Good, they should be able to build as high as they want. The market incentivizes housing that has parking so they would only be hurting the value of their own property by not building sufficient parking for their residents. The alternative is nothing but expensive SFHs for everyone to bid up.

There are plenty of second order effects that may ultimately be caused by racism that would be beneficial to look for. For example, there are large populations of black people in rural areas like Alabama and Mississippi as well as large populations in high-density cities like New York and LA where they are much more likely to experience high levels of air pollution. There are historical reasons why black people would experience higher levels of air pollution, even amongst people living in the same city, but by segmenting the groups like that you can try to find a connection to air pollution and if that is the case, that changes out understanding of the effects of urban planning and we can make actionable changes from that. That to me sounds like a better outcome, then whipping ourselves about how bad racism is, a topic the people who care about that kind of thing are already aware of.

I mean, I don't disagree with racism being involved and all the second order effects that causes. But not looking deeper into the actual mechanism is like figuring out that the planets revolve around the sun by some magical force and then deciding that god did it and closing the book. I'm much more interested in the specifics of what racism does that causes premature aging because then that means we can actually do something actionable about it rather than adding to a list of reasons why racism is bad.

>This assumes that social disparities can’t be studied empirically, which is not true.

I agree with this, but the explanation that racism did this is the scientific equivalent of god did it. It's a solution that gets you nowhere. A much better study would attempt to pinpoint the exact causes (air pollution, smoking rates, higher risk jobs, etc) which actually gets us somewhere. You can recognize that all these might be second order effects of racism, but we still need to know the exact cause and effect relationships in order to be able to translate that into real world actions. For example, segmenting people by both race and city/rural groups lets us study the effect of air pollution on outcomes...if that turns out to be relevant then that changes the way we think about the relationship between highway construction and high-density housing which can actually lead to an improvement.

I’ve always thought this would work much better as an anime. The magical elements and some of the characters just seem like they wouldn’t work as in a live action series.