When I first started reading about housing affordability, I was all for the kinds of upzoning this article (among many others like it) is advocating. Today I st

When I first started reading about housing affordability, I was all for the kinds of upzoning this article (among many others like it) is advocating. Today I still believe it would be an effective approach to improving housing affordability, but some recurrent gaps in logic have started to bug me, so today I avoid the debate rather than take part, or rather stand on the sidelines and cast aspersions, like this: - there's a lack of deep investigation and analysis into why people prefer single-family neighborhoods so strongly; the few articles that do go into the social and psychological picture tend to be ultra-leftist and include such themes as "anti-privacy" which I'm obviously against - the debate over housing types is tied to the debate over transportation types, and there's no representation for people who agree modern houses are too big but still prefer to own a car (even if we don't use them all the time) - the whole conversation is pretty much set up and run (on both sides) by people who aren't severely affected by any of the policies they're advocating, and who will be able to afford the lifestyle they want regardless of what policy passes, even if it might force them to take two annual trips to Jackson Hole instead of three - truly unique ideas have a tendency to get lost in the fray, like even if you run the one of most popular blogs in urban planning and propose a solution to housing prices in (e.g.) Portland [1], the typical voter will never ever hear about your idea, nobody will ever turn it into a workable policy or perform a serious analysis of what it might do, and legislators won't give it a moment's thought, so why are we even posting about this (I'll throw in my $0.02 -- green roofs should count at least partially towards open space requirements) - the fact that some people just don't like certain kinds of people, motivated by race, religion, lifestyle, politics, aesthetic sensibilities, or even vocation, is always bubbling beneath the surface - it's not clear how we're going to modify political, legal, and educational systems so that if people ever DO accept sensible growth policies, they're doing it because they understand it will improve their lives and not because they've been threatened or bribed or shamed into genuflecting in the presence of economists 1: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/30/spiking-a-rising-tide https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/10/30/spiking-a-ris...