Just want to point out that people already "take a financial hit" in the form of taxes. I don't agree with it, but we pay taxes for a reason. So the answer may not lie in asking for "more", but rather in doing "better" or more "targeted" things with the money we already give out every month "for the greater good".

I've many times recommended we allow the populace to take a more hands-on approach when it comes to determining where tax-money should be allocated. E.g. I want 20% of federal war spending to be redirected to housing. Oh, what's that, we don't all agree? Well then, good sir, take 20% of my portion of tax money that currently goes to war spending and allocate only that to housing.

/not being snarky with the quotes, btw, that's just how it came out of my brain.

Your alternative is more sprawl that will need to be supported by more new infrastructure that we already struggle to build out and maintain? I think we need to keep looking.

Well the consolidation to make things cheaper isn't working out so well at making things cheaper, is it?

You can't have both "everyone should want to live in the same place" and then also want "everyone should be able to afford to all stay in the same place".

Highly contented areas aren't going to get cheaper even if you double the accommodation. The expensive areas are expensive because people either want to live there or need to live there.

If you reduce the amount of people who need to live there, prices will reduce accordingly.

Our priors are different.

We need to not cover all decently accessible land on the planet with either sprawl or agriculture. That's bad for the environment.

People need to have affordable access to medium-to-high density housing for reasons of physical and mental and cultural health.

Concentrating people in medium-to-high density housing makes it easier to achieve our decarbonization goals.

We need to work backwards from there. If the market doesn't cooperate, the problem is the market and how it's set up, not the goals.

> People need to have affordable access to medium-to-high density housing for reasons of physical and mental and cultural health.

Physical and mental health is better out of the city than in it.

And cultural health is purely subjective: what on earth makes you think that what you consider good for culture is the same as what everyone else considers good culture.

This is what I meant by attempting to enforce your moral mores on everyone else.

> Concentrating people in medium-to-high density housing makes it easier to achieve our decarbonization goals

Well that's not the problem being discussed here, is it?

We're talking about how to make certain centers more affordable wrt housing.

Removing need is a good first step, as that lets people who want to live elsewhere, live elsewhere.

> Physical and mental health is better out of the city than in it.

For some people.

I'm one of those out-of-the-city-is-better people. However, I would never try to force it on anyone as it would make them miserable and ruin the country for people who want to be there. Sadly, it is difficult to keep city lights in the city.

I wrote medium-to-high density, which means anything between city and "walkable town with a core". This doesn't preclude detached homes. It does preclude sprawling car-centric suburbia, which is similar to rural isolation in terms of the effects it has on the most people's mental health.

ah, I understand. I've lived in both city and "walkable town with a core. I now live 2 miles outside of a New England mill city. The value of each place has been for what I can reach, not the place itself.

> It does preclude sprawling car-centric suburbia, which is similar to rural isolation in terms of the effects it has on the most people's mental health.

Come on now: "Surburbia has more negative effects of people's mental health than high-density living" sounds like both pure conjecture and wishful thinking on your part.

Were there any measurements actually done? What are you basing this assertion on?

Makes sense. A quick search shows that there is research on this subject and results seem to agree with GP.

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20230529/Study-shows-link-...

> If the market doesn't cooperate, the problem is the market and how it's set up, not the goals.

Market schmarket, the thing not cooperating is people — families. Any plan that operates on the premise that people will be fine and willing to give up detached homes with useful amounts of land is doomed from the start.

Who is asking them to? The US has an enormous supply of such housing, after decades of restrictive zoning codes which make it difficult to build much of anything else. Some fraction of the US population live in single-family detached suburban-style homes not because they value those features but because that was all they could find. People who might prefer city living often can't have it, because the old forms of development which used to cover the spectrum between the single-family detached house and the downtown high-rise have generally been banned.

In order to solve the housing crisis, we must fix the zoning codes to allow a much greater variety of development patterns, allowing gradual small-scale infill. Nobody is going to stop building single-family detached housing so long as there is a demand for it - but relaxing the zoning codes would mean that the existing, unmet demand for other types of housing could also be satisfied.

It's either more sprawl or a new high density city from scratch.

While I agree with your general premise, I'm not convinced that remote work is the driver we should rely on. As a peer comment mentioned, infrastructure is a weak point right now, and remote work would add another dynamic that would make the situation more risky instead of less. Up front though, I should clarify I am a huge proponent FOR remote work. The rest of this is focused on why remote work should not be a foundation to build American housing on.

Prior to the normalizing of remote work and cloud computing, the infrastructure risks that a company needed to consider were related to hubs. Cloud computing moved a lot of the processing out of the hub, which is good from a risk perspective. This leaves the need to ensure the infrastructure related to workers accessing the computing is resilient.

If remote work becomes the foundation we building our cities on, we now expose our companies to the additional infrastructure problem related to internet connectivity while not resolving the connectivity issues inherent in the other grids of roads, power, and water. This is fine for companies that are natively born to this, but this is dangerous for the existing large cap companies and governments that are not.

And just as we're pushing for an increase in remote work, we are also in a period of time where our infrastructure is regularly attacked remotely.

Again, this is not to say remote work is bad. There's just a lot of transformation that needs to occur and I personally feel we should not take a darwinian approach to this when state and local governments are involved.

The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback.

My main fear is that we would inadvertently create remote private corporate fiefdoms that would lead to corporate scrip [1] being used for local goods and services and non-transferable to other regions. The flexibility of remote work would, if my fears are realized, lead to a world of less flexibility than we have today. Not more.

I don't know what a better driver is though. How does one generate desire for a traditionally undesireable location?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrip

> The instability we would introduce through this would likely lead to corporate funded infrastructure being stood up to ensure remote workers maintain access to cloud computing. I believe the company town concept [0] would make a comeback.

I'm not following this argument for two reasons:

1. I don't see corporate-funded infrastructure being stood up nationwide across a nation because the local services in a few places are not up to scratch. IMHO, those few places just won't get the migrants from the cities.

2. Even if the corporations built private infrastructure to support WFH, I don't see a probability of that leading to something like a company-town concept. IOW, I don't see how "Microsoft built private infrastructure to ensure WFH works" leads to "A Microsoft town in those places that has the MS infrastructure." After all, even if the alternative is unreliable, it's still there!. In company towns, your actual dollar was close to worthless - you had to spend it elsewhere.