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this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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cars
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We have overproduced living space just like we've overproduced everything else. There are 32 million empty bedrooms and this is a conservative estimate of housing usage. There are plenty of smaller cities/towns, empty units, vacant lots, and oversize houses such that you could easily fit everyone within a short bicycle ride of their downtown. For someone who has a car, and either isn't trapped in debt or has reasonably okay job prospects, living in the suburbs is a choice.
People choose to continue living in suburbs partly because they're constrained from imagining anything else, and partly because they swallow the propaganda that this is what a good life means.
We could take 70% of the cars off the road within a year and still be just fine. (We proved this, pretty conclusively, in a dry run 6 years ago.)
Anybody who has the ability to move further than a regular commute's length has the prospects of living without a car, where 90% of what you need from a city is within a 30 minute bike ride and the rest is a 3-hour bus trip away, and where baseline costs (rent, water, electricity, phone bill, staple foods, produce) amount to 70 hours of low-wage work a month or less.
Most people (excepting those with chronic/acute illness) could live just fine on $30k USD per year. They don't do this because they're constantly chasing a bunch of optional things that you really don't need. Not everyone is eager to shed their car dependency, but for those that do, there's definitely a way.
there's a ton of unexamined individualism and liberalism in this comment
I was split between making a point of living a "third-world" lifestyle, versus verging towards inviting people to come live the materially simpler life that I have, where I live and organize in accordance with the ends I want to see.
But sure, keep on saying "the poor, poor Americans are forced to live in their suburbs with 1000 square feet of building space and 0.2 acres of land per person". I'm sure they can't help it, if someone's burning up the Earth's resources at 1.5x the rate at which they're replenished, maybe they just might be the real victim. Nothing can be done until we overthrow the whole thing; forget about intermediary steps; try not to think about the rate at which the country's working class is moving toward revolution and how many lifetimes it will be until that happens.
housing units aren't fungible. jobs aren't necessarily where the housing is. A program of displacing people is not something i want the US government doing again.
none of the structure required to support what you want to do exists.
Most people in hyperexploited countries would have a
reaction to how people in this country live.
The transition is not going to happen overnight for all suburban dwellers*, but an organized group of people can go live in high density (sometimes with roommates, the greatest fear of an amerikkkan that is having to share living space with someone they don't have a chain of progenitors with) and orient around a new approach to settled places.
Jobs are largely a function of need which is a function of population; this has been the case since the dawn of civilization. Good Jobs are scarce and will get more scarce no matter what. As communists we know this, and we should also recognize that a Job is a means to making a living, and there have always been other means.
*At some point, though, we will run up against environmental or economic constraints that reveal living 10-40 miles away from all of your destinations to be futile and impractical, possibly by oil scarcity, possibly by supply chain shocks, or possibly by bankruptcy of municipalities.
We can either get ahead of the curve and live well, or we can wait until it hits us, but the exurbs are an ephemeral peculiarity of parts of the 20th and 21st centuries. One way or another, they are headed to the dustbin of history.
And I for one would love nothing more than to see the tears of the inheritance class and PMC ladder climbers when they no longer have the option to live in a McMansion.
so what you're saying is
?
Not as a whole all at once, but that's not a reason against beginning the desertion of the suburbs.
I don't pretend that everybody can stop being in debt all at once either, but I help people reduce their debt anyway.
If we only did things when we felt like we'd have a wave of acceptance powering us, we'd never make any progress.