When you argue for housing reform to legalize denser development in our cities, you quickly learn that some people hate density. Like, really hate density, with visceral disgust and contempt for any development pattern that involves buildings being tall or close together.
I wish. It’s going to take selling everything I own, and buying land that no one else wants and abuts BLM land. And then living in a shack similar to Ted Kaczynski’s. If you want to buy desert scrub that’s an hour from the nearest abandoned ghost town, you can get it for a couple hundred an acre or less. Meanwhile, a 1 acre lot near me that’s nearly unbuildable has an asking price of a little more than $30,000.
I’ve lived in poor neighborhoods most of my adult live. Before moving to the south, I lived on the west side of Chicago, in the Austin neighborhood (if you know Chicago, you know that’s not a nice area). Before that, I lived in Humboldt Park before that started gentrifying, and in Little Village before that. I moved to Chicago from eastern Michigan–near Detroit–where GM, Ford, and Chrysler had closed all the plants and left the area with no jobs. I’ve never lived in the ‘nice’ part of town my entire adult life. I’m middle class now, but only barely.