[crabmusket]

I've been thinking about this a lot. It feels to me like we* are not good at making new places that people want to be, so we spend a lot of energy working out how to maximally utilise the existing good places.

There will of course be some places that are uniquely popular e.g. due to their geography or natural beauty. Humans tend to congregate around centres of economic activity, which means some places become popular. But creating sprawls of dormitory suburbs and efficiently piping everybody into the few places that are actually nice sounds terrible.

* my perspective from Australia

[JumpCrisscross]

> we are not good at making new places that people want to be

Isn’t this every boom town or place complaining about their quaint community blowing up?

[crabmusket]

I'm not sure I follow entirely.

If you're responding to an implication that people should go have their own nice place elsewhere and not bother me in my nice place... yeah, I can understand why that's problematic. But I don't think the position "we should build more nice places" is itself a wrong position to take.

[JumpCrisscross]

I’m saying every time a quiet town’s housing market booms, that is peoples’ preferences around where they want to live shifting.

[physPop]

China does it and it works well. We just need governments with executive planning capabilities. In my country (Canada) we only have myopic politicians who only care for re-election.

[fragmede]

In the US, in California, some billionaires tried to create a new city, but it got shot down, because billionaires.

[rickydroll]

> we are not good at making new places that people want to be

I think it's more appropriate to say that we don't have enough diversity of places to meet the population's wide-ranging desires and needs. There are city mice that love the density, crowds, and noise of urban environments, and there are country mice who take refuge in quieter country spaces. It's a disaster when housing misallocation forces one to live in another's space.

Case in point. A friend lived in a suburban rural community because it had dark skies and he loved astronomy. It was great until some neighbors moved into an adjacent house, and they immediately put up floodlights all around the house and left them on all the time. They resisted turning them off when he asked.

These people should have been living in a city condo tower where they would feel "safe." The question then becomes, why didn't they buy in the city? They clearly had the money given the size of the property and the city it was located in. I suspect the answer was an insufficient number of urban condos.

I love having gardens, fruit trees, and birds at the feeder. That is an existence I chose. I want people to be able to choose a different living option if they want it.

I don't have an answer for how to solve the housing problem. I hope that whatever plans people use, they keep urban-scale density inside the city limits and not export it to the countryside. And while they're at it, turn down the fucking lights. Your light bubble damages crepuscular and nocturnal life cycles in animals and plants within a 20-plus-mile radius.

[_carbyau_]

> we* are not good at making new places that people want to be

So much this. Australia has ridiculous space compared to population. In comparison to somewhere like Singapore, we have sooo much space.

And yet bureaucracy seems to be trying to kill off most places not a capital city...