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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

No, they don’t.

This is a classic example of listening to what people say vs observing what they do. And it’s a good lesson in product development. Ask your users “do you want X?” And the answer is inevitably “yes”. Ask them “do you want A or B?” And you’ll start to get a better approximation of user behavior. Better yet is observing actual behavior.

In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves.

Americans want walkable areas in close proximity to the exact kind of house they live in now with all that entails: large single family house on a large lot with their 2+ cars.

People would don’t love in the US may not realize just how large the lots are most Americans live on. In Australian cities a quarter acre block was once the dream. More typical now is half that.

You will find areas in Atlanta where the lot size is one or even two acres.

It’s only the older typically East Coast cities that have anything remotely approaching the density you might see in Europe.

View on HN

Your thesis is flawed. It is illegal to build new dense walkable neighborhoods in almost all of north america. But existing neighbourhoods of that style tend to be both highly priced to live in and also popular tourist destinations, implying high desirability.

The older east coat cities built walkable neighbourhoods before they became illegal.

They’re illegal because people vote for representatives who makes them illegal and show up to city council meetings to petition for them to be illegal.

Existing areas in that style tend to be expensive, but are often (at least where I’ve lived) some of the most NYMBY areas in a city. They like the benefits their density has brought, but won’t tolerate the lot next to them getting one iota more dense.

> They’re illegal because people vote for representatives who makes them illegal

Yes, but that's not because nobody wants to live in them. It's because a loud subsection of the people that already own single-family homes there don't want them built.

You seem to recognize this. That's different from saying "Americans don't want to live in this sort of housing".

Ah sorry! That’s fair - I understand what you’re saying now. That said, I’d argue that this is a bit of people wanting their cake and to eat it too. They want a contradiction - to be close to everything (so they can walk places and be in the middle of the action), but also far away from it (so they have privacy and room). So - It’s true to say that people want density, but also true to say they don’t.

The people who show up to city council meetings and pay attention to local politics are a tiny minority. It is not a stretch to believe that they do not represent what most people want.

It will become a necessity in a few decades.

Single family homes that are up to code don't bring in enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure that is necessary to suport them.

Same thing goes for strip mals.

You can try to run a deficit forever, it is just a really bad idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...

Is that because they don't prefer that design, or because protecting the price of their house is so essential to their long term financial stability that they'll block literally any policy, no matter how good, if it threatens their house price?

Housing is actually more expensive outside of San Francisco, at least suburbs close to the city.

I’d say there is more demand for a house with a yard in the suburbs than a 2 bedroom apartment in the city.

Especially in a post-Covid world where people are working from home, who wants to be stuck in an apartment during the next lockdown?

> Housing is actually more expensive outside of San Francisco, at least suburbs close to the city.

Not per lot SQ feet

Why would you look at just the lot sq ft and ignore the house or other factors?

Because it's the land that drives value in the Bay Area.

I suppose you can use some weighted combination of lot and house, but I haven't seen common and simple valuation metrics there.

> Because it's the land that drives value in the Bay Area.

I'd say that's kind of their point.

Land is 50-60% of the total value in the Bay Area. You can’t ignore the other 40-50%.

> It is illegal to build new dense walkable neighborhoods in almost all of north america

Yes.. because of the people's representatives. Why is that do you think?

> The older east coat cities built walkable neighbourhoods before they became illegal.

Technically, they were built before the modern automobile era when there was really no alternative. Additionally, geography played a part. Manhattan is land-constrained. So is San Francisco. LA, Chicago and Atlanta are not.

By any quantitative measure, Americans have clearly chosen a car-dependent lifestyle. Since WW2, houses have gotten larger while families have gotten smaller. When given the choice between less space is a downtown neighbourhood or more space in the suburbs the vast majority of people choose the latter.

People will even choose more space and pay exorbitant private school fees rather than live with less space but get a "free" excellent public school system, even though the latter is almost always more economically sensible, even more so the more children a family has.

Nobody campaigns on parking minimums, setbacks, etc and most people you speak to haven’t heard of these things. Municipal election turnout is low.

I’ll admit it’s certainly possible. Or possible that decades ago people voted for this and the laws stayed.

But the argument seems pretty indirect given how few people are familiar with these issues.

> Why is that do you think?

Zoning is too local, so if I can't afford to live near my job I can't vote to allow me to live near my job.

I've never dealt with a city in my region that didn't have variance procedures for building and land development permits. In my own experience, these committees are nearly a rubber stamp unless an adjacent property owner expects to be inconvenienced. You're observing what's called realized preferences.

Coffee-table planners seem content to frame everything as a political problem, as if developers are an extended civil service or some kind of unthinking machines. There is also an unsurprising lack of investigation into places in the world where zoning free-for-alls actually do exist. Most are not like Martha's Vinyard. Many people don't actually want to live in a favela, and they vote and spend their dollars accordingly.

The east coast built walkable neighborhoods because they were built before cars existed. Several of these states have a net negative domestic migration, which does not suggest that people want to live there.

There were plenty of walkable places in the US. They were just bulldozed for the car.

https://strongtowns.org has a few good examples.

Wait why is it illegal to build dense walkable neighbourhoods? Which laws?

At a high level:

1. Zoning prevents density, which precludes having enough foot traffic for neighborhood stores to exist (if zoning actually allow them).

2. Parking minimums force things farther apart because so much of each lot is asphalt.

3. Street design that prioritizes car speed over pedestrian safety.

In the end, it's not safe, pleasant, or practical to walk in suburbs built from the 70s on. These things are a patchwork of local and state law so specifics vary by area.

> In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves.

They've chosen their preferred option, given the current (meager) options. That doesn't mean people wouldn't choose walkable cities over suburbs---the option of walkable cities just functionally doesn't exist in the US for a middle income family.

And this isn't due to organic demand for suburban neighborhoods, either. In the US, central planning has had a major role in accelerating the development of suburbs. Tax incentives for home ownership were first rolled out during the New Deal, and these especially targeted single family homes. After the war, the dual-use civil-military interstate system was created and highways were subsidized which allowed neighborhood development far from the city center. Auto and petrochemical development were targeted for national security, which acted as a subsidy toward the gasoline-heavy suburban lifestyle. The 1970s energy crisis shifted US foreign policy toward stabilizing petrol prices, which has resulted in various military and CIA operations to that effect (Paul Wolfowitz was talking about securing oil in Iraq before 2nd Bush was even in office). Suburban homes in many cities consume more resources via public roads, water, sewer, electric than they pay in property taxes, but taxes are kept low for political reasons, because that's where voters live.

So there are quite a lot of extra-market forces that have shaped city planning. Now all of this has reached a scale where it is self-sustaining, but that doesn't mean people would have picked this route if the initial conditions were not so favorable.

People do vote with their dollars. The walkable neighborhoods in my city tend to cost 2-3X more than houses in less walkable areas.

There are actually huge swaths of affordable houses built on the outskirts of many towns, but people don’t want them because they’re not close to the walkable parts of the city.

This can be misleading. The supply in walkable areas will, by near definition, be lower than places you have to drive to. Such that the evidence isn't that houses are more expensive in walkable areas. The evidence is that it is not economically viable to build more walkable neighborhoods.

Edit: I meant to say it could be an alternative, not that it is.

I have lived in highly walkable neighborhoods. They utilize highrises to increase density (supply) of housing and commercial space. Walkable areas are by necessity higher density, meaning they pack more supply into the same footprint.

Some do. I lived in upper Queen Anne in Seattle. Very few highrise houses and all very expensive now. I would be a liar if I said I didn't miss how walkable it was.

I also lived in Buckhead area of Atlanta. Also very walkable for me, though there were a few high rises.

I lived in the Junction in West Seattle for 7 years. Highly walkable, lots of highrises in the core, but still lots of (very expensive!) single family homes. Now I live on Alki and it is much less walkable. I can get around but have to climb Admiral to get to a grocery store. Several of our bus routes were permanently closed.

Queen Anne benefits from being in Seattle and the economic benefits that has to businesses that make a neighborhood walkable. It’s also just very old and was built when walkability was a necessity. Unfortunately it is prohibitively expensive because higher density development is difficult or impossible.

Right. But whenever I hear that "walkable places are expensive", I hear folks talking about places like Seattle. Or downtown Atlanta.

What places are we talking about that are a) highly walkable, b) expensive, and c) not at capacity?

(This is a genuine question. I fully cede that I could just be completely miscalibrated for this.)

I have sensed an emerging "story" in various media over the last 6-12 months that within the US at least, there are vanishingly few cities or large towns that are (a) highly desirable places to live (b) affordable to median income folks. Or maybe the story is that if this is not true to today, it seems that it will be in 5-10 years.

I don't think this is necessarily a new story, all told. I think I remember it back in the 90s.

That said, does seem to be getting more pronounced. Really, just seems that there aren't any new cities. All of the places folks wanted to live, are the same places folks want to live today. :(

I think we are talking past each other. When you said “The supply in walkable areas will, by near definition, be lower than places you have to drive to.“ I interpreted that to mean there is less total supply. You seem to be speaking to available supply.

> What places are we talking about that are a) highly walkable, b) expensive, and c) not at capacity?

I don’t think there is such a place. If a place is walkable it is going to be at or near capacity which makes it expensive.

The lack of these areas seems to be a result of an unwillingness to increase density.

I was meaning it in terms of purchasable supply. Nothing is stopping anyone from building a new city center in the middle of Montana, such that it has plenty of buildable supply.

That is, you can say that dense cities are more effecient, but that only matters if you can build another one. Otherwise, there are more affordable homes further from existing city center then there are in them. And that is going to be hard to change.

You seem to be pointing that existing cities should double down on their density. I'm claiming if that was such a clear path to success, it would be done in new places.

I do suspect there is a mix of both.

> Nothing is stopping anyone from building a new city center in the middle of Montana, such that it has plenty of buildable supply.

I don’t think it is that easy. The state has to approve a new town. I don’t think you can just create one at will. Nearby landowners are certainly going to have opinions.

> You seem to be pointing that existing cities should double down on their density.

Ideally, yes. But really I am saying they can’t because zoning laws prevent it. Existing home owners favor this constraint because it keeps prices up.

I think it is easier than you'd think to get a builder to build a neighborhood. Convincing mixed zoning to move in is more difficult. Largely due to how confusing store ownership is. Often the buildings need to exist and be owned before businesses look to lease in places.

None of which is to say I disagree with zoning being problematic. I fully agree with that points. I just think it is oversold. Folks like having room, and folks are typically over afraid of letting kids play in parks on their own. (I can't really argue against some of that fear... :( )

My census tract in Chicago is denser than 96% of America. There are like two high-rises, one for seniors and some shorter new construction near the transit stops in the 5-6 story range.

The bulk of my neighborhoods density is created by missing middle housing, two and three flats, four-six square apartments, and a healthy smattering of SFHs on narrow lots.

I have a backyard. My neighbor grows a garden in between her house and her two car garage. She pollinates her garden with the honey bees she keeps.

The dichotomy between “car centric suburbia” or “huge 100 story high rises” is false. You can get to walkable density without going over three stories on average.

I don’t think there is a building in Seattle even close to 100 floors.

The Junction in West Seattle (where I lived) is exactly what you describe.

It is far far far more economical to build walkable neighborhoods. They require far less infrastructure costs, from water piping to sewer to roads. Quite often the only places that can sustainably fund themselves on property taxes are walkable multiuse neighborhoods. A ton of suburbia is sitting on huge infrastructure bills that will come due in the near future.

Car-dependent neighborhoods only exist because law prevents more dense uses. I don't know of a single such car-dependent neighborhood that doesn't strictly prevent a change away from being car dependent. From zoning to codes, anything that could lead to a walkable neighborhood is banned by law from even starting.

If we didn't outlaw walkable neighborhoods, and vigorously defend the banning of apartments and corner stores by swarming of planning meetings and recalls of city council members, vigorous actions perpetrated by the few and not the many, the balance would be entirely different.

In every single family neighborhood that is far dependent, you'll find a small number of people that will go to war to prevent any change to that. And all our systems are set up to allow a small number of people to control the outcomes of planning decisions.

This sounds good on paper, but you just have to look at how Walmart destroyed brick and mortar shops. They would build a single giant shop for an entire region and folks would drive to it in droves.

That is to say, I want to agree. I just can't square that with how I've seen small towns destroyed by shopping centers that require cars for the residents to drive to. (Ironically, this is different from the situation that requires companies to drive to the customers. Though, there, reverse pressure exists such that the more reliant on the company driving, the less pleasant the shopping experience.)

I don't quite understand the contradiction. If you're talking about small rural areas, sure, but that's a tiny fraction of our population. And rural areas don't typically vigorously block apartment and walkable development.

And I haven't seen every rural town, but all of the ones that I know of have plenty of housing near a walkable core too. I know lots of rural people that have no trouble getting in 20,000 steps daily because of that walkability of homes neat the downtown.

But suburbia, the vast majority of our new housing over the past 50-60 years, is not rural, and is of a very different character.

Strong Towns has been reporting on this for years, from the fiscally conservative side. Though I don't call myself any sort of fiscal conservative, the data and analysis is very good, IMHO:

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/

But... talking about the rural areas is enough to destroy the "if you build walkable areas, folks will live there." Right?

Well this is also combined with a shift away from rural areas in terms of job opportunities, as farming has either become hugely automated, or staffed by skilled labor that is severely underpaid.

Where there is economic opportunity, density and walk ability are forbidden by law, not by market preferences or by natural choices.

I want to believe this, to a large extent. But it doesn't square with my experiences in small towns.

I fully grant that I'm rather removed from my experiences in said small towns. And I should fully lay the cards on the table that I haven't driven a car for my own commute or basic transportation in almost a decade. I far far prefer biking/walking to work. Even still, we drive the kids to school where we are now. (We walked them back in Seattle.)

People wanted to live in rural areas before the car existed, I'm pretty sure.

But companies did not, and generally do not, want to build in them. Which makes them particularly difficult to make walkable.

I’m interested in what you mean by car-dependent neighborhood?

From what I’ve seen it has little to do with accommodations for vehicles at the residence level and more to do with the proximity of interesting places to walk to. It does help if these ‘interesting places’ don’t have much parking accommodation.

By "car-dependent" I mean the style of US urban planning that has dominated since WW2, with huge tracts of single-use zoning, miles and miles wide. Usually dominated by cul-de-sacs with feeder roads. There is nowhere to walk to, distances are far enough that bicycles even become challenging, and it's impossible for transit to serve the road design, because density of housing is too low and the intentional lack of a connected road network makes it too difficult to ever run buses in a meaningful way.

Cul-de-sacs are used to minimize the danger of cars (the largest cause of child death) and keep traffic to a minimum where people live, at the expense of circuitous routes. And they shift car traffic to even more dangerous feeder roads, that have high speeds and few crossings, that serve as extremely dangerous barriers for pedestrians and bikes.

That's called "drive until you qualify."

> "In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves."

"chosen the suburbs" implies that there was a choice.

The limited walkable cities that have been built since 1950 (like Seaside, FL) are some of the most coveted real estate in the United States. The plain fact is that walkable cities are illegal to build now because of zoning laws and building codes.

> The limited walkable cities that have been built since 1950 (like Seaside, FL)

I think you should check the population of Seaside (or Celebration). Oh that's right, it's never had a census scan. Suffice it to say that calling either of them "cities" is quite a stretch.

Supply and demand drives prices up, but it doesn't tell us how large the demand is, only that there is enough to drive up prices. it only takes a small number of unmet demand go drive prices up.

There is some truth in this post, but it's also important to understand that in most of the places with very large lots, it is illegal to subdivide the lots and build denser housing. If greater density was legalized, it would almost certainly be built and inhabited in a great many places.

People have this all-or-nothing thinking about this, but realistically most cities ought to have a mix. A single person in their 20s doesn't necessarily need or want a house with a yard, but they might want one later on. Right now, in most places that means allowing more options for apartments to be built, and more medium-density for people who are somewhere in between.

I think it's largely because we're still at the point in American politics where the folks against densification are still strongly tied to a certain pastoral vision of America: large lot sizes, single family homes, easy parking, and heavily manicured neighborhoods. It's more than just density, it's a legally codified way of life. Folks understand that the moment restrictions are eased that this pastoral view of urban development will necessarily change. It takes a lot of restrictions to have a built environment like America's and the only way to maintain that built environment is to resist any change to the restrictions.

But I agree. A vision of sustainable development would be a dense urban core with decreasing density away from the core, instead of endless SFH large-lot sprawl. Families or other individuals that want/need more space can live on the outskirts and take a train in to the urban core for work. Younger people or those who don't need the space can stay in the core, and folks in between can live anywhere in the spectrum of density.

There needs to be a land tax that is high enough to cover the cost of infrastructure.

This is currently not the case with single family homes.

Suburban character isn’t the result of consumer choice. In most suburbs, alternative kinds of development are literally illegal to build. Cities regulate the number of units, the heights of buildings, how far they must be setback from the street, how many parking spaces they require, and so on and so on.

Landowners lobby for and enact these regulations precisely because they know that if people were allowed to vote with their wallets they’d choose to live in denser developments.

You can’t make cheeseburgers illegal and then argue that nobody orders cheeseburgers in restaurants because they’re unpopular.

I hope no one will think it too unorthodox if I respond to my own comment just to add that given these constraints on land use patterns it’s obviously the case that Americans choose to drive automobiles. It’s fairly common to hear people describe this, too, as another kind of “revealed preference” for driving over the alternatives. But it’s a revealed preference in the environment as it exists today, which is the only environment that’s legal. If people were allowed to build other kinds of environments, then they would build other kinds of environments and in those other kinds of environments they would make other choices about transportation.

If you only look at people on the beach, you’ll find a revealed preference for flip-flops. But in other kinds of environments, people wear other kinds of footwear. If you only looked at people on beaches, you’d draw some funny conclusions about what people like to wear on their feet.

The big takeaway here is that the suburbs are the result of big government social engineering on a massive scale. You really can’t look at anything about land-use or transportation and conclude basically anything useful about “revealed preferences.”

It's not a hard choice when suburbs have been subsidized like hell for about 70 years while money has been drained out of cities to pay for said suburbs. Here in Ohio there is this garbage designation for "rural farming areas" called townships that get huge infrastructures subsidies/grants, even though they are all just suburbs/exurbs.

Look at any of the areas around Cincinnati, Columbus, or Cleveland and check out how many of them have township in their name. It's pretty incredible and absolutely disgustingly dishonest.

Drained out of the cities? Nearly all of Texas is what most people would consider "suburb". Even the "urban" areas are mostly sprawl. Very little of Texas is walkable by any stretch.

Out of curiosity, is Austin an exception?

Austin is a giant suburban sprawl that's better than most Texan cities because it has a reasonable bus line. It's all low density, all of it, with massive parking lots everywhere.

There are pockets of walkabality here and there but it's a drop in the ocean. Those locations are sparse, job and home location specific, and EXPENSIVE.

I live in San Antonio. Low COL right? Ehhh, not where I live haha. The desirable areas near town are not cheap. Alamo Heights is super expense and not walkable at all. A 1 bedroom near the Pearl is over 2k/mo now essentially. Actually, I've seen effeciencies for about that much and there are not really grocery stores around within walking distance.

Texas has a 1.9t GDP and it's almost entirely generated by people living in urban sprawl and rural areas. Austin is no exception as someone has pointed out.

Most of the people who work in the smallish Texas high density centers live in the sprawl. We have no income tax so of court that's made up with prop tax. School quality is highly dependent on quality of the neighborhoods they are located near. It's not fantastic but the idea that the sprawl is "draining" the cities is off base since the vast majority of workers producing the value live in the sprawl.

Yes, a significant amount of tax dollars come from cities and are funneled to suburbs/exurba via "grants" and other subsidized funding methods, which urban areas don't get the benefit of receiving.

A quarter acre is a little over 10,000 square feet, which is what I'd consider a normal-size lot in a normal town. A 5,000 square foot lot is smallish, but pretty typical of new construction. I leave near Portland, OR.

One way to have large lots and walkable cities at the same time is just to have smaller cities or towns. People are drawn to large urban areas because that's where the jobs are and that's where the interesting people and things to do are. If we had more towns that were desirable places to live, it would go a long way towards fixing the housing shortages and long commutes and so on that are typical of major cities. (This is easier said than done, though.)

You aren't looking at the right variables. The revealed preference isn't shown by where people chose to move because pricing due to exogenous factors has a huge impact on availability. The right way to look is in some mix of "price per square foot" and "cost per dwelling unit" metrics, both of which show a strong preference for (1) dense urban living like NYC and (2) walkable suburban living like downtown palo alto, Berkeley, LA or many other inner ring suburbs in east coast cities.

Many choose suburbs because there aren't walkable cities as an option

And because the walkable cities have been made unaffordable by those insisting that no one wants to live in such a place.

I have never met anyone who lives in the suburbs because "the city wasn't walkable."

It is always because they want a larger house, more land, and no shared walls.

If you live in a truly walkable city you don't need a yard because there's parks. You also don't feel crammed because it's walkable and spend time walking around as opposed to a small yard or no yard where your options are to be inside or drive somewhere. And you don't need a larger house if there's a more appealing outside. Ayooooo these issues go away for most people when you introduce real walkable cities

> you don't need a yard because there's parks

Americans want their own private spaces and that preference is not going to change, especially when there is so much land available.

> you don't need a larger house if there's a more appealing outside

The outside is intolerable at best, if not outright dangerous for up to half of the year in much of the US. imo, our attitudes about walkability are due in large part to not having a mild climate like Europe.

Not all Americans chose to live in the suburbs. Many Americans are finding themselves displaced from cities in to far out areas. This happens because demand to live in cities is causing increased rents.

I know there are people happily living in suburbia by choice. But there are also many government policies from restrictive zoning to an imbalanced 80:20 highways to transit spending ratio that has profound impacts on how people live.

Americans choose suburbs in droves because the schools are more well funded. Most agree that this tradeoff gets the a far worse commute than if they lived in the city. I have many coworkers who commute 2 hours a day for their glorious backyards? No, there are other economic factors driving the decision, but the joy of having a lawn to maintain and living on a highway 4 hours a day are not among them.

> In this case Americans have chosen the [car-centric] suburbs in droves.

What alternative do they have if that is all that is being built?

For the record, I'm not defending car-dependent living. I wish there were more walkable options in the US for people to live in (myself included).

But there's an awful lot of copium in these kinds of threads that shallowly blame the lack of choice as to why American life is so car-dependent. Housing markets are extremely good at responding to consumer demand.

Here's a good quantitative data point of people expressing their preferences [1]:

> In 1973, the median new single-family house was just 1,525 square feet, according to the US Census Bureau. By 2010, it had grown to 2,169 square feet. And, by 2018, it had bloated to 2,435 square feet. Who in 1973 would have believed that a newly built typical American home would be 60% bigger than theirs in 45 years?

> There's another even more startling factor to take into account. Statista.com claims the average household in 1973 comprised 3.01 people, meaning the home offered 507 square feet per person. But by 2018, that household had shrunk to 2.53 people. And each had 962 square feet to stretch out.

Houses have gotten 60% larger while households have gotten 15% smaller in the last 50 years. That didn't happen in spite of consumer demand.

[1]: https://www.hsh.com/homeowner/average-american-home.html

> But there's an awful lot of copium in these kinds of threads that shallowly blame the lack of choice as to why American life is so car-dependent. Housing markets are extremely good at responding to consumer demand.

With-in the limits allowed by zoning policy. I'm not entirely laissez-faire but I think a lot of NIMBYism and just plain old inertial has been baked into by-laws and such.

Certain mandates can do good (tighter building envelopes, better insulation), while other mandates can do bad (minimum lot sizes).

While this suggests that people want more space in their homes, it doesn’t imply that they prefer car-dependent neighborhoods. That would only follow if > 2,000 sq ft precluded walkability.

I paid a large premium to own a home in one of the east coast’s walkable areas. Lot sizes here average about 0.15 acres, which is over 6,500 (single-story) square feet. Homes have front yards, back yards, off-street parking, gardens, trees, and still easily fit > 2,000 square feet of living space.

The dichotomy of “walkable vs comfortable” is a false one. There’s a middle ground between tiny high-rise apartments and sprawling McMansions.

> Houses have gotten 60% larger while households have gotten 15% smaller in the last 50 years. That didn't happen in spite of consumer demand.

Pre-WW2 there were large houses, in walkable and transit/cycle-friendly neighbourhoods, where people also now own cars:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...

There were also more modest homes in the same are:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

These places now cost quite a lot, but in roughly 1960-90s they were relatively cheap because all the WASPs moved to the suburbs because 'downtown was for immigrants'; this particular neighbourhood was >90% Polish during the time period. Just to the east of this neighbourhood is Little Portugal, and to the west a large Ukraine community used to be concentrated (with a smattering of Lithuanians).

Now that urban living has become fashionable again, it has been gentrified (no more Poles) and the prices are crazy high.

But there's nothing unique about how it was built, and nothing is stopping communities from (e.g.) instituting zoning to mandate higher density (but less than Hong Kong levels):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

Framing it as user choice ignores a lot of history and politics. Long Island, for instance, became suburban largely due to Robert Moses' starvation of public transportation and his prioritization of cars. Because Long Island lacked any sort of industry of its own, most inhabitants commuted into New York City. Because Moses built massive highways without reserving any right of way for a train, most of these inhabitants drove into cities. Because they drove cars, they would naturally prioritize living in spaces where they could have a garage, i.e. a suburb. As more people drove, the trains lost revenue, ran less frequently and lost more customers. If fast trains had been built to and from Long Island, it's not unbelievable to imagine it'd have become as dense as New York.

Or take the white flight. A lot of movement to suburbs was predicated on fear of minorities and urban crime.

This sort of thinking is how city planning and product design gets stuck in a local optimum.

Once kids are in the picture, school districts with greater proportions of wealthier families is the priority.

Plus, the easiest way to avoid dealing with homeless people and/or gangs is to live in far flung suburbs where everything is so far that cars are a necessity.

"Avoid" being the operative word! Unfortunately we've chosen to slap on the suburbia band-aid that just introduces more negative externalities. Dense cities in Europe and East Asia are much safer _and_ score better on education metrics, so it's not like eschewing urbanity is working well for us comparatively.

Those neighborhoods are deeply subsidized. I don’t doubt that most Americans would like their exact house (or bigger) in a walkable neighborhood over something that’s actually be available in town today, but it’s not a purely market driven choice today.

Yea, you have to ask people “do you like walkable cities enough that you’d be willing to let a for-profit developer build houses and vote for an otherwise-unsavory politician who repealed minimum parking requirements?”

At the end of the day most people want more of their bit of space (indoor and outdoor) for the money. Which inherently pushes them to suburbs.

I agree - but the answer may lie in extensive bike "Roads" for walkers and bikers.

Agreed. If we truly wanted them we would be willing to give up car ownership, single family homes, and suburban sprawl. I doubt that will ever happen in this hyper-individualistic culture. Hopefully it is uncontroversial by now to say that an enormous swath of American society does not believe in self-sacrifice.

I would love to give all that up. But until change happens, I can't. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. I believe many would give that up if they could, especially younger people, but there's no option to give it up currently.

I think you are dismissing or not considering a major part of living in a walkable area - the cost of housing at any square footage. I know I did until quite recently.

I really want to live in a walkable city, and would be thrilled not to own a car and live in a smaller space. I'm a remote dev, and as my partner just finished graduate school and is starting their professional career I thought we'd have the perfect opportunity to live the dream and move somewhere where we could use walking/biking as our primary form of transportation.

Turns out, there's a very limited supply of walkable communities in the US and they have a significant premium. We gotta pay off graduate school loans and even with higher salaries, it would be years of additional repayments living in somewhere like Seattle or New York vs a suburb of Raleigh, NC. There are small and more out of the way walkable communities, but not really any with good job prospects. Maybe at some point in the future, but right now I honestly don't think I can afford it.

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