dizfactor posted:Zoning laws, which often include things like minimum and maximum lot sizes, are pretty well-established prerogatives of government, as are environmental laws. We also continue to actively subsidize critical elements of the unsustainable suburban lifestyle (through highway and sewer construction, tax breaks for children, etc, plus all the ways in which military action in the Middle East is a backdoor subsidy on oil), so we're already using government policy for social engineering, just in the wrong direction. The simple reality is this: we are not going to be able to sustain our current standards of living 50 years from now unless most people in this country are living in a higher-density pattern than they are now. We are currently building the built environment we are going to have to live in over the next few decades, so we need to stop building the wrong buildings ASAP. Because we've been subsidizing the wrong kinds of buildings in the wrong patterns for half a century now, it will at the very least require us to seriously cut back on the subsidies we already have in place to allow things to grow in the direction they need to grow, and it may require corrective intervention to undo the damage we've already done. Our current infrastructure is an albatross around our necks, and we've been using serious government intervention to do everything we can to make it as big a problem as we could for many years now and now it's kind of an emergency. There may be other ways of getting there, admittedly, but we do need to get there pronto. Obviously, smart growth zoning rules on the level of local and state governments would help, as would some kind of carbon tax, repealing some of the more perverse incentives in our government spending and our tax code, etc. If we're going to spend a grip on our aging infrastructure, which we probably need to, we should make it greener in every sense, including encouraging denser habitation and public transit. If this were 1980, we would have time to let the market take its course, but since then, we've actively encouraged several waves of suburb and exurb building through government intervention, and we need to do infill on the suburbs already built and stop building new ones, and we don't really have a lot of time to do it.
dizfactor posted:We have already developed the technology to solve this problem. Mid-to-high density housing built using "bright green" building techniques is the technology. Presumably, as we build the housing of the future, we will get better and better at it and refine it further, but we already have it.
dizfactor posted:However, the nature of the problem is such that the public perception of the cost/benefit ratio is skewed, and that skew is compounded by a culture that is dependent on the infrastructure we've already built and by government subsidies of that infrastructure that distort the costs. Market forces will not be able to adequately address this issue until the real costs of carbon consumption are priced into housing and transportation and everything else, but because we've not only avoided doing that for the past 50 years but actively moved things the other way, we might need a harder corrective to implement the technology shift.
