Sunday, August 27, 2017

Welcome Home, Part II

Nearly a week ago we cited a Bloomberg article on Millennials moving to the suburbs. Today Bloomberg is back with a panel discussing that very topic. One member, Justin Fox, states it plain:
  1. The fact that millennials weren’t buying homes or cars a few years ago was more the product of economic hard times than an expression of changing tastes.

  2. The supply of walkable, transit-friendly neighborhoods in the U.S. is limited, and it’s really hard for political reasons to add density to them or build more of them.
As we long ago learned to say in geometry class, "QED, suburbs ... here come the Millennials!"

Man, oh, man, does that spasm the backsides of urban planners who love high density designs. Urban planning, I'm forced to conclude, shares a basic flaw with socialism: both suffer from a fatal misunderstanding of human nature.

Urban planners admire the organized societies of bees and want humans to conform to a similar model of hive-like living. We are much more diverse than worker bees, and refuse to conform.