> But unless you somehow gift me one million dollars USD or more (and the same to every single person I know), none of us are going to be able to afford to live anywhere in Paris that actually has close access to all of those things you've described, with the living situation described above.

Have you ever set foot in a European city ? I currently live in Paris. Bus, metro and Vélib' are three minutes away and I am not a millionaire. It all costs me 38 euros a month for unlimited journeys.

I could afford to start a family here. Two affluent people can rent 750 square feet in Paris. I could even probably buy if I accepted to be in debt for thirty years.

>I could afford to start a family here. Two affluent people can rent 750 square feet in Paris. I could even probably buy if I accepted to be in debt for thirty years.

I think this is the exact tradeoff that is being discussed. Some people are OK with the 750 square ft flat. Others want a 3,000 sqft home on a quarter acre with room to park a boat or RV.

You can get this within a 15 minute Drive of downtown Houston for $300k, but you wont be walking to the local grocery or civic building.

As far as I can tell, 300k will buy you a 250 sqft apartment in Paris, but you will have access to walkable civic amenities.

> It all costs me 38 euros a month for unlimited journeys.

Ouch. My VBB-Umweltkarte for similar costs 63 EUR a month.

Well, the actual cost is 73 euros per month but in typical French fashion my employer has to pay for half of my metro pass (also I have the cheapest bike rental plan and trips are only free if they last less than 30 minutes).

I don't know about Paris, but London public transport reaches almost every corner of the city. I'm making some assumptions here, but I assume you've only ever lived in an American city. You often see Americans thinking that the terrible public transit they see is what public transit is everywhere. This is very much not the case.

Scooters, the RER, the SNCF, the bus, the Vélib and the metro, are very cheap and service even poor parts of Paris and the Banlieue pretty well.

There's also this assumption that people in relatively segregated rich areas want to be connected to poorer areas via public transit - the opposite is more often true.

People who wish to live in neighborhoods with low crime often NIMBY off any attempts to add public transit options specifically to keep out the riffraff.

  Marin County is home to over 252,000 residents, yet it is without a BART station. If you search
  web content to find out why that is the case, you will not find a lot. There is minimal information 
  explaining why the BART doesn't connect from Marin to San Francisco and even less explaining why it 
  doesn't connect from the East Bay to Marin.

  Marin funded a large portion of the project when BART was being planned in the 1950s. But "concerns"
  over whether or not the Golden Gate Bridge could support BART suddenly arose. After San Mateo pulled
  out of the plan, Marin's participation fell through as well.

  It is not unfair to speculate that socio-economic discrepancies might have something to do with this 
  lack of transit connection. After all, Marin is the county where wealthy residents stopped George Lucas 
  from building affordable housing on his land. The median household income there is almost $84,000, more 
  than $15,000 more than San Francisco and more than twice as much as Oakland.

  A similar situation in Dayton, Ohio arose where wealthy suburbanites tried to stop the local transit 
  authority from building three new bus stops near major employment centers.[1]

[1] https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollecti...

Agreed, though I don't think we should, as a society, allow this kind of class-based segregation. It causes nothing but pain in the long term.

This is everywhere, though. In spite of the reverence for Parisian living in this thread, it limits how high buildings can go, resulting in pricier housing because "muh skyline".

I lived in the center of Paris for years on a few Altairian dollars per day, and you're being ridiculous. Rental prices in Paris proper, not even the banlieue, are about the same per foot as Cambridge/Somerville/Boston while being an overall nicer place to live.

If the problem is that there aren't enough acceptable quality housing with good public transit access, it seems like building more transportation and housing would be a good solution rather than building similarly expensive suburban sprawl.