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If you could unravel all perverse effects of American localist planning and regulation, it would be great.

But if the idea is just "let the developers build where they want and that solves everything", that idea is wrong. Developers don't want to build the dense, affordable house that's needed. Developers want to take advantage of the existing housing and housing expectation and build one bigger house or bigger development one ring out among the suburbs.

What's needed is dense construction near to cities and regulations to support that. And "Yimby" and so forth aren't supporting no regulations, they're supporting pure developer friendly regulations, which won't do anything but give them a piece of the present perverse "gold rush".




What is this nonsense? Yimbys are support upzoning property, so denser housing can be built. They support removing parking minimums so denser housing can be built.


Most places (where I live, Nevada City, for example) upzoning and reducing parking limits would just create problems. It's the actual central areas where you want to allow much greater density. A denser outlying suburb isn't a win.


Outlying suburbs should see an increase in the sorts of things that make them "places". Cafes, bakeries, bars, restaurants, offices, markets, schools, plazas, bookstores, and so on. Then they can further densify without automatically driving more commute traffic into the city.


Doesn't make sense that increasing density from very low to merely low in an outlying suburb would result in cafes and bakeries. You're talking places already oriented to the automobile, where people drive to the whatever cafe or bakery they already like in a large area.


You're assuming that those local businesses can just spin up and wait what, months? years? for the density to reach levels that will sustain said local businesses. Most people don't have the money to throw down the drain like that merely wishing for the urbanist utopia to arrive. In the real world, money matters, timescales matter, customers matter, etc.


Developers make money by building what people want.




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