[KevinGlass]

The fact that everything is designed around cars is one of the invisible nooses around the neck of America. When you look around and notice that everything is covered in cars, that's hard to unnotice. All those cars, roads, parking lots, highways, box stores, mile of sewer and water pipe, cost a staggering amount and are going to start costing a lot more to maintain over the next decade as systems age out and need replacement or maintenance. Not to mention the cost of demolishing the country we spend the previous 300 years constructing. The vampiric system of automobilism has made everything much more expensive for everyone.

Living in a semi-crowded city, near your family and friends, should be the default, cheap option. Instead we've wasted about 10 trillion dollars pave the entire continent. Possibly the most expensive mistake ever made in history.

[rexpop]

It disturbs me that your comment is "greyed out," whatever that means: you're speaking an obvious truth. The car-scale of American infrastructure is an impediment to physical health; it's an impediment to social capital, and therefore to democracy and to mental health, as well. It funnels us down restricted, commercial avenues--pun intended. It's physically dangerous, it's chemically toxic, it's ecologically destructive, and it's damned expensive to maintain!

It's obvious when I visit a city / countryside with poor transit and pedestrian infrastructure how much more I suffer. It's so damned obvious, it's the first thing that screams out to me right when I land / pull in / ride up.

I can't understand what literate person would take issue with the core of your assertions.

[geraldwhen]

Nobody wants to live in apartments. Maybe 20-something’s with no prospect of family, but that’s it.

[PhasmaFelis]

Apartments are fine as long as they're good apartments. Properly-built concrete walls completely mitigate the sound problem you mentioned below. In four years at my current place, I've never heard a neighbor's voice from inside my apartment.

Shitty slumlord apartments are what everyone wants to escape from, in my experience.

[rexpop]

The post to which you're responding said nothing about apartments. Do you mind connecting a few dots for those of us less well-versed in the presumptions of your milieu?

[vladvasiliu]

The post didn't explicitly say "apartment", but it said:

> Living in a semi-crowded city, near your family and friends, should be the default, cheap option.

What kind of dwelling, apart from apartments, are there in a "semi-crowded city"? They may not be high-rises, but even if it's a "multi-family house", it's still "apartments". There's only a (usually thin) wall separating your room from your neighbor's. This is one of the main aspects people typically hate about apartments.