[xversilov]

It's hard for a non-American to appreciate just how different their urban environments are compared to the US, and vice versa.

It was certainly a shock to me when I first arrived to the USA... "Why is everything so far away? Why does every building have a bunch of empty space around it? (i.e. mandated setbacks)" etc.

The lack of real cities is probably my least favorite thing about the USA.

[influx]

The USA is so big and diverse it's silly to say that the it doesn't have any "real cities". I suspect New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Portland and others would be proof otherwise.

[davidw]

NY, Boston, kind of. Portland... a little bit, downtown, and starting, a little bit to be that way in some areas.

With the Supreme Court's Euclid decision in 1916, we've had zoning that has only gotten worse and worse since then, so most things built in the years following that have deviated from that sort of walkable, incremental city that we used to have here too.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...

[TulliusCicero]

Even 'real cities' in the US have a lot more garbage urban design than most cities in, say, western Europe. Even the denser ones like you frequently have silly car-oriented design, like minimum parking requirements, and huge swathes of the city that are mandated single-family housing only.

Comparing Seattle's transit system to, say, Munich's (where I currently live) is a sick joke. Munich is far more walkable and bikable, too. Of course, a big part of this is that a majority of the land in Seattle is zoned exclusively for, you guessed it, nothing but detached single-family homes.

As an example, I sometimes visit smaller cities (< 50k) here, and even then they still are highly walkable, moderately dense, and they usually have pretty good transit connections to other places.

[InclinedPlane]

There is a wide diversity of cities in the US. You can go to places like NYC, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. and see examples of cities with decently dense cores and functional public transit. But then you can go to cities in the South, for example, where it's almost impossible to get around without a car.

[ars]

And it's one of my favorite things about the USA. I hate dense European style cities.

Different people like different things. The nice thing about the USA is you can pick. You can live anywhere from a remote farm to a dense apartment.

[rayiner]

But you don’t really get to pick. Dense European style cities are outlawed in the US. Hell, dense European style suburbs are outlawed here. My pre-zoning code suburb has lots that are less than 3,000 square feet. It’s awesome—easy to walk and you see your neighbors all the time. But it’s completely illegal to build more neighborhoods like mine. The minimum lot size now is more than five times bigger—we have legally mandated suburban sprawl. And there is no justification for it. If people wanted to have big lots, developers would subdivide lots that way. There is no reason to mandate it by law.

[opportune]

Dense suburbs are only "outlawed" because certain places, usually at the municipality level, zone the buildings that way. You know it is also "outlawed" for most European cities to build too high vertically too right?

Also, it varies from city to city (and within cities). Although most of the 20-35 crowd probably would prefer a denser city, old people prefer owning homes with lawns, so they wouldn't even want to live in that kind of place to begin with.

[davidw]

You can get a place with a lawn in Europe, too; you just have to pay for it, or live further out.

It's very difficult to find a place like our house in Italy in the US: we could walk to schools, grocery stories, pastry shops, our doctor, cafes, pizza place, a few barbers and a tram stop to go downtown.

And that's in a suburb of a mid-size city (about 300K).

[brians]

I live in a place like that in Lexington, Mass. I commute by bicycle (or wimp out and drive in bad weather) about 8 miles. Two groceries, the elementary school, three preschools, an amazing cookie shop, three pizza places, and a fantastic Chinese place are walkable. Oh, and two dentists and an eye doctor, plus your selection of churches. A bus line runs from there, every 15 minutes in rush hour, to the terminus of a subway line. Oh, and a public library.

Now, it’s not perfect: the T breaks down all the time due to criminal underinvestment, my bike commute is noticeably faster than driving through the traffic, the mass transit schedule is such that any route with multiple transfers is insane.

But I’m going to guess that the Italian and Dutch versions of this aren’t perfect either; it’s a matter of deciding which flaws to live with.

[ocschwar]

Zoning codes in the US are mostly copies of zoning code templates published decades ago, so even though every single place has its own, it's a little-modified version of what everyone else has.

Even dense US towns are zoned against density. Somerville, Massachusetts had a rude awakening 5 years ago when they discovered the entire city is in violation of the zoning code. Every single home is out of compliance for one reason or another.

[harryh]

old people prefer owning homes with lawns

That's fine, but why do old people need it legally mandated that everyone has to do that?

[PhasmaFelis]

> You know it is also "outlawed" for most European cities to build too high vertically too right?

What's the justification for that?

[adrianN]

Dark streets mostly. Also the length of ladders that Fire engines have.

[rootusrootus]

That is very dependent on where you are at. We have suburbs around here with lot sizes of 2178 sf (for houses of ~1800 sf).

I don't really agree that developers are particularly responsive to the market in this regard, either. Or rather, they make quite a lot more profit from two 6K lot houses than they do from a more expensive house on a 12K lot. Builders always, always want to go for smaller lots unless they're selling super-premium houses of at least $1M (for context, the average house price here is probably right around $350-400K right now).

[rayiner]

Minimum lot sizes are pervasive in the U.S. Many of the suburbs that do have smaller lot sizes are "grandfathered in" to the zoning regulations--it would not be legal to build a new subdivision in the same county with the same layout.

Your example does not show that developers are not responsive to the market. The fact that developers can make more profit on two 6K lot houses than they do from a more expensive house on a 12K lot simply means that there is more economic value in satisfying two peoples' desires for a 6K lot house than in satisfying one person's desire for a 12K lot house.

If you eliminated the minimum lot size, people who want big lots would have to pay a lot more for them to make it worth developers' while, and that makes total sense! One person buying a house with a 12K lot pushes out two people who might be perfectly happy with a 6K lot. They should pay more.

[AnimalMuppet]

Sure, it's outlawed - in your suburb. It's not a nationwide ban, though. It's not even (I presume) statewide, or even city-wide.

(It may be true that there literally are no municipalities in the US with zoning codes that allow dense neighborhoods, but I would be highly surprised.)

[DoreenMichele]

The New Urbanist movement tried to recreate dense, mixed use, walkable neighborhoods like were the norm in the past. It was an uphill battle. They would take their plans to city hall and get told it could not be approved. They would then carefully scrutinize the zoning laws, rename some roads and other features as something else, rinse and repeat until something resembling their vision could get approved.

In most parts of the US, you can no longer build those dense, walkable, mixed use neighborhoods that make it convenient to live without a car.

[natrius]

It's outlawed in so many places because of the incentives at work. At the edges of a city, greenfield exclusive neighborhoods have a better chance of holding their value than neighborhoods that let people with less money buy homes on less land. Once an economically stratified city is in place, no one can opt out without losing money. Everyone has to opt out together, and the politics of that are the worst.

[brians]

This is a great focusing question.

There was a study a Few years about about which cities and suburbs could be built under their current zoning laws. I remember it showing that Somerville—a dense collection of 3-decker houses near Boston—was completely impossible to build under its current laws. I don’t have the link handy, but happy googling.

[oftenwrong]

http://cityobservatory.org/the-illegal-city-of-somerville/

[cmurf]

It's hugely wasteful and ultimately not affordable, to build out such massive infrastructure that then needs to be maintained with taxes. Most cities have extracted the initial funding for this infrastructure: roads, water, sewage, storm drainage, sidewalks, overhead or underground cables from the developer. But the tax base can't really support that beyond the initial life for that infrastructure without raising revenue. All city and county fees, taxes, and fines all inevitably go up and quality of infrastructure still goes down.

And that's in cities. Extend it out to podunk and they have to be subsidized, even when they don't know that's what's happening. And it's getting bad enough many counties in the U.S. have started to revert paved county roads back into gravel because they simply don't have the money to maintain the paving. They're worse full of pot holes than gravel. And the locals don't want to pay their fair share which might mean a dozen families sharing 50 miles of road - it's the exact opposite of economies of scale. Their incomes obviously have not kept up with the cost of even maintaining local roads... but there's no market force that's really correcting for this either.

[549362-30499]

Maybe your favorite thing. As a urban dweller, I'm a little fed up by subsidizing people living rural lifestyles only to see them have (in some cases) 4 times as powerful a vote as my own. I suspect that if we removed the federal interstate subsidies, farm subsidies, internet subsidies, etc. your lifestyle would not be self sufficient.

[TulliusCicero]

Simply false. There are virtually no European-style cities in the US. If you think otherwise, maybe it's because you haven't actually lived in Europe? I live in Munich right now, and I've lived in several regions of the US, visited lots of places too, and can't think of any city that felt very much like Munich does, or even German cities as a whole for that matter. Perhaps you could enlighten me.

[CalRobert]

Except you can't, really, unless you're quite wealthy. There's a clear expressed preference for more housing (note massive rents on very small apartments in major US cities) but those cities forbid people from building more housing.