alt Hacker NewsI live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save?
And yeah, bike lanes are part of it too. They make it easy to get around quickly & cheaply. Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero. Bike lanes are popular because they work.
High rent is caused by low supply of high-density housing. Apartment blocks are cheap. It's bad zoning, NIMBYs, and a slow pace of construction due to disproportionate focus on luxury units that cause housing supply issues.
> The third option is to LIVE IN CHEAPER PLACES. The US has 1.1 housing units per household.
Yeah, you know why people don't live in those places? They're in exurbs of Arizona, a thousand miles from anything. During the housing bubble, we built a bunch of homes in unlivable areas and now we're dealing with the fact that they're functionally useless.
> I live in a big city with decent transit. I'm in my late 20s. Neither I nor any of my (white-collar professional) peers own cars. Do you have any idea how much money we save?
None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit. Transit is FREAKISHLY expensive in time and money, it's not even funny how inefficient it is.
> Our bike lanes are packed with bicycle couriers and the impact on traffic is practically zero.
So you're in Manhattan? Figures
> High rent is caused by low supply of high-density housing.
Wrong. Hint: Manhattan is one of the most expensive places in the US. And recently elected a socialist who was promising state-run grocery stores.
> Yeah, you know why people don't live in those places?
Because toxic urbanism strangled the democracy with bike lanes. There are no jobs because it's cheaper for companies to build offices in Downtowns of large cities, offloading the externalities.
This in turn makes housing near Downtowns more expensive because workers have to live there in order to get a job. This further increases the talent pool nearby, incentivizing more companies to open offices there.
Rinse, wash, repeat, and you get a misery-density housing spiral.