One half of your point is that the US government is too incompetent/malicious to actually care for or remunerate its own residents, even as the richest country

One half of your point is that the US government is too incompetent/malicious to actually care for or remunerate its own residents, even as the richest country in the world. I can’t wave that problem away, and it contributes to my point about the dire state of American infrastructure. But separately, as much as I respect the right for someone to their property, I think we as a society in the USA overindex on that personal right vs the public benefit and the health of the community as a whole, hobbling forward progress. Just like the other commenter talked about Europe, I’m living in Japan currently - a far older country with far more people per sq foot who had to be relocated for the very thorough transit system here to be developed, with far less resources than the USA had when it was being built out. The result is not that you end up with housing shortages, the effect is instead that transit dramatically increases the amount of viable land to live on within a reasonable commute to the city, creating cheap housing surpluses - provided that incentives are set up properly to encourage that housing production, as opposed to the USA’s hopelessly restrictive permitting/zoning + the incompetence of government to efficiently utilize land at transit stations + the unwillingness of the govt and electorate to allow private enterprise to do it instead (as it extremely profitably is done here in Japan). That’s why I can get my current 1 bedroom apartment 15 minutes from the center of Tokyo for $600/mo here, a literal impossibility in even 2nd or 3rd tier American cities like the one I grew up in. And no, I’m not living in a shoebox or a soulless high rise, I live in a vibrant walkable neighborhood of low rises - since the combination of transit development, small (re: proper scale) streets and unrestrictive zoning means that a high quality of life is accessible to far more people. Not to mention that if American cities were willing to deprioritize cars a bit you can probably get a pretty good system going almost entirely built on streets that are way wider than they need to be/evicting cars from those thoroughfares... glad to see baby steps in NYC and SF to do it a little, but at this rate it’ll be centuries before anything significant happens.