netherlands in the US are among the most expensive in the country) it seems like a moot point. The cities that are built this way aren't financially sustainable and that much car usage is basically incompatible with future life on earth.
That statement assume "people like it that way" applies to all people. Even if 80% of the people preferred the suburbs/rural experience, the fact that city layouts are only available on a small portion of the land means that it will cost more.
You appear to be claiming that Netherlands can achieve car free living because it’s tiny and flat, and yet you point to a U.S. city that has made car free living possible despite being nearly half the size of the entire country of Netherlands, and therefore massively bigger than any Dutch city.
So which is it? Is being tiny an advantage or is it a disadvantage?
Most US urban areas can easily achieve car free living the way the Dutch did. Obviously the suburbs cannot, but that does not prevent American cities from trying.
Have they been exposed to anything else? Be honest. I was raised in the rural midwest where there wasn't even the concept of public transportation; now I live in NYC with no car, and I've never been happier or healthier.
Most city suburbs are chock full of people who used to live further in.
I now vastly enjoy living in my own house where closets are bigger than my flat's living room and driving anywhere I want. Everyone I know in the city is less than an hour away. I shop for groceries every two weeks and sometimes on the way from work. My commute is 20 minutes a day. I visit more different places in a month than in a year of living in the "walkable paradise".
It's nearly impossible to have an objective opinion on something that one has no example or experience of. Medieval peasants would want supermarkets and modern living if they were given the change to experience it.
It doesn't even have to be much less, just no longer require it and it starts to solve itself.
Last time she came to visit, somebody got stabbed at the bus station an hour after she passed through. Someone got murdered on a bus within a few blocks of me two months ago.
I'm living in a very walkable neighborhood with only a moderate parking availability problem and similar groups of people are encouraging the police to do nothing while encouraging density nonsense through restricting parking.
If you want to create dense slums where the only people who don't leave are those who can't afford to, this is exactly what you should advocate.
I don't want to live somewhere where I have to worry about a guest's safety, cars achieve that to a significant degree. Fuck everybody who wants to ruin cities by cramming people in as close as possible.
That's crazy that people are getting murdered at your bus stop though. What city do you live in?
People getting murdered, assaulted, and robbed isn't a homelessness problem (it is quite hard to survive winter being homeless in Minnesota) it is a gang, poverty, and policing problem. Part of it is accepting a large number of Somalian refugees, a small but significant number of whom disproportionally contribute to crime, but it's not exclusively that group.
Despite the business robberies, gun shots, assaults and murders blocks away from me, my rent is still $2000.
However the "was that a gunshot or fireworks" question nearly daily with about a 50:50 distribution is not good for my stress levels or general sanity.
But trying to go entirely car-free is a pipe dream; but "car reduced" is possible.
What would be roughly a 30-40 minute trip by car becomes an hour and 20 minutes by bus, if you don't need to change buses too many times to get to your destination- and that's by ideal conditions (bus isn't running late, etc) (that example used stillwater park&ride to the north loop).
I too don’t want to take the subway or bud late at night in Stockholm or Gothenburg, as in my youth. Witnessed too many car burnings and shootouts.
It sucks to access things without a car because we made it that way, it's not an inherent quality of dense environments.
But I think the correct place to do the revival is not at the city centers but at the edges; we could reduce the "land use" of suburbs by 50% or more without diminishing the quality of life, and suddenly things that don't work because the density is too low would start to make sense.
For example, it's insane that I have to have my front wall set back 40 feet from the street, which itself is 50 feet wide to allow for parking on both sides - I'd much rather have a street with no parking that was maybe 20 feet wide in total, and allow the front of the house to be right up against the sidewalk on the same lot - get more useful backyard and reduce street speed too.
Everything where I live is accessible, but there's nothing you can do to make a bus schedule beat a car trip, and it's ridiculous that somebody a couple of miles away needs to be an hour away to justify a tiny bump in density for idealists.
Crime on public transit doesn't mean public transit is bad, it means that public transit is a last-resort option patronized by the most desperate members of society. If our cities were designed for more convenient public transit, more people would be willing to take the bus, and your average patron would be less likely to be one of the scaries that you and your visiting friend were worried about.
It still smelled like a latrine (once I'm positive someone shit in a fast food bag and left it in the middle of the car sometime before my midday ride). BART wasn't a "last resort option" but an "only resort" if I didn't want to spend $100 a day on parking.
It's not even public transit, my neighborhood is past the point of "safe" especially at certain times of day where I don't want to subject anybody who couldn't beat me in a boxing match to walking around significant distances between sunset and 10am (lots of people getting mugged around 7 or 8 in the morning too).
But it doesn't have to be like this. It's very possible to build dense living spaces that are nice to live in.
But more to the point, you are free to live in the middle of nowhere if you want to. If you don't want to live in a dense area, the vast majority of residential areas in the US cater directly to you. Personally, I'd like to live in an actual city, and I'd like to pay less than $5000/month for a decent 1 bedroom apartment.
I would like not to be forced out by idealists.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
Density also makes services like policing cover more ground for less money. Japanese & european cities are often much denser and face lower crime rates.
Yeah they don't. At least not the way you're implying. e.g.:
- That rural town in Maine (Passadumkeag) that basically shut down because its sole clerk couldn't survive on $13,000 annually.
- There's plenty of state and federal money in local government. Texas, for instance, will use state funds to ensure a minimum level of school funding even in rural areas.
- Some places don't have much in the way of services. For e.g. Timathy Taylor in Klamath County, Oregon. The sheriff there has three (3) officers to patrol 6,136 square miles.
The uniquely north american model of cities oriented around sparse car centric growth is just not sustainable in the long run. Every metre of asphalt paved & pipes placed is a metre of commitment to eternal maintenance, and when that metre connects to a tiny suburb of 15 people that can't remotely afford the bill for the infrastructure that supports them then you have a cities that grow over the long run towards massively subsidized development, soaring property taxes, & growing debt.
That seems more like rural. Every suburb I've lived in has been on the order of 5,000-40,000 people (and that's one town, with towns not separated by anything but an invisible line).
Less parking makes density higher, which is a bad thing, not a good thing. Why do you call it an improvement?
People are not livestock to be packed in a tightly as possible. Give me space to live. Everyone should have a basement or a garage where they can keep random tools for random projects.
People should have backyards with enough spacing where they can have solitude from other people.
People should live far enough apart that you don't hear your neighbors.
Are there actually people who prefer to live packed in tightly with other people, in tiny apartments with barely space?
How many of those places can you visit without a car?
One thing people can get confused on is that density doesn't necessarily go hand-in-hand with mixed usage - you could have relatively low density areas that are extremely mixed so there's always basically everything within 15 minute walk, and you could have very high density apartment buildings with nearly no services to speak of.
Suburbs are especially bad at this because they segregate the living and the sleeping areas far apart from each other (but relatively short by car).
So I drive about 10 minutes and go to the larger stores, the selection is better and the prices are better because the land is not so crowded.
I have family who live in a very dense city without a car - every time I visit they "stock up" and go on multiple car trips with me to visit slightly distant stores to buy all the stuff that is cheaper, or hard to transport without a car.
The car isn't going away because it's simply too useful. No matter how hard you try to make a city that supposedly doesn't need one, the car option is still better.
Let's stop telling people what they should want and let the market build what people want. If "the market" builds what nobody wants, some folks are gonna lose some of their own money and someone else will make a profit from correcting it.
The fact of the matter is: many people in the US like it how it is, even if we don't.
Edit: If anything we currently have the reverse case, with dense areas where infrastructure is shared by many subsidizing less dense areas where roads and houses serve much fewer people while providing less tax revenue. There have been some good articles on here about this over the years.
Nobody is advocating forcing everyone to live in dense housing. Our current political/legal system massively favors and subsidizes lower density. Removing that favoritism is not unfair at all.
If you don't fund their roads you can't tell them "but you need a sidewalk".
The Americans with Disabilities Act says you need sidewalks.
What's the enforcement mechanism if the entity writing the rules doesn't control the purse strings? Tie them up in court for 10yr and then when you finally win they just do something marginally different to the same end (i.e. exactly what we see with civil liberties).
Yes because those people still own cars and they park those cars in other peoples parking areas. The cars don't magically stop existing, the developer just has a better bottom line because they have been subsidized.
Isn't it already illegal to park on other people's property without permission?
It’s funny because we would literally have more space if cars and their infrastructure took up less of it. So, in a way you’re advocating for cramming people together.
> People should have backyards with enough spacing where they can have solitude from other people.
> People should live far enough apart that you don't hear your neighbors.
I think that sounds just fine. And you can do that in America today. What does that have to do with living in the city or in nearby residential suburbs?
Sure it does, if you have a normal sized house, then you have space in front of the house, on the street where you can park. You also might have a driveway.
And there are no "giant surface lots" needed.
> you’d see tree-lined streets, beautiful large houses
And in front of those houses is a place to park. If the house is properly separated from the neighbor you can even park along the side of the house (if you always put two driveways together from neighboring houses, then driveways save space relative to parking on the road).
> It’s funny because we would literally have more space if cars and their infrastructure took up less of it.
The car is far to useful a tool to get rid of. Why do you think that even people in dense European "utopia car-free cities" still have cars?
I've tried it both ways - I'll never go back. I'll never live in a dense city.
Yes. That’s not really under debate here.
> You also might have a driveway.
You could do that so long as you wanted to waste that space on your lot, but you don’t need that because you can park on the street near your house instead or in your garage behind your house (where the alley is). Personally I’d rather have more green space, or just to have a bigger house since I live at my house and my car is just some random machine that is fine sitting out all day and night in all weather conditions.
> And there are no "giant surface lots" needed.
Right… yet that’s what mandatory minimums and car-first public transit are creating. That’s what we are complaining about.
> The car is far to useful a tool to get rid of. Why do you think that even people in dense European "utopia car-free cities" still have cars?
I’m confused about this statement. Where did I suggest we needed to get rid of cars?
> I've tried it both ways - I'll never go back. I'll never live in a dense city.
I think that’s great! You can totally live in the country. I find it very appealing myself. Just stop the continuous public transit subsidies of highways when we already have more than enough for all future needs for the next 50 years. It doesn’t make sense for people who live 5 miles outside of downtown to have to drive a quarter mile down the road each way to get a gallon of milk. We can’t afford it and we are going to bankrupt ourselves and the planet with this asinine waste of energy. It also has personal benefits for you living in the country because you’ll have fewer people driving.
My house was built around the time the automobile became common, meaning long long long before parking requirements or even driveways and I have a yard… I highly suggest you take a look around - even within the US - at older neighborhoods and see how nice and quaint it can be without loud, smelly, space wasting cars.
This will never happen because the bulk of the people pushing for less cars a) see regulation as an inherent good and would rather regulate toward the outcome they want than just dispose of bad regulation and watch it happen organically b) wouldn't be caught dead agreeing with libertarians.
Whether you live in a car-dependent suburb, or in a city, real estate that lets you save time when living will always be more valuable.
In addition, low interest rates might be the reason people CAN buy houses with enormous valuations. Not just housing is overvalued, but companies' stocks also.
> Not just housing is overvalued, but companies' stocks also.
Berkshire has outperformed houses.
If I could have bought my 4 bed house with average garden on the outskirts of London for £50k, I wouldn't have bought it. I'd have bought an 6 bed house with a swimming pool, huge garden, double garage and driveway in central London instead, for the price I paid for my house. Not to get rich, just because I'd like more space, a pool, a big garden and a short walk to one of the world's best city's centre.
It's a physical impossibility to build everyone a large detached family home in the city centre, and most people don't want to live in apartments forever.
I believe the real solution is allowing small towns to grow into cities, and building a ton of very fast and effective rapid 24/7 transport so you can ferry people into the urban core of large cities from those cheaper smaller cities. We can scale out fast trains in a way that we can't scale out cycling, walking and cars.
In my mind, the ideal model for a livable megacity is an extremely large conurbation of individually small, walk/cyclable cities with low to mid-density housing, with the cities separated from each other by large public green spaces and all linked together with rapid public transport, and huge disincentives for cars.
I believe this would not be the case if we built apartments better.
For my personal take I'd need a communal workshop / garage to store and work on my motorcycle, far better sound deadening, equivalent square footage of personal space, a nice playground for my kids, affordability to move to N+1 bedrooms when N+1th child arrives, and that fresh clean air feeling that the suburbs has which downtown SF's crap and urine infested streets do not... oh and as affordable as the suburbs (net of benefits of being central)
You do get less freedoms as a renter though. Like I've never had the option to choose any kind of paint, tile, carpet, on demand water heater, reverse osmosis water line etc etc.
But you get other freedoms, like being able to move without having to go through the pain and cost of selling you house. That being said, I do agree that "all things being equal", it's better to own than rent; but there are certainly cases where renting makes more sense.
Plus I don't think all landlords are evil. I've had a number of them that were fantastic people; more than the number of bad ones I've had.
It sounds like a Fat FIRE concept that is out of reach of most people. Or at least something the average person would only be able to access later in life.
> You do get less freedoms as a renter though.
But you also aren't responsible for all the things that can break. And natural disasters.
I have heard of many renters painting their apartments.
It's not that far off the amount sunk into a equity+interest view of a mortgage ... eg a $500K house would be about $1M after interest. A $1M portfolio would provide about $2500-3300 a month in passive inflation proof income[1]. A quick rule of thumb is a place should rent annually for about 1/19th - 1/20th the purchase price which conveniently is about ~2200 a month...
So overall if someone could afford to buy, they likely could also afford to choose a portfolio and a reasonable rent.
[1]: we'll have to wait and see how true this remains through the kind of inflation we're seeing lately though...
> I have heard of many renters painting their apartments.
Yes, but they likely either were renting a place that had terrible paint (doing their land lord a favor) or had to return it to the original colors at the end of the lease, else face "repair" costs
I have a full sized private garden that I can grow plants in, keep a large bunny enclosure, shed, and let my dog run around in unsupervised. I spend a lot of time in my garden.
I can just drill holes in my walls without asking anyone and never have to share a lift with neighbours. I can hand out keys to whoever I want without building management getting on my case, or indeed replace the keys with a non-key entry system. I don't need to spend 2 minutes waiting for a lift to get downstairs, or longer if someone's decided to block the lifts while they move in/out, or climb 15 floors because they broke the lifts.
Personally, moving from an apartment to a house has been the biggest QoL improvement in my life since I left home 15 years ago.
Some guidelines assume two working adults per unit, each with their own car. However, we're finding less spots are needed. With local commercial development, one car per unit is turning out to be more the norm for some areas and even less with greater density, since public transit is often better. Having satellite parking /w shuttle might also be a solution for those who only "need" a car for weekend travel.
Mostly what the people in my California city who "rely" on street parking need to do is stop hoarding and clean out their garage, and stop collecting used Volvos to store in their driveways.
The fact is that yes, people who want to live in city cores and own cars there are going to have compromises. Parking needs to be less common and more expensive. Driving will become a slower, less appealing option as speed limits are reduced and more space given to other forms of transit.
These are necessary to reduce the negative impacts already experienced by people trying to use other forms of transit, or even just safely move around their neighborhood on foot. These changes will also benefit car owners! I assume y'all walk sometimes and want to have useful places to go, want to be able to cross the street without stress?
It would be a socially good will step to instead adequately compensate car owners for their respective losses under legislation -- random eg: Maybe offer to buy their car off them for a lifetime of free bus passes, or whatever makes them not lose while society wins.
People don’t want to pay for parking even though that land has inherent value, and American city planners for years have been overproducing unproductive land just to park vehicles, and it’s literally bankrupting them.
Property developers will give you "just enough to not get fired" and people grow accustomed to the worsening conditions until they hit their tipping point and leave for much less environmentally friendly suburban sprawl because of the human-hostile policies being pushed that are only tolerated by the young, the poor, and people who just don't care about space (likely without families).
I almost never see small children in my neighborhood and there are a good set of reasons why.
Yeah, I take my car.
My parents live in a fairly dense part of Northern Virginia, and we walk a lot of places. More than 50% of our walking distance is across or around parking, in some cases much more.
A lot of change is actually well within reach even in sparsely populated suburbs.
What’s really happening is that cars are subsidized and encouraged. Make people pay the real costs of driving and parking and replacing bad zoning rules and development practices and you’ll see steady progress.
Mandatory parking minimums are effectively a price cap. We don’t even cap the price of healthcare, why are we capping the price of parking?
All that's going to happen in these places is they'll make people miserable as they drive in circles looking for a parking place, or they'll park several streets over, making those neighbors annoyed they can't find a place, then they introduce residential parking permits, to make sure only the right people park.
Eventually home prices and types adjust so that only low income people who can't afford a car park there, or the opposite happens: they knock down a house or two, turn it into a parking lot and rent those spots out, increasing the cost for anyone who wants to live there.
I've lived in a place like that - not having a car was not an option, but it was all apartment buildings with no parking. They gave us a paper with the names of several local places with lots where we could rent a parking spot, which is what we did.
We moved away as soon as we could - who wants to live in a place like that?
- you limit your friends and family to those that live where you can access them.
- you choose sports that don’t require remote locations or large equipment (no mountains, no surfboards, etcetera) or you live where your sport is.
- you move where you can access your job, or you limit your job prospects.
I have lived without a car in a variety of places in the world. Public transport is great if you can accept the set of limitations imposed upon you.
And yes, it does mean some limits, but they aren't as severe as many people think.
Why the condescending state-the-bleeding-obvious question? Renting and sharing makes little sense for me personally. I answer a similar question here re taxis and public transport: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31690450
It'll be interesting to see how people might react if they either can't own a car, or can't park very close to home.
An interesting model for a city would be a dense city with some sort of shared cars on the outskirts for when you need road trips.
It still does not solve the California’s lack-of-living space problem overall, much less Oregon’s.
Surely you mean the 3 square miles of Portland
> "Most Americans drive to most places, and that's going to be true 20 years from now, there's just no way it isn't," Herriges said. "But we desperately need to make the alternatives more available to more people and at a price point that's available to more people. Parking is the biggest obstacle standing in the way of that."
No, it's really not. Local governments and NIMBYs that control them prevent changes to zoning laws that could actually help alleviate housing issues. How about letting MFHs go up in your SFH zoned neighborhood? How about getting rid of arbitrary limits on how high you can build up?
> "If you have more compact, walkable, mixed-use areas and you eliminate or reduce those off-street parking requirements, people drive less," McCurdy said. "They might not need to own that second car. Or a car at all. And they certainly use it less often and drive fewer miles. So it's kind of a win-win all around on housing affordability and climate."
I think this hits the nail on the head. Mixed used areas should be present pretty much everywhere. I lived in Germany for almost ten years and I've never encountered a town in the US much like the ones there. I lived in a single family home, but right next door was an apartment building, and on the same exact street at the corner was a Totto Lotto. On the street perpendicular to the one I lived on was a bakery, a clothes shop, a gas station, a small grocery store, an asian food restaurant, and an ice cream shop. I could easily walk to various shops because the zoning laws allowed for it. In Japan even the most residential of zoning still allows for shops to be run out of them. In the US we hardly allow businesses to be in vicinity of housing.
I do think it's fair that we do need roads for large vehicles because we can't magically transport bulk goods from warehouses into local shops, but there's probably a better solution than what exists currently in most American cities. There could maybe be better bifurcation on the use of roads that still allows safe pedestrian/bicycle traffic.
I also do think that parking lots are a waste of space, at least the surface level ones. I just don't know that I agree that it's a low hanging fruit like these people do. You can't get rid of them until you alleviate the need for them. You can't do that until you make changes in policy through the government or a broad change in requirements for commuting in the first place, like expanding WFH.
Change the zoning laws.
While I do think my old neighborhood should be densified at least a little bit I think you really hit the nail on the head with mixed-use zoning. I had restaurants, transit, libraries, retail, police, schools, parks, pools, etc. all within a stone's throw of my apartment. It was amazing. I'm currently in suburban hell and it's just bleak and depressing.
Yes, they are NIMBYs, and they are hugely prevalent in low density housing because they bought that single family home for a reason.
I get the desire for that sort of life, especially when you’re raising young children. I just don’t think single family homes should be what much of our land should be zoned for.
When the three options you offer are "rich people being okay with less money" "forced labor" and "redistribute land more equally" it seems like a rather thinly veiled push for Georgism...
TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism aka Geoism
IDK at first blush it seems ethically sound, but I suppose I need more than 5 minutes to really learn the nuances.
Less cars and less parking is a good start, but we also need to build more transit and bike infrastructure.