Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

> I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier.

Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. I want my neighborhood to be functional and efficient, I already have access to several parks for taking a walk if I want to.

Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though.

Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD).

The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. And housing has become a "store of value" against inflation for investors, driving up prices and becoming a retirement fund for landlords and homeowners so governments can never let the prices drop (e.g. by embracing the abundance of development proposed in this article).

Zoning is the biggest impediment. Most US cities have parking requirements, rules for setbacks, and limits on number units in a building.

There is a strong incentive against changing the rules to allow more construction because scarcity increases the value of existing units.

If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly (e.g. not a residential-only section of suburbia pretending to be a proper neighborhood) your schlepping shouldn't be any longer than a 15-minute walk either way, at which point instead of doing the periodic bulk shopping that cars incentivize, you just pick up a limited amount of stuff as you need it every day or every other day.

A lot of U.S. cities have gotten this fundamentally wrong by just not being dense enough to support businesses like this and/or zoning strict residential instead of allowing natural development of small stores, so you end up with neighborhoods that are nominally walkable but that are still pointless without a car because there aren't any businesses at all within a mile radius of your home.

I don't think that's as simple as the article tries to make it out to be.

As poorer people start moving into a neighborhood, the richer people will flee away en masse. It seems to me that rich people will pay any amount of money just to make sure they're living where other rich people are, even if that means moving somewhere less convenient.

As the poorer people start taking over a hood due to prices going down for whatever reason (e.g. building more "affordable" accommodation), it begins to deteriorate such that in a decade or two, it becomes a "rough" place with badly maintained houses, dirty streets, broken street lamps, youngster gangs roaming around and so on.

That's not the default of the poor people themselves only, I think, but a combination of them naturally having lower standards (so they complain less about broken things to the local government - not sure I can accept that poorer areas are less maintained because there's no people living there who are in government), less money to keep up with maintenance (so houses deteriorate and stop looking cute), higher tendency of the youngsters in getting involved in gangs and crime (simply because many of them have far fewer opportunities in life, and they become aware of that very early) and so on.

Where I live is not a rough hood by any means, but it's more "affordable" than many other places... and I can see at least some of these things happening here... the government doesn't keep the vegetation on public places nearly as well trimmed as in the rich areas, there's definitely less care with the quality of the street pavement, houses are not completely deteriorated but most are not in perfect shape either... I just need to walk around 20 mins to get into an area where everything changes and houses are all of a sudden perfectly well kept, the public areas are beautiful, even the people look "prettier".

This segregation seems to happen naturally with humans everywhere.