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Having loved high-density cosmopolitan places, I confirm it’s not baked in American values but it’s based on actual benefits:

- In high-density, you share everything. Therefore, everything is closed for public access during Covid, but also when there is wind, rain, hot weather or risks of terrorist attacks (talking from experience of my life in cities). The rulers of the city have effective control on your ability to see the sun.

- Cities are suitable when politically leaning towards collectivization. And when you’re over with your youth ideas that everyone will fit together and do peace and love, you start starting at the poster in the hall of the building that says “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble). Given cities gather people who lean towards collectivization, you yearn to get your own lawns with friends who will understand this.

- Also, the costs.

So, it’s not cultural love for lawns, it’s a cycle of people moving by necessity.

It's not an irrational value, but it is an American value pushed by society.

> Cities are suitable when politically leaning towards collectivization.

So are suburbs, but they just represent a more exclusive collectivism. Last I checked, they still have public roads, water, sewer, and schools. In prosperous suburbs, it's just collectivism with a minimum net worth or income requirement.

> “Let’s fit together” as, not only an injunction, but shoving in your face that people here, in fact, are different, don’t fit, and their kid is racketing your kid, you end up despising the people who keep telling you to “livetogether” (vivrensemble).

Sounds like you had a bad urban experience with people "different" than you. That sucks, but it doesn't speak for everyone's urban experience.

> Last I checked, they still have public roads, water, sewer, and schools.

Sure. But depending on where you land, you can avoid HOAs, architectural design review boards, neighbor comment periods, 24-month permit delays, EIRs, etc. The red tape ("community involvement", if you prefer) involved in living in a city like SF is nothing like what it is in the suburbs, not even the crazy Stepford ones like Irvine.

> 1. I get acoustic isolation from my neighbors. I don't care when they watch loud movies. They don't care when I make music.

This part is so hard to overstate! I will never voluntarily move into shared-wall or shared-ceiling housing. Unless I was so broke that I had to do it or become homeless. The neighbors' TV. The neighbors' arguments. The neighbors' partying. The neighbors having sex. The neighbors clomp-clomp-clomping up the stairs directly outside my door. The cops making loud visits to the neighbors when they misbehaved again. This has been pretty much a constant for me in apartment living, no matter the town. I knew I "made it" as a grown-up when I finally moved to a single family house where I couldn't hear a neighbor. Never again!

The other things you mentioned are great bonuses of suburban living, but the major benefit is acoustic distance from neighbors--and stepping back a bit--in general not being forced by proximity to be a part of your neighbors' wild lives.

Oh, I like SFHs too, but my new-build home in London was sound-proofed to the gills. I ran into the neighbours at the lifts one day and they apologized for their kids shrieking "they've been awful this weekend, I'm sorry". I hadn't heard a thing. I could hear the river boats and everything with my window open (faced the Thames) but I never heard a peep out of a neighbour.

American construction is shoddy, which is why American homes are relatively cheap, even at the mid-luxury end. High-end luxury is pretty good. My cousin pays some $12k/month for his home and it's really quiet.

You can’t soundproof open Windows. I lived in an insanely soundproof building. You could hear nothing if everyone had their windows closed.

I like fresh air. So did my neighbor with the shrieking parrot.

You could get some of that in a SFH too. It'll be quieter due to the distance though.

Of course. But having done multiple iterations of both, I will never, ever share walls again. With neighbors I can plant a hedge or close the facing windows. It’s not even close.

I noticed the same thing moving from an apartment to a condo. It turns out moving from wood construction to concrete slab gets you a lot of the same noise isolation in an urban environment.

A lot of people move from apartment to home and at the same time take a huge jump in the value of the residence. They assume the quality of life improvement is attributable to the SFH aspect, rather than the increase in construction quality.

Noise sometimes is more a question of build quality than living situation.

I think people state a lot of reasons for their preferences that aren't actually the origins. We were looking at real estate and I realized that emotionally I am not willing to commit to our region's bloated housing costs without getting to feel like I am insulated from neighbors by a lot of trees. This is not sensible in any way for my lifestyle. I can construct a lot of post hoc justifications, and oh boy I do when people ask, but fundamentally I just have this sense (from growing up on 5 acres) of what's satisfying. I have a friend who feels this way about lawn ("how can you have a dog without a yard"), which strikes me as completely untethered from the objective value of lawn, and probably comes from his suburban upbringing.

Probably a lot of "well the noise" "benefits" of SFH are post hoc in this way. In those more permissive areas, it just takes one family with poorly trained/exercised dogs to make you long for the relative tameness of upstairs stomping. But it makes sense as a benefit people can explain in the thing that they want regardless.

> But I do think Americans are generally smart enough to like single family homes mostly because they like single family homes and not because they have been hoodwinked by some nefarious pro-suburbia organization.

Maybe, but I would also argue that the US dependence on cars makes anything other than single family homes totally suck.

The fact that you need a car means you need somewhere to park that car. Don't need to go anywhere for a couple days? If you've parked on the street, sucks to be you, your car got towed. So, you need a garage. And probably enough space for two cars, not one.

You want to walk? Great! Except that you have to cross several 4 lane highways because we have to accommodate all those cars. And, that's assuming you have somewhere you want to walk to within a reasonable distance.

You don't have a car so you want some big thing delivered? Hope you can wait 2 months and can take off an entire day from work.

etc.

> Maybe, but I would also argue that the US dependence on cars makes anything other than single family homes totally suck.

It's definitely hard to untangle the affects of cars on city planning from single family homes, but I don't think the two are inextricably intertwined. There are many places and have been many time periods with plenty of both single family homes and public transit use.

> The fact that you need a car means you need somewhere to park that car. Don't need to go anywhere for a couple days? If you've parked on the street, sucks to be you, your car got towed.

I live in a single family home in a very walkable city with plenty of public transit. I park on the street and have never been towed or had my truck broken into. These days because of COVID, I rarely drive more than once a month. Even before the pandemic, I usually biked to work and left my truck parked on the street for weeks without using it.

I think you're exaggerating to say that single family homes push towards giant two-car garages. There are lots and lots of single family homes that are not in sprawling suburbia.

of course Americans like single family homes. I'm sure most people throughout the world would love the option. They are appealing by definition. But are single family homes good for society? They use space so much more inefficiently. They encourage more electricity usage, along with other resources. They forcibly maintain the wastefulness of American car culture. They are ludicrously profligate yet have been normalized in this country. It's not that some "nefarious organization" hoodwinked people - they are a devil's bargain that nobody had the foreknowledge to contain.

> I'm sure most people throughout the world would love the option. ... But are single family homes good for society?

Is not the ultimate goal of society to enable people to pursue and hopefully attain what they love?

> They use space so much more inefficiently. They encourage more electricity usage, along with other resources. They forcibly maintain the wastefulness of American car culture. They are ludicrously profligate yet have been normalized in this country.

Efficiency is not a first-order goal of society. The maximally efficient society would kill all of its citizens. Everyone walks into the oceans. Plenty of free food for the fish and no human consumption whatsoever.

The goal of society is to provide meaningful happiness to its members efficiently. It doesn't strictly increase efficiency to simply take away things people want.

> Is not the ultimate goal of society to enable people to pursue and hopefully attain what they love?

That's not what I would consider the ultimate goal, if for no other reason than I don't see how that allows us to forbid drunk driving or heroin use.

Drunk driving hurts innocent people, thus preventing them from attaining what they love.

If heroin use leads to crime then maybe it could be forbidden for similar reasons. Or if the government can determine that people don't love heroin and instead only use it as an escape or due to addiction, then forbidding it might help those people to attain what they actually love.

if everyone in the world was living in a single family home, American style, we'd be completely doomed. There's no justifying the waste of our lifestyles. Is there any evidence people in Asia or Europe, where single family homes were not allowed to run rampant, are less "meaningfully happy" than Americans?

Our inefficiency is unsustainable and is on pace to destroy the climate, how can that possibly be construed as providing maximal happiness? Short-term happiness for lucky US citizens, maybe.

> I hate the framing of 5) because it presumes a narrative where people don't have agency over their own preferences.

People have agency over their preferences? Then why do people ever have trouble dieting? Wouldn't it be easier to just want to eat canned beans/spam/nutritious mush to keep you healthy? Why are they sad when they cannot afford something? Why don't they just stop wanting it?

I think there's one other major factor you're entirely overlooking here: cost. NIMBYism and bad zoning lead to that a lot of US cities with housing far, far more expensive than similar places in many other countries.