| > It is unimaginably expensive, it's just getting subsidized to ridiculous extents. Yep, that's totally true. But we as a society have chosen to subsidize it. We would not continue to subsidize it if society as a whole didn't find that lifestyle worth the immense weight on government finances. > but saying the majority of Americans do when so few even know what's possible is misplaced in the best possible read of it. Perhaps you're correct, but we're getting into conjecture at this point. The single family home on a quarter acre plot is ingrained into the physche of Americans at birth. It's the American dream. Cultural memes like that don't die without a herculean amount of effort. And when this dream is so well built into our urban design, uniformity across the country, the likelihood of it really changing is fairly small. Online spaces are really the first time I've seen anything different from the mainstream viewpoint here--never heard anything like this offline. Even San Francisco won’t upzone. If that isn’t a clear indication of preference, I don’t know what is. > The demand for car-free neighbourhoods is also obvious if you look at what exists, and how exorbitant the prices are due to the high demand and low offer. Definitely, we need more of these neighborhoods to satisfy demand. Again, I live in one, and I experience the price increases first hand. I just don't agree with the position folks take of changing existing neighborhoods into "urban, walkable" ones when the residents don't want that. There is a lot of space to try building these communities, especially since many people (even not in tech!) don't need to go to downtown offices anymore. Streetcar suburbs are pretty awesome, because they allow single family home-style living while maintaining walkability. But density advocates want to see those neighborhoods built up into apartments and townhomes. That's tough for residents to swallow, since they have heavily invested in making their neighborhood the exact low-ish density but walkable, manicured living space they want to be in. And it's part of the appeal of unwalkable / HOA subdivisions, because such up zone conversions are difficult to impossible, or make little financial sense. Vegetation, old architecture, etc. takes a long time to grow and "settle in". Destruction of backyards and old homes for large buildings that don't fit in with anything else in the neighborhood is not a fun time for existing residents. I don't really care about the property value (well, I would care if my neighborhood completely changed by a forced zoning change and I needed to move). It's about keeping the small town neighborhood vibes I chose to move here for. |
> It’s good thing we moved from these old urban walkable designs to a car centric lifestyle, which the vast majority of Americans enjoy.
Your (non-)argument that american lifestyle being car-centric is a "good thing" is VERY different to "I enjoy suburbia and I'd like it not to be destroyed".
Your corner of the earth can remain. If some people are trying to destroy or change it, those people aren't me, nor anyone else in this thread, and they may or may not be "walkability advocates" or what have you that's pretty irrelevant.
The majority of walkability advocates argue for the following:
- US suburbia should not be subsidized as much as it is, it's putting cities in dangerous debt.
- Zoning laws preventing the construction of denser neighbourhoods that aren't skyscrapers should be relaxed.
- City centers should become more walkable and livable, less car-centric
- New constructions and renovations should focus on being human scale, instead of giving massive amounts of land and priority to cars.