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keawade | 4 years ago
However I am not convinced that is what has happened in the US and Canada's suburban development with regards to the overwhelming adoption of single family homes.
Charles Marohn, a former city planner and engineer, has written about this "the free market has spoken" position as his own previous position on this topic which he no longer holds:
> At this point in my life, I was a self-described free-market Republican with an outspoken passion for markets and my chosen profession of civil engineering, which to me was a technical way to say “city building.” If I had been pushed to reconcile my rejection of congestion pricing with my support for the free market, I would have had no problem. I would have said something like:
> > Markets are about the expression of personal preference. It was clear that, since most people drove automobiles, auto-based infrastructure was the clear market preference. Since most people lived in single-family homes, they were also the clear market preference. Given those clear and obvious preferences—combined with the fact that people paid taxes and expected the government to respond to their desires—charging people more for something they already paid for was a ploy to benefit the rich. Instead of congestion pricing, the state should have been building more capacity.
The ubiquity of a given mode of something, in this case single family homes in US and Canadian suburbs, is not necessarily evidence that people overwhelming want or support those modes. Especially if there is rarely, if ever, a true alternative available to actually choose instead.
Further, even if we assume that the free market _did_ actually freely choose this mode that it should stand unquestioned in perpetuity. Needs and desires change as people and the world change together.
0: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/10/25/my-journey-fr...
AlbertCory|4 years ago
Anyone in the suburbs can move to the city if they want to, and the ubiquity of expensive downtown condo projects for empty-nesters demonstrates that a fair number do. So your citing of a lack of alternatives is pretty unconvincing. You're left with forcing people to do what they choose not to.
cheriot|4 years ago
In the most prosperous cities there's an entire conversation around displacement because costs are too high for people to live where they group up. So no, not everyone can.
> you citing of a lack of alternatives is pretty unconvincing.
There's a government commission deciding how much of each type of housing can exist. What alternative do people have other than living in what has been allowed? We can look at price to reveal preferences and the price per interior square foot is highest close to jobs. That's a far stronger signal than a survey that doesn't even ask people to imagine the tradeoffs.