> It's not problematic to discuss how a low-rise neighborhood is preferable in the architectural or aesthetic sense, let alone in quality of life. Or are you asserting that Jane Jacobs was a racist?

There is an intrinsic trade off here between aesthetics and poverty/homelessness. The beneficiaries and the casualties are different people. What does it say if the priority is aesthetics?

> No, there's a reason why celebrities prefer living in Brownstone Brooklyn and not in Midtown Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn, or Long Island City.

"Avoiding paparazzi in denser buildings" isn't a common concern for ordinary people.

> I choose not to drive into New York City. I still choose to drive and pay plenty of tolls locally in NJ, pay my car registration in NJ, etc.

Driving into New York City is the relevant thing. NYC congestion pricing isn't modifying what you're paying in NJ.

> Between you repeatedly calling me cheap and saying my phrasing is "problematic", it sure seems like I'm wasting my time replying to a troll who doesn't even live here and isn't affected by NYC congestion pricing in any way in the first place.

I generally ignore personal questions in debates like this, so you don't actually know where I live or work, because the only reason it would matter is as the basis for an ad hominem attack or an appeal to authority. Does anything about the argument change if I live in New York? What if I live in Canada but have parents in New York? What if I live in Washington but might move to New York? None of that would affect whether congestion pricing is good policy or not.

We're only even talking about your circumstances because I pointed out that the people who live in New Jersey aren't being represented (even though they'd represent a disproportionate share of the people who drive into New York), and your retort was that you live in New Jersey and don't drive into New York. Which would only be relevant if your position was held by the majority of interested people in the jurisdictions without a vote, and even if it was that still wouldn't be an excuse to leave them unrepresented on an issue directly affecting them.

> So when I lived right on 6th Ave and my windowsills would get covered in black dust any time the window was open, you're claiming that wasn't from the 24/7 four-lane traffic flow outside? Sure is strange then, considering that when I lived in other parts of NYC that weren't on busy roads, that was never a problem.

Don't confuse roads with cars. Roads also have buses and trucks, and if you're looking for a source of soot, diesel engines are a scourge.

> That's correct, but tire wear still produces a decent amount of air pollution, and it's especially bad with EVs due to their increased weight.

"Tire wear" is the last refuge of people with nothing else to complain about. A tire will shed around 1500 grams of mass over its entire lifetime. By contrast, a single gallon of gasoline is more than 3200 grams and combines with air to produce more than 8 kilograms of emissions. Modern cars ensure that nearly all of that is (stable) CO2 and not other dangerously reactive carbon and nitrogen oxides as they used to be and electric cars don't even produce the CO2. So we've gone from >15,000 kg of tailpipe emissions over 50,000 miles in a 26 MPG car to zero and the only complaint left is the 6 kg from a set of four tires.

Meanwhile the "electric cars are heavier" thing isn't really true. It came from comparing electric conversions of traditional gasoline cars to the weight of the original cars. The conversions weigh more than the original cars (and even then not by much), but they also weigh more than cars specifically designed to be electric from the start, which don't contain unnecessary engine support scaffolding and are heavily optimized for weight to maximize range.

> So congestion pricing is bad because our democracy consistently ties voting rights to residency? What?

Voting rights are tied to residency for issues that predominantly affect local people, like local schools. Issues that affect people over a wider area, like transportation, are meant to be decided at higher levels of government to make sure that the people being directly affected are represented. But here we have a transportation issue directly affecting people outside the jurisdiction being decided by the local government.

> No, the 24-story building I'm describing is on a long block in the Flatiron District where literally all of the other buildings on the block are between 4 and 12 stories.

I see I'm not explaining this clearly.

You have some amount of land which is zoned for 24-story buildings, but all the areas you see which are already full of 24-story buildings? That's most of the areas so zoned. You can't add new ones there because they already have them. You also can't put them in any of the areas with more restrictive zoning.

What's left is a small percentage of the city where the zoning allows for something that isn't already there. That small percentage can include a contiguous strip of smaller buildings. But because it's only those strips, it limits development to only those areas. That might not be where the greatest demand is, and most of the buildings in any given area wouldn't be on the market at any given time, so the opportunities to do it are reduced to a fraction of what they would have been.

That doesn't mean it never happens, what it means is that it would be happening many times more often in the absence of those restrictions, and that reduction in construction significantly exacerbates the housing shortage.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but you don't have to prohibit something through zoning that nobody was going to do anyway. Whereas if they were going to do it, where "it" is "increasing the housing supply", and the zoning stops them, QED.