[nemo44x]

It's because most people don't want to live in small boxes stacked on top of each other. The market responded to what people wanted and it was larger single family homes with yards and living space. An automobile to get you to other places for shopping and entertainment. This is what most people people want.

I agree though that a lot of suburbs are just wastelands and I would consider them to be depressing places to live. But people seem to love them for some reason. A lot of these places don't even have sidewalks but I guess it makes sense as there isn't really anywhere to walk to.

[kenned3]

This!

I love how people seem to feel they can enforce their views of how a city should be build on others.

The fact of the matter is very clear.. we have so many detach houses because that is what people WANT.

For some odd reason there is a subset of the population who feel entitled to dictate how OTHERS should live. These people go on and on about "increasing density" while ignoring that some don't want to live like this.

[kmeisthax]

You are projecting.

The current state of affairs in the US is that, in most towns, detached single-family housing is the only thing you are legally allowed to build. When you buy land the local zoning board tells you what can be built on that land, and these zones are extremely fine-grained. Thus, the people who want detached houses are the ones who are dictating how others should live.

There is a huge demand for denser urban arrangements, because people would like to live closer to where they work and don't want to drive cars. This is why smaller houses in urban centers go for more money than larger houses in suburbs. This is an arbitrage opportunity for anyone with the capital to buy houses at the periphery of those urban centers and demolish or renovate them to house more people. Except that's illegal, so instead the market is stuck pricing by convenience, and you get a society that demands it's working class spend two or more unpaid hours of their lives each day driving from the suburbs into the city.

Historically, the transition to suburban home ownership as the default mode of living was also something dictated by elites rather than organically decided upon. To explain this we need to talk about cars, because suburbs and cars are basically a package deal. It is extremely inconvenient to live in the suburbs without owning a car, and cars do not work in cities where they have to compete for limited road space against pedestrians and public transit.

So the car companies demanded that the laws and cities change to make their business work. We invented the """crime""" of jaywalking[0] just to make cities more convenient to access in a large vehicle. Car companies even bought up and destroyed public transit, turning efficient streetcar and rail systems into buses that had to compete for road space with individual riders, and often lost. This meant more people having to buy back their freedom[1] by moving to the suburbs and buying cars to get to the job they used to walk to.

Had this decision not been made through top-down power and social engineering[2], the suburbanization of America would have been far more limited. We can see this in much of Europe and Asia, where attempts to level and rebuild cities in Henry Ford's divine image were resisted at every turn.

[0] "jay" is old-timey derogatory slang for rural farmers, roughly equivalent to today's "hick".

[1] I should point out that this freedom was an illusion because road capacity is far more limited for cars than it is for people. Suburbs will inevitably jam their streets and highways in ways that dense urban spaces cannot.

[2] As in, engineering society to work a certain way, not defrauding someone out of their login password

[kenned3]

i love it when people make statements liek "you are projecting" yet dont fully understand them.

What it means to be projecting?

According to Karen R. Koenig, M. Ed, LCSW, projection refers to unconsciously taking unwanted emotions or traits you don't like about yourself and attributing them to someone else. A common example is a cheating spouse who suspects their partner is being unfaithful.

I've not taken any of my views and projected them anywhere.

you simply look around, and you can find TONS of so called "Social justice warriors" demanding more public transit, more density..

Usually under some "Stop urban sprawl" mantra - who gives them the right to enforce how others want to live?