That option has a few problems -
1. It's not very cheap. The price of land is really high and if it is fertile land it is even that much more expensive. Not to mention the cost of raising animals and plants isn't free.
2. Specializing is much more efficient than trying to do everything yourself, requiring at least a basic economy.
3. Do you like healthcare? Trying to move to the countryside while affording healthcare(at least in the US) and actually having access to it are considerable hurdles.
4. Providing your own power isn't cheap and getting it from others certainly requires something.
And this is to just name a few - definitely not an exhaustive list.
We, as a society, have moved on from subsistence living with small groups of people and with the ratio to the number of people in the world to fertilel and it isn't a serious option for large numbers of the population. I love the dream of it and I do think we could make a big shift to move towards food independence, even through urban gardening, etc, but I don't really see it going there unless there are some pretty large societal/environmental/economic shifts that happen.
What really needs to happen, in my opinion, is a shift to the idea that we live in a time of abundance. We have the means to supply all of our needs to everyone, it is 100% a political choice to let people suffer in order for a few to thrive at levels that have never been seen. We should have food security, access to healthcare, and housing as a human right and we should do it in an efficient way (and we can!). Unfortunately we are in a time where power is once again being concentrated to the hands of the very few. There will always be work that needs to be done, but who determines what work is actually completed and who benefits from it can and has changed many times throughout our history.
Design docs are great for high-level orientation. If you are laying out all your code structure around it, you are doing it wrong. It's great to use the for what patterns will be used (using a facade pattern for example). It gives eng's a guide to how to implement at a high level and it should identify points of non-functional requirements; speed requirements, monitoring, security, etc. Throwaway code doesn't even touch on that. It should also put in scope some of the architecturally significant decisions that need to be made. While throwaway/prototype code can address some of that, it doesn't always identify it and talk about _why_ it is important.
In short, doing both is the best thing you can do and you should scope your design docs correctly.
Not just zoning reform, we need to make actual free housing for people. We have an economy that can't provide enough jobs. We have a surplus of goods. We don't need people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we just need to give people a place to live and some food to eat so they can contribute and potentially dig themselves out of any hole they have found themselves in.
Even government run public housing charges rent. Making housing free will mean even larger subsidies are required for construction, which means fewer units built overall.
> Even government run public housing charges rent.
IIRC, the norm is sliding-scale income contingent with a minimum of zero, so, it only sometimes charges rent, and has costs associated with identifying whether to charge and, if so, the rent to charge, charging, tracking, and collecting it.
>> We have an economy that can't provide enough jobs
That's so wrong. There are more job openings right now than there are unemployed workers. Explain it to me, how is that "an economy that can't provide enough jobs"?
Think about it this way. If there were enough good paying jobs around for everyone then recessions would be impossible because people always have the option to switch to a good job.
That implies that everyone wants to work, AND that the people who are homeless at the margin want to live in a house.
Case in point: I live in a "nice" area up on a hill in my city and there are multiple homeless who sleep/have camps in the hillside directly adjacent. One of them drives a bmw and has been there at least 6 months. A couple sits in their car all day in the same spot doing who knows what.
There are many people who simply do not want to take part in society, while still living within it.
> We have an economy that can't provide enough jobs.
Bullshit. There is plenty of work that needs to be done.
People are just paid to not do it. In urban areas, they become political slaves, and in rural areas, it destroys any chance they might have of building a local economy.
This bad meme became very popular when the federal gov paid out an extra $600 (then $400, then $300) / wk in unemployment insurance benefits. In reality UI benefits have been utterly destroyed in some states (see FL -- underfunded, payout is dirt and getting approved or denied took people months) and in the rest of the states the payouts are so low they were totally insufficient.
Perhaps the biggest lie, however, is that people can just stay on these benefits or turn down work -- they are time limited per recipient and turning down work / quitting your job makes you ineligible!
Also many electric bike riders don't take the extra power into consideration when they speed down those bike lanes. I overheard a conversation at the office recently where the topic was the number of bike deaths this year (I work/live in Manhattan) and they did point out that many of those might actually be electric bike riders.
They're not. You can find the full details on each and every cyclist fatality in the city from news reports and such, and e-bikes are a small minority of deaths.
It's more complicated than that. Pedal-assist e-bikes are now legal, but throttle-control e-bikes still aren't (although in theory they're supposed to be legalized soon). The latter constitutes the vast majority of e-bikes on the streets here.
The required education doesn’t help the students so why reward it? Education degrees and continuing professional education have no reliably detectable effect on teacher effectiveness. Experience does, up to six years, and subject matter expertise does, so teachers with a Master’s in Chemistry get better results than ones with just a Bachelor’s but the qualifications most people are talking about are in pedagogy, which has no effect. And it’s not like it’s a secret that the average Ed school degree is a joke, even if you don’t count the bloated Master’s degree that is an Ed.D.
Don't forget the homelessness, mental health and drug crises that are challenging everyone on the West Coast. It's not just about not having enough homes, it's about the culture we create for people to thrive.
I would honestly hope that this would facilitate a move to a more even distribution of businesses in neighborhoods. Perhaps making local deliveries cheaper and more feasible. Might make lighter transportation such as smaller, short range electric vehicles more of an option and cheaper as well.
This is probably one of the most insightful comments in this entire thread. Density isn't the problem - zoning is. Even in a suburban area, if there was a corner store, you could just take a golf cart, provided that you live someplace with a climate like the West Coast. I live in an area that swings from -5f in the winter to +105f in the summer, so for many months out of the year any transport without HVAC is not something you'd actually want to use.
And this is to just name a few - definitely not an exhaustive list.
We, as a society, have moved on from subsistence living with small groups of people and with the ratio to the number of people in the world to fertilel and it isn't a serious option for large numbers of the population. I love the dream of it and I do think we could make a big shift to move towards food independence, even through urban gardening, etc, but I don't really see it going there unless there are some pretty large societal/environmental/economic shifts that happen.
What really needs to happen, in my opinion, is a shift to the idea that we live in a time of abundance. We have the means to supply all of our needs to everyone, it is 100% a political choice to let people suffer in order for a few to thrive at levels that have never been seen. We should have food security, access to healthcare, and housing as a human right and we should do it in an efficient way (and we can!). Unfortunately we are in a time where power is once again being concentrated to the hands of the very few. There will always be work that needs to be done, but who determines what work is actually completed and who benefits from it can and has changed many times throughout our history.