Comment by Vanvidum on What is the low hanging fruit of things we could be doing to improve society? · 2021-03-10T14:45:21.654Z · LW · GW

Adopting Japanese style planning & zoning alongside European models of social housing organization & finance would unlock a considerable degree of economic growth in a lot of Anglophone countries. It'd also have the additional benefits of reducing the carbon intensity of housing and transport through greater density, and make efficient public transit easier to finance and develop. It also would in the long-term stabilize urban housing costs and reduce the precarity of low-income households, while enabling a larger number of people to benefit from higher big-city wages through more dynamic housing stock growth.

As it is, we are locking people out of the places where their labor is most valuable and where they would have the smallest environmental impact to the benefit of (relatively wealthy) incumbent property owners. This equilibrium is difficult to change when there's expansive local control over land use and housing development, as it's much easier for narrow coalitions of property owners to dominate those nominally democratic decision-making processes, and because local constituents have little incentive to take the utility of newcomers or the metro region into account.