>>...the price of upkeeping a beater car... ...not enough public transit in the US to avoid this reality outside of cities with high rent
It is not only the price of purchase, insurance, maintenance of a car, it is also the TIME you are condemning them to spend on commuting everywhere.
The solution is to make massively more residential development/redevelopment IN and NEAR the cities, such as now converting underutilized office space to residential, and not only passing regs favoring and encouraging such conversions (as is being done noe in Boston), but ALSO passing regs encouraging Remote Work.
And, where there IS public transit, encourage development there. Massachusetts is doing this, specifically encouraging conversion of offices to residential and overriding zoning laws within X distance of commuter rail stops.
Those are both good moves. But arguing for merely blanket 'develop anything anywhere' is literally stupid and will do more damage to society than any gains. There are reasons zoning was developed, and while a small part of it was racist/classist, most of it has very good reasons to exist. Simply overriding it is statist authoritarian, and saying people in their locales have no right to determine how they run their LOCAL affairs, from environmental, to historic preservation, to traffic patterns.
Plus, it's already been proven that cheap housing away from the city doesn't work. People can buy a trailer for $10-$30K and as spot for $400-1000/mth, or rentals for a bit more. But the locales are all away from the city. There are very few people who actually do it BECAUSE it is impractical to live so far from jobs in the city. If you want to house people more cheaply, it needs to be done NEAR their jobs. Destroying everything else for a bad idea will merely leave the problem unsolved, and destroy value.
I've watched towns have zoning, abandon it, then reinstate it a decade later because they saw what an awful idea it was to have none. I've seen towns that rezoned to "modernize" and destroy their character, and towns preserve their character and grow steadily into desirable locales. NONE of it is as trivial as you think.
It is not only the price of purchase, insurance, maintenance of a car, it is also the TIME you are condemning them to spend on commuting everywhere.
The solution is to make massively more residential development/redevelopment IN and NEAR the cities, such as now converting underutilized office space to residential, and not only passing regs favoring and encouraging such conversions (as is being done noe in Boston), but ALSO passing regs encouraging Remote Work.
And, where there IS public transit, encourage development there. Massachusetts is doing this, specifically encouraging conversion of offices to residential and overriding zoning laws within X distance of commuter rail stops.
Those are both good moves. But arguing for merely blanket 'develop anything anywhere' is literally stupid and will do more damage to society than any gains. There are reasons zoning was developed, and while a small part of it was racist/classist, most of it has very good reasons to exist. Simply overriding it is statist authoritarian, and saying people in their locales have no right to determine how they run their LOCAL affairs, from environmental, to historic preservation, to traffic patterns.
Plus, it's already been proven that cheap housing away from the city doesn't work. People can buy a trailer for $10-$30K and as spot for $400-1000/mth, or rentals for a bit more. But the locales are all away from the city. There are very few people who actually do it BECAUSE it is impractical to live so far from jobs in the city. If you want to house people more cheaply, it needs to be done NEAR their jobs. Destroying everything else for a bad idea will merely leave the problem unsolved, and destroy value.
I've watched towns have zoning, abandon it, then reinstate it a decade later because they saw what an awful idea it was to have none. I've seen towns that rezoned to "modernize" and destroy their character, and towns preserve their character and grow steadily into desirable locales. NONE of it is as trivial as you think.