[dougmwne]

I’m very skeptical that you have lived in a US suburb with single family homes. They are almost never walkable, have no services except those you drive to and life involves driving from one parking lot of another. Having lived in several EU cities, ideal density to me appears to be 3 to 7 story buildings arranged into city blocks with 20 to 40 businesses within a 1km walk.

[kkfx]

I don't but the issue with US suburbs is that they are residential-only, not mixed with small and medium commercial activities.

Let's say you have a 7 story building, it's typically composed by a certain number of different families (20-30?) with different ideas, agendas etc. Let's say the building start to be aged, time to improve it. It's possible? Hint: no in the mean, just because of it's original design. Let's say remote work became common, but apartments are not large enough to spare a "home office room" per adult inside. What you can do? Buy a room from an old age neighbor who do not need it? A building done in the age where no on-line retail exists, but now we all use it and so we need large external storage to get amazon packages, how can you made it in an already designed building? What about p.v.? Oh, sure the building have a roof, maybe even good for p.v. but it's not enough for ALL apartment self-consumption, so it's just a system to sell electricity not an interesting things technically and in most countries also economically and so on. The point is simple: if you own the land and a light building on it, single owner, a single family inside, it's "easy" change it to adapt to modern needs, a multi-family building is a nightmare.

As a results in certain point in time an apartment is cheaper to buy and run than a home, BUT at another point in time became a nightmare economically and practically. A home can change, so you can keep it up potentially forever.

Since we all need services well, we can't live well in large areas without stores, and that's why US suburbs fails. But in some areas of the EU there are home and small buildings intermixed and they works very well for their residents and in general. I see no reasons why they can't scale. Personally I've left big dense cities for a mounting place in the Alps, a good enough connection (2Gbps/860Mbps FTTH), good roads, enough stores around, a living economical tissue and WFH. It can't scale for let's say automotive industry, but it scale for many kind of other activities.

[greedo]

The problem with achieving this is that business has consolidated too much in the last 20 years. Around me, I have a bunch of small offices (mostly dental/chiropractors, etc) a few gas stations, and then mega stores like Walmart/Lowes etc. On the other side of town, there are megabusinesses like banking and insurance. The company I work for employs over 2K, and that would be pretty difficult to staff with people within walking distance. Thank god my team is allowed to work remotely...

I think that all the talk about modifying city design etc is just unrealistic in the US. You'd need to change regulations, change economic centralization, and most importantly kill the dream of SFH.

[zirgs]

The USA already modified their city design. The cities were much denser before cars were invented. Lots of stuff was bulldozed and converted to parking lots.

In many European cities you can see single family homes next to apartment buildings, offices and shopping malls and it works just fine.

I'm glad that we don't have the same zoning nonsense as in the USA.