> Your preferences to live in sprawl don’t outweigh humanity’s collective needs.
What is the benefit of having this type of argument with people? It sounds like you're saying that you'd prefer to live in a fascist dictatorship that just bulldozes insufficiently-dense neighborhoods as it builds large, dense apartment blocks downtown to forcibly relocate the residents into, for the "good of humanity." Setting aside logistics of this (such as who's going to pay for that project, how many gestapo do you need to force people out of their homes) you first would need absolute dictatorial powers -- and I bet you will say you don't want that. You just want all of the non-city people to all change their minds at once and move to the city. Not really a proposal that's going to be very impactful, because that's never going to happen. For one thing, because most of the people who already live in the city hate the idea of building any new housing anywhere at any time. They hate low-income housing because it's wildly unfair to give it to a lucky few while everyone else struggles, and they hate market rate housing, because (eat the rich/hate those gentrifiers/etc). And everyone agrees they would hate for Transit System or the streets to become more congested.
It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there. Work on crime, work on transit that makes people be glad to not be driving, rather than miserable that they can't afford to park a car there as they watch a full bus bypass their stop or wait 25 minutes for one to come. But also, cities would need to have a lot more high quality housing large enough for families, which again isn't something the suburbanites can fix for cities.
> It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there.
This is exactly what's needed. People should stop trying to convince others that they should be forced out of their homes and into high density apartment complexes where no one drives and instead demonstrate an alternative to having private homes and backyards that's actually more attractive. If it's actually better, people will go there naturally and demand more developments like it.
Exactly! And the funny part is, this exact thing is what’s being done on a small scale, and there are a ton of willing buyers for those developments. The main problem is that, due to the massive supply constraints imposed by urban NIMBYs, they are way too expensive for most Americans to afford living in, so the whole thing is just a nonstarter for most. Sure I’d love to live on the cutest walkable street in Brooklyn or whatever. Those houses cost $3 million though.
I never said non-city people all need to move to cities. In fact, small towns predate automobiles by thousands of years, and are not examples of urban sprawl. Furthermore, there are examples of suburbs and small towns that are well-served by transit, don't waste land wildly, and don't force you to own a car. [1]
I'm just saying that American zoning and regional planning should be adjusted to use land better and be more focused on humans than vehicles. I'm not saying that everyone needs to live in a studio apartment, nor that the government should use eminent domain to re-develop vast swaths of land and displace people. But simple things like zoning law changes can impact the direction of the future.
You've done a lot of talking about freedom, facscism, and dictatorship of being forced to live in close quarters. I would submit that the opposite has its own aspects of this "dictatorship." For example, you are forced to buy an automobile from a corporation (and most of them sold today track your every move and sell data to insurance companies [2]). You are forced to risk personal injury to drive that vehicle on the road rather than a safer alternative like walking, biking or transit. You are forced to change your job or lifestyle or home if you ever lose the ability to drive yourself by age or disability.
You say that the non-city people will never move to the city, but that has literally already been happening in the past 20 years or so.
Finally, I will point out that cities are already making themselves more attractive in exactly the way you describe. Crime has been plummeting in the last 30 years, city streets are being reconfigured to favor livability, blight is being redeveloped, and more housing is being built. For example, downtown Cleveland, Ohio has more people living downtown now than at any point in history, since before urban flight and regional population decline ever occurred.
I would also submit the idea that it's something of a misconception that cities don't have any family-friendly housing. Sure, NYC isn't a great example, but many other cities have plenty of suitable dwellings at affordable prices. Just because they aren't square footage maxxing doesn't mean they are inadequate.
I also think that many suburbanites visualize themselves as living in "small towns" when they really live in somewhat large cities in their own right that really could be entirely traversed by walking, cycling or taking financially sustainable transit like a modest bus system if they weren't made up of haphazardly parceled off farmland with winding streets rather than an easily traversed grid that has some level of long-term planning rather than a haphazard piecemeal development plan based on which farmers are selling.
Today, nobody is really being “forced” to live in either of those environments. Anybody who doesn’t want to own a car and wants to walk everywhere and hates sprawl can live in a city - as long as that city contains a home that fits their family and budget.
It’s not the fault of the suburb people that the people who control city governments, the city dwellers themselves, continually thwart the building of housing in cities that is both suitable for families in terms of things like bedroom count, and affordable (dictated almost entirely by the amount of supply, but sadly all of those in charge seem to have failed economics class so they don’t acknowledge that fact).
Also, re:crime
SF for one still has a lot more crime than the state average by all types of crime except murder, and has more crime than its surrounding suburbs. The murder stat is nice, but I still don’t like how much Rape has gone up since 2011 in these stats. Overall the line that crime is way down across the board is not proven by long-term trends. I’m sure it is for some cities, but not all.
What is the benefit of having this type of argument with people? It sounds like you're saying that you'd prefer to live in a fascist dictatorship that just bulldozes insufficiently-dense neighborhoods as it builds large, dense apartment blocks downtown to forcibly relocate the residents into, for the "good of humanity." Setting aside logistics of this (such as who's going to pay for that project, how many gestapo do you need to force people out of their homes) you first would need absolute dictatorial powers -- and I bet you will say you don't want that. You just want all of the non-city people to all change their minds at once and move to the city. Not really a proposal that's going to be very impactful, because that's never going to happen. For one thing, because most of the people who already live in the city hate the idea of building any new housing anywhere at any time. They hate low-income housing because it's wildly unfair to give it to a lucky few while everyone else struggles, and they hate market rate housing, because (eat the rich/hate those gentrifiers/etc). And everyone agrees they would hate for Transit System or the streets to become more congested.
It's better to focus, instead of on shame, on making the cities that already exist more attractive to people you think should want to live there. Work on crime, work on transit that makes people be glad to not be driving, rather than miserable that they can't afford to park a car there as they watch a full bus bypass their stop or wait 25 minutes for one to come. But also, cities would need to have a lot more high quality housing large enough for families, which again isn't something the suburbanites can fix for cities.