re: #118 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

So some blurb on the internet claims that the fastest growing areas of the country are DFW and Houston.

Both those locations are sprawl exemplar.

We lament that people don’t take climate change seriously, and (some) leaders talk about how we have to limit our carbon emissions… and yet we promote sprawl.

This is why I have sort of given up on seriously believing we will do mitigation to the extent needed.

Our mitigation efforts are more than tokens but still fall far short of what is needed.

My answer to sprawl is direct and impossible: counties and municipalities should refuse to offer building permits for a single family dwelling until said builder has built at least one multi-family dwelling AND paid money to build a rail service to connect said dwellings into a regional network.

But that will never happen.

You gotta buy where land is cheap if you want affordable housing. Simple economics.

When we bought our home in 1997, which is walking distance from downtown, three blocks from the Symphony/Ballet/and Opera Hall, our dirt was valued at $25,000.

If we sold our house today we could get $1.4 million and they’d demo the house. So any developer could put up a duplex on the lot, but would have to sink $200 per sqft just in the dirt before construction could begin.

So, yeah, “affordability” is a pipe dream in my neighborhood and in close in neighborhoods in Austin. In addition, 50% of the housing stock in our zip code is already in Multifamily zoned structures (duplexes, triplexes, and apartments, including a lot of Section 8 units).