But you got yourself a deal: I won't argue for building single family homes in downtown San Francisco (really, who is?) and you don't argue for building apartment complexes in Tracy and Gilroy.
Like 95+% of the suburbs in the USA are at little to no risk of urbanization in our lifetime.
Many people did exactly that, back when the Bay was half orchards and no one knew tech was going to explode.
You realize Manhattan used to be mostly farmland too, right?
Tiny back yards, but mine (which was built by the same developer as the cargo bike picture development in the article) is big enough for me. Not my wife, but c’est la vie.
It just doesn’t want to acknowledge that due to NIMBYs
I'm struggling to understand how this could work, except as a prior restraint on childbirth. Otherwise, if someone comes into being and no community wants to house them, what do we do? Execute them? Cast them out into the countryside, see if they can survive as a hermit off the land? (Whose land?) Lifetime imprisonment for trespassing, since there are zero places they're entitled to be?
Is the privilege revokable? Can I decide my neighborhood is too crowded, get together with 51% of my neighbors, and vote the other 49% out? Bulldoze their houses and turn them into open space preserves?
There is plenty of available space in the USA. It doesn’t have to be some crazy dog pile into desirable areas. Spread jobs and amenities out and we all don’t have to jam into a few cities or fight people off our lawns.
Successful economic centers grow; failed ones shrink. Yes, there is cheap housing around economically crumbling places, but bricks and dirt don’t sustain life. Economies do.
You could try to counteract economic centralization by restricting commercial development as aggressively as residential in growing places, but (as with housing) you’ll see all but the highest value businesses displaced. I don’t see how you could pull off decentralization without full-on central planning. Capitalism wants megacities, badly. To decentralize the economy, you need extreme policy interventions for every aspect of life and commerce. It might work, but what’s certainly not working is making the intervention only for housing.
It’s all well & good to say a solution but when that solution is a complete fantasy it’s hsrdky helping
What I don't suggest is moving to a dense urban area and then complaining about it being a dense urban area.