Interesting. I also listen to podcasts like The War on Cars [1].

[1] https://thewaroncars.org

The Urbanist Agenda by Jason Slaughter / Not Just Bikes is a wonderful companion podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@theurbanistagenda/videos

Also "The High Cost of Free Parking" by Donald Shoup.

Yep, good read and wonderful on the vicious cycle that led to the downtowns of most US cities looking like WWII bombed out zones by 1975.

That's not the cause at all. Extreme minority poverty and the potent bifurcation of incomes, education and wealth in the US is the cause.

Parking won't fix any of that realistically. You can push minority poverty to the suburbs, which for example is what France does, however it doesn't solve anything about the bombed out look, it merely redistributes the problem to somewhere else. You can gentrify the cities and push poor minorities to the suburbs and inverse how it's arranged in the US now, it will make the suburbs look bombed out - until you fix the minority poverty problem.

as usual, it’s probably a mixture of many things, and poverty is one, property prices is another, and there are certainly many many others.

we (engineering types) have this terrible habit of declaring that it is One Thing when in reality, complex problems are… complicated. shocking, i know. it isn’t a simple math problem with a one answer. human problems are significantly more chaotic and fractal.

i don’t want to imply that we shouldn’t look at these and add our ideas, only that id love to see us lessen our crutches of “You’re wrong, it’s X!” and recognize that others are probably correct as well.

Lowering housing costs is a pretty good way to reduce poverty, isn't it?

Root cause it's poverty, it is zoning laws and taxes for real estate.

Honestly that would be fixed with expanded immigration. Look at places where the limited immigrants we have had in recent years primarily ended up and have changed the demography, like LA county or Miami-Dade county, and they don’t look like those midwestern or great plains cities. In fact there are almost no vacant parcels anywhere today, with majority latino populations now reflecting the recent waves of immigration.

LA has extremely dysfunctional housing policy. A wave of immigration does nothing but increase demand for housing and drive up prices on rather limited stock. It has not lead to an increase in housing stock or better commercial districts. Adding more people who don't really speak the language laws are written in doesn't change the laws that prevent you from building vibrant cities.

There is very little mixed use. Majority of the city is zoned single family. The only reason there are no parking minimums is because the California changed that law. It has nothing to do with expanded immigration. LA, despite the immigration, is in massive need of a zoning overhaul to build a vibrant city. Very little is walkable, it is very car-centric, and the zoning is the strong opposition to all of this.

You're confusing correlation with causation. Immigrants are more likely to go where there are jobs.

Immigrants have a lot of motivations. Jobs are one, but unless the immigrant was recruited for a specific job (which is common) it isn't primary. There are jobs everywhere, even in blighted cities.

Immigrants with no particular job in mind look for places where the cost of living is low: they tend to have much worse job prospects than normal, so a minimum wage job in a low cost of living area is better life than double minimum wage in a high cost of living area.

Immigrants often have poor English skills (or whatever the local language is). They often are used to food not common in the country. So if they can find a community of other immigrants that means people they can comfortably talk to, and also makes it more likely that someone can figure out the process of getting food they like into local stores.

There are at least 15 million illegals currently in the US. If they all left, there'd be atleast 3-4 million housing units freed up instantaneously, mostly in areas already with hard to get housing. It should be pretty obvious what that would do to housing prices.

Ah yes, the "this country is full" trope.

Also, "illegal immigrant" is the term. No human being is inherently illegal.

You seriously think each person who is here illegally is renting or owning their own unit of housing?

No, I don't. Which is why I changed 15 million into 3-4M housing units...

The country is not full. But the places with jobs have more renters than rentable units.. which is why a 2br costs $3k a month.

You got 2 out of 3 points completely wrong, and your other was a pedantic point about wording. You should probably slow down and think before discussing this subject.

The US might not be full, but it does seem like you have run out of houses?

You got me super interested in this book now. This is a pattern that I've kept seeing in my visits to lots of other cities in the US (especially cities in the South) and I always wondered why that was (aside from white flight and big auto, though I figured those weren't the _only_ reasons).

There's a lot of people commenting in this thread that would benefit from reading this book...

Easily one of the best books I read last year, and probably the one that had the biggest lasting effect on the way I look at things.