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>But aside from the fact that I didn’t care for any of these homes and was never going to buy in these locations, I realized the truth of the Appleton model. Thirty years from now all the new homes she’s selling will slip into the “old” category and will gradually fester as taxes rise and the middle class migrates to new greenfield developments.

Capitalism consumes limited resources (land) for temporary gains (poorly built structures that nobody wants after just one generation). This is not a sustainable model to build a strong society.

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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.

I'm convinced that suburbia is popular enough that it would survive pretty well without government intervention, just not indefinitely in the same locations.

Strong Towns disagrees with that. Suburbia is expensive and only survives by siphoning off money from cities via state grants.

Strong Towns is just one perspective with a strong agenda. I began doubting everything they publish when they got all the important details completely wrong in a story about my home town.

The money that goes to cities is paid by the employers of people who commute from suburbs, and the businesses those commuters buy from. The mental and physical space of living outside the city is essential to maintain the productivity and sanity of the urban workforce. Cramming all those people into cardboard "luxury" apartments where their kids have to listen to their neighbors fighting or banging sounds like a great way to end a population by ending parenthood. Which is exactly what is happening.

We could easily make the same contention about sitting in a car for 1-3 hours/day.

A false dichotomy that persists because typical US zoning encourages only those two outcomes: single family homes until the pressure bursts, leading to a high rise apartment some place.

>Cramming all those people into cardboard "luxury" apartments where their kids have to listen to their neighbors fighting or banging sounds like a great way to end a population by ending parenthood. Which is exactly what is happening.

It's really hard to take your post seriously when you diverge into paranoid conspiracy theories like this one.

Nobody is being forced to live in an apartment. Nobody is even being asked to live in an apartment (except by a few politically inert eco-activists). We merely want people to be allowed to live in apartments! In many areas, families compete for houses with groups of adult renters, the latter having 3-4 incomes, because apartments are so underprovisioned. This of course is no good for people's ability to raise children, but my faction isn't loony enough to pretend it's a secret genocide.

Meanwhile, urbanists are in fact aware of and regularly lament[1, 2] the low standards for sound insulation and build-to-code reality of contemporary multi-family construction. But when we propose raising the standards, we get complaints from conservatives that "the free market will take care of it" (even though it obviously doesn't).

1: https://reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/oivn68/sound_pro...

2: https://reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/kk1m1n/townhouse...

> But when we propose raising the standards, we get complaints from conservatives that "the free market will take care of it" (even though it obviously doesn't).

The free market approach would rely on drastically looser zoning and other land use restrictions so that tons more housing gets built resulting landlords actually have to compete and thus start caring about a wider range of issues.

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.

Because it’s regulation in the form of zoning that produces these homes, not capitalism.

These places offer a level of perceived safety [0] and measured public school performance that are somewhere between outrageously expensive and impossible to replicate in an urban setting. Not many people are excited* about living here and don’t choose it in their 20s, but in your 30s it’s understood that you’re not going to walk your child past needles and homeless encampments to a 2/10 school. It’s also understood that doing anything about the needles and homeless encampments would be a human rights violation, even if somehow the money were available, which it’s not. Mechanisms which once allowed upper-middle-class urban families to put their kids in good* public schools, like testing-based admissions, are also being recognized as unjust and dismantled.

[0] The absence of threatening humans makes them feel safe, but what we should really be worried about are all the vehicle miles traveled.

> in your 30s it’s understood that you’re not going to walk your child past needles and homeless encampments to a 2/10 school.

You don't need to live in suburbs to achieve that, really. And in suburbs you dont walk child to school all that often, you drive them anyway.

> It’s also understood that doing anything about the needles and homeless encampments would be a human rights violation, even if somehow the money were available, which it’s not.

I mean this 100% seriously: you can actually do things about homelessness that are not human rights violations. Big amount of homelessness is literally consequence of policies - and not the ones that seek to help people.

We can surely do a lot more to mitigate the suffering that is mostly invisible to begin with.

But as long as there exists a right to decline drug treatment or behave unacceptably in shared housing, then go camp out in the main pedestrian thoroughfare, at least a few people are going to do it, and the city will feel like that kind of place.

Even in SF with a massive homeless population, it’s fewer than 10 faces I see over and over. I still want to help the thousands living in their cars, crashing on friends couches, or sleeping in out of the way places. But it’s the 10 dudes being aggressive in very public places who are why it’s unpopular to raise kids here.

SF just needs to build up a bit and have connected walkways between each building that the homeless are not allowed into.

It’s effectively what we end up with.

Fun fact: New Yourk does not have all that lower homelessness. They however have more shelters and generally systems so it not as acute.

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.

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.

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