I'll make it even simpler for you. Urbanist policies, like all leftist utopian plans, don't have to successfully accomplish their goals in order to ruin people's lives. Millions of walkable apartments don't have to be built before urbanist policies start having real effects; their effect on housing prices and congestion are felt immediately. Just because your utopia hasn't come to fruition doesn't mean that you haven't wrecked millions of people's standard of living in pursuit of it.
What you wrongly attribute to urbanism is mostly just NIMBYism. What kind of urbanism is it if you don’t actually build urban stuff?
You constantly bring up straw urbanism, anyway. If your idea of urbanism is just obstructionism indistinguishable from tree-huggers and NIMBYs, then I am not urbanist. I might be some kind of build-stuff-ist. Or something.
Also, this could explain your absurd claim there are (anglophone) cities where urbanists are in control, which I don’t think is true. When urbanism is defined as making things worse with no upside whatsoever, there’s plenty of cities with urbanists in control.
That's
illegal thanks to urban growth boundaries to "protect the environment", which is something that you support
I am not an environmentalist NIMBY either. You may have noticed I proposed building several new Berlins. I am a fan of building more stuff, I am not a fan of not building more stuff.
The kind of “urban growth boundary” I like is when you build enough medium-rise stuff downtown that new demand for suburban houses doesn’t need new suburban houses: people who like the new medium rises move out of the suburbs and more people move in to the suburbs to replace them. You can still build new suburbs if there is demand for it, be my guest.
Since commercial real estate sprawls as well, commute time isn't a limiting factor for city size. We are nowhere close to consuming all available land except for in a handful of areas surrounded by oceans or mountains. Why restrict building and cause the price of housing to rise now just because you personally dislike cars and sprawl?
If what you say is true, why do commute times swell dramatically in sprawling cities? Are people stupid and don’t work in nearby strip malls and business parks? The ideal of decentralized jobs just doesn’t match up with reality. Most jobs, particularly good, well-paying jobs want to locate next to other jobs. The larger your commuting area, the better (worse?) it gets. It’s wrecking millions of people’s standard of living, especially for people who are not particularly fond of driving hours per day just to be able to work. But I guess it’s a good kind of wrecking. You know, with car wrecks?
The “suck it up and drive” rhetoric about people who are anxious or for any other reason not fond of driving around all day is a big reason why America has such high traffic accidents stats. The best way to improve the quality of drivers is to let people who have no business driving not drive if they don’t want to. Fewer, better drivers is not only safer but more efficient for highway traffic.
Also, I still don’t get why you accuse me of wanting to not build stuff. Just build stuff. From my first post in this chain, I advocate building more of all kinds of stuff. Including the good stuff that doesn’t accommodate cars much, but apparently you insist that everything should put the car first. Literally just don’t drive to places that suck to drive in. Your life isn’t getting wrecked by it. Do you complain this much about every single suburb that suck to drive for through traffic? Because a ton of them block through routes and do traffic calming and you already cope with it by not driving there in the first place.
Try not using covid numbers. Housing prices in Texas and other free states went up a ton in the last year because they had far more immigration than normal due to people fleeing draconian lockdown states. Their housing prices will stabilize or fall as the construction industry deals with their unexcepted demand spike. They also don't have a multi year waiting list for apartments like many European cities do.
Cope.
I hope you’re right, but I am not as optimistic.
