The solution to expensive neighborhoods isn't destroying those neighborhoods with high density housing. Most humans don't want to live in hives.
The problem to solve is distributing economic viability more widely across the country and then building more cities and towns in the density that supports family formation and doesn't dehumanize the occupants: single family homes on 5-12k square foot lots surrounding walkable commercial districts.
Allowing our population to naturally stabilize by restricting immigration would help too.
Not sure why you're getting down voted for this opinion. Living in a dense urban center like NYC is extremely stressful and unhealthy for some (most). It's baked into the human mind/body to need nature. To hear natural sounds like birds and creeks. Not garbage trucks and honking horns. I personally think that living in huge skyscrapers is detrimental to humanity because like you said, we are not insects.
That being said, it is definitely the direction we will need to head evolutionarily if we are going to survive and become a space-fairing species. All hail the borg I guess...
Several of those refer to redistribution of wealth. A Georgian LVT applies to high-cost, high-employment metropolises which have underprovisioned housing and exacerbated sprawl, but not really to low-cost, underperforming failed cities such as Detroit or Pittsburg.
Clarifying my question: how do you propose to create economic opportunities where housing is cheap but prospects are few, particularly as economic activity seems to want to concentrate.
I would distribute sovereignty more broadly, allow the smaller units of sovereignty to practice mercantilism to protect internal industries (i.e. productive capacity) and remove usury as the basis of the money supply to avoid wealth concentration in money centers.
Wealth redistribution is inevitable at this point, ideally in the form of debt jubilee but, given the political power of the banking class, more likely via something more chaotic.
I'd prefer dropping wealth distribution from the discussion and focus not because I disagree with it, but because 1. I'm already sold, 2. it's trivially implemented (technically if not politically), and 3. it tends, as evidenced here in another thread, to generate predictable and unproductive discussion.
Actually, I'll go a step or two further and suggest that a mix of rentier taxes (land and other monopolistic elements) and income supports (UBI, living minimum wage, additional targeted support as needed), workplace and labour protections, collective bargaining, are almost certainly required.
UBI without LVT merely pumps wages to landlords. Similar further arguments extend to otther elements above.
But that leaves us with the fundamental issue remaining: natural clustering tendencies of many economic activitties, particularly dematerialised ones ("informattion work") tend toward clusteering (where skills are scarce) or outsourcing to the lowest-wage centre (where skill is automated away). All other areas are effectively dead zones.
(In-person services, repair, and construction remain, but these are poorly-scaling, low-profit sectors.)
That's the dynamic I see as needing addressing. And UBI + LVT don't get you there, that I see.
All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.
The problem to solve is distributing economic viability more widely across the country and then building more cities and towns in the density that supports family formation and doesn't dehumanize the occupants: single family homes on 5-12k square foot lots surrounding walkable commercial districts.
Allowing our population to naturally stabilize by restricting immigration would help too.