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Notes -
Having your business seized is probably much worse than being able to live in a slightly further out area is good, and destroying the downtown makes it less valuable to everyone, including the new commuters, but as I tried to describe in my replies to curious, the main issue is cost. 7.5 billion is $140,000 per commuter. Another issue is just time--Austin's population increased by 200,000 between 2005 and 2015 (corresponding to each of those commuters supporting a family of 4, though in reality this is generous since families aren't that big any more). Are you going to build another 4 lanes every <10 years? Constant construction, until the whole of downtown is pavement?
The problem isn't being too far from the city, it's limitations on development. There's enormous amounts of underdeveloped land extremely close to downtown. Destroying an apartment building close to downtown so you can build more sprawling houses far away is a terrible way to reduce rents. Similarly, development opportunities far away are much less valuable. Like, this is just so backwards--let's destroy development downtown so we can build slightly more very far away? Should we just not have cities at all?
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