Our policies are mostly geared around creating never-ending strip malls, endless suburban neighborhoods, and omnipresent traffic issues. Because these things most efficiently create tax revenue, happy "what my parents had" families, and income segregated areas.

Similar to college, fixing America starts with deciding that everyone doesn't need a single family home in a popular metro.

EDIT... atrocious grammar

And no, I don't mean "the pool" or "the weight room." I mean actual lounge areas. Social areas. Hell, even Marriott's Residence Inns do a better job than your average building.

Parks, YMCAs, basketball courts, cafes, etc.

In that "Community spaces" is a subset of "businesses an owner leasing commercial space would rent to."

I don't think we're talking about a Subway sandwich shop on the ground floor being helpful.

That’s not to say I don’t have a few close friends, but certainly not my next-door neighbors.

The lack of close friendships is probably driven more by a lack of community activities than not knowing your neighbors.

And of course, if people need to work longer and harder to achieve what would've been considered fairly modest goals by (recent) previous generations in terms of housing, then they have less time and energy to devote to friendship and community.

When vast sums of institutional money are freed and chasing yield, eventually some of it leaks into residential property.

And when a market that was precariously balanced with only retail buyers (due to density opposition and building economics) now has equal or more investors pile in? Well, prices do what they've done.

The fact of the matter is conventional central banking is a failure, as is widespread private homeownership in metropolitan areas.

In that respect, they've been fairly successful.

The side effects are... less good. But worse than a national depression? Eh.

well start with those side effects: inflation is kept in check by beating back workers whenever they get to powerful. Then take into account how lousy growth has been since the 1970s when they started doing that.

If we could have had depressions but more amortized growth, and not "jobless recoveries" and anemic amortized growth, would that have been worse or better?

Edit:

I read the article and it basically boils down to rich people benefiting from low inflation because it doesn't erode their deposits and makes stocks/housing go up without increasing wages. It's pretty much true but it is also so obvious to be boring. Money from the past is power from the past.

Maintaining the value of money earned 60 years ago is the same as maintaining power obtained 60 years ago. Holding onto money doesn't help workers be more productive so if they spent their 60 year old money it would get eroded by inflation. You therefore need to add some slack in the labor supply that is not used up by anyone, meaning nobody is going to miss that labor if it is paid by 60 year old dollars that would otherwise result in inflation if there were full employment.

The central bank doesn't decide the interest rate, rather it is closer to an autonomous organization whose goal is to let interest rates follow the economy.

Low interest rates are the result of the preference to hold deposits and the preference to not take on debt. If you want higher interest rates you'll have to raise the government debt ceiling or kill deposits with inflation/negative interest rates on deposits. Considering the demand for perpetual savings it only makes sense that governments would issue perpetual bonds.

The reason why perpetual bonds are interesting is that they only have to be paid back when they have to be paid back.

I doubt that they are most efficient at generating tax revenue, especially when considering density and infrastructure maintenance.

Mixed housing along with ground level commercial spaces even in the poorest of downtown districts generate more tax revenue.

The problem is when crime and other forms of blight lead to people not living or working in those places anymore.

You mean tax revenue because there are subsidies for new developments? Car based suburban sprawl is a money pit for tax revenue. You need a lot of road per house.