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> US zoning laws...

That's an incredibly broad statement since most zoning is handled on the state, county or city level. There are plenty of places in the US where someone could build an equivalent SF or NYC and yet they don't.

> The few prewar walkable cities that still function such as New York and San Francisco are very expensive as a result.

You seem to be drawing a causal link here, walkable leads to desirable and expensive. Yet, as I mentioned before, not only is it possible to build walkable cities in many states, there are plenty of other walkable cities that aren't expensive or desirable.

I suspect that SF and NYC being the both historic and a hub of two giant economic engines of the US, the tech and financial sectors respectively, has a lot more to do with the pricing of those areas than their walkability.




> I suspect that SF and NYC being the both historic and a hub of two giant economic engines of the US, the tech and financial sectors respectively, has a lot more to do with the pricing of those areas than their walkability.

Demand - from various sectors over time, sure, but also geographic constraints

Each are different enough to only talk about in isolation, but of the commonalities you can't dismiss how interrelated the density and walkability are. A byproduct of the geographic constraints with a constant need to fulfill the demand.


Most US zoning is pretty similar. There are exceptions like Houston, but by and large, zoning codes aren't that different from place to place. A lot of the model codes were derived from similar sources, IIRC

https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines has some good, if brief history of all of it.


> there are plenty of other walkable cities that aren't expensive or desirable.

Can you name some of them?




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