Walkability/No demolition

The problem

Some cities are known to demolish perfectly good buildings in the name of walkability.

Ideally, this should be avoided, because:

There's already a housing shortage.
Materials & labor are not unlimited either.
Construction has an environmental footprint.
For the same cost & resources used, they could have built the new homes elsewhere and left the old ones intact. That would help more to increase the overall housing supply.

One approach to walkability: Add more housing to neighborhoods that are already walkable.
- This requires densification, which is often achieved by demolishing houses to make room for taller condo buildings.
- Neglects other approaches to walkability:
  - Bring more amenities to the suburbs
  - Create entirely new walkable neighborhoods
Gentrification
- In some cases, the total housing supply doesn't even increase at all; it just goes to the highest bidders.
Policy makers wanting to avoid sprawl but misunderstanding what makes sprawl a problem discussion TODO: elaborate; also discuss the general tradeoff: wastefulness of "demolish+rebuild", vs deforestation of "use more land" (note that housing's land footprint is nothing compared to agriculture)

Repurpose buildings (instead of rebuilding from scratch) 💬 discussion TODO: talk about examples: commercial-to-residential and vice versa, also how you can convert houses into denser housing without building a whole new building. Lastly, why people haven't done that already: cultural expectations that a building has to look a certain way (inside and out) to match its particular purpose - we need to think beyond that, and stop stigmatizing cheap solutions
- If a building isn't condemned, there's probably a solution that doesn't involve demolishing it.
Instead of trying to add more housing to the city core, bring walkability to the other residential areas.

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