Do ya’ll ever wonder if single family zoning, and car-centric urban planning, are some of the primary factors behind modern adults suffering from rampant loneliness? Two environments renown for fostering friendships and social activities are university campuses, and seasonal jobs in remote locations. What do those two things have in common? Proximity. People work, eat, and play together. In another word, community.
In my experience, humans are simple creatures. We take the path of least resistance. For your standard adult, the concept of traveling across town to meet up with friends after a full day of work or chores is exhausting. We crave those connections, but the barrier to entry is too high. We settle for whatever scratches that itch with the minimal amount of effort. Typically that involves some form of social media or other digital communication. It’s like grabbing that crappy packet of ramen because you ran out of groceries before your market day. It’s not really what you want to have for dinner, but it’s what is readily available so you shrug and eat it anyway.
This is all anecdotal and speculation on my part, but I’m curious if anyone else has any thoughts on this.
So what about all the people who are being fucked over by not having access to affordable housing?
Someone always gets screwed when policy is changed, we should make our decisions based on if the policy is better for collective flourishing in the long run
If your policy change is going to harm the less fortunate then you should re-evaluate the policy.
A land value tax just shifts those who can’t afford it out of their homes and hands more land over to the wealthy.
Land isn’t the problem with housing. The problem is that developers have figured out it’s more profitable to build fewer expensive properties than a large number of affordable ones. Not only do they have to do less work, but it keeps the market artificially low and so lets them charge more for what inventory they do have.
So they do just that.
And the residential development market has such a huge investment level to enter you won’t see many willing to roll the dice on mass producing affordable housing.
Show me a home builder who has plans which are less than 3k sqft these days. You won’t find one.
You’re right about this part, but you need to ask why is this the case. It’s due to (among other things) over regulation and a stifling of home building.
Most cities in North America make it very expensive and difficult to build. Zoning laws means there are only a few places they can build densely, and red tape increases the cost of building. This has caused a huge mismatch of supply and demand for housing in cities. So of course in that environment, what is most profitable is to cater to the wealthy.
If developers could build faster than demand was growing, they would satisfy the wealthy demands and then move on to less profitable middle and lower income housing.
This is how all markets work in this context. Electric cars were initially only made for the wealthy, because those sales were the only ones that could be profitable for the emerging technology. Now that the tech has improved and the wealthy demand is satisfied, it has come down to middle class prices