What's the solution then? Utah built apartments for everyone. That seems to have worked.
If housing prices dropped, the labor market would stabilize, lowering the cost of more construction.
Instead, the planning commissions and zoning boards intentionally restrict the supply of housing, causing all sorts of market distortions.
Similarly, the transit system is repeatedly sabotaged. We spend a lot of money narrowing roads or intentionally lowering their rush hour throughput. Public transit is also systematically mismanaged. My theory is that they intentionally reduce practical commute distances to prop up housing values near the work.
(Sometimes they claim they make commuting worse to protect the environment. My car gets 50-66% as many miles per gallon in the bay area as it does in other cities. Even driving up a mountain is more fuel efficient than rush hour around here. It’s pretty clear the traffic engineering here is not concerned with CO2 emissions.)
I think the idea is that if commuting sucks enough you’ll stop doing it and those emissions go to zero.
Or you’ll switch to public or shuttle transit and emissions per person per mile drop by some ridiculously high factor. A bus can pack some 80 people into the space of 4 cars and I bet emissions aren’t 80x those of a car either.
The next nearest bus stop is a 15 min walk from here. Still easily doable but not as nice, especially in the dark wet months. Service is unreliable so a bus is between 5 and 60 minutes away, if it isn’t cancelled.
To get to the office I have to do a transfer downtown. That 5-45 minute ordeal involves standing in human waste (mostly urine) with a very real risk of being shot or robbed or just randomly assaulted verbally or physically.
Or I can pay a $1,000.00 premium to live near the office.
I don’t live way out in the suburbs either. I am within the city limits in a “transit first” neighborhood with great walkability. I held up my end of this deal.
The problem with making cars infeasible is that public transit is simply terrible here, and we have one of the best systems in the country.
The state legislature can introduce a legislatively referred constitutional amendment to eliminate state and local sales tax and replace it with a distributive land tax.
So, while saying "just build more housing" isn't wrong, it's not a useful way to communicate the concept of do whatever it takes to encourage more housing to people that aren't already on board with the idea.
Governments are completely run by monetary expenditure.
You don't spend all your budget cause you savy? Great, we'll put that money with someone else next year.
Spend all your money on junk? Great we'll give you more money next year because you clearly need it.
What needs to happen is to decouple monetary spend from incentives.
Incentivise saving money and use escape hatches to protect budgets from fluctuations (saving one year might not be recurring, this shouldn't affect your spend next year)