Many poor people already can't afford to drive. In my city, over a third of households are carless and for most of them i can guarantee it's not by choice. Public transit is weak outside the core, the urban poor are by default locked out of suburban opportunities and job centers.

I imagine the situation is probably just as bad for the carless rural poor.

Car culture also locks out opportunity for other segments of the population - the young, the very old, the disabled.

The problem is that homeowners see their house as an investment, and therefore expect it to accrue value at a predictable rate, and so they'll fight tooth and nail against housing availability in the city.

We basically need to bring the hammer down at the state and federal level on urban NIMBYs, because it'll never happen if left up to city councils.

The reason rent in the cities is so high is that people are already renting/buying the available places to rent, so there is a scarcity. It isn't like all these places are standing vacant, waiting for government to force down pricing so people can move in. People have already moved in. The city is fully occupied. All you'd accomplish by forcing property owners to lower their rents, via amoral means I might add, is getting the people who already live there a better deal on their rent. You haven't really solved anything at all, pertaining to the content of this thread, have you?

There are plenty of ways to lower costs... If you remove density restrictions and bad zoning laws, some developer will eventually buy up enough low density housing and build much higher density appartments (or local stores), especially if subsidized.

Thing is, density restrictions help neighborhoods survive extreme growth. Connection to your neighbors, and retention of the qualities that attracted you to the city in the first place are vital for a city to retain their population.

Regulation certainly needs to be updated, but favoring density is not always a good thing.

"Connection to your neighbors"? When low-density housing means that houses cost several million dollars apiece, that means you're trying to preserve the "uniqueness" of the city center for a bunch of millionaires. I fail to see why I should care about them.

Low density housing doesn't mean million dollar pricing in a lot of cities. When a neighborhood of single-family homes is torn down to make duplexes and condos, the connection between neighbors is certainly broken. The neighborhood can also lose the appeal that drew residents in the first place.

They will build high... as long as the price and rent remain high. It the price and rent stop raising and go down, they stop building high. Especially considering that building high is more costly, prices have to stay very high to justify building high. Building high / high density does not really lower market prices, that would kill the reason for building high.

> We basically need to bring the hammer down

That's a surefire way to galvanize your opposition.

If you make the cities a nice place to live people will move there. If you turn the screws on them to try to control them they will go to war with you and you will lose.

What the GP means by "bring the hammer down" is basically "make places for people to live." People will very obviously not move to a place where there is no place to live.

Small towns used to be walkable, too. It's not like everyone lived in big cities before the automobile was invented.

Sure, and maybe promoting walkability in small towns is the right path.

This doesn't solve the problem that the low- and mid-level staff of downtown offices in major metros benefits immensely from the ability to drive to work (or to within a few transit stops of work) and would suffer immensely if that option were taken away.

Most small American towns may have small population, but enormous land mass. There's a video somewhere about how old towns had to be small in area in part because people didn't have things like cars to get around, so although population was low density kept up. Those are the kind of towns we should be encouraging these days.

As for driving to work, I do think that transit into work would be a perfectly good (and personally preferable) alternative; Id rather sparse communities have decent car infrastructure and storage at transit connections to dense cities, which don't have as much space to build car storage and road capacity and suffer from far greater utilization since they catch the traffic from all suburbs instead of a subsection of them. It's just a more scalable design.

That's only true for a handful of cities.

Most american cities and towns remain very affordable. These cities have tons of vacant lots close to the downtown office areas and are degraded by all the car infrastructure that serves the wealthier suburbanites. In those places, a lot of people of low means actually live very centrally. There's room to contract there and provide ample living space for households of all incomes.

It is really a failure of the imagination. Most Americans cannot imagine a luxurious or aspirational life without a car. It has nothing to do with not having the means for it.

And, fwiw, it really does require somewhat of an imaginative leap.

When someone says that cars have bad consequences and there should be less driving, most objections are really reflexive. People imagine their current way of life, but without a car. A few examples:

- How will I take my kids to school? You won't, they'll walk, because you live close to school, and since there are fewer cars, it will be safe for them to do so.

- You expect me to lug all my costco bags on foot? No, you still can drive there, but you'll drive out as a special occasion once a week anyway. Or you pick up groceries in small batches from the grocery next to your office.

- You want me to wait for the bus that only comes once an hour? No, you'll live closer to your office and walk or bike there. Or you'll take a streetcar that stops one block from your house every 10 minutes.

- You want me to give up my huge front yard? Yes, but you won't need it, because you won't live next to a noisy and dangerous road. Instead, you'll have a small courtyard and it will look sick, with a lemon tree and a koi pond. And with all the money you save on gas, you can buy a little cabin out in the country and enjoy real nature there a few weekends a year.

The imaginative leap requires you to imagine, basically, town life, and most Americans no longer can because they have never experienced it. Some americans in some city neighborhoods or tourist traps enjoy it. It's usually expensive, but only because supply is constrained, not because it's innately costly. People who have lived abroad may have experienced it. Often they return to the US, and are offended by the sheer ugliness of it all. Many college students experience it, it's kind of nice huh, small college towns. Well, to americans that's not "the real world", just a holding pen for young people to squander their youth. But why couldn't it be "the real world"?

Make town living aspirational again, and half the battle is won. But that will only happen if people can imagine it. And that won't happen as long as people imagine `their` life `without` a car. They should imagine `somebody else's` life `with` a car.

And again, the rents in the coastal cities are an exception. Most cities and towns do not have any significant pressure on land prices. Town life is right there in front of us, for the cost of used tire lot and a White Castle, and people cannot see it. Because they'll object that there won't be any room for the drive-thru lane.

This is an excellent point.

>People imagine their current way of life, but without a car

We imagine it because that's what's being proposed: public policy changes to discourage driving, without the attendant changes to remove our desire to drive.

San Francisco homeowners can easily get behind a proposal to make their streets safer, quieter, and prettier by removing all those South/East Bay outsiders and their cars.

They won't get behind a proposal to make their streets louder, in shadow, and full of undesirables by building high- or even mid-rise housing to let the commuters move in.

The movement to shut down driving has legs. The movement to densify doesn't. That's what scares me.

College towns are a great model. One interesting feature of many college towns is the preponderance of scooters and small motorcycles. I suspect these will be crucial (even if only as a transitional step) in densifying. Amazon Prime and the panoply of food delivery apps are also quite popular among students, helping to eliminate the shopping/errands use case for cars.

>Most Americans cannot imagine a luxurious or aspirational life without a car. It has nothing to do with not having the means for it.

The thing is, even in the densest cities in the world it's not like people are completely without cars. They just manage to get by with one car per family rather than one car per driving age member of the household.

It has the additional advantage of letting their teenaged kids get around and do shit on their own without having their parents play chauffeur all day.

Between car sharing services, bike shares, and on-demand ride-hailing it's easier than ever to get around without a car and fill in the gaps that a transit system leaves. The only thing that actually gets hard is being able to drive out to go camping or manage the extemporaneous pick-up of free-shit on CraigsList. Even that would be doable if car rental companies were more focused on long term rentals for road-trippers rather than just people who need commuter econoboxes to leave their hotels.

> The thing is, even in the densest cities in the world it's not like people are completely without cars. They just manage to get by with one car per family rather than one car per driving age member of the household.

60% of households in Paris do not have any car.

In its suburbs, and in other major but smaller cities in France, again 30% to 40% of households do not have any car.

That's a fair share of people who are completely without cars.

I live in Tokyo and I don't own a car. I take a 20 minutes train ride to commute to work and I do the groceries in the shops around my train station. I use online shopping as well and I receive my purchase the next day or two days after. To move around my neighbourhood I use a bicycle (if I was older I would have an electric one).

The weekend I want to go out of the city, I just go to the rent a car next to my house and I rent a hybrid car during 48 hours for about $150. If the place I want to go is really far, I take the bullet train and I rent a cheaper car there.

It's perfectly ok to live without car, it's just that the cities need to be designed in a different way.

You don't even have to leave the US to see cities like NY, where fewer than half of all households have a car, even including the spacious areas in Queens and Staten Island. Have you visited any of these dense cities?

> And with all the money you save on gas, you can buy a little cabin out in the country and enjoy real nature there a few weekends a year.

1. At peak, I only spend $1800/year on gas. Even if that doubled or tripled, that's not enough to buy a cabin in the country - not by a long shot.

2. If I had a cabin in the woods, how would I get to/from it without a vehicle?

3. I don't want to enjoy "real nature" a few weekends a year. I want to enjoy it every day when I get home from work.

Owning and driving a vehicle is about freedom. Freedom to go where I want, when I want, with whom I want. Freedom always makes an exchange for risk (cost, crashing, health, etc) but I wouldn't exchange my freedom for any of those. If you would, that's fine, but don't tread on me.

> You want me to give up my huge front yard? Yes, but you won't need it, because you won't live next to a noisy and dangerous road. Instead, you'll have a small courtyard and it will look sick, with a lemon tree and a koi pond. And with all the money you save on gas, you can buy a little cabin out in the country and enjoy real nature there a few weekends a year.

What gives you the right to tell others what they need, what they should own, where and how they should live? I don't want a small, sick courtyard with a lemon tree and a koi pond. I want a yard where I can go outside and throw a ball around or play with my dog. I don't want to buy and maintain a cabin in the woods. Who are you to tell me that I can't or shouldn't have that?

You didn't have a problem imposing your modelling of cities and road networks on others, did you?

What a bizarre comment. I have done no such thing. You, however, have deigned to tell others, "You don't need that. Here's what you should have, and it is what you will prefer."

They won't remain affordable if you essentially ban commuting.

This is needs to be shouted from the rooftops.

I basically just parroted Nathan Lewis, who has a great blog series on the topic: http://newworldeconomics.com/category/traditional-city-post-....

It's virtually the same message from Andres Duany. His talk from 30 years ago is still so eerily precise and comprehensive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMvwHDFVpCE. When I feel presumptuous, I email this to people (deaf ears, mostly). Leon Krier bangs the same drum, and adds a more sophisticated, architectural perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFiYL8AvvnY.

Thanks, I'll take a look at all of those!

High rent in the cities seems more like an example of basic economics than a problem worthy of attention. It's a simple supply vs. demand situation. The only way you're going to reduce rent in the city is to build more city for people to live in, i.e. increase supply. I guess you could use the big guns of government to force property owners to lower their rents, but that is immoral, in my opinion.

It's not immoral, just counterproductive. Rent controls never make things better, just worse.

I disagree. If I buy an expensive piece of rental property in a city center as an investment, then the government comes in and forces me to lower my rent through some strong-arm, artificial means, they are stealing from me by keeping me from reaping the full, market-supported rewards of my investment, and theft is immoral.

You are not entitled to a return on investment. When you make an investment, you expose yourself to risks, including regulatory risks. Nothing immoral about it and certainly no theft.

In case you think we are talking hypotheticals here, what you are describing is exactly how rent control works.