| I like to put it this way: The automobile, at least insofar as it impacts the urban landscape, is only incidentally about transportation. It's really about leverage in real estate markets. I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth. Tangent but: I also see a hidden legacy of racism here that probably still impacts black net worth in the USA. Early suburbs, before the civil rights act (which the right still hates) and similar laws, were often red-lined. This probably did a double whammy. On one hand, blacks were prohibited from participating in the automobile-driven escape to affordable home ownership, and the exodus from the cities probably tanked that home equity some of them might have had there. I'm not at all the first person to point this out, but it's something people forget about. Of course now the suburbs are getting unaffordable, so now everyone's on the Titanic arguing about deck chairs. In the long term the automobile can't keep driving sprawl forever. The law of rent catches up. |
Suburbs not only aren't required for this, requiring them to be suburbs actually makes it worse.
Suppose you have 1000 parcels of land and you need 3000 housing units. Obviously you need an average of three units per parcel. If 950 of the parcels are zoned to allow only one unit, the remaining 50 parcels then need to have an average of 41 units each.
Those parcels then become dramatically more expensive because they're the only place additional units can be added. Rents then have to rise to reflect the higher costs. Worse, some of those parcels already have e.g. 30 units but the cost of demolishing a perfectly good 30-unit building to build a slightly larger one is prohibitive, so now there is a shortfall and even the one-unit-per-parcel land ends up with higher rents.