[minihat]

My idea of a hell hole is the neighborhood I would have to live in to afford a home in the city near my office.

What if we made cities more affordable, nicer places to live instead of making commuting even more expensive and miserable than it already is?

[Sharlin]

False dichotomy. Far from being conflicting, those goals are fundamentally aligned and you can't have one without the other!

[ImPostingOnHN]

you can definitely have nice affordable housing near work without making commuting miserable, and that's the only way to get people to not commute

[Sharlin]

Well, yes, if by "not making commuting miserable" you mean "build a lot of transit, convert roads and motorways to streets, and somehow cure people of their car addiction". But yes, you also have to cure people and planners of their single-family house addiction.

[ImPostingOnHN]

I didn't say that, and it's obviously not what a normal person would take to mean from that sequence of words.

The spending needs to be on building more housing, better housing, more affordable housing, housing closer to work. Single family or multi family? Whatever the people need, neither will exclusively work if people want both.

If you don't do that, it doesn't matter how miserable you make the commute, people will still do it because the alternative for them is not going to their job and becoming destitute.

[elzbardico]

What if we had cities, but smaller ones and made sure companies and business opportunities were not concentrated in a few points? We could enjoy the benefits of high demographic density that matters, while having walkability.

If we have zoning requirements for building residences, why not quotas for the number of companies allowed in a city, in a county, in a state? Why the fuck everybody needs to live in a ratcage in NYC, because every fucking oligarch feels like he needs to have his bank HQ in Manhattan? Why can't we have a few dozen smaller high density urban centers instead on this day and age?

something like "sorry Mega Company, we already have MegaCorp and MegaEnterprise here on this city, the quota is over, have you considered PleasantVille for your new HQ? I hear they have a free quota after MBA Business Machines finally fold down and closed their offices there. "

[prometheus76]

What about industry? Do you want megabuildings like they have in Taiwan, where the company owns the whole building with grocery stores, laundry, apartments, and a factory all in the same building?

How's the air quality in cities where they do that?