The political incentive is to do the opposite. Make it cheaper and more attractive to employers, then make residential housing scarce. You get huge demand for housing, then employers have to pay more (generating more income tax revenues) even though all the money goes to landlords, then landlords have to pay more in property taxes. From the perspective of the self-interested government bureaucrat, this is the system working as intended.
> Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.
Except that then things are more spread out, and what you're using inefficiently then is transportation.
If you have a twenty story building with shops at the bottom and housing at the top, anyone in that building can walk to any of those shops, or any of the ones across the street.
There is enough land that we could build all of that stuff across a hundred square miles, but then everybody needs a car. And many people don't want that, but restrictive zoning prohibits the thing they do want.
You may not want to live like that, but plenty of people do. We should allow them.
I suspect that number is a lot lower than is claimed. It's only a very loud set of vocal urbanist activitsts who clamor for these changes and create the illusion of that demand. The reality is most people grow out of wanting to live in dense areas and walkability is very overrated. In fact walk scores basically don't matter when people actually shop for a house compared to other factors (price, size, location, schools, etc). And as people age and want to establish a family, the urban life quickly loses its attractiveness.
The real question is why should any neighborhood have to 'allow' anyone who wants to live there to do so? Am I entitled to living beachfront in Maui just because I want to? Should they have to change their zoning to permit that? I feel like incumbent residents have a right to maintain their neighborhood character, density, and quality of life. Those things get eroded when you have an influx of new residents and different density - you end up with streets, parks, and other amenities that no longer work the way they're supposed to. What I see happening is that a city will build itself over time into something very attractive, and newcomers want a piece of that, so they demand zoning changes at the cost of the incumbents who made that place attractive in the first place.
And walkability is a tradeoff for space. Pretty much everyone in my family are Single-family home for life kind of people, but they all enjoy visiting walkable places and talk about how nice they are. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's not that people don't value walkability, it's that there are very, very few good walkable places to live. Would even go as far to say close to none, but I'm sure some smaller towns are out there that go under the radar.
This is not supported by home prices in many housing markets. The walkable parts of cities tend to be among the most expensive in every metro area. Realtors even have a phrase for not being able to afford to live in the dense metro core: "drive until you qualify" (for a mortgage, given your income).
This is also weird thing to note given that real estate websites pay to license walk scores presumably because they believe that home buyers want this information.
That doesn't prove anything. We don't allow very many walkable spaces, so by supply and demand it only takes a few people who actually like walkable spaces to drive the prices up.
I think the idea that people like walkable spaces is correct, but it is hard to prove it.
Cities though have a problem of allowing much more surface area than people can reasonably traverse. You don't want traffic in your city? Fine, stop adding subdivisions.
We're not farmers. We benefit from other people, not from land. Stop this fantasy that everyone can have a country estate 15 minutes from the city center. It's geometrically impossible.
Nobody needs to use time "efficiently" by going 60 miles an hour. If you can't reach what you need on foot or bicycle, that is a land use problem, not a transportation problem.
For a closer example, visit Washington DC, and another poster recommended Montreal.
Cities though have the problem of allowing much more space for jobs than they have for housing. You don’t want high density housing in your city? Fine, cap your employer zoning.
It’s a big country out there and people need to decentralize and stop trying to turn nice places into hong kong density.
Nobody needs to use land “efficiently” by packing more people into it.