I am not trying to dunk on this thread, which is good, but if we can talk big about universal healthcare we can talk equally big about abolishing sprawl and the fact that this is a normative reaction to our transpo future from my fellow leftists is Not Tight and needs to stop.
I resolve to be productive and contribute meaningful policy suggestions re: the Green New Deal and land use in 2019 (thank you @HenryKraemer!), but gotta call this shit out when I see it.
If y’all can’t envision a world that’s more about buses than green-AV science fiction, come sit next to me. I’m fun, and I throw really good parties.
On my walk home I thought about how we’ve encoded NORMATIVITY in our land-use patterns (not new theses) and how a GND could begin to repair this by embracing a radically differently shaped future (evidently too new a thesis 😐) but I need to make pasta before tweeting
K. Urban sprawl is Very Bad. I find climate/enviro the most compelling argument for why sprawl is very bad and should be stopped. A recent example of what happens when we sprawl is the devastation resulting from the California fires: psmag.com/environment/ho…
There are countless more examples as to why sprawling land-use patterns, esp. in the US, are environmental disasters. But sprawl has never been clearly defined. This is a great paper that digs into everything around that: mdpi.com/2071-1050/5/8/…
But, basically, the US is way more of what's on the right here than what's on the left, and that is a HUGE BIG VERY ENORMOUS PROBLEM for countless reasons. (Dead link, but Google tells me the original credit pointed to: chrisnorstrom.com/2011/10/invent…) 
Either you buy this, or you don't. If you don't, links to things such as this are not going to convince you that the land-use patterns federally incentivized through, for example, transportation funding, which disproportionately favors roads, are Very Bad. citylab.com/design/2016/06…
A lot of people don't think this is Very Bad because this is what they find to be their personal preference, their default, their normal, where they grew up, or—perhaps—their aspiration. A single-fam house with a garage is a signifier! (Too much to unpack there for this thread.)
But we have a climate imperative to stop living like this. To my original point at the top, if you can imagine a different political regime in which universal healthcare is a reality, abolishing sprawl is *not* a reach for your imagination, I swear.
But if all of us bumbling across the landscape in electric AVs is a vision more mentally accessible to you, you need to start unpacking your own preferences. YOU 👏 MUST 👏 REEVALUATE 👏 YOUR 👏 DAMN 👏 PRIORS👏 BECAUSE 👏 THE 👏 OCEANS 👏 ARE 👏 BOILING.
Here is where my norm-encoding thing kicks in: It's comfier for us to think about driving electric cars than taking buses for a million different reasons. I'd argue that white supremacy is a very American root cause; more abstractly, it's norms versus deviance.
It's more common now that people can't afford to raise families in cities. Sure, yes. But people more far more often to get their kids into the "good" schools. We know what that means. And because of our legally encoded land-use choices, when you leave a city, you move to sprawl.
(Obligatory deep-breath interstitial to remind everyone that each one of these tweets basically demands an essay—nay, a book—in and of itself, and some of those things have already been written, but I'm getting to the GND framing, I promise.)
So, if we take that: Sprawl is Very Bad, we keep doing it bc national policy incentivizes it, we have a decade to course-correct our shit, our shit is entirely tied to how we use our land, and land is inherently political, you get me, salty af:
We cannot fight sprawl project-by-project. It has not worked. It will not work going forward. If a GND is a platform to be radical, we *must* acknowledge how land use undergirds all of our lives. We *must* accept that sprawl is the manifestation of enshrined normativity.
If you think that merely attempting to mitigate the deleterious effects of our current land-use regime is impossible, I'd ask you to think why it makes you uncomfortable that people might live near each other, in apartments, and ride buses together.
And if you insist that it *doesn't* make you uncomfortable, but you think, in the back of your head, that all kids really deserve backyards to play in? That no one would really choose a basement apartment? That you can't really imagine not driving to get groceries?
Really sit with why you think a particular way of life is better, healthier, more whole, and more worth aspiring toward. And don't, for the love of God, build policy around something that is legitimately killing us. jstor.org/stable/4092440…
We have an enormous responsibility to get this right. It may be too late. But weak, mealy assumptions that the land-use patterns that we have will continue as such is giving up on any hope of a just and fair future that repairs historical harms.
Tl;dr your personal preferences are not necessarily more important than a planet we can all live on, and if you, like the people who are appearing in my mentions, like your sprawl, rest assured knowing your preferences are, and have been, disproportionately favored for decades.
I'm going to mute this and go to bed. Buses rule.
