alt Hacker News> 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.
> None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit.
Oo, totally wrong! Fun guess though. The average monthly cost of car ownership is $1,300. The cost of a one-month transit pass is $150. I'm not gonna save $1,150 on rent by moving to a shitty suburb.
> So you're in Manhattan?
Nope.
> Wrong. Hint: Manhattan is one of the most expensive places in the US.
Yeah, because there's a shortage of apartments—that's what I said. Manhattan Island (being a rather small island) has physically run out of room for buildings, but that's not true of other areas.
> And recently elected a socialist who was promising state-run grocery stores.
Ok? So what? Maybe they'll expose private-sector price fixing & maybe they'll just be grocery stores.
> Because toxic urbanism strangled the democracy with bike lanes.
I'm honestly baffled. What makes you think bike lanes are undemocratic? Bikes are super cheap and take up very little space. Bike lanes really cut down on traffic.
> This in turn makes housing near Downtowns more expensive because workers have to live there in order to get a job.
Have you heard of industrial parks? It's pretty common for offices in big cities to be outside the city centre—far more common on the whole than downtown offices are.
The big advantage of downtown offices is that a city's downtown is the nexus of its public transit: If you work downtown, you can easily live a ways outside the city on cheaper land and then come in by train. So no, the point of a downtown is that you don't need to live there to work there.
Do you actually live in a city? I feel like you don't have a very strong understanding of how they're structured.