Capitalism always wastes precious resources for the sake of profit.
Can you explain the photos? Is it the same place before and after or something?
Not just for you, but for anyone else (coming in after some other comments, so trying to add more thoughts to the convo):
I think the image demonstrates two problems that feed on each other.
The first is to notice how much land is used for cars and parking lots, when it could be used for housing or something useful. Presumably that red line shows the same amount of distance in both photos.
But then on top of that, it’s literally cheaper to live in the sparser area. So the area on the right not only has more housing but has four times the cost of that housing.
Since free parking is literally a cost put on society as a whole, and because things like plumbing and electricity cost less on a per household basis in denser environments, this means that the image on the right is subsidizing the image on the left, heavily in fact, if they were in the same city.
It literally costs less to live in a denser neighborhood on a per person/hosehold basis, but the costs there are higher anyway.
Wait, wouldn’t commieblocks be the perfect solution to this though?
Then again; they’re considered the affordable, walkable and family-friendly options in most post-bloc countries.
Commi blocks are definitely the like premiere reference point for dense living with amenities.
But of course the USSR at the time was doing what it needed to do to house as many people as it could. It’s not that literally every single home has to be in that style. But it is true that big single-family homes on big lots are subsidized, So, in a better world, houses like that would certainly still cost a lot.
I think they are trying to convey that the space the parking lot takes up could have been used for houses?
Oh, I see. I was confused because of the price tags, suggesting the problem with cars is that they lower land prices.
One represents a conventional commercial corridor that features strip malls and ample parking; the other is a historical downtown street (both in Portland, ME).
The comparison between both is that property taxes greatly subsidize having a parking lot rather than having developments that could be used for housing or anything else that could benefit the community. In other words, it is way more costly to actually produce value for people in general than producing a gigantic parking lot that only benefit car drivers.
About the per square foot prices, in American cities, the city governments are funded through property taxes. Meaning that the right developments pay higher taxes, which then go to subsidise the developments on the left, which don’t pay enough property taxes to financially sustain themselves. Oh, and the federal government also subsidises development of the left type, meaning that the American tax payers put even more money into maldevelopment.
