[TheApexTheater]

I've recently begun to think about the availability of housing and how that impacts the middle/lower stratum of the US, and it seems to me that there have been several short-sighted policies put in place that have put us in a much worse position for the future for short term gain (the article explains how subsidies for single-family homes are a reason for the shift away from small apartment buildings). Has this always been happening, or has it appeared to become more pronounced with the recent focus on gentrification? What can be done to improve affordable housing? I'm not all too familiar with this field, so anything helps!

[Endama]

A lot of it seems to exacerbated by limited access to quality public transport. As jobs become more consolidated in city centers, the middle and lower class are more likely to get priced out of living near their work places. High insurance and other private vehicle costs (tickets, maintenance, traffic) make car ownership impossible for mid/lower class citizens.

So you end up with a bunch of people, living in poor housing conditions, with poor access to quality transportation, which means the amount of time they are spending in transit, or the jobs that they can reasonably have access to, is constrained.

America should have spent more time trying to shift demand away from private car ownership and more towards effective public transportation. Doing so would make areas outside of major metropolitan areas available for middle/lower class people and allow smaller/mid sized cities benefit from the tax revenue.

[loeg]

Redlining[0] was going on through the 80s. Much of many Americans' net worth is tied up in their houses, and house prices have risen somewhat faster than inflation in American cities. Consider the magnitude to which black Americans as a population were disenfranchised by this practice until quite recently.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

[khuey]

It's become more pronounced lately because the original solution, which to move further and further away from the city, is no longer scaling.