alt Hacker NewsThe housing crisis is a cultural problem. We don't want to build density, and we don't want to build transportation, because this all lowers housing values, and besides the millions of homeowners you'll piss off, you'll destabilize an economy primarily built on the mortgage. Not a good reelection plan.
The places you're seeing growth are places where we could buy the land for cheap: suburbs and exurbs. We build huge ass subdivisions and then we run highways to them. This fucks no one's housing value, it bails out struggling/dying land owners, the auto industry loves it, the energy industry loves it, people love their faux-castles with lawn moats, it's a full employment plan to developers, and it's essentially all middle/upper-middle class housing so it's thoroughly unobjectionable to the voting majority.
The reason cities in Texas are out building blue cities is that they just do the suburb/exurb thing. Blue cities don't: where are the workable SF or NYC exurbs? Abundance gets so close, it more or less blames bureaucrats and the Jane Jacobs veto points built into the liberal building process. But these things arise out of the culture on the left, and whether we admit it or not, we like the walled gardens we built. We like our multi-million dollar castles we've got something like $80k in. We like people not driving/riding trams/buses through our neighborhoods, and we vote accordingly.
I personally think this is intractable. I think SF/NYC/etc have reached the ceiling and if we're gonna fix the housing crisis we need to build density elsewhere. I think we should lean heavily into remote work, lighten the infra grid costs with off-grid tech like solar, lighten the construction costs with low-car built environments (few if any parking requirements, rail instead of huge highways for shipping/transit, etc), invest heavily in the schools, and subsidize people moving to these areas--like with cash, not tax rebates. This is essentially "build the exurbs", but the progressive version of it that better meets health and climate goals, while also building communities we know are better for human flourishing (less isolation, more eyes on the street, etc). Focusing on permitting reform or democratic veto points is way, way too small a vision here.
Replies
> Jane Jacobs veto
As an aside, puts on Jane Jacobs defender hat I just want to point out that Jane Jacobs was on the record with the assertion that an ideal urban fabric was effectively small apartment buildings at densities well beyond what your typical North American city and suburb currently has.
It's deeply sad that Boomers took her ideas and distorted her message to preserve an ultra low density single family detached housing status quo.
https://viewpointvancouver.ca/2012/06/01/jane-jacobs-style-d...
this is sort of wrong though, there is a measurable increase in positive economic activity with increased density. you can increase housing in an area in a way that doesn’t mess with people’s existing home evaluations, at least in urban enough areas
SF is surrounded by water on three sides. Palo Alto was the suburb. San Jose was the exurb. You could build 50 story towers all over San Francisco and it wouldn't suddenly make it feasible to build on water.
New York has a similar story. You can't build on the Atlantic. Brooklyn and Queens were the suburbs. Long Island and Hartford were the exurbs.
The US simply needs to build new cities, and link them with high-speed rail. You do that by taking federal spending (military bases, universities and research labs, tax cuts for large industries) and directing it to places that would fit according to a high-speed-rail master plan. Opportunity Zones have shown a lot of promise at helping to direct capital to under-developed regions, but the lack of a larger master plan in helping link these regions with better transportation links and job creation has prevented them from reaching their full potential.