[QuarterReptile]

To take this a step further, you don't even have to be in a substantial city to get the walkable atmosphere. Granted you'll suffer a smaller variety of restaurants, but there are towns of just 10k or 20k that manage to get things right, and some of them are really cool places.

It's really all about suburbia. It's isolating, expensive, and unproductive. The places that come to grips with this fact soon (or already) will face a much less painful contraction in the future. And they won't find themselves with a bunch of impoverished people stuck out in suburbs that no one else will live in.

[ArkyBeagle]

Suburbia is all about cost per square foot. It's not going anywhere. It'll just be apartments rather than single family detatched.

At least in the US, we're not exactly constrained by land availability. And as you may notice, the sustainability of NYC and SF style property prices isn't guaranteed.

[QuarterReptile]

The constraint isn't the amount of raw land, but rather the necessity of productive density if we are to afford the level of public services that most of us are accustomed to.

I have nothing against people living in sparsely populated areas, but the people living there now are mostly not seeing true costs of their lifestyles. If they weren't so heavily subsidized, they would probably have a lot more wells, septic tanks, and gravel roads; the school buses would not run to their houses; and they would have slower emergency response times and less police presence.

Faced with those painful realities, I expect more people would choose dense living. That's not to say they'd have to. Me personally, I just hate driving and love eating, in both cases too much to commute by car.

[ArkyBeagle]

So eat while you drive, man :) ( I too hate driving, but live suburban and have been extremely lucky in being able to keep commute times to a minimum - like on the order of five minutes ).

Productive density is constrained by things like how accounting works, how we can't get out of our own way, by other things that are like public choice economics. At each job I've had, I've seen people walk away from millions of dollars, either in increased sales or reduced cost because somebody just didn't understand it ( or rather, did understand it all too well ).

I couldn't agree more - people who live farther out should expect less services unless they're prepared to pay what they actually cost. In cases like California, the Pubic Choice Theory stories about water are ... interesting enough that it's a central plot element from a movie from the 1970s - "Chinatown".

I've lived on well water and septic.

This being said, I don't think real estate development public debt is even on the radar as a threat to anything. They can always raise rates...

[QuarterReptile]

Lol, I meant that I need the energy consumption of walking to support my carb-eating habit. I can handle the time commitment of eating mostly.

As to the policy questions, I admit that I don't know how to solve that one. I know a start would be to clean up the mess made by FHA standards. And I think a lot of places have moved, or are starting to move, away from Euclidean zoning, which is a step in the right direction, if not a very large one.