[throw0101a]

> This is possible if you’re not picky about where you live, where you work, your career options, how crowded your local vicinity is, or how much you pay for your residence.

Perhaps the problem is the lack of options for those people that want human-centric (versus car-centric) communities. Maybe if we let The Market™ decide, versus forcing low-density sprawl via zoning, more options would be available.

Right now, if you look on any real estate web site, you'll probably find walkable neighbourhoods have higher prices non-walkable ones: there is demand for them, but a fixed supply since they're not being made anymore, and so they get bid up. Perhaps if there were more of them, especially around commuter rail stations, it would help.

[quantumwannabe]

We already tried that experiment. The result was Houston.

[throw0101a]

The City Beautiful channel goes over the restrictions that Houston has:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaU1UH_3B5k

For example deed restrictions, where, when a sub-division is created, the use case of the lots can never be changed. See also "residential buffering ordinance", parking requirement ordinance, historic districts, etc.

[HEmanZ]

Houston is not a free market for housing at all. They don’t have “zoning” because they call it “land use covenants” and “parking requirements” instead, and it ends up amounting to the same thing as “zoning” in other cities.

And the market doesn’t build the streets, sidewalks, or set up public transport routes.

I remember visiting my friend in an 400+ unit apartment complex in Houston. When I got up in the morning I was like “hey I’m going to walk down and get coffee.” My friend said to just Uber Eats it, I was like that’s insane. So I went down to the ground floor and found out there was literaly no way to walk to the coffee shop that was 0.1 miles away less than 30 minutes because of the absolute nightmare that is Huston streets and sidewalks.

[psd1]

I don't think we can learn much about pedestrianisation from Texas.