[bllguo]

But of course they like large living spaces, most people do. The issue is how costly suburbia is on a societal level. It promotes car usage, fosters social isolation, prevents building walkable and convenient neighborhoods, etc. The worst part is that after the cat's out of the bag, nobody is willing to give up their spacious homes. Better to heavily restrict or disallow the option in the first place.

[greggman3]

I don't believe suburbia promotes social isolation. In fact the opposite. At least in my experience most people living in a suburban neighborhood get to know their neighbors where as it's the stereotype that people in the city make it a point to not know any of their neighbors (except on Sesame Street). It might just by my anecdata but it fits my experience.

Note: I prefer a walkable city I think.

[rsj_hn]

> of course they like large living spaces, most people do [..]

> nobody is willing to give up their spacious homes

This is a view that is strident and sanctimonious, yet completely wrong.

Suburbia did not come to exist because of a desire for big houses, which are just an incidental side effect, it's about home ownership.

Specifically getting out from under the thumb of landlords. It was suburbia and the automobile -- not the New Deal -- that created the American middle class.

Without the suburbs, you have to live in large urban tenements (or in rural areas) and there is no possibility of homeownership, as those landlords only sell to other landlords.

Now along comes transportation technology which allows you to keep your job in the city but live where land is cheap enough to buy.

Woohoo!

Now you can be a homeowner thanks to automobiles, roads, and highways.

The houses are larger than the urban tenements and flat just because the land is cheap. Going vertical is very expensive and makes financial sense only when land is expensive. So the size and shape of the house has nothing to do with why people rushed there. They rushed there because they want to get out from under the thumb of the urban landlord.

Take a look at home ownership rates in the 20th C[1]:

    1900: 46.5% <- Nothing much happens from 1900-1930
    1910: 45.9% 
    1920: 45.6%
    1930: 47.8% <- Great Depresssion + New deal: 1933-1941 sees decline
    1940: 43.6% <- post-war suburbia boom: 1946-1966
    1950: 55.0% 
    1960: 61.9% <- Increase slows as suburbs built out 1960 - 1980
    1970: 62.9%
    1980: 64.4% <- massively falling rates don't do much to 2000
    1990: 64.2%
    2000: 66.2% 

So to look at the post-war suburbia boom as some kind of indulgent preference for big houses is to completely miss what this is about.

And note that a side effect of the growth of suburbia is the shrinking of rural areas, as people in rural areas don't need to relinquish home ownership and become renters if they move to cities. That used to be the case. Before suburbia, if you wanted to move to the city, you needed to rent from one of these landlords.

But, you counter, we have condos! Well, there were no condos in 1940, and by 1990, less then 5% of housing units were condos[2]. There are very few condos in America, because again the owners of the big multi-unit properties prefer to rent them out rather than convert them to condos, and there just isn't that much infill land available in existing urban areas for developers to come in and add a significant amount of condo urban housing stock.

So please stop judging people and wildly moralizing about long term social or economic trends. That's a terrible lens through which to understand economic history.

- - -

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/ti...

[2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-7775.pdf

[novok]

There are many developed countries with very large middle classes, such as japan, korea and large parts of europe that didn't go with the car dependent lifestyle and make everything but suburbs literally illegal to build and created policies to boost home ownership, such as the 30-yr government backed mortgages and the mortgage interest tax deduction.

The modern american middle class grew because of the post war economic boom and it being the only industrial economy left standing, along with many other structural advantages, such as a large population, a safe geopolitical region and huge amounts of natural resources. It wasn't because of suburbs, the suburb boom happened because of white flight.

There are countries with higher homeownership rates, such as spain, and it really hasn't done them much good. Home ownership rates do not really matter for how well your economy is doing: https://qz.com/167887/germany-has-one-of-the-worlds-lowest-h...

[bobthepanda]

Unfortunately, that economic trick can't be repeated forever. We've simply run out of land that is within commutable distance, and our governments are collapsing under the lifecycle cost of infrastructure for ever lower densities.

---

I read an interesting article that framed the new laws around loosening single family zoning in California as allowing a new type of homesteading. Basically, the zoning regulations have forced homeowners to more or less get value only out of the house they actually live in. Actually homesteading with a garden in your backyard in 2021, the way American homesteads used to be small farms, would not really make any sort of significant income.

The argument was that people can now choose to use what was previously more or less legally mandated unproductive[1] land, your backyard and front yard, to be converted into more housing, which could be rented out as a source of income.