Across the nation massive YIMBY laws are being passed to mass produce cheap “homes” 12 to an acre while not addressing any of the causes of the housing shortage. For some reason, despite all logic and reason YIMBYs seem to be incapable of the reality that we need growth in small towns to balance growth over massive city hubs, that building new cities would reduce strain while also allowing INNOVATION that constantly replacing in old cities is vastly expensive (think placing central air in every building in Europe).
Instead YIMBYs love the Austin “model”. Here’s what Austin did, they flooded the market with sardine box apartments, half of Austin’s apartments are now single bedrooms or studios and the average size of ALL apartments are 830 sq feet. The average price per Sq Ft of homes in Austin is ~$320, ~$228 is the national average. However rental prices are down (if you ignore price per square foot)!
Any sane person could tell that overall price dropping while price per square feet increasing is massively bad, if eggs became 75% of their price tomorrow people would be happy, until they realized cartons now hold 8 eggs. YIMBYs however think that instead of using the millions of dying small towns for new cities and planned growth we should do the worst possible thing and cram more people into smaller homes that cost more.
It wasn’t just immigration, anti redlining polices completely destroyed the cheap semi urban housing and let it go to shit. That was part of Bill “We will no longer be a White nation” Clinton’s and Alan “Line go up” Greenspans love child. That same love child also caused the housing bubble crisis and froze housing development for over a decade.
We could have thousands of walkable small cities today if the state government didn’t intentionally steer all job growth to cities while turning rural America into dumping grounds for no/low permanent job projects like data centers. Cities have really become city states and hold the rest of the state hostage of all resources and growth.
This is pretty on the nose.
A "walkable city" doesn't exist. It's called a small town, and the policies of the left deliberately killed it decades ago. They're selling fake antidotes to their own poison.