> 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.