A federal policy change in the 1980s created the modern food desert

The Democrats on the other hand are beholden to corporate interests which limits how far left they can go.

Which is, by design in the American system, not possible without strict control of the presidency, the House, and the Senate, and possibly the Supreme Court.

As long as voters continue to not vote for democrats for "not doing enough", the democrats will never be able to "do enough". That's inherent in the system! Republican voters meanwhile understand the concept of "I'm going to put them in charge and see what they end up doing", even if I disagree with the things they want and their methods, they understand democracy very well!

I'm in the US, which can be pretty sparse even in urban areas if they were designed with particular bulk transit in mind. We have an industrial site that several hundred people need to report to over a 12 hour period, some temporarily, some for the entire duration. There's no parking and it's surrounded by multilane roads, now, so without bussing, no one can enter or leave except on a particular schedule, which hasn't been aligning to their personal schedules, so they can't necessarily get back to their cars to get access to food that may exist half a mile away in an otherwise urban area. There are no food trucks, and there's no food delivery.

If you're there, there's no convenient way to eat anything you didn't bring. The city took a look and now classifies it as a food desert, so they have to fix it.

Other types of food deserts are named as an indicator of poverty. In my home town, there was one grocery store and only a few diners. Once the commuter rail ended, about a third of the population (largely plant and mill workers) could only access that that part of town if they had a vehicle that could take the highway. A formerly 10 minute trip by rail and foot suddenly took three or four times as long and required a car! With how many single car households there were, people lost access to convenient food and eventually formed their own town.

Something similar happened when the bus routes were changed in another city I lived in, intentionally. It was part of a "beautification" scheme to create a false impression of wealth and demographics in a bid to attract investors, and they thought manufacturing a food desert would keep people out. The first year, some elderly people on fixed income died trying to make the trip by foot in the heat or were hit by cars, and the city was sued to reinstate transport.

What do you mean "just" ? The whole point is that the difficulty of social scaling is the network effects.

> I didn't invent this. This is how the whole world worked, in general, 100 years ago.

Sorry, you cannot reverse the arrow of time. From the little I understand the Japanese model is close to what I proposed about buying up land and creating a new urban area from scratch. So as I said, that is actually legally still on the table in the US. The problem is it seems to be off the table culturally (development companies in the US are building suburban tract houses instead of train stations and sky scrapers).

> But less need for cars when you can walk to where you are going

Yes, as I said, it's a tradeoff. I didn't explore all the facets. You're free to make these arguments. In fact, I encourage you to in general! I'm in a more ruralish area now and at this point in my life probably won't ever move back, but I used to live in a good sized walkable/bikeable city and I really enjoyed it (but for the economic treadmill).

> Exactly the NIMBY attitude that supposes you get to say what other people do with their property

Here we've gotten to the heart of the matter where so called right-libertarianism falls apart [0]. We're not talking about property (the buildings), but rather real estate (a land area relative to other people's real estate). That distinction exists for an important reason - because physical proximity means that your actions on your real estate does affect your neighbors, regardless of how much you want to ignore it. The retort of living next to a chemical plant is cliche, but for a good reason.

The null hypothesis base case is to move somewhere less dense so you don't affect your neighbors as much (which is precisely why the American conception of freedom encourages the sprawl it has!), not somehow having high population density without any conflict-resolving regulations. Scaling population density inherently requires social technology, not merely the rejection of social technology. If you're concerned about freedom in the urban context, you should be looking for freedom-preserving social technologies.

[0] just for context here I am libertarian, but have come to see right libertarianism as pathologically specious.

Errr, yes, this is a very valid critique. My argument was based on the assumptions you seemed to be coming from, which fit the same pattern of conjuring up new structures out of thin air:

>> If black neighborhoods are underserved, go make a fortune in black neighborhood grocery stores or their suppliers.

You then continued on about "men with guns" and willfully ignoring that actions on one piece of real estate can affect someone on another piece of real estate. All three are common tropes of right libertarianism.

Hence my:

> not somehow having high population density without any conflict-resolving regulations.

because I thought this is where you were coming from. But if you're really just arguing for "Merely liberalization", that's fantastic! Argue away, and you will get no argument from me on this topic (I don't live in a dense area, and I still recognize that the high cost of housing is strangling our society). But perhaps reformulate your arguments so they don't come off as dead end right libertarian tropes.

(Although I will say, completely independently of the rest of this exchange, and obviously not as a replacement for liberalization - if we could figure out a way to bootstrap new [non-car-based] cities in this country, that could go a long way as well)