The core fabric of society - the deal that was offered by society to the people - to work in a job, own a house, raise a family, have a retirement - has decayed away entirely for many people.
You're not wrong but this is too simplistic and avoids holding up a mirror that really ought to be held up. Zoning was the "we're gonna regulate our way into utopia" of their time. The class of useful idiots who made it happen and the class of useful idiots who will go to bat for it's continuance because they make a buck on it is far broader than that.
Once again, the race thing is a distraction because it lets the useful idiots who are peddling stuff that's just as short sighted claim that it'll work out simply because they're not peddling racist policies this time.
Nobody has the balls to put their foot down and say that your neighbors have the right to build stuff you don't like and you can move if you don't like it.
More people. Same amount of land, and features people want to live by - cities (which in the past often meant rivers but always meant jobs)/in my area, lakes. It’s really that simple. Everything else is missing for forest for the trees.
This can never be solved until we resolve the public pension crisis.
Lawmakers in my state of Oregon are soon going to debate how the state invests in hedge funds but the simple truth of the numbers says that there's no possible way Oregon can meet its pension obligations without their stated returns.
Peasant farmers didn't sign up for and get given random plots of land by their lord for temporary holding that gets taken back later. They lived and died in the homes they themselves built on land they managed and worked in basically perpetuity down their family line, provided their family survived or wasn't driven off by or killed by war.
I don't mean to be shitty, and I fully understand that contrary takes are what HN is great at, but I genuinely fail to see what the point of your comment is other than a knee jerk nothing?
Truly, though, we did used to own many things in common that are now privately enclosed.