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America’s housing supply will grow. A policy that it grows only by sprawl is a policy of cruelty to everyone today and in the future who thrives best in an urba
by closeparen 5y ago
America’s housing supply will grow. A policy that it grows only by sprawl is a policy of cruelty to everyone today and in the future who thrives best in an urban environment and isn’t super-rich.
Urban environments can’t be stamped onto cornfields; they only occur when sparser environments become expensive. I don’t think there’s a right to live in any arbitrary expensive town. I do think there’s a right to have the expensive-town-to-city pipeline running somewhere at more than a trickle, so that urbanism is not impossible to access.
- teakettle42 5y ago> so that urbanism is not impossible to access. Urbanism in a desirable location is expensive, everywhere in the world. It’s an inescapable problem of scale. You’re free to live like a sardine in a dense city, but it will be expensive. You cannot avoid that.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- closeparen 5y agoMost of the world is not rich enough to live as sparsely as we do. The suburbs are a miracle of prosperity and technology - a car for every adult, the energy to run it, the infrastructure to drive it on. Most human settlements in the world are walkable because they have to be. Actually it is because car centric design was associated with wealth and status that the “backwards” old ways became prohibited. This inversion now, where walkable environments seem to be luxurious, is a legacy of that prohibition more than anything else.