[yonran]

I have the opposite takeaway. The city should be mutable. A subway line should be buildable within one political term. The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet. A lot of the author’s learnings are actually indicators of 21st century American stagnancy. Real life should be more like Sim City.

[mschuster91]

> A subway line should be buildable within one political term.

That used to be the case maybe 50 years ago, when we had the first network built in Munich.

The problem is, since then a loooooot of stuff was built underground. Not just more and more tunnels, but also so many subterranean lines for power, POTS, internet... and a lot of what was built 50 years ago was built by literally ripping open a street, excavating tunnel space, building a roof of concrete and backfilling everything with soil. You simply can do this exactly once and you need a wide enough street to do this. Once all these "cheap and easy" routes are built over, it becomes a multi-billion-dollar project as you have to make sure you don't endanger the buildings on top - in Cologne, that cost the lives of two people and destroyed a good portion of the City Archives [1].

> The property tax rate should rise or fall within a time frame that would incentivize people to vote with their feet.

People should not be forced to move, at all. Incentivizing movement, okay, but forcing people around like we do now (mostly, by not having any kind of modern jobs in rural areas) has a lot of nasty side effects - not everyone can move, so you get resentment building up against those that did move (eventually culminating in the "these librul cities turn our kids gay!!!" bullshit and, subsequently, the massive urban-rural political disconnect), and a lot of old people in rural areas end up having no one to take care of them in old(er) age, and young people in urban areas don't have kids because they don't have family to support them in raising said children.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historisches_Archiv_der_Stadt_...