Suburbia represents a few trillion dollars worth of malinvestment, IMHO. You can even trace the spread of suburbs back to the subsidies and incentives that crea

Suburbia represents a few trillion dollars worth of malinvestment, IMHO. You can even trace the spread of suburbs back to the subsidies and incentives that created them. The tax deduction on mortgages, along with Fannie Mae et al, were explicitly designed to increase home ownership. Extraneous housing will get built in that environment, and the only question is where. Undeveloped areas have a much easier time giving concessions to developers, so that's where they're going to build. Overall, the fix is some combination of a land-value tax, anti-NIMBY ordinances, subsidy removal, and infrastructure downgrades. Explanations for each: Land-value tax: the unimproved value of land is approximately equal to the value created by building infrastructure and creating valuable economic areas. This aligns incentives better than existing tax structures, and has various other benefits that economists really like. Anti-NIMBY: the overall effect of NIMBY policies is two-fold - it makes undeveloped areas relatively more attractive, and it enriches current residents of an area at the expense of society as a whole. Subsidy removal: often, when silly things are happening, it's because there's a subsidy or tax reason that boils down to "we are willing to pay you to do silly things". It's just as true for building suburbs as it is for removing windows from vans, shipping them from Germany to the US, and then re-installing those windows. Infrastructure downgrades: a certain intensity of land use makes only so much infrastructure make sense. If there's not enough people benefiting from a road to pay for asphalt, it needs to be gravel. Sucks for the people there, but it's even less fair for everyone else to pay for their asphalt privileges.