What would be the best policies to incentivize density and putting an end to wasteful suburban sprawl?
small brewery, to an artisan coffee shop, to a gig venue, to an interesting clothing store, to a specifically curated intl food place
While interesting ideas, these all seem very hipstery. Alternate examples for more non-coastal city-ish neighborhoods like my own could include:
-seed library -workshop/tool library -school/education center -theater
I don’t know, abolish parking minimums federally, dismantle the FHA, require a large amount of the money in the highway fund be dedicated to bike and transit infrastructure, institute a land-value tax?
Or just put the Strong Towns people in charge
Do you mean in a socialist government? Or working with the system we have now?
If it’s the later, I mean what Portland did seems to have worked. Drew a line around the city and banned suburban sprawl behind that line. While that won’t eliminate already-existing suburbs, it does prevent the problem from getting any worse. If it’s a growing city then it forces people to revamp brownsites. If you want to actually “eliminate” suburbs, I think it would largely involve what I described plus changes in zoning and massive investments in public transportation so people could reasonably get by without owning a car.
Carrot - Make living in the city better for people who are in the suburbs
- Make rent in the city CHEAP/help people find homes in the city who want to be there
- Make moving goods around the city for families cheap/easy
- More Parks and play areas for kids (basically make living in the city easier/better for “families” )
- More transit options
- Much better transit options for the disabled
- Make it easy for people from suburbs/far away visit the cities.
Make Farm live more desirable/possible for those who don’t love the city
- Availability of training for farming
- Subsidies for smaller farmers for crop varieties
- Get them equipment/ability to share equipment (as economies of scale and so forth)
Stick -
- Make it harder/more annoying to build “neighborhoods” of single family homes.
- Incentivize turning lawns/property in suburbs into climate appropriate farms. (IE - less fucking almonds in California that should be a fucking desert)
- Break Buying/Selling Homes - investment in home ownership must be turned from a goal/purpose for people into “owning a boat”/ Buying a “new car” a huge waste of money that you are doing mainly for the sake of having it.
I’d look at it as a long term thing of removing the things that make suburbs seem better than Farm/City life.
I’m not sure that there is a good answer to this that anyone is going to be happy with. We already have enough housing to house everyone in America. Mass redevelopment of urban areas, migration back to those urban areas, and demolition of the suburbs would result in a ton of CO2 emissions. It’s probably better to redeveleop commercial areas in the suburbs into almost like smaller villages, where instead of one giant Target or Walmart for the town, there are a bunch of smaller retail/entertainment clusters more spread out and accessable by bike or foot. Sprawl/growth of the suburbs should definitely be halted, though.
I think that massive redevelopment would also need to entail massive jobs programs to encourage working near home. Furthermore, zoning laws would need to be upended to improve walkability and carbon-negative development.
In a sense, the car and it’s infrastructure are what allow unsustainable sprawl and our goal would be to abolish the car as a primary means of transportation. But the question is how do you do this without unduly punishing the poor?
