If commutes are paid and people are free to choose where they live, you’re incentivizing LONGER commutes.

If commutes are paid and you need to incentivize shorter commutes, either the government or the employer is going to be able to tell you exactly where you’re allowed to live. And if you and your partner work far away from each other, you’ll just have to live in separate homes.

You’re already free to live closer to your job. I could live 150 meters from the office but choose not to because I want there to be greenery around my home. So I live 3 kilometers away and walk through a pretty nice part of town, including several parks.

You’re telling me you want a system where my employer can tell me to fuck off and drive to work or pay more rent to live in a worse apartment. It’d be prohibitively expensive to build a train line I could take to work. Buses are slower than driving.

Plus think about it. Downtown rent is already super high. If your location now determines which jobs you’re allowed to work, this gets worse.

There are much less draconian solutions for what you’re after. Here’s one I literally just came up with: Mandate new developments to have a minimum occupant density. Make it dependent on total population of the city. Include downtown office and shopping zones in this law, they also need to have a minimum population capacity so you’ll have a condo tower next to an office tower, or an office tower with apartments on some floors. Include a clause that old neighborhoods are to be demolished once they haven’t been compliant to the regulations for 5, maybe 10 years. By the time this happens to anyone, the land under the house will be worth way more than the house because it could house more units and once population is up, demand for real estate goes up too.

Or just have really high congestion charges and include suburbs for it. When nobody can afford to drive to work, apartments near jobs go up in demand and more get built. Demand for public transit goes up and ideally more gets built.