I do love the US but so many of our cities really are garbage... they stink, buildings are dirty from pollution, roads are littered with potholes and trash, etc. I really don't get why people love NYC that much unless you grew up in the environment and view it as normal.
I don't think this is actually true. If you spend enough time on Nextdoor and read what nimby's complain about, the chief concerns are traffic, parking, and congestion (after crime and safety). Obviously, there are nimby's who are concerned with their property values, but the average 75 year old nimby isn't interested in selling/moving their property.
If you hate traffic, want more parking, or the like; the easiest way to do that is to just stop building housing, throw up your hands, and say the city's full.
But because doing that also makes your own property more valuable, both complaints are intermingled: people who want more money in their pocket can concern-troll about traffic to sound prosocial. In fact, this commingling has happened for so long that it is difficult to separate out the two concerns.
[0] AI ethicist jargon for "prerequisite you have to do to accomplish a lot of disparate or conflicting goals".
Indeed. The reason it feels so different in many European cities (and feels much better IMO) is that they are human scale instead of automobile scale.
See James Howard Kunstler's The Geography of Nowhere https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125313.The_Geography_of_...
NYC is actually a really pleasant place to live in a lot of respects, and I've lived in several other places. The real problem here is that housing is so expensive. You could drop a bunch of 8-10 story buildings on corners near trains here and you wouldn't really even notice at street level but it would add a lot of housing.
That will really encourage development!