This is US-centric though.As noted elsewhere, I'm pretty short of sleep, so I no doubt could have said some things better.
Yes, some of what I'm describing is very US-centric. But not all of it.
When I was growing up, most of the world lived and worked on farms. Within my lifetime -- in fact, within the lifetime of my children -- that changed and we now have more people living in cities worldwide than on farms.
The world has changed, but we still cleave to certain mental models that no longer serve us well. That's the super short version.
But anyway, since these suburbs are already built, couldn't this be resolved relatively easily by building public transport to the biggest suburbs?
Mostly, no. The suburbs actually built in the 1950s aren't so bad. A larger problem is the policies that era fostered in the US and the direction things have gone since then.
Average new homes in the 1950s were about 1200 square feet and held about 3.5 people. Today, the average new home is more than 2400 square feet and holds about 2.5 people.
There have been a lot of other changes as well in what is typical for a new home, but those details right there are enough to let you know that our homes have grown larger on average while our families have grown smaller. Meanwhile, we have a growing homeless problem (which people on the internet routinely want to claim is unrelated to housing supply issues and the high cost of rent, but the data doesn't support that conclusion).
Our family size has shrunk. Our homes need to also shrink and we need to return to patterns of development compatible with fostering walkable neighborhoods and transit-oriented design. Adding public transit to existing suburbs won't really achieve that.
The general assumption in the US is that young people should rent a place designed for a nuclear family and get a bunch of roommates to fill the extra rooms and split the rent. Then we make horror movies, like Single White Female, about basically what a nightmare this is. The internet is filled with horror stories of the roommate from hell and questions about "How on earth can I survive this or get out of this???"
We have eliminated about a million SROs. People object to SROs a "slum" housing. They are literally more comfortable with having people out in the street than with building housing that isn't upper middle class as our baseline expectation without providing jobs and incomes to support that as our baseline expectation.
While eliminating small homes that people could potentially live in as a single adult or childless couple, our millionaires are actively planning to eliminate jobs and create permanent unemployment. After eliminating jobs that paid on average $20k to $50k annually, our rich people here would like to institute UBI paying between $10k and $18k annually with an expectation that we will have 80 percent permanent unemployment.
Given that we have eliminated most housing across the US that costs less than $500/month to rent, there are a lot of places where $10k won't even pay your rent for the year, much less feed you. Without resolving our housing issues, there is no hope that some ridiculous scheme like UBI will do anything but shaft most Americans.
I mostly can't get people to really listen to me. They are too busy listening to multimillionaires and failing to see that those people are actively and intentionally planning to create a permanent underclass that will have no hope of accessing wealth ever again.
I was homeless for nearly six years while active on Hacker News. Simply being allowed to run my damn mouth in the same space as all kinds of millionaire businessmen absolutely didn't fix my life and lift me out of poverty and so forth. So I'm quite convinced that the entire point of wanting to create UBI is so that asshole rich people can wash their hands of poor people.
It's quite horrifying and I don't know how to stop it.
On the upside, the pandemic seems to have fostered some of the changes the world has been talking about for years and not accomplishing, such as reducing our carbon footprint and reducing pollution. So maybe we will find solutions anyway, in spite of bulling our way intentionally and on purpose towards a dystopian vision of intentionally shafting most Americans and telling them to fuck the hell off and forget about ever having any kind of a life.
SROs are going the way of the dinosaur and a lot of people no longer know what they are, so here is the obligatory link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
This comment is a little more on the ranty side than I really like. I'm just really short of sleep and tired of trying to be polite to people who literally don't care if their callous BS results in my death. So it's probably time for me just stop talking and attempt to go get some sleep.
