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Lifestyle inflation, urban planning, and choices makes living a quality life more difficult than it should be.

You're able to afford a larger house and a car or two, but you're also spending more money than necessary on transportation and housing. Buying a car is expensive and so is the road built for cars. Trains are more expensive than a car, but its cost can be amortized across many riders.

Housing is a problem of both government and market dysfunction and is directly tied to our transportation woes. People are tied to the idea of real estate as an investment which means they often opposed development. Planners continued to zone only SFH, and made middle housing illegal. They also don't do mixed zoning which improve efficient utilization of land.

I supposed if income goes to workers more, they would just push the housing price higher. It can't be fixed unless we build sufficient housing.




Lifestyle inflation is why people don’t feel so much wealthier than their grandparents, but housing isn’t the economic drain it seems like because so much of its value doesn’t require resources to create. It’s mostly redistribution of income from workers to other people and as such it gets into politics.

Well that and the giant ball of suck associated with long commutes, but I am kind of hoping there’s going to be more pushback on that due to people working from home during COVID. Even those who still needed to go in had vastly less traffic.


If you increases the income of workers that's going to go to right back into housing, unless you made changes on how the housing market works.




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