Housing monoculture

Commenting on the mismatch between the US housing stock and people's wish to live in walkable urban environments, Christopher Leinberger writes:

[a third of people surveyed] wanted to live in mixed-use, walkable urban areas - but most had no way to do so at an affordable price. The next slum, 'Atlantic Monthly', March

Suburban housing is largely a product of central planning and government subsidies. Zoning requirements have done a lot to separate people from work, shops and entertainment, along with the subsidies for roading and the extraction and consumption of oil. The disaster has not only been to the physical environment. Suburban alienation and dependence on cheap, available oil are other results of this lifestyle choice made not by ordinary people but by the planners and technocrats in government and their friends (and paymasters) in gigantic construction corporates. The decision makers are now so remote from us, so beholden to large corporations and operating at such a high level of aggregation and abstraction that they can impose a monoculture, whose potentially catastrophic vulnerabilities are like those of its agricultural equivalent.

Social Policy Bonds are not just about efficiency, but about efficiency in achieving social and environmental goals that are meaningful to natural persons - as distinct from public sector macroeconomists and large corporations. They are about closing the gap between policymakers and the people they are supposed to represent. Policy under a Social Policy Bond regime means targeting agreed outcomes, and the subordination of all activities and institutions to those outcomes. If people want to live kilometres away from their work, friends, shops and other distractions that's fine, but there's no need for taxpayers to subsidise such lifestyle choices, still less to impose it on people who'd make different choices in an undistorted market.