Reply to Biden Has Fully Embraced YIMBYs and Will Lose Suburban Voters

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m legitimately thinking about switching my vote over this.[/quote]

Good thing zoning is a local and not federal issue, then.[/quote]

They are going to try to force it on local communities by tying federal funding to zoning reforms. [/quote]

So you think eventually having people commute 2+ hours and not having arable land close to suburbs and cities is a good thing?[/quote]

Exactly.  We need to save our farms, save our small towns, and so on - and the best way to do that is to change our current dumb zoning policies which have promoted sprawl, car dependence, long commutes, and endless acres lost to stupid cookie-cutter subdivisions.  The people who oppose this should take some time to read some Jane Jacobs, who talked about saving cities and having them be livable rather than carving them up with superhighways coming and going, nothing but massive office complexes and so on.  Or read Save Our Land, Save Our Towns by Thomas Hylton.  Europe does not have many of the problems that we do in the US because their towns grew up organically, where zoning doesn't just chunk things out into "commercial here, residential there" and instead has first-floor retail with residential above, and so on.  We really should aim for livable, walkable communities, where you can walk to the grocery store and other things, where you have easy mass transit to work or wherever else you need to go and don't even need a car.  [/quote]

The YIMBYs are never satisfied and they will not stop until there is basically no zoning and developers are allowed to build high density 10+ story apartments everywhere. They are total shills for developers and the real estate industry. Most of them do not care about any practical concerns like infrastructure limitations, traffic, school capacity, or community impact. Upzoning an entire county or state (to allow multiplexes) is not necessarily an effective solution to prevent sprawl and encourage environmental sustainability or farmland preservation.  It will actively encourage sprawl and development in rural locations when land is substantially cheaper per acre.  More targeted zoning changes are the most effective way to ensure that development is sustainable while preventing sprawl.

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I get it, that the Boomers have been sold a bill of goods about the idealized American condition of a single family home on a quarter acre lot with a white picket fence. That was fine when the world's population was under a billion people. It isn't fine now. I get it, you are upset about it, but we can't really contain global population growth  or population growth in the US. We also can't force people from rural areas to stay in those rural areas. Most of the ones who can, leave their rural hamlet, go to a public university and then on to the big city in their state or to NY, Boston, Chicago, DC, San Francisco, Atlanta etc. Unless you want to somehow ban people from doing that, we will need to continue to grow our cities.

We can either grow our cities by continuing to build single family homes on quarter acre lots, or we can densify and use the land more efficiently. Using land more efficiently also means more transportation choices, more choices around housing types etc.

The ideal of the boomers, of the open road, a car and a house just isn't reality today for the Gen Z and many Millennials. So we need to plan for a future that is different from the Boomer past. Sure, there will still be single family homes, there will still be people who commute by car, but we also need to plan for people living in apartmens and high rises, and to get around by mass transit or bikes or scooters.

The planning taking place now won't impact you, PP, but it will make life more tenable for your grandchildren.[/quote]

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