Housing might be cheap but…
- Car centric design (sprawl)
- Shitty weather year round (hot and muggy or just snowy)
- Pollution
- Terrible local cops
- Low worker pay
- Gerrymandering
- Nothing to do
- C o r n
When I was an exchange student there, it was so painful. In my country I could walk places… Like, damn, going to the store to buy a snack or something. In Ohio I needed to ask someone for a 30m ride to the nearest location. It was just farm after farm after farm… Damn… It sucked.
I love the dichotomy of different kinds of states that tell technical truths about moving there. Ohio: I’ll tell you the truth because you actually don’t want to move here, trust me. An unnamed western state: weather or animals will killl you. Twice (please don’t move here, because it’s awesome without you here).
It’s worth actually doing the comparisons to see whether car-centric living is a net positive or negative in practice in particular situations. Urban density should be a pure benefit, with economies of scale making everything cheaper. Unfortunately, cities in practice have some downsides that reduce that benefit. One major one is that centralizing services means that it’s more useful to try to get a cut of the cash flowing through the institution, and so some of the gains get siphoned off. As a trivial example, exactly zero percent of car commute expenses go to a bus driver’s union.
Okay, so for your example, the money you’d spend on buying and maintaining a car, and all of the gas you have to buy to fuel it is clearly orders of magnitude more than the percent of you bus ticket price that goes to paying the percent of the bus driver’s wages than then goes to their union dues. Like, hundred or maybe even thousands of dollars per month vs. a few cents a month. Many people have already done the math many, many times, and it always works out to be a lot cheaper to have dense urban areas. It’s not even close in any scenario. This is not a new idea, and there already over a century of data all coming to the same conclusion.
Also, just the idea that unions are “siphoning off” money is really creepy. They are providing a very important service, and exactly zero percent of those union dues go to lobbying by oil companies to continue using fossil fuels even as global warming is becoming our present, not just our future. It is a much better use of funds than, for instance, paving 2/3 of the real estate in every city in America until we have 4 times as many parking spots as we have cars. Which is a thing we have done.
Many people have already done the math many, many times, and it always works out to be a lot cheaper to have dense urban areas.
I just moved from a dense urban area to a rural area. Taking everything into account - yes, really - things are unambiguously cheaper here. That’s a common result in the US. If you want to blame a single thing, I’d go with lack of housing supply in cities due to exclusionary zoning, but I hit some other weird figures like municipal water+sewer being more expensive than a well and septic system (again, yes, taking everything into account including construction costs).
I understand you’re trying to be nuanced here. I think that realistically things are so very skewed toward suburban and exurban development, car centricity, that any movement toward urbanity is better at this point in time.
It’s really bad to support specific policies just because they sound like a kind of policy that you broadly support. I personally broadly support pro-density policies. But many specific policies that are proposed either have fatal flaws or are useless as long as a century worth of accumulated NIMBY policies exist that super-redundantly ban the sort of density increase that would actually be useful.
And to be clear, only allowing density increases without cars would be exactly the sort of nonsense restriction that would be a fatal flaw, at least in the US.
