[hibikir]

I'd much prefer that high density world myself, but this is a complicated problem. Rezoning as to make denser building possible, and even preferable by most people, would be great. But limiting ourselves for that solution isn't going to be enough.

Many American cities could be 1/4th of the size they currently are while still being full of single family residential + townhouses. We could be even denser if we wanted to. It'd, however, make the current homes of 3/4ths of the homeowners basically worthless. The world might be a lot better if the latest ring of single family exurbs didn't exist, but it does, and people are not going to be happy to abandon their new houses. Do we give people their money back from their now unsellable houses? Are we happy with the fact that the lucky winners that are the real targets of rezoning becoming very rich, as their land is now going to house more the families than before? How many construction workers, and construction materials, are we going to get to increase our homebuilding speed by orders of magnitude? That's a lot of materials in exchange for abandoned houses.

In practice, a change like this has to take 30-40 years minimum, and we sure shouldn't we waiting that long with gas cars. It's not a case of true solutions and false solutions: The problem is large enough that we'll have to apply many solutions at once.

[clairity]

> "Are we happy with the fact that the lucky winners that are the real targets of rezoning becoming very rich, as their land is now going to house more the families than before?"

there's a potential fix for that that's being tried in australia: rezoning windfall taxes (https://www.prosper.org.au/rezoning-windfalls/ ; posted here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32957896)