Strong Towns is just one perspective with a strong agenda. I began doubting everything they publish when they got all the important details completely wrong in a story about my home town.
The money that goes to cities is paid by the employers of people who commute from suburbs, and the businesses those commuters buy from. The mental and physical space of living outside the city is essential to maintain the productivity and sanity of the urban workforce. Cramming all those people into cardboard "luxury" apartments where their kids have to listen to their neighbors fighting or banging sounds like a great way to end a population by ending parenthood. Which is exactly what is happening.
A false dichotomy that persists because typical US zoning encourages only those two outcomes: single family homes until the pressure bursts, leading to a high rise apartment some place.
>Cramming all those people into cardboard "luxury" apartments where their kids have to listen to their neighbors fighting or banging sounds like a great way to end a population by ending parenthood. Which is exactly what is happening.
It's really hard to take your post seriously when you diverge into paranoid conspiracy theories like this one.
Nobody is being forced to live in an apartment. Nobody is even being asked to live in an apartment (except by a few politically inert eco-activists). We merely want people to be allowed to live in apartments! In many areas, families compete for houses with groups of adult renters, the latter having 3-4 incomes, because apartments are so underprovisioned. This of course is no good for people's ability to raise children, but my faction isn't loony enough to pretend it's a secret genocide.
Meanwhile, urbanists are in fact aware of and regularly lament[1, 2] the low standards for sound insulation and build-to-code reality of contemporary multi-family construction. But when we propose raising the standards, we get complaints from conservatives that "the free market will take care of it" (even though it obviously doesn't).
> But when we propose raising the standards, we get complaints from conservatives that "the free market will take care of it" (even though it obviously doesn't).
The free market approach would rely on drastically looser zoning and other land use restrictions so that tons more housing gets built resulting landlords actually have to compete and thus start caring about a wider range of issues.
The money that goes to cities is paid by the employers of people who commute from suburbs, and the businesses those commuters buy from. The mental and physical space of living outside the city is essential to maintain the productivity and sanity of the urban workforce. Cramming all those people into cardboard "luxury" apartments where their kids have to listen to their neighbors fighting or banging sounds like a great way to end a population by ending parenthood. Which is exactly what is happening.