Originally Posted by
bkrownd
That would only work if people stopped buying suburban homes and primarily rented one or more transient dwellings, which is utopian and financially difficult in the US. People live where they can afford to buy a satisfactory home, and work where they (plus family members!) happen to find a job/school that year. Most people don't have much choice in where those things happen to be located. Making everything needlessly more expensive and difficult to penalize people who happen to work far from home is just plain mean.
Maybe the definition of what constitutes a satisfactory home needs to change. Not everyone actually needs 5000 sq ft and a two-car garage. I live in an 800 sq foot condo, near the center of town. It wasn't too expensive, I'm close to everything I need to be close to, and I actually have more space than I need. Because I live so close, I don't need a car, which frees up money for more important things, like saving for retirement. Even needing a yard should be open to question. I see a lot of really big houses with large-ish yards on my travels in suburbia, yet the vast majority of these yards are completely empty of people virtually all of the time. And it's not like people are using the space to grow vegetables or anything, either; they're just full of bluegrass (that needs to be irrigated in most places) and ornamental shrubbery. Why spend thousands of extra dollars on vehicles and fuel, and hundreds of commuting hours per year, just for the short-lived pleasure of seeing some unmowed grass as you wait for your garage door to open?