Is It Time for a New American City?
24th April 2022
While remote work has enabled some people to relocate from expensive metro areas, many of the smaller cities and towns they went to have quickly developed housing shortages of their own.
America wasn’t always like this — we once built all those countless cities and towns, after all.
A common thread: American towns and cities are no longer able to adapt to new residents as they once were, thanks to rigid zoning codes and tangled bureaucracy that makes infrastructure cost far more than it does in Europe or Asia. Even a simple bus lane can take over a decade to implement. And trying to change this can result in endless political fights.
So what if we just started new cities?
What if we just got rid of zoning regulations? Houston demonstrates that not even big cities really need them.