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Recipe for solving loneliness and increasing the odds of "successful marriages" (which is really what this article seems focused on conveying as a problem).

Build a successful community:

    * Enough housing, at reasonable cost
    * Enough jobs to "employ" all adults
    * Good jobs, fitting the skills of workers
    * Stable jobs, that aren't a gig or contract
    * Career jobs, with a future in the area
    * Good transit mesh
    * More diverse third places / third spaces
Right now transit sucks, zoning sucks, housing options suck, and decades of trying to manage things from the consumption side have lead the supply side to be crazy in all sorts of aspects. Since markets aren't free (zoning laws, all sorts of other regulations) active maintenance is not just desirable from a ripple smoothing standpoint, it's actually required from a systemic viewpoint. There are also too many areas of uncertainty on the supply side; cases where things fail because of those who already got their happiness.

Japan's "nuisance" based zoning is better (#1), if a project fits within an area's limits and passes environmental/other planning review it can be done. Their transit structure is also partly funded by the "taxes" involved with the rail companies also owning the land around the stations (which ends up falling in to the higher end of the nuisance classes and gets the shopping centers, hotels, and denser apartments built on it); but that could happen here too if we actually had civic planning, taxes, and open book accountability that could tie taxes to spending and involved politicians/companies in people's minds.

I'm also in favor of a //long term// plan for establishing an expanding zone of high quality (Japanese subway/rail style) transit that has frequent, on time, predictable service. This would spread out from city centers over time and would involve interface and storage silos (for cars, and big stuff). Critically this should start with first improving transit, then adding the interface silos that adapt legacy infrastructure to the city-core infrastructure, and only then getting the cars out of the city; entirely. Aside from maybe an underground network for deliveries and emergency transport.

Finally, because the market is so screwed up with respect to available housing in the areas that need it, emergency remediation should be instituted and reviewed until the crisis is resolved. That would probably start with a short-table evaluation of rezoning, and even loans if at least 70% of the units were intended for median in the state's population income and at least 10% for those making "minimum wage" (the lesser of state and city values).

A land-value based tax should also be instituted to encourage the evolution of a zone over time rather than keeping historic single dwelling housing just because it made sense 50-100 years ago.

#1 http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html #1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540845



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