We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship

> Now, maybe I live in California and things are different.

You live in California and things are different. You live there because you want to be in a specific location and near a some-what-specific crowd of people for work reasons.

In the rest of the country, (most of it), that is not the consideration people have.

It might be a thriving city vs smaller town thing. Thriving cities outside of California (say Atlanta or Dallas) have valuable real estate in central locations just like in California cities. Nobody wants to be on the furthest outskirts with the furthest commute - it's more just an exhaust valve for growth so you don't get the same absolutely insane prices and resulting problems like homelessness to the same level.

Yes, this is different. Not because you live in California but because you live in the bay area. Urbanization has been so intense that a lot of large metro areas have avoided this fate. The land values rise so high that it becomes "worth it" to fix up the houses. The author alludes to this when talking about how some downtown lots with high enough real estate value are refurbished while those without it are dozed.

But this is not the case throughout the vast spread of rural towns in America. Some are shrinking, some are stagnant and some are growing but still not sustaining land prices that unlock the capital necessary to significantly overhaul structures.

Let them serve lattes ? to rephrase an unfortunate quote from France

"Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

I read it as "if we have to choose between maintaining nature and having cruise ships, we'd rather maintain nature and not have cruises".

Yeah, it’s not very clear to me either. From my reading, the poem is comparing the overwhelming majesty and elegance of the natural iceberg to the comparatively shoddy man-made vessel. But it’s open to interpretation.

The author definitely doesn’t do themselves any favors, though, by making an analogy with a fairly obscure poem and not even bothering to explain it.

The author isn't going for direct metaphor. But it appears to be around the concept that icebergs eventually melt. So if you were traveling/floating on an iceberg it would eventually go away. A well built ship on the other hand could last indefinitely or much longer at least.

Society, on the whole would rather have solutions that are more romantic/grandiose, albeit fleeting, uncontrollable and less practical

> I've never found what he is saying to be true at all, even in the real estate market. I live in a 40-year-old house that I bought 5 years ago, and its value has only increased. Before that I lived in another 40-year-old house in a thriving and busy market. Some of the most expensive places to live in my area date to the 1930's-1960's - I know, because my realtor showed them to me last time we moved.

There's no contradiction between an area being blighted and expensive. I've seen incredibly crappy neighborhoods in Boston, Chicago, Dallas and New York that were extremely expensive and clearly was in need of work.

I'm in Canada so with a grain of salt. My house is 45y old, and it was a cheap house to begin with. All the maintenance is done, roof replaced, stucco redone, we've done renos, elec is up to code. However when you look at the yearly appraisal, the house value keeps dropping year by year. They add a little line here and there to keep into account the renos done in the last 5 years. The only thing that grows is land value, which more than makes up for the house.

I can totally see that were we not in a pressured market, value would go done; and America is not at a saturation point where land is a big concern as a rule.

My previous house was built in 1902. It had lots of issues. We lived in it for almost six years, loved the place and its character. I sold it for 50% more than I bought it. It never made it on the market before the contract was signed.

Maybe he's being inaccurately hyperbolic by saying "all" and "exclusively". I'd agree that your disagreement there is reasonable. But I wonder, if he said "90% of our institutions" instead, how would you feel about his claims?

It seems that core areas sometimes go the way you're describing, but no peripheral areas do, and we're building a lot more of them, but no more cores.

I agree with you, taking rural Wisconsin as somehow exemplary, I think the author is really just observing the 80 year slow decline of small town America. I live in a bigger metro of around 1M and though we have never succeeded in bringing downtown back to what it was there are at least 4 distinct layers of neighborhoods- the 1900s streetcar neighborhoods, the postwar suburbs, the 80s developments, and the contemporary (post 2000) redevelopment of the postwar areas. These areas are all being bought up and rennovated rapidly. I would have loved to restore an old bungalow type house but they essentially all are rennovated and sell for a much higher price. There was a lot of development of suburbs and exburbs around the 2000s that has virtually come to a halt. Its all infill developmemt and rennovation now. I live in a 50s house and my sister in a 1910s house and both are fine.

>If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it helps

In general, Americans hate taxes because they hate the idea that "their" money might go to someone undeserving.

It's probably difficult for a non-American to understand just how deeply associated dense, urban environments are with random violence and crime.

If I could live in an environment like Berlin, I might consider it, although I'd still get itchy at having that many people around. But that's not a reality anywhere in the US that you have that kind of density.

the larger cities have been on a trajectory like what you describe - it’s difficult to increase density, home owners are resistant to it, but it happens gradually anyway.

but in small cities, there’s just too much empty space available. people just build further and further out from the old city center, so they can have their giant houses and enormous yards.

my state, Oregon, has a concept of an “Urban Growth Boundary” which is a zoning rule meant to reduce sprawl, and it helps somewhat. But generally people in the smaller cities vote to keep density very low.

It's worth noting that Japan also has a depreciation-based model of housing construction, but in Japan they don't endlessly sprawl outwards - isntead they knock down the old depreciated homes and rebuild in-place. Their permissive zoning model allows this to provide intensification naturally without the kind of protracted legal and PR battles required for intensification redevelopment here we have here in North America.

A good book to read on the subject is Jane Jacob's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It's 60 years old now, and is concentrating on cities rather than towns, but you can see the points she is making play out in scenes like the article mentions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...

Promote how?

I'm in the Dallas "metroplex," and it understood here that you get more value for your money the farther out you go. There's the inner loop (Loop 12) and outer loop (I-635) inside Dallas city limits, and then there are suburbs which again can be described (at least in the north) as "inside TX-121" and "inside US-380." As you cross each "boundary," your choices provde more value--defined as less money for more space, or newer construction, or both.

I grew up in San Diego, which is naturally constrained by mountains, ocean, an international border, and a military base, even before you add state and local laws. The Dallas area has no such constraints anywhere, nothing to keep it from sprawling until it reaches the state border to the north--and really, nothing to keep it from sprawling beyond that, either.

The YouTube channel Not Just Bikes [1] explores this in a short series [2]. I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, but what he discusses rings true for my city at least.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes [2]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...

As an American... this model is crazy

Because the driving philosophy is to make a profit. Not to build a liveable place or a sustainable community, not to improve the standard of living for people, not even to build something great. Only to squeeze most dollars out of an invested sum.

Once you look at it that way, it makes perfect sense. Depressing, self-destructive, short-sighted, awful, but logical.

>How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?

More houses = more taxes. Development is promoted in less dense areas because it creates jobs and brings in money. New constructions are profitable, and the industry is basically dictated by builders that throw up cheap houses on plots of land they bought for 10k.

In the United States, 75-90% of all land is zoned for single family residences with maximum densities of 4-5 households per acre. This is a legacy from the era of integration of non-white Americans called "White Flight." White Americans, seeking to avoid living next to non-whites left urban centers and populated suburban centers which had been engineered to be unaffordable or inaccessible to black and non-white Americans.

Houses were large and separated by lawns. They also required financing to purchase. Financing which was usually denied to non-whites by red-lining. In addition these neighborhoods were usually walled off and mazed to prevent people from walking through them. This made families depend on expensive cars to get where they were going, further increasing the burden on those living within and excluding poor and lower middle class Americans.

Now we have these pointless laws that are slowly strangling us to death with expensive car infrastructure that is insanely expensive and deteriorating fast. Small businesses can't survive because of poor walkability, parking minimums and outside investors jacking up rent costs. People can't find homes because they are all too expensive.

The legacy of racism is a death pact for America. I hope we can escape it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#:~:text=White%20f....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?

1) The US is really big. Seriously. Our population density is 1/3 that of the EUs with a similar (but now smaller) total population. Only Sweden and Latvia are less dense as EU member states. Add to that most of the US is more temperate than most of Europe and therefore we have even more desirable land (Barcelona is north of New York City).

That is to say, we have less need for it. Houston and Phoenix, our 4th and 5th biggest cities, just keep expanding out as opposed to up. This has long term costs, but certainly is cheaper.

1a) Gas is also a lot cheaper in the US than the EU. Two car families are plentiful. So spreading out costs less. And all our infrastructure (outside NYC, DC and maybe Boston/Chicago) is based around cars, not mass transit, so you need a spot to park your cars.

2) Local taxes are (in general) done based on the value of a house. If new houses in less desirable places are cheaper to originally buy, they are often also cheaper to hold. They have fewer established tax costs as well for maintenance of public transit or school because those come later (or not at all). What he's talking about is greenfield on the other side of a legal boundary, so there are different (usually fewer) governments to levy taxes. In the US, you may pay taxes to your city, county, state and the country (a lot of caveats there I'm skipping). If you buy a house outside the city, that's one fewer entity that can tax you.

3) There's a huge anti-urban political component. Literally, there are people who want rural areas to thrive and cities to fail. In some states (see Texas and Arizona, where Houston and Phoenix are), these people control the state.

4) Amazingly, for some reason (possibly holding offshore dollars), it's far more profitable to use the same square footage for luxury condos that sell out right away compared to many smaller cheaper houses/apartments in desirable cities.

5) It's literally been sold to generations of Americans that owing a lawn is a sign of having succeeded. That's where the "white picket fence" comes in. There is a huge market demand for suburbs.

> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?

How do you do that?

The US has the luxury of space that other countries don't and that space mostly is owned by the public and not federal, state, or local governments.

- In the US, zoning and land use are typically managed at the micro level, not the macro level (city < county < state < country).

- There's also a persistent threat of competition both at the state and county level. So most policy is about attracting residents and jobs, maintaining property values, etc.

- Proximity to a major city impacts price so the further away you travel, the more home you get for the same price.

- When people don't like how the local government is behaving, they'll hold a referendum and form a new city to escape regulation.

If you look at a city like Atlanta, you see that upper middle class have moved further outward from the metro area with each decade to larger more expensive homes (e.g. Brookhaven -> Sandy Springs -> Roswell -> Alpharetta -> Cumming). They did this because as undeveloped property decreased it drove property values up so they were able to sell their homes and purchase larger but cheaper homes in undeveloped neighborhoods. The cycle repeats itself every 10 years or so.

Because nobody wants to live there. Americans by and large come in two types: the urbanists who want to live in a big city, and everyone else who wants a cottage in the woods that's file miles from a McDonald's. Sanphillippo wants a return to this 1940s idea of dense small towns, walkable towns with a population of ten thousand. He doesn't get that those towns weren't that way because everyone liked it; they were like that because they had to be. People were too poor to have a personal vehicle. Everybody either farmed and only came into town when they had to, or worked in the same factory, or worked in a store where the factory workers spent their money. Then when the industry changed the factory closed and the town died almost overnight.

If people want to live in a single family home in the suburbs, why not let them? It's not like the US is short on space.

In areas where there is high demand for a particular reason (ex. NYC or the Bay Area because of the job market) I think it makes sense to intensify. But in cities where it isn't important for a lot of people to live close to the center, I don't really see a problem with just building more houses. Having a backyard is nice.

If you ever go to Phoenix, all you see is miles of suburbs. And then you drive out of the city, and all you see is miles of open land that they can expand into. I say just keep building them, clearly they are pretty popular.

> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?

They do promote it. Every city in the US is promoting inner-city neighborhood development (commonly called "gentrification" here). It's just not usually a great for actual citizens.

Dense construction is always more expensive, so anytime density goes up, your immediately paying a lot more money for a lot less housing. And property in the US is valued exclusively by it's density (what realtors will call "location, location, location", but really just means "how much stuff is around it -- how dense is the area"). Living near density (even if your own property is not dense) always costs a lot more money, which means your again paying a lot more cash for a lot less housing. Alternative public transit options are poor in most places, but simultaneously, most inner-cities are actively hostile to our current universal public transit (cars), so the closer you live to the center of town, the harder it will be for you as a resident to get anywhere regularly, and you'll be transportation-disadvantaged compared to any of your friends in the suburbs. And because it's more expensive to live there, the taxes there are almost always much higher (since the tax you pay is based in large part on the value of your home, and houses near the city cost more, so you also get to pay more in taxes).

And, since families generally don't have lots of money to spend, they are in the same boat as you, and almost entirely pick suburbs (to save lots of cash and get better transport), so their kids all enroll in schools out there, so the quality of the schools out there is a lot higher, which makes future families more likely to make the same decision.

And if you have anything "tricky" happen to you (perhaps a elderly family member needs support, or you get divorced, or your kid becomes disabled, or similar), any and all of the assistance you might want or need to help deal with that, is also easier to get out in the suburbs. And since your cost of living is lower out there, if you need extra cash to handle a problem, it's easier to financially float that in the suburbs.

The model is crazy, but it's not crazy at the person-level. It's mostly crazy at the federal level. The government could let properties actually depreciate, so that renovating old properties inside the city is cheaper than building new out in the suburbs. But that would require them to let property values fall in urban areas so that housing can become affordable, and cities as well as all rich people are always 100% against that idea. So instead, federal policies prop up artificially high property values in urban areas, with the net effect being a semi-explicit policy that cities are not for most people. The goal is that anyone not single/20-something/wealthy, should not ever actually live there, and these policies are mostly successful at doing that.

> If local taxes were done at a uniform rate statewide, would it help

Probably not. The problem with local taxes is not usually that the rate is much higher, it's that the cost of living in a city is much higher, so your property itself costs way more, and that means you pay way more in taxes (even if the rate were hypothetically exactly identical in both, you'd still be paying way more in taxes city-vs-suburbs, because urban housing tends to cost way more to buy, and the taxes you pay are based on the sale price of the property itself)

> Building standards which means construction of "depreciation homes" is not viable

This is a good idea, but it would actually help the suburban sprawl far more than it would help the city (since lower density is more affordable), it would encourage people to stay in suburban sprawl longer, since those properties would still always be cheaper, but now (under this new rule) would also would be better built and last longer.

It is a relic of slavery. As former slaves moved into the cities to find work in the reconstruction era and beyond the white residents fled to the suburbs and took their money with them. This lead to a decay of the inner cities which sets up a viscous cycle of poverty and neglect.

There's a second problem where people who might have good intentions and try to revitalize the inner city are instead considered to be gentrifiers. Basically in an attempt to break the cycle of poverty they cause the rents to increase and end up pushing out the poor people instead of uplifting them.

We do in some places! Actual cities have exactly that profile, and have the opposite problem of this article; a dense city core that is so expensive that it can be hard to live in.

This article is really describing the failures of suburbia, that soulless monstrosity. By all rights, no matter what is legally true, this 'Appleton' is not a city, or a town or a village, it's just the vestigial growth of people who all want to live in suburbia.

Has any western nation achieved dense middle class inner city neighborhoods post WWII? The anglosphere cities that rose after the ubiquity of the automobile are all sprawling. The outer run suburbs of all western major cities are sprawling.

The cities with dense middle class inner city neighborhoods mostly developed without cars.

You'd have to ban cars to achieve it.

> How/why do you not promote the growth of denser, middle class inner city neighborhoods with a diverse profile? Is there a positive reason to not encourage it?

Nope! Not sure who said it first, but...

If you don't know why some fucked up thing in America is the way it is, the answer is probably racism.

In this case, it's white flight from city centers -> suburbs and racist real-estate practices.

You can see it in what the author was told about Appleton, if you read between the lines:

> he schools are much better in the newer areas, and people shop for school districts more than they shop for a house itself. While Appleton is a very safe little city, crime is always a bigger problem at the core compared to the edges. You have to think of the children.

"Safer" == "whiter"

If we’re talking about a medium density mixed residential / commercial suburbs with walkable streets & a varied housing mix, including local schools and shops then those are usually pretty popular places to live.

The YT channel Not Just Bikes talks about Riverdale in Toronto, Canada here as an example: https://youtu.be/MWsGBRdK2N0?t=521 It has some of the highest house prices in Toronto & that reflects people’s desire to live there.

Zoning into sidely dispersed commercial / residential areas where the only way to get from one to the other is by car is a curse on society.

I don't know about other places, but historic downtown areas in Oregon are pretty consistently packed, especially now. My family just took a trip to a small town mid-week, which is when you can usually get a seat at a restaurant on the "strip". We had to wait nearly two hours for lunch this time. Walking between shops was bordering on bothersome because of the crowds. I can't even fathom how it is on the weekend.

It's politically hard, but otherwise quite possible to redevelop older areas. Old Town in Pasadena, CA is a great example. Old Town was a largely uninhabited and unprosperous commercial area. Mostly through simple policy changes re: urban development, it was completely revitalized. Today, Old Town is pretty much endlessly packed with people and the commercial rents are sky high. It's bustling with shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, luxury apartments, and office spaces.

It doesn't have a water front. There are plenty of older (historic?) brick buildings, which IMHO look much nicer than modern buildings, but the buildings are hardly unique; buildings of this type can be found all over Los Angeles County. It does have lots of excellent restaurants, but I don't see any reason why that couldn't be replicated elsewhere. The restaurants came as a result of the redevelopment, not the other way around.

There's only so much you can do with an area like this as a "destination", without being embedded in a healthy community.

However attractive the area is, if you have to make a trip you'll only go there infrequently. Large parts will be dedicated to parking. Transit may be a pain to get there.

Not to say it can't have value - it can be a central point to bring together a larger low density community. But there's only so much need for something like this.

Compare with what is usually meant by a "walkable" area. Medium or high density housing mixed with local businesses. Enough residents within walking distance to support local restaurants and shops even during the week, not only on weekends.

Not a common model in North America unfortunately, the trend is either low density residential housing, or high density condo areas without much commercial or public spaces.

If US cities could remove the collective "no mixed zoning" stick from their asses, that might be possible.

Small businesses are only convenient if they're close. Nobody (within reason) minds if food is 10% more when you can get it last minute just crossing the street. But if it needs to be a "trip" to get there, it's not a survivable approach.

Not Just Bikes is a great channel on urban development, and he did a series on Strong Towns' ideas specifically. I like this one, "How Suburban Development Makes American Cities Poorer".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0

Granola Shotgun reminds me of blogging in its prime. Maybe 15 years ago? I had a big RSS feed of several blogs like this that I really loved. Over the years I’ve either gotten worse at finding them or the average blog has gotten much worse.

Glad to see there are other fans of Granola Shotgun on HN. Most of the titles Johnny uses are probably too vague to capture interest here, but a few submissions have made the front page:

"Letting Go of Nostalgia Urbanism" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25626389 https://www.granolashotgun.com/granolashotguncom/2mvygaw3y67...

"The Show Horse and the Work Horse" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20497711 https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2019/07/22/the-show-hor...

"Eating Jell-O with Chopsticks" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20060732 https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2019/05/27/eating-jell-...

"Guaranteed Minimum What?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326505 https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2017/05/05/guaranteed-m...

The guy comes off as a somewhat of a jerk in those examples, I don't think I will be subscribing to his RSS feed.

In the first one, he seems to keep getting in conflicts with people about his photography of their property or community, over and over. I'm reminded of the phrase "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole".

In the second one, he starts off with, "I visited friends" and then proceeds to go on a rant against those purported friends, criticizing the fact that they bought a bunch of stuff from Julia Child's estate and display it as artwork on the wall rather than I don't know....baking stuff with it or something? Not a friend I would want. I'm starting to see a pattern here.

The third one is just "Levittown sucks revisited", not a very good introduction to Levittown. The pictures emphasize "all of these houses look the same", which well duh. They were one of the first examples of mass produced housing in the US so of course they were built off the same blueprint. More interesting takes on Levittown look at what happened to the houses and neighborhoods as the place got older.

But yeah, I guess I've got to agree with the "this is America take a look" part. I'm a fan, he's not.

Most US stock of multi-family housing in low and mid-rise apartments were not built with modern building code with STC above 45 (hotel framing AKA staggered studs). Furthermore, between floors sound can carry, and even older homes can drop in STC over time depending upon the material used in insulation as well as deterioration of materials over time. My friends that lived in only high rise buildings haven't had noise issues like myself and many others where we could hear conversations on the other side of walls of neighbors similar to the extent parodied in the movie Office Space with the main character's neighbor.

The "modern" apartments I've lived in have been relatively quiet, but the one 50's era apartment was terribly noisy. It was a two story with an attic appt and a basement appt wedged in-between the main floors.

I lived on the second floor, and loved the hardwood floors and french doors etc. Then someone moved in above me, and another across the hall. I could hear the guy across the hall every time he opened or closed the door. The guy who moved into the attic above me must have been related to Sting. His lovemaking sessions lasted for what felt like weeks.

I think this is a key point of customer discrimination. It would be really helpful for housing to have a required and standardized "sound-proof" rating. If customers could be informed and builders incentivized, then what is build and bought could change.

That being said most apts I've lived have been pretty quiet, but I'm not sure how much that is from materials or luck with neighbors.

I've lived in a variety of multi-family units, some have _definitely_ been far too noisy. I'm still trying to work out what some upstairs neighbors I had a few years ago were up to regularly that sounded just like bowling but with office furniture.

But for the most part as long as the unit isn't facing a major road/rail and the neighbors aren't the college-frat sort, they're usually not too noisy at all.

Most apartment buildings in America have a quite bad sound insulation in my experience, and although I've seen some modern apartment towers with a solid soundproofing, those are usually not affordable to most people and so everyone just believes that apartments = noise.

Every apartment or condo I’ve lived in in the US (and it’s been at least 10) has had terrible problems with noise from neighbor units, except 2, and one of those was the top floor. The other was actually a concrete high-rise built as condos so I suspect that solid construction helped. Voices, TV, footsteps, sex, arguments, domestic violence, parties, demo/remodeling, noisy pets; you name it, I’ve heard it in excruciating detail. It’s not been my experience that “niceness” of the building makes any difference either, just height, as wood frame construction becomes impractical over a certain number of stories—but that’s getting higher every few years.

I understand there are construction techniques to mitigate this even in low-rise wood frame buildings, but I’ll eat my hat if any designer or builder in the US bothers unless forced by regulation.

It is related to the cost of construction. I paid 600k+ for a nice condo with concrete slab between floors. I never heard anything from my neighbors. Wood construction might be a different story.

In Canada they certainly are. In Germany the isolation tends to be significantly better.

In Canada I could follow the hockey score through the wall. In Germany I've literally never heard my next door neighbour. Newer buildings are even quieter.

In 2019, we began a home addition. Every contractor who looked at our plan told us to make a tradeoff to allow for a fourth bedroom. We persisted, as we were doing this for ourselves rather than future buyers.

In 2020 and 2021, we're absolutely loving that we went for our home office plan instead of that bedroom. We knew we wanted it but had no idea how much we would need it!

I've bought two houses in my life. My second one is the youngster at around 100 years old now. The first one is of unknown age, but based on old town maps was between 186 and 199 years old when I bought it (it was on the later map and not the previous).

Both were great experiences, indeed with some maintenance needed (just like any structure). Both appreciated significantly during my ownership, in addition to providing shelter.

I'm glad that people generally don't want older houses. It means I can get a lot more of what I want for less money; I'm perfectly happy to have 1.5% annual maintenance (and worse insulation) instead of 1.0% when the place sells for 25% less than a comparable structure (and often has more land around it and land that's quality soil often with established/re-established trees).

Lead-based paint is a legitimate concern for older houses (built before 1979/1980), especially if you have children staying in the home, or if you want to do any remodeling/repainting

There are a few larger houses left with character in my town. Left, because starting in the 60's people left the city for the suburbs, and the houses fell into disrepair, burned down, etc.

I thought about buying one. Twice as big of a house that I have now, for half the price. However, you have a boiler system, no central AC, basically non-existant insulation, more wallpaper than you would ever want to remove, ancient electrical systems, and 125 years of shadetree repairs to every part of the house.

You'd spend a quarter million dollars upgrading the house to today's standards, like you see on an episode of This Old House. And then what? You have to deal with the crime and nuisances of the city, alley or a horse stall to park in, you get to pay city income tax, city water and trash which are 3X what I pay in my township, and then you have to figure out where you're going to send your kids to school. The city public schools are bottom 5% in the state so you have to go private or drive them to another district.

Do most small-town Italians speak English, and would they actually want a bunch of expat Americans showing up in their neighborhoods one day? You may be Italian, but for others...

'donoteat' also has a good series (Cities: Skylines) on city building in the US >> https://www.youtube.com/user/donoteat01/videos

I think this is the talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_the_ghastly_...

Just because I might like to visit Disneyland doesn't mean I want to live there.

Have you never heard the common English expression, "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there?"

People like having yards for their kids to play in and not sharing walls with neighbors. And people visit campsites with no running water, but obviously it would be bad to live somewhere with no running water.

Look at tourists attitudes of many of those areas; they glamorize them to an extent, but they'll also warn you to watch out for pickpockets and wear security wallets. They don't want to live there, it's an amusement park.

Suburbia is made of families. People want big houses with big yards for their kids. They’re often not bringing their kids on those same vacations. And on top of that, where people vacation is very different from where they’d want to live long term.

Highly recommend his TED talk. It’s both hilarious and horrifying.

Financial incentives aren't there. Why would I redevelop and old house if it's cheaper for me to buy a lot and build new?

Just speculating here, but is there a possibility that Bellevue & Redmond's success is due in part to Microsoft HQ being located there? I imagine that without that, those suburbs would look quite different...

Suburbia is centrally planned in extreme detail. American voters understand that when it comes to housing, capitalism must be marginalized to a small box, otherwise the places we live would be “too crowded” with “the wrong kind of people” and “not enough parking.” So it is. And we get out parking, and our open space, and our socioeconomic segregation. And this is what it looks like.

Capitalism tends to produce more of the thing that people demand. I would wonder why people want this kind of home. I myself am not a US person, don't understand why.

Capitalism wants to build high density in city centers that lasts hundreds of years. Zoning is collusion between landowners to stop other landowners from producing housing - it’s a legal (sadly) monopolist practice that requires government.

Communism is even better at doing that: Khrushchyovkas. At any rate, extrapolating a trend from a single society to be an indelible part of an economic system is specious.

Transitioning from a property tax model to a Land Value Tax model would encourage rather than discourage development, and ensure society is compensated for granting someone a monopoly on an area of land.