(08-19-2022, 02:19 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: Sounds as if you are indicating a possible reduction in the number of single family homes. Sadly (for many at least) this will have to happen for both environmental reasons as well as addressing the now out of control homeless issue. This is the time of year when this should really start before the cold weather envelops the area with four season climates. Our love affair with single family homes then will have to end. However, the chief paramour is the powerful coalition of homeowners associations which have been very influential in whipsawing jurisdictions to enact strict zoning laws which in many cases will not allow anything other than SFHs or the occasional upscale condo project from being built.
I would be an advocate for bringing back the concept of rooming houses, which would do a lot to begin to get more homeless into housing. Not luxury but an improvement over having to be on the streets, especially during the winter months.
With 150 million people, America could have the suburban ranch house as a norm for (at the least) the white middle class. Land was cheap, so mortgages weren't as fiendishly expensive even as urban rent is for what are frankly slums by the standards of the 1950's. With 300 million people, most of the population is damned to live in over-priced slums.
Many communities killed the possibility of suburban ranch-style houses with zoning that mandated quarter-acre lots. Apparently those communities saw the "mere" middle class as riff-raff who would require services and not pay exorbitant taxes. People still need housing, and if America has a shortage of single-family ranch houses then we could end up with something like the prefabricated monstrosities characteristic of Communist countries.
Housing on quarter-acre lots implies high expenses of building roads and establishing utilities... and the not-so-rich end up subsidizing the rich who can afford quarter-acre suburban lots. The public utilities probably lose money on these customers while making money off apartment dwellers. Ouch!
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.