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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Is it really that these cities are poorly managed or just that everyone feels entitled to live in the most expensive and desirable places? I don’t get the point of building up more - it’s just going to induce more demand (a common argument used by urbanists when it comes to road infrastructure). The real fix is that people need to spread out, and stop feeling like there are only two places to live in across such a large land. But no one wants to hear that they’re not entitled to have the exact job/city/pricing/conditions they feel they deserve.

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>(a common argument used by urbanists when it comes to road infrastructure)

This just proves that you don't know how housing works. I'm not even talking about the market itself. I'm just talking about the concept of being allowed to live in a building for money. You have to pay rent to live in a house/apartment. Alternatively you pay a mortgage or you buy the house outright.

None of this applies to road infrastructure, you don't pay toll to use a wider road. It's a direct subsidy to people who like driving. You would have to be extremely stupid to not understand that wider roads will lead to more driving. There is nothing preventing you from using public infrastructure wastefully precisely because it's free. Free suffers from tragedy of commons, everyone knows that.

If you use housing wastefully like by keeping it vacant you personally pay for this loss yourself. You're on the hook for your own behavior. People also get to decide whether they want denser apartments meanwhile the city planner forces road construction upon you whether your neighborhood really needs it or not.

> People also get to decide whether they want denser apartments meanwhile the city planner forces road construction upon you whether your neighborhood really needs it or not.

This isn't really right, you're confusing 60s style city planning with the modern approach. 60s style "urban renewal" built a lot of freeways everywhere without asking and destroyed many poor neighborhoods. This caused a backlash and the start of urban environmental activism (e.g. SF getting rid of the Embarcadero highway), and urban planning switched to the exact opposite approach it uses now, which is to never do anything without 5000 community meetings.

The result of this is… nothing ever happens, because the only people who show up to community meetings are retirees who don't want anything to change; nobody else has any free time. These people are less against roads than they are against houses though, because they mostly have no opinions other than hating traffic and liking free parking.

In Seattle it’s the opposite. Retirees are a minority at these meetings. Young urban or leftist activists are the majority, for example socialist housing advocates and homelessness advocates. They are well organized, seemingly have tons of time (potentially jobless?), and are aggressive, often staging protests outside city hall hearings and ensuring anyone else is shouted down. In many cases no one else is able to sign up on time to even speak, because the organizations these activists belong to are very disciplined about brigading the sign up page right on time. And who’s missing? The middle group - people with families or jobs.

Luckily switching to online meetings should solve both problems, now everyone can attend from home and nobody can scream at you.

The problem is that Western countries in general now seem incapable of building new cities.

Particularly Canada. Government policy has destroyed Northern Ontario. Everyone is crowding into Southern Ontario.

The defining trait of modern Canada is doing less with more. This country has given up on building infrastructure. It's given up improving.

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