Great. So we agree it is cherry picked.
> Sure. It provides an even better illustration about how the runaway urbanism resulted in breaking the previous trend of increasing living area.
I don't follow the logic here. Why would 2015 be the tipping point? What's so special about that year? The US has been increasingly urbanizing since WW2.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
> You might have cause and effect confused here.
Just to be clear, you're suggesting that people are having fewer kids (fertility had a recent peak in 2007) because new builds (which are just a small percentage of total housing stock!) have lost a few square feet? I find that to be laughable.
> Why is it strange? In the counter-factual world without the dense office core, the new transit would have been useless.
1. There are more than just offices in CBDs. There are also retail, restaurants, entertainment venues, residential, etc.
2. This ignores the benefit to the worker. And employer/employee relationship goes two-ways. You assign all the benefits to the employers (who gain access to a larger talent pool), while ignoring the fact that this benefits workers too by increasing the pool of jobs they can reliably and comfortably commute to.
3. Economic gains for employers are not purely extractive. A thriving and dynamic centeral business district helps provide income for residents, drive increased investment, and foster innovation.
> And none of them requires the amount of traffic that justifies $150k per household.
Sports venues. Concerts. Festivals. Parades. Any large gathering of people. Not to mention that it's still a good thing to have for general use to go anywhere, even at non-max-capacity times.
https://mynorthwest.com/kiro-opinion/sound-transit-3-34-5-bi...
Not seeing that $150k per household number anywhere in that article. Looks like $10k per person is the number they come up with. Expensive to be sure, but not quite the number you somehow arrived at.
