This fun city nerd video is somewhat relevant: www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsbkvsyN-O8 Cities where the lowest percent of median income goes to median (housing + transportation). The winners were Seattle and San Francisco. This suggests that salaries may be able to compensate for increased housing costs. Of course, a longitudinal study would be necessary to answer this question.

I prefer Micromamba since it’s faster at solving environments.

The problem comes when people who insist on living away from civilization demand the perks of civilization by being able to drive to a city and park their cars for free.

This becomes very expensive, and degrades the quality of life of those who live in the City.

That puts you at an extreme, where there are not many like you. So I don’t care if you have a gas car. But you should not stand in the way for most people to live more ethicaly, without a car. Support dense cities so there are plenty of pristine caves for hermits to live in.

In America, it’s 5:1 urban to rural. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america.html

And the threshold for rural is 500 people per square mile. So the 5 minutes to neighbor is at a rare extreme. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/acs/acsgeo-1.pdf

You can have nice land to work on in rural village. Being miles from your neighbor is not a sustainable way to live. And probably not healthy for a social animal like humans.

Transit between rural villages and the nearest city is possible and has been implemented in other countries

Very few people ought to be living that way. I think it’s fine for those people to use ICE cars. I also don’t care very much if the tractors use fossil fuels.

I see, my favorite podcast (“A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs”)[https://500songs.com/] has no ads. I’d strongly recommend if your interested in that kind of music

I don’t understand what you mean. I just skip the ads with my skip 30 seconds button.

George W Bush won the popular vote in 2004

If you’re doing it over an app, without the chance for the person you’re dumping to respond, I see no risk of things turning nasty

I’m generally against the idea of planting as many trees as possible.

Trees are not very good carbon sinks because they decompose and burn. Also, there are also some ecological communities where adding trees makes the land a worse carbon sink.

Avoiding cutting down forests to build suburbs is something I can certainly get behind though.

Do you think anyone ought to go to prison?

If a person has harmed others, and is likely to do more harm in the future, it’s appropriate to remove them from society. This is why prisons exist.

Drivers licence suspension typically is the consequence of crimes that are too minor to warrant prison. In this case, the perpetrator has the chance to make changes to their life to avoid prison. For example, they can accept slow public transit, bike to work, get a closer job, move to a place where it’s easier to live without a car.

Obviously, It will be challenging for the perpetrator to reorganize their life in a way that does not require them to risk harming others, and many will fail.

But your argument that society is required to accept being victimized by dangerous drivers because it would be inhumane to force them to use alternative forms of transportation (used by millions of people too poor to afford a car, even in the most car dependent cities) is absurd.

something like 15,000 empty houses right now

This statistic is meaningless because many of the cities with excess housing are in places with no jobs

building brand new single family homes doesn’t empower the working class, it empowers landlords

This is incorrect. The important statistic to look at is vacancy rate In almost all the major cities in the US vacency rates are well below the tenant empowering 8% and many are below the 5% rate where tenant have a fighting chance. We absolutely need more housing. I’d prefer duplexes, triplexes, row houses and apartments for urbanist reasons, but the idea that building more houses empowers landlords over the proletariat is ridiculous.

That is not an example of market capitalism. It’s an example of regulatory capture by homeowners: capitalist developers would like to build more housing, but homeowners cause the local government to block this.

With housing, we are in an unusual circumstance where both less government intervention (let people build more housing) and more government intervention (build public housing) would be better than the status quo.

In Amsterdam the mode share for all trips is like 30% for biking and for walking and like 20% for driving and for transit

I mean the policy in question was to tax second homes at 10,000%

Presumably that includes houses an organization wants to rent out. It’s hard to imagine that this policy wouldnt make it very difficult to rent

Because it’s good for people to be able to rent a house, and we already subside home ownership enough in the US

They did this in California and Oregon, then the schools went to shit.

Also, property taxes are a good way to encourage density, which is necessary to fight climate change