>It's totally a bad idea to say that once someone has built a dwelling on a plot of land, they have forever banned increased density near them.
That needs to be argued, not stated (ideally without the 'forever' part, which is very much a strawman).
>The history of American suburbanism is a story of race. There are other players (cars, telephones, pollution), but race was a major pillar
I think the question for most people is (1) how much of an influence is race today and (2) does racist motivation yesterday make the policy bad today.
In all the discussions I see on HN and elsewhere, discussion of these questions is conspicuously absent. What we have instead is a doxa such that anything contaminated by racism -- in any quantity or at any stage of history -- is to be rooted out. Such arguments are not terribly convincing, even though we both agree that racism is a bad thing.
That needs to be argued, not stated (ideally without the 'forever' part, which is very much a strawman).
>The history of American suburbanism is a story of race. There are other players (cars, telephones, pollution), but race was a major pillar
I think the question for most people is (1) how much of an influence is race today and (2) does racist motivation yesterday make the policy bad today.
In all the discussions I see on HN and elsewhere, discussion of these questions is conspicuously absent. What we have instead is a doxa such that anything contaminated by racism -- in any quantity or at any stage of history -- is to be rooted out. Such arguments are not terribly convincing, even though we both agree that racism is a bad thing.