⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️
I've watched the PNW housing market for a while and I'm developing a few #urbanist thoughts, maybe a #manifesto.
- Cars are, within episilon, bad.
- Buses are good. Trains are better. Walking is best. Not everyone can do any of those. #transit matters.
- Single family zoning is a key cause of our current housing crisis among the < 35 set. Single family housing
- Suburbs are a drain on our ecology and in the modern form, started as racialized bubbles.
⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️
- costs of living in the suburb should be priced dependent on the distance to the nearest major density & job center.
- Price controls on houses should be adopted, tied directly to income, on a curve corresponding to a *regional/statewide* income PDF. Max should be 3x median income.
- Rent controls should be adopted with a similar cost curve.
- Rents should be deductible on tax; mortgages should not be.
- Cars should be taxed per mile. This can be accomplished with GPS trackers.
⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️
- Single family housing zoning should be removed. Neighborhood input & process should be almost negligible, only as a safety factor.
- Mixed use & high density zoning - 50 story max should be normative; urban zones should have no max limit not set by physics, and a min limit of, say, 15-20 stories.
- High sq ft houses and enormous lots with only 1 family on them should be taxed heavily, larger = much more tax, exponentially.
- Public housing should be standard for the bottom of the incomes.
⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️
In short, fellow Mastodonians, we need to effectively ban exburbs, force the suburbs to either densify or collapse, and turn cities into places for all people, not just the rich.
Genuine rural living is fine, but for the upper class of that population, it's more a faux-rural environmental disaster; for the lower class, there's no escape. Let's relocate them to the heart of the city.
Remote areas should be for visiting, not living.
⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️
We need housing for all people, and that means rolling back one hundred years of anti-just zoning laws and exercising freedoms that harm others.
Housing for everyone means housing for EVERYONE. That means that real estate stops being an asset. Period. It's not for retirement or selling. It's for living. Selling is not a big deal.
And to get there, we need to force through an approach which does not permit another round of white flight and vacuuming money out of our cities.
DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab
@pnathan we currently live in the heart of the city and the noise pollution is almost crippling for my wife. we will ultimately be moving out of the city specifically for this reason.
⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️
@djsundog emigrating from the city generates a long tail of pollution and waste, which is directly tied to climate change and other terrible environmental effects.
there's no way to get out of that hole without radically redoing the way of housing today.
DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab
@pnathan if the radical change required is physically damaging to entire groups of persons it will be trading one hole for another
⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️
@djsundog Apartments can be sound isolated. Parts of town don't have to be next to police stations & hospitals. There are ways to solve the problem.
DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab
@pnathan I will resolve to move us back to the city as soon as those problems are resolved ;)
⚗️⚗️⚗️ pnathan ⚗️⚗️⚗️
@djsundog Leaving the city harms our children, our children's children, on and on. That's consequential from what we know of the environment.
each of us when we leave and drive our car, move into a single family house, we pick up a tiny stone of that responsibility, and it doesn't go away.
I would like to adapt our society for sustainable long-term living across the board.
Jonkman Microblog is a social network, courtesy of SOBAC Microcomputer Services. It runs on GNU social, version 1.2.0-beta5, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.