Very poor countries also have exceptional public water wells where people can draw water with buckets.

That is because those are inconvenient, slow but necessary amenities in the areas where most people are poor. And that is why US currently doesn't need either.

Source: lived in a poor country with exceptional public transit and didn't ever drive till 29; and carried water with buckets from a well only a block away for an aggregate of 1-2 years.

Or you can pay attention to it, in which case it will ignore you.

Because what are you going to do about it? Say the same thing everyone else is saying? But a little different?

While I agree building housing is a symptom, and not the core problem. But I'm skeptical that increasing building or density would actually lower housing costs. If that were true, high dense cities like Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, or Hong Kong would have much lower cost housing.

Housing more people in a concentrated area creates more demand for services, which creates more demand for housing which jacks up prices. Packing 1,000 people into an apartment build creates extremely high demand for plumbing, house cleaning etc, services, which jack up housing prices. But if cities were low-density with commerce centers decenteralized across many neighbhorhoods or towns, you don't create location demand hotspots (e.g. cities) that jack up prices.

Property taxes and interest rates are a forcing function to keep unoccupied properties in check, as long as the appreciation doesn't dramatically exceed the risks of being a LL. For Tier 1-3 markets in the USA, you can't cash flow properties as rent is drastically lags property ownership costs.

Hi! Author here, wasn't expecting that someone would share this hastily-hacked-together post on HN ^^'

Thanks for reading, and ask me anything!

PS - I suspect some may have missed my footnotes if they were reading on mobile - tap the numbers to see them.

I haven't considered that. Do you have any data surrounding tax increase on urbanites caused by suburbanites? (If I understand your point.)

Is there anything stopping you from also syncing an encrypted copy of your data to a central server to be synced down or your other devices? It doesn’t appear so.

A websocket between all your devices and a server (or even webrtc between devices) could achieve this in parallel.

It's very hard to find a good camembert now. Easier with goat cheese and other products from the mountain.

But yesterday we bought one in Esteron that finally tasted how it's supposed to taste.

So it still exists, but as with anything popular, it dies from tragedy of the common.

quick, someone tell that small rural community of 600 people they need public transportation!

When people express opinions like this you immediately know they live in the city and think everyone else does too.

Id like to see the US focus on walkability too, but the reality is most Americans disagree. Most Americans want to live in a SFH with a big yard in suburbia. Public transit does not really work with those constraints. Public transit is great for the people that want to live in cities, but there are more than enough that dont to make electrifying cars an important goal. NYC is great but its obvious to me that I would not enjoy living there, and Im more city postiive than the vast majority of americans.