“More Housing + Less Commuting = Better quality of life and a healthier society”

Our Proposal:

• Undertake creative, multi-faceted approaches to make housing affordable and reduce traffic congestion

The Goal:

• Eliminate the quagmire of unaffordable housing and clogged roads
• Improve the quality of life for millions

Explanation:

Housing, one of the most basic of human needs, is shamefully ever more unaffordable in our country. This has many devastating consequences, among them being 1) a disgraceful and worsening scourge of widespread homelessness, and 2) people having to live ever farther from their workplace in order to access affordable living spaces. Both of these consequences are tragic, but the second one in particular has many hidden costs for our society at large, starting with clogged roadways as increasing numbers of workers engage in ever longer commutes. This means across the country tens of millions of commuters trapped in their vehicles for hundreds of hours every year in a stressful, unproductive, and downright wasteful way. These long commutes severely affect quality of life, examples of which include:

1. Degraded physical health, such as obesity, high blood pressure, and sleep disorders
2. Degraded mental health, including stress, depression, and anxiety
3. Little-to-no time for family, exercise, learning new skills, socializing, and other positive activities
4. Much of the personal budget dedicated to vehicle-related expenses (gas, maintenance, repairs, insurance)

These quality of life issues in turn have consequences for our country as a whole, including:

1. The degraded physical and mental health of millions of commuters leads to higher medical and insurance costs for all of us.
2. Less family time means (among other things) millions of children often cannot get the support they need from parents to do well in school, meaning they will be less prepared to eventually enter the workforce
3. Higher gas prices due to more demand for this non-renewable, globally traded commodity (and the higher gas prices ripple through the entire economy)
4. More air pollution, including toxic exhaust fumes and planet-warming CO2; poor air quality itself has many hidden costs
5. No time to learn new skills means less ability to adapt to, and take advantage of, new employment trends; this results in a less flexible workforce, and more burden on welfare programs

The saturated roadways represent a huge, costly, dirty, and simply foolish inefficiency that we must do something about. Addressing the affordable housing crisis therefore needs to be linked to reducing traffic and the amount of time that people need to spend in vehicles in order to live their lives. To this end, the Solutions Party proposes the following ideas:

1. For office-job workers, let’s make remote work an even more viable possibility. With the same determination we demonstrated to realize a moon landing, let’s give attractive incentives to university and private R&D departments to develop “holodeck-like” virtual reality office spaces, the goal being to much more realistically replicate an in-office experience (compared to videoconferencing) via immersive 3-D technology, simulated physical movement, and even optical illusions.

Once holodeck offices are developed and deployed nationwide, office meetings, cubical visits, even impromptu get-togethers in the hallway could be possible for groups of workers regardless of their physical location. Instead of having to reside in the vicinity of their workplaces, office workers would be able to choose where to live, be it in their preferred cities or in wide-open, more affordable rural areas; setting up holodeck office spaces in rural towns would make such areas more viable choices to live for in-office professionals, and they could be promoted as such. This would help to distribute population and economic growth across the country. A mountain-biking software manager for example could choose to live in a small town in the Rockies instead of an expensive dwelling unit near her company facilities in Silicon Valley. For suburbs and urban areas, holodeck office buildings could be built within walking or biking distance of any neighborhood, further reducing the need to deal with a gridlocked commute.

The holodeck office would enable the best of all worlds: companies get the benefits of in-office talent, employees get more choices where to live, reduced local housing demand would help keep prices under control, and roads in and around the major metropolitan areas would be less crowded (the air would be cleaner too). The proposed holodeck capabilities could also be used for more realistic in-person classroom-like experiences in order to enhance school choice and remote learning. Holodeck offices could be even used for amazing immersive overseas tourism and entertainment experiences when they are not being used for work purposes.

2. For lower-to-medium income workers who must be physically present in high cost-of-living areas in order to do their jobs (school teachers and grocery store workers, for example), let’s make local subsidized multi-family units available. Having locally-employed workers living in the neighborhoods where they work would help relieve traffic and do away with the associated negative quality of life issues for such workers. Additionally, the local residents and workers would develop a neighbor-like kinship, helping to make a healthier neighborhood, better schools, and closer ties to local businesses.
3. For others who must commute, let’s a) greatly improve our public transportation systems, and b) create an efficient network of bike paths in the major metropolitan areas so that commuters can have realistic alternatives to personal vehicles in order to get to work and school.
4. Let’s go after government regulations and zoning laws that have prevented more housing, and supporting infrastructure, from being built where it is needed. A step in the right direction would be to do away with local and state-level career politicians who cater to greedy special interests, and instead have one-time elected officials who give priority to solving problems.
5. In the interest of further reducing traffic in the suburbs, let’s have small in-garage minimarts on every block in suburban neighborhoods, which could offer neighbors a quick way to get basic products without the need to drive to the supermarket. These minimarts could even offer lower, partially subsidized prices to encourage people in the neighborhood to shop there. Special orders could be dispatched to the minimarts via drones. Less traffic in the suburbs means more multi-family units could be built without saturating local traffic infrastructure.

When considering the investment needed to implement these ideas, it is important to keep in mind the benefits and overall cost savings that would come from reducing the terrible inefficiencies caused by the unaffordable-housing-clogged-roads quagmire, and the significant reduction of the associated societal maladies—such as less-healthy citizens, higher insurance and medical costs, stressed families, and environmental degradation. Investing to have healthier citizens and families, better-prepared children, and a cleaner environment will more than pay for itself over the long term. One dollar less spent on housing and commuting is an extra dollar to spend in ways that can promote local economic growth—this means more local jobs, more local investment, and better local schools and infrastructure.

It is also important to consider the hidden cost of doing nothing, which goes beyond the personal and societal issues listed above. Unaffordable housing and the negative effects that long commutes have on people’s lives are two serious sources of discontentment for too many of us. As history has shown and continues to demonstrate, widespread discontentment is a threat to democracy. Discontented people are apt to look for easy scapegoats, and are also more prone to listen to greedy, unprincipled politicians and others who seek to profit from such discontentment by fanning the flames of division, spurring the culture wars, gumming up democracy, and shackling progress.

By utilizing our unmatched creativity, investing in solutions, and powering those solutions with unlimited energy, we can find novel ways to solve both the affordable housing crisis and eliminate the absurd inefficiencies and societal maladies caused by clogged traffic infrastructure.

Let’s aim high, and make it happen.