My biggest worry is that people already have no sense of community. Third places (is it still a third place if we remove going in to work?) can't really exist in suburbia. People sit inside when off work, drive to work isolated from everyone, then sit at work mostly not building a community. Americans have no sense of community, which I would blame for most of our current political issues. People spreading out and not going in to work (I'm not in favor of this, just not looking forward to this one effect of it) can only further degrade any sense of community that currently exists.

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I doubt it.

Housing is expensive near city centers partly because that's where people want to live. Even if I could 100% WFH I wouldn't move out of the city to save money. But I suppose that doesn't apply to everyone.

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Yeah, right synae, A single, relevant meme.

Are you familiar with the "Housing first" model? It posits that even for people who need medical or living assistance, having shelter, a bed, a bathroom, a refrigerator, and a permanent address will allow them and whoever is providing support to deal with compounding factors and receive regular visits, Conversely, attempts to treat something like dementia or substance abuse on the street are next to impossible.

1. Shelter is critical to survival. The general rule of thumb places it as a higher priority than food or water. Arguing against people having access to reliable shelter, regardless the rational, is arguing for deliberately killing them.

2. The "they're defective and will destroy whatever they live. Don't let them in!!!" is just calling them cockroaches in a different way. It's fear mongering nonsense and there is no evidence to support that claim.

3. You're assuming correlation does not equal causation. It turns out being homeless, even for a relatively short period of time, is devastating to mental health and even if not the root cause (IE genetic predeposition, TBIs, etc.) it can strongly exasperate them and create some nasty co-morbidities.

Being repeatedly assulted and or raided by police, neighborhood vigilantes and other desperate people is an extremely quick path towards PTSD/other general anxiety disorders. The aggressive de-humunization that occurs can be a potent factor in antisocial disorders. Direct health impacts like physical battery, hypo/hyperthermia, illness, etc. can cause more detect brain damage such as TBIs, etc. Schizophrenia is usually fairly treatable, schizophrenia with PTSD amplified paranoia much less so.

is that truly the case, or just a pervasive urban legend?

which studies support this theory?

I mean the overarching problem being talked about here is not having well planned cities (ie 15 min cities) that provide housing for everyone.

The solution mentioned would absolutely solve or go a long way to solve all the problems mentioned in the meme.

Yeah, this is not a "slap it in" solution. If indeed it does solve all of these problems. Traffic is gonna get worse before it gets better if you take away roads and lanes. Culture has to shift and people have to leave their cars at home, or really affordable housing and good transit? Thats just gonna supply the outsized demand to move to California's densest areas. So you'll have the same problem, but with lots of new people who don't experience it. Planning has to find people who will change their lives to make all of society better, too.

That's fair, but the meme doesn't work that way.

…and insane traffic.

…and homelessness.

Not as much as you think. Here’s some trivia for you: which urban area is more densely populated, NYC or LA?

The answer is actually LA. Everyone imagines Manhattan or Brooklyn when they think of NYC but actually a huge part of the city in an economic and cultural sense consists of low density suburbs, enough so that it brings the average below famously sprawling LA. Allowing more density in these neighborhoods would likely help reduce the cost in the core of the city. Some neighborhoods might remain expensive—if you’re competing with investment bankers who will pay any price to be in walking distance of Wall St, adding more housing in other boroughs or satellite communities won’t help with that. But it could make a dramatic difference on overall cost of living in NYC. It’s only expensive because way more people want to live in a relatively small urban core than can fit there.

The same solutions can solve or greatly mitigate these problems in virtually every American city. This is because even large, older cities that predate the horrific car-centric development of the post-war era are surrounded by huge swathes of this type of development.

Because they were inadequately funded, regulated to low income areas with no jobs and shit schools. They we're just a glorified hole to stick brown ppl

I saw a video that they intentionally made the projects bad to try to "incentivize" people to get out of them. The whole stupid pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

It also centralizes the problem, which intensifies it. What you need is communities of mixed income, which has effects on schools, hospitals, stores nearby, etc.

This is less about the government building things and more about the government changing zoning so denser communities are built.

Can you be more specific?

Cost of living is tied to supply and demand, more than anything else. When supply is constrained, prices tend to rise.

People often want to have short commutes and to live in walkable areas.

However, most cities in the US and Canada have huge swaths of their metro area zoned exclusively for low density single family housing. Upzoning neighborhoods on the edges of cities is politically difficult.

Cities like NY become expensive because people want to move there, but it's really difficult to add a lot of net-new walkable, transit accessible housing due to zoning, permitting, etc.

If we build a lot of net-new housing, prices will fall.

As for traffic, one of the benefits of mixed use development is being able to walk 5 min to buy groceries, eat at a restaurant or go to a pub. Being able to do many daily chores on foot or bike decreases the number of times you need to either drive or take transit.

For the cost of living thing, ideally you just implement similar good urban planning across the country. The reason some places are so expensive is because they have relatively livable cities compared to most of the country, so people want to move their. If you just improve the cities in places people already want to be for some reason or another, then you'll just get more people across the country interested in being there unless they have similar options near them. Guess you could alternatively make enough housing for like 50 million people in that one city. Technically, there's always the excuse of "you just didn't build enough". Not sure how the cost per housing unit gets for super structures, particularly since the cost of them includes infrastructure costs we don't usually value into the cost of the home (pipes, roads, etc) and commercial spaces + residential which would make a small city with huge population possible.

• cost of living - can be solved if its social housing provided by the government and/or assigned by need and/or there is a restriction that the properties can only be owned by individuals.
• traffic - if everything is a walkable or cycleable distance traffic should be alright even with poor public transport. Although if we are trying to right the wrongs of bad urban planning you'd like to think public transport, green spaces, utilities and amenities would be well planned out in this scenario.
• homelessness - homelessness is not directly related to cost of living, its more related to lack of a social safety net and social services. The cost of living rising just exacerbates the issue.

The problem is corporations, and lack of regulation and social services.

All those issues are not intrinsic to apartments. We can have nice apartments too. Sure, cheap ones will cut corners, but it's not required.

I can't hear my neighbors, don't need an elevator, and don't need a garage because I don't need a car. I don't have a back yard but I'm pretty close to a massive city park. This apartment is pretty okay.

Meanwhile the suburbs were just crushing isolation and cultural wasteland. And needing to drive everywhere was awful.

You could meet all of your apartment complaints with some decently designed medium density projects. I agree though that not everyone needs to live in a towering skyscraper

There is a middle ground between single family housing and high density housing, it's just not less common in the US than either apartments or single family housing.

Medium density housing, duplexes, quadruplexes, and town homes.

And yeah crappy apartments with little to no sound dampening are really common. At my brother's apartment I can hear his neighbor's coffee pot turn on both outside and inside the apartment building. Shit's got tissues for walls I swear.

I think you're making the common mistake of thinking that advocating for dense, mixed use housing means YOU can't have a single-story home. In reality, rezoning for this kind of thing makes your preferred kind of living much more attainable.

Think of it like this. You take a giant suburb of repeating box homes. Take what is a dozen homes next to the highway, and build a couple of four and five story apartments with bars and restaurants and a few grocery stores and hair salons on the first level. Now you've made a nice little main street. Put a little office space on the second levels, and suddenly there's less congestion coming and going every morning and evening, since folks don't need to take the highway to get to work. Shrink the highway to make room for a bus lane, and add a separated bike lane and nature trail to connect your little main street to the next one a few miles away, and eventually the next major metropolitan area.

The next thing you know, folks like you are still live just fine in your classic American home, but now you have places to shop within walking distance. You've got somewhere for your kids to move out to that won't put them a plane ride away from home. And you've got less competition for land. This means that you can get a bigger backyard for the same price, and if your kids want to come back one day to start a family, there are affordable starter homes and condos.

Keep it up, and next thing you know, you can commute to the office without driving and kids can walk themselves to school. You see what I'm saying? You don't have to live in the apartments to get a lot of benefits.

With density and admitily mixed development, it is pretty simple to live within walking distance of everything around you. A car just needs much more space then a pedestrian and you do not park your body at the site of the street. Other then that the key to good public transport is high frequency. So for a transit connection the more people want to travel the route, the more high frequency makes sense.

It doesn't solve it, but I can see how it would help to solve it. If everyone lives in super low density suburban neighborhoods, public transportation doesn't make any sense. You can't build a train station that would realistically serve a dozen people tops.

Higher density makes public transportation a viable option, which in turn reduces traffic and pollution.

Also high density mixed used means you don't need the car every time you need to go grocery shopping, or to a bar or even to a park. You can go by foot

You can't have efficient public transport with low density housing. Also high density housing makes it easier to have things like supermarkets within walking distance of everyone.

High density basically makes the case for transit itself.

The only reason not to build public transport is not having the density to support it…

If you can walk/bike to your job without the threat of being run over, you are one less car on the road.

Thihk of it in levels:

1. People will skip work-commuting by car (including students) when there are other viable options that are not made life-threatening by other people in cars. Fewer trips= less traffic

2. People will avoid driving for errands when there is decent local public transit that lets them shop where they want. Even fewer trips = even less traffic

3. People will stop owning cars when there is decent local public transit and decent regional networks. Fewer cars = less traffic

I don't think it's a choice between one and the other.

First, the goal isn't to make an endless sea of identical skyscrapers. It's to make a blend of large and medium ones with rowhouses and duplexes mixed in, and then use the space that creates to make big, expansive parks and natural spaces for everyone. And if you want to start a commune, now there is a lot more space for communal, rustic living much closer to major cultural and transit hubs.

To fix this that kind of development has to be far more normalized. A big part that drives up those land values is because that style of development is both rare and desirable. If it becomes desirable, common,and meets housing/commercial needs, the market will become more competitively priced.

I have a lot of suggestions, but one that I think you'd find particularly interesting is land tax rates.

This video is 46 minutes, but it's the mayor of Detroit explaining why low taxes on land incentivize blight and abandonment instead of productive use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A_Z96gZxIM

Actually, at some point the graph flips around. If everywhere is fairly dense, less dense areas go for a premium (rich people hate living near poor people).