[stetrain]

Let cities be cities, let rural be rural.

If you want to live spread out, fine. There’s plenty of space for that.

If you want to go into the city for the amenities it provides, take a reasonable form of transportation that doesn’t require millions of parking spaces and bulldozing neighborhoods for new freeways.

Heterogeneity of options is good. I don’t think most people who advocate for good urban spaces think that everyone should be forced to live that way. They just want it to be an option instead of only building homogenous suburban developments everywhere.

Right now the supply and demand for those kinds of walkable, bikeable cities, towns, and neighborhoods is out of whack. You can tell this because the places that are built like this tend to be very expensive places to buy a home.

In my area a house in a normal suburb costs around $500k. A similarly sized house near a local town center with walkable shops, restaurants, park, grocery store, library, etc cost $1m+.

[ixtli]

As a concerted urbanite i totally agree with you. The problem is that people like the author are arguing for a third type of place, the suburb, which is unsupportable and harms us. Its a post-war experiment which has largely failed.

[stetrain]

Yes in the sense of suburbs that commute by car into the city, requiring that city to maintain adequate infrastructure, but prefer the lower taxes of the suburbs.

If you choose a lifestyle that requires more to be spent per capita on roads, utilities, and public services then you should pay for that cost.

Suburbs themselves should also have variety. People love small towns, but instead of a mix of small towns with vibrant dense centers surrounded by less dense housing options, we just build sameness stretching in all directions.

[rickydroll]

Urban, suburban, and rural spaces all have different pluses and minuses. People have different needs for living spaces throughout their lives, and I feel it's important to recognize and acknowledge that and support them in finding the right place to live.

To me, the fundamental reason behind suburban failure is the lack of affordable housing in the city, forcing city mice to move out to suburbia, bringing their city mice habits and expectations with them. Build more housing in cities, and suburban problems will work themselves out.

[stetrain]

Yes. Letting cities be actually dense would make suburbs work better.

But we tend to resist upzoning existing low-density development that is now in the density gravity well of the expanding city, keeping housing prices artificially inflated.