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One problem with suburbs is that they don't generate that much economic/tax revenue to support their infrastructure compared to the denser mixed use land in the city proper. Let alone the business districts.
At my hometown - during communist times there were quite a lot bedroom communities and when I moved they were deserts economic wise. Right now some of them are quite vibrant -due to somewhat Laissez-faire situation after the fall, a lot of land left by the planners, and because a lot of shady interests built there business districts, bars, restaurants and all other kinds of business. But they were quite dense to begin with - one of the biggest had 300000 people living in 10 square kilometers in Large Panel System buildings. If they were single housing units - there wouldn't have been enough land for anything.
So you need proper planning for everything - to have spare land for any kind of use. The problem is that people really like their single houses and are quite reluctant to change it. And unfortunately YIMBY-sm just doesn't have answer to that.
That can be solved by raising property taxes. In California, prop 13 makes this difficult, as the old rich people are grandfathered in (or whatever the new term is supposed to be).
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Nobody cares if someone want to live in a SFH. The problem is nimbys telling other people what they can and can't build on their own property.
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I've lived in various suburban towns. They have enough tax revenue to pave the streets and pay the cops. The public parks are quite nice.
I've seen assertions that suburbs are not financially sustainable. But decade after decade I live in them and somehow their finances work out.
A lot of these assertions come from Strong Towns, an organization ran by Charles Marohn that frequently makes up just-so stories about how suburbs will eventually crumble, based on fradulent "analysis", if you can even call it a coherent analysis.
One example is the claim that replacing parking spots at a restaurant with restaurant patios increases revenue, but this compares revenue from the parking fees of the parking spots to the revenue of the new restaurant tables, which is a blatant apples-to-oranges comparison that goes away if you actually compare the revenue of the restaurant as a whole before and after.
This claim is oft repeated by other urbanists like Not Just Bikes. I've yet to see NJB or even ST retract these faulty claims.
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Is that a problem? I was happy the small town we moved to only provides basic services, police, fire (volunteer), school and plowing in the winter. We've few business and fewer restaruants. Most everyone has a well and septic.
My presumption is that TPTB would find something silly to spend money on given a chance.
That there's a baseline of self reliance is not a 'problem'.
Depends on what infrastructure people want. If everyone has septic tank, you don't need central sewage. If people want central water treatment, but don't want to (or can't) pay the taxes for it, then you have problems. There certainly are examples of sprawling suburbs (or cities with lots of suburban area) that either go into bankruptcy or depend on state/federal bailouts, or where the low-density areas of a city are effectively subsidized by the higher-density ones.
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I think that the issue is that people don't want a small town life in suburbs, they want big city life but with low density. Not that it is not achievable - London was doing quite ok with the row and semi detached houses build around the communities it had devoured, but those houses are tiny and quite densely packed with very small plot of land as the backyard.
That may be true for some. It's not been my experience. I'm happy to have small town life in the exburbs. Big city life is why we moved away from the big city.
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It's the central thesis of the "Strong Towns" blog, and it's become gospel by repetition. A look at just about any municipal budget will show you it isn't so.
The Strong Towns champions are all 3x - 5x the size of my small town.
Maybe it doesn't scale.
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Your footnote says that this is just a name, but I would point out that car-dependent suburbs are relatively new, mostly post WW2. The neighborhoods that urbanists like tend to be the older ones, and in fact often describe this as a "traditional" development style.
This is somewhat true, but far from completely. Highways especially are often the domain of the state or federal government, so you have situations like the state of Texas trying to expand I-35 through downtown Austin that the city generally opposes. Or small groups of individuals who join together based on their self-interest rather than political agreement to oppose changes with nitpicky legal maneuvering. In general, lawsuits filed by individuals or small groups are a common tool to prevent development, and the laws these suits are based on can come from any level of government.
Mind-boggling. It’s as if they want Austin to suck as much as possible. Like the suck is part of the charm.
It sometimes legitimately feels like the state does things for no other reason than to frustrate the city and its residents. In this case I think the relevant state officials really do believe that expanding the highway will reduce congestion in spite of overwhelming empirical evidence, but wouldn't be surprised if they felt the ability to throw their weight around and ignore the city's point of view was a bonus.
Expanding will enable people to further satisfy their powerful preference to live further from work. Congestion and total commute time will of course remain approximately the same. And that's a good thing.
Why stop there? Why not buy everyone their own helicopter? It's not the responsibility of government to try to satisfy everyone's preference on everything at no cost to them. That's not economically efficient.
If we had the technology for Blade Runner style flying cars or something I would support them. If helicopters were quiet, affordable and reliable I would support them. I would certainly not accept an argument along the lines of "mini super helicopters are bad because they let people live in single family homes outside of the urban core". Just as I don't expect the government to hand out free helicopters.
I'm not asking for the government to buy me an SUV. I am going to vote for a very small portion of my taxes being used on basic infrastructure such as light rail in the urban core and a robust freeway network.
Sure, and this all sounds good. But cars are very heavily subsidized. I know people don't like to accept this fact, because they see how much they are paying and assume that it can't be that much after subsidies. The fact is simply that driving is very expensive, and costs aside, is a terrible way to have everyone get around inside a city.
Austin has almost no light rail, and what little there is, isn't near I-35. If it did, this wouldn't be such an issue!
I don't think road costs up being "a very small portion" of taxes. This one project is estimated to cost 7.5 billion; Austin's population is about a million. That's $7,500 per resident. Obviously the state is spending the money in this case, and some of the people impacted don't live in the area, but again it's only one project in one small part of the city.
It crosses I-35, twice. It's not a perfect substitute for I-35 because it doesn't parallel it; the "Red Line" (optimistically named to be forward-compatible with future dreams of having a second color too...) connects downtown to the NW, whereas I-35 is still required for anyone connecting to N, NE, S, or SE. If you want to use rail to skip (most) southbound I-35 traffic you have to divert 3 miles west to the Howard Park&Ride first.
2.5M, if you include the whole metro area. And the metro area is very affected by these decisions; a ton of I-35 traffic is commuting from Pflugerville or Round Rock, and the Red Line goes through Cedar Park and Leander. $7,500 per resident goes down to $3,000 per metro resident.
A lot of the people impacted don't live in the area - if you want to go between Dallas/Ft-Worth (6.5M people) and San Antonio (2.5M), you either take a toll loop (expensive for car drivers, speed limits too high for many truck drivers, miles of extra distance) or you slog through I-35. The relative amount of impact is surprisingly small, though, with something like 85% of I-35 traffic from within the metro area.
The plans I've seen are divided into an 8 mile stretch in the center of the city (the expensive part), 8 in the south, 11.5 in the north. That's almost the entire North-South length of the city! And because Austin's historical philosophy toward East-West arterials has been "What's an East-West arterial?", a lot of travel which isn't really North/South as the crow flies gets fed into I-35 for a congested stretch anyway.
I also wouldn't chalk the whole cost up to "cars are heavily subsidized". The expensive new lanes are slated to be HOV-only, in part to make buses more attractive by no longer forcing them to sit in traffic with single-occupancy commuters. Some of the new features are things like decks and pedestrian bridges, connections between bike paths, etc.
On the other hand, I wouldn't bet on $7.5M being the whole cost or on everything planned being a completed benefit. The $7.1B "Project Connect" expansions to public transit (which you might interpret as "non-car-users are heavily subsidized", to be fair?) have been downscaled to a useless shadow of what was originally promised to voters.
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Wait, no. That’s the opposite of the point I was making. I-35 through downtown Austin is 3 lanes each direction. It’s awful. That’s the same width as I-35 through rural areas between San Antonio and Waco.
You seem to have fallen for the “induced demand” meme. No, the demand is already there. People want to live in the suburbs and work downtown. If throughput were increased, more people would be able to do that. The welfare of the area would be increased. People wouldn’t have to pay massive rent for shitty apartments near their work. Not to mention the fact that I-35 is, you know, an Interstate. People hate driving through Austin. Other Texas cities with functional freeway systems are objectively easier to get around.
It's not a meme; it's basic economics which is also backed up by fairly overwhelming empirical evidence.
Given Austin's zoning map, a correct statement would be "Austinites are largely prohibited from living anywhere except a suburb or right in the middle of downtown." Also, people may "want"* to live in the suburbs and drive into downtown, but that's not possible. Doubling freeway capacity would not change that, because it is literally impossible to fit the whole population into cars. They simply take up too much space.
*I put "want" in scare quotes because rarely do such people want to pay all of the costs associated with doing so.
No, it would be a net decrease, because the cost of doing so would be very high, and those resources could be more efficiently used elsewhere. It would suck for anyone who currently lives in the area and has to deal with additional car traffic, construction, and possibly have their property sized to make room. It would separate downtown from East Austin even more, etc.
There's no reason to have the only interstate go straight through downtown. Lots of cities have interstates that go around the core. San Antonio has 410. Houston has 610 and I think others I don't recall the number of. DFW has 635, 20, and again I think others. Elsewhere, 95 goes totally around Boston, while 90 and 93 go into the city. Austin only has 45, which isn't an interstate and is a toll road, so all the trucks and other thru traffic go through the city even though it's slower.
No, it isn't. Here's a good video by an economist covering it.
I guess if the induced demand argument was rephrased to "in places that already see infrastructure being used, it is likely that people will, eventually, fill the new capacity once new capacity is built" it would be less objectionable. But then it doesn't mean that the solution is automatically "just don't build anything, ever". It may as very well just be to limit the flow of immigration to this area.
You can also make the more subtle argument that, in specific cases, the costs of widening a road are not worth the benefits compared with the alternatives, but I don't buy that as a fully-general argument for all roads everywhere.
I cannot find any information on EE's background; what is the basis for calling him an "economist"? The channel has spawned a number of threads on /r/badeconomics (e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/mt3emq/economics_explained_thinks_theres_us/, https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/jg5gpf/economics_explained_on_heres_why_supply_and/,
https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/j8p85o/misleading_with_statistics_how_economics/) so I'm definitely not going to take that channel's word for anything. Speaking of BE, here is a thread which points out that ID is, in fact, just basic supply and demand analysis (and that it doesn't really need a separate name).
This video never addresses actual arguments for ID or the best evidence. In fact, it seems to agree that the elasticity of demand is basically 1, which is true. It A) makes a semantic argument about whether "induced" is a good term, and then B) misrepresents the empirical evidence. For example, following this video, you would think there's only been 1 or 2 studies of ID, one of which just looked at increases in road miles and driving over time, but this is not the case. No citations are provided, either, to check any of his following claims
Who is saying this?
That wouldn't stop the existing residents from using the infrastructure more. And would be a terrible solution for other reasons.
That "more subtle" argument is what I've been trying to convey in this thread--it's almost certainly net negative to double the width of I-35 through downtown Austin, but also for many other similar road projects. You also seem to be missing that a lot of people do expect congestion to be reduced.
Induced demand is often the justification for opposing road widening projects, or even supporting demolishing roads (a "road diet"). I'm not sure what else the conclusion would be, if you not only legitimately believed the version where roads always fill up immediately once you build them, but also that demand would just magically decrease if you took away roads.
I know that it's also used in the reverse direction to justify building buses, bike lanes, etc. Apparently for those modes, the demand that's been "induced" doesn't end up stressing the network to the point of congestion like it would for cars and roads (not sure why; maybe it's just because they're always fundamentally slower than driving?). Regardless, I still think it's justified to describe induced demand as an anti-YIMBY/pro-NIMBY/anti-building/pro-demolishing sentiment, as most of the time, it's invoked as an argument against car infrastructure. If I were making an argument for building bike infrastructure, I would rather argue that the demand is already there, just suppressed.
For what reason would existing residents start using the infrastructure more? Sure, you might see an increase from latent demand, but latent demand is the exact thing that's going to be suppressed when congestion is too high. If it was just latent demand, then the highway wouldn't end up being congested again. It would at worst only reach the point just before travel times significantly start slowing down.
I can think of a few reasons (and this was just me coming up with a third alternative), but let me put it this way: When you have a lot of people in an area, it ends up placing a huge demand on transportation infrastructure. For example, you can look at photo after photo of overcrowded train in Mumbai, India. Is the solution to build more trains? Well, where are you gonna put the trains and tracks? You'll end up having to demolish apartment blocks to do so, but that's introducing the same negative externalities of many road widening projects.
I know Quantumfreakonomics was proposing to double the width, but personally, I believe it would be more reasonable to only add 1 or 2 lanes instead (it looks like there's enough space for it on many parts of the freeway that are at grade with the surface).
In the first few years before population growth catches up, yes. Similar situation with the Katy freeway widening.
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Let's say we add the new lanes, and congestion stays the same, and travel times stay the same. Is this a failure?
Let's say you have a single supermarket in a town. It's too crowded, the lines are always long. A second supermarket opens in a town. There's enough demand that, now, both supermarkets are too crowded, and the lines are too long. Is this bad? No, it's strictly an improvement - more people are buying food now! And the supermarket makes more money!
The same is true of 'induced demand' - the goal of 'reduce congestion' wasn't accomplished, but a separate goal of 'more people getting to where they want to' was. The extra people who drive on the new highway are benefitting greatly from the change - they can now get to places they couldn't before!
That's ... not a net decrease. That's a 'suboptimal policy'. It's only a net decrease if those resources would be used more efficiently elsewhere absent the highway. Which, I think you would agree when looking at the rest of the city budget, they're not likely to be any time soon.
A net decrease would require comparing that 'dealing with additional traffic' to the new jobs or new activities the people the additional traffic brings, or the economic benefits from the businesses employing / serving the additional traffic. And ... I can't see how that comes out net negative. Having your property sized does suck, yeah, and I'm not sure how to factor that cost in - but that's basically a universal cost of development, so it doesn't obviously bring the total negative.
I think the induced demand idea comes from the observation that while travel times for things like trains are fairly stiff as utilization approaches capacity, roads tend to see a large increase in travel times when approaching capacity. I don't think it's aptly described by induced demand, but it is likely rather frustrating that an increase in capacity is just that, with no decrease in travel times. This is an especially bitter truth because the total throughput may be maximised at less than full capacity.
Yeah. If the only cost one pays to drive is in travel time, and more people want to use the road at 0 congestion than can, congestion will be the 'price' that rises until the market clears. And if the supply curve is X people can use the road at 0 congestion, but X * 1.05 people can use the road at high congestion ... if the demand curve is in the wrong place, everyone can end up with high congestion. But this isn't a "distributive effect" as it'd be if it was a toll price extracting surplus value, because nobody's "getting" the lost time to congestion, it's just burned.
I'm not entirely sure what a 'full capacity but not max throughput' road looks like? (genuine question as opposed to rhetorical)
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I missed some of these comments from before.
"Don't tax people as much" is pretty efficient. You can make any project at all seem good by comparing it to something even worse, but this isn't a high standard.
You're not counting any of the money spent as part of the net negative. If we could teleport roads in for free, then yeah, that be a different calculation. But the roads are free to drive on, which means they are being used above the level which is economically efficient, and building more lanes would just exacerbate the problem. This is what I mean by net negative: We're spending more and more money for what is, yes, a fairly marginal benefit. You know what would let a lot more people commute faster, with fewer externalities? A train.
Let me ask you this: Is there any domain where this argument doesn't apply? Should the government supply every good at 0 cost to the consumer? Because I'm pretty sure that communism doesn't work very well.
By this reasoning, any salaried employee is also being used above the level which is economically efficient, at least if the employer has a choice of what assignments to give the employee.
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If your goal is to reduce congestion, which is typically a major stated goal of these projects, then yes, it's clearly a failure.
I don't think this statement means anything, but also there is no "market" here. The state government just wants to build more highway, regardless of costs or benefits.
I don't know why every time I end up in a discussion about roads on here, all of the car enthusiasts use the same analogy as if I don't understand that more people driving means that more people are going places. That's not the question. The question is how this particular use of space, money, and time compares to alternatives. It's like offering starving people 1,000-dollar truffle mushrooms as food, and then when someone points out that 98% of them are still starving because you could only afford to feed 2%, you pat yourself on the back because, well, you fed some people, right?
Plus, you can't just completely ignore everyone except for the group who benefits. What about the businesses and homes that would be subsumed by the wider freeway? Are they better off? What about people who live in East Austin and would like to be able to get into downtown without driving? What about people who can't or don't want to drive?
Okay, lets bring some numbers into it. I-35 through downtown has an average annual daily traffic count (AADT) of 150,000-200,000. The widest section of the Katy Freeway in Houston has an AADT of about 300,000. It seems plausible that if we doubled the width of I-35 we could get an AADT of 250,000-300,000 before experiencing the current level of congestion. That's 50,000 extra commuters (since AADT measures traffic both ways). To put that in perspective, 50,000 is 4% of the entire population of Travis County. Suppose an entire city block has to be demolished the whole length of the freeway through the county, does that directly impact 50,000 people? Do 4% of the county's citizens live or work directly adjacent to the East side of I-35? It's not like these people are thrown into the fires of Mordor either. The massively increased throughput will open up development opportunities further away from the city center, increasing the supply of housing and driving down rents.
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By market I meant "the supermarket", not a market in the economy sense, sorry
Well, that's the main stated goal because 'people who do not shop or live or work here, but will after we do ' isn't a particularly valuable constituency for local politics, whereas 'people who live here and want driving to be easier is'. But ... imagine we expand the highways, but we track everyone who uses the highway & their frequency of use in the preceding months, and ban anyone from using the highway more frequently than they did in the past. This would ensure congestion is relieved. But seems dumb, precisely because 'existing people driving a bit faster' seems worse than 'more people using the highway'?
If all the transit-urbanism claims are true and that money should go into efficiently constructed subways instead, and if doing so would cause road use to be demanded so much less that current congestion dries up ... strong assumptions, but then yes, the current highway expansion would be pointless. But given that alternative isn't happening, and both lack of political will and existing dysfunction in construction in the US make it unlikely to happen soon. Whereas the highway expansion is happening. So outside of that, what better alternatives are there for that money, do you think?
It makes the question of 'should we stop handing out the truffle mushrooms'? And - if you're an individual who has that power, yes, you should simultaneously stop buying truffles and start buying rice. But given I don't have that power, I don't see how advocating against building the highway helps much - because if the highway stops, the existing (stronger) forces preventing better (i am assuming they are better for this discussion, haven't thought enough to be sure) forms of transit won't suddenly dissipate, we'll be arguably worse off, without expanded highways or better transit
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The market in this case is utility enjoyed by people living where they prefer.
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Re. Condo owners: it depends on the legal structure. Some (many?) are set up so that the condo owners have a pro-rata share in the land the condo complex is built on.
No. The location is also highly valuable. If a condo building stays completely unchanged but a major city springs up around it, the building values will massively appreciate. The low density of the condo building just implies slightly higher carrying costs.
Also, demolishing condos isn't that hard outside of CA. NYC rebuilds old skyscrapers all the time.
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None of this really deals with what generates such a need for suburbia: being physically separated from the criminal element and the dirty elements that have been allowed to dominate cities.
I am old enough to remember why suburbia was built, as I grew up in a country where it happened later than in the US. People used to live in tenements - entire families in single rooms in large buildings that were either fancy family homes or industrial buildings. These were hideous places to live. The new estates were built, with modest, by American standards, semi-detached (which means two houses share a wall) homes with small gardens. People did hot have cars, of course, but needing to walk a mile to get to things was far better than living in decaying 18th-century buildings (for strange reasons, all buildings stopped in 1800, so almost all the built environment dated from then).
The new estates were great but would tend to go through a rough patch 14 years after they were first built when the children of the first inhabitants became teens (and were bad). Once this patch ended, they turned into lovely places. The houses were built by the corporation, so people got them at a very large discount. The system broke down later, as the number of decent people declined, and the later estates never became acceptable places to live. A bad element arose that made the estates unlivable, drugs were commonplace, and no one in their right mind would want to live there. Strangely, the newer estates have better quality houses than the old ones. As far as I can tell, the corporation gave decent people houses first.
I had held out hope that these estates would turn around, but that is not going to happen unless the new immigrants do it. It may have been the 70s, or it may be that the later residents were worse, or it may be something else, but the glory that was public housing ended and can not return because enough of the people who are being housed are too antisocial to allow the estates to thrive.
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Sure it does.
This is fundamentally a problem of supply. Clean and bring order to the cities, and they’ll still be more expensive per square foot than the suburbs, because building out is still cheaper than building up, and building up will always imply multi-family units. Anyone who wants their white picket fence has no choice but to move out.
How is it a supply problem? There are, in most cities, particularly places like Chicago and Detroit, places that were once dense(ish) full of single, or multifamily (but not skyscrapers) housing that was cheap and close(ish) to the urban core and could easily get their via public transit. These places now look like warzones. The supply is still there (kinda, you'd probably want to demolish and rebuild basically the same thing). Just the people aren't they were replaced by bad people who did bad things, and then even most of the bad people left so there are just a handful of bad and sad people.
I’m not clear on how the timeline looks for those. I was thinking the urban cores didn’t really get hollowed out until the 60s, long after suburbia became popular. Then again this article suggests the decline started in the ‘20s. I don’t even know what to think for my own city.
Some of urban hollowing out earlier on was because the urban core was so shitty. There was pollution, literal shit, poorly constructed dense (and tall) housing structures, etc. That is fixed in most cities nowadays. The true urban commercial hub areas like Manhattan, The Loop, etc are dense, almost fully utilized, and extremely expensive.
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"Streetcar suburbs" were the early original suburbs, and as the name suggests date back to when streetcars existed but automobiles didn't. The city core was dirty, smelly, loud, polluted and generally a miserable place to live, so people started living outside them as soon as reliable, affordable transportation existed. The history of city vs. suburb growth is also greatly confounded by the fact that many large cities annexed their inner-ring suburbs during the 20th century, "growing" in population but reducing in density.
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Except, this isn't actually true in your proposed system. It has an urban growth boundary. Inside, development is promoted. Outside, development is forbidden. So the idea is to push density out until it hits the boundary, then keep densifying, with rural land outside the border.
Sometimes I wonder if this is largely aesthetics. Some people like open spaces and trees. Others like
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Coyote valley is nowhere near six miles from downtown San Jose. It's more like 19 miles. It's actually closer to Gilroy (18 miles).
It's also in a fairly narrow mountain pass that's about four miles wide (eyeballing the map).
Livermore by contrast is located on a huge open space, although access to the cities on the bay itself is limited (especially with the demise of the bart extension).
Claiming Cupertino is the center of the bay area is an, uh, interesting claim as well.
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I first learned about Japanese zoning from urban kchoze. It seemed reasonable enough. Can’t tell if there’s some cultural reason it would fall apart here, or if we’re just in an awkward equilibrium with vested interests in keeping our messed-up system. But until proven otherwise, I’m vaguely in favor of adopting it.
Do you think this is the kind of policy which can be implemented starting small, like electoral reform? A town or county or state can adopt approval voting without issues, proving the concept and making it more visible to the larger populace. I’m not sure whether a municipality adopting Japanese zoning gives it a competitive advantage against others of its same size.
Finally, what would be an effective way to advocate for such a change? This is kind of a detour, but I’ve always wondered where lobbyists come from. Somehow I doubt I can just show up to city council with a five-step plan to phase out our zoning law…or can I?
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