things like food service and retail, which are distributed and local enough that anybody working such a job should be picking one they live near
This is a pretty huge fantasy. Jobs like that have a strong tendency to be clustered around expensive business districts where those who work can’t afford to live. The average commute is half an hour by car or an hour by bus.
people are largely too poor to live close to work.” No, they largely are not.
Outside of your fantasies they actually are. The average single family home is now 589k and many old folks are burning down the equity in their home rather than passing them down. Also its not much of a solution to tell everyone to move in from suburbia to the city to rent from a slumlord when there isn’t enough housing there NOW. A fraction could move in but it doesn’t scale to the rest of them until we actually build more housing in the places people want to live.
This is a pretty huge fantasy. Jobs like that have a strong tendency to be clustered around expensive business districts where those who work can’t afford to live. The average commute is half an hour by car or an hour by bus.
Outside of your fantasies they actually are. The average single family home is now 589k and many old folks are burning down the equity in their home rather than passing them down. Also its not much of a solution to tell everyone to move in from suburbia to the city to rent from a slumlord when there isn’t enough housing there NOW. A fraction could move in but it doesn’t scale to the rest of them until we actually build more housing in the places people want to live.