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Comment by supertrope | Hacker News Reader

Because the majority of the electorate is dependent on their cars for access to employment, school, stores, recreation, and their friends and family. The lower friction path is to buy a car and demand free parking, toll free roads, cheap fuel, higher speed limits, etc.

They don’t make the connection between half of urban land (!) being allocated toward driving infrastructure and high housing costs. Landlords take the blame. Other problems caused by spatial displacement and only building infrastructure for cars include traffic congestion, oil dependency, climate change, and rising traffic deaths. Driving doesn’t scale well in cities. Besides insatiable demand for parking and congestion, people buy bigger cars to keep up with the crash safety arms race.

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How did they become dependent on an object that cost them a fortune and ruins cities and enviroment?

Because the benefit is immediate, and personal, but the cost is deferred and distributed.

Because the cost/benefit analysis makes it perfectly viable or even cheap.

Even as someone living in a non-US city with supposedly good public transport, the cost of a cheap car + gas is ridiculous compared to the benefits.

The power of large corporations and their marketing departments.

Specifically, GM, who lobbied hard about this starting in the 60s

If we consider restrictions and costs of housing as the cause of needing a car, it seems hard to conclusively assign blame to just the chicken or just the egg.

Because all of the proposed replacements entail substantial compromises, such as "not actually going directly from point A to point B", and because we no longer seem to have the ability to build infrastructure like transit for reasonable costs.

Because corporations brainwashed people very successfully.

It's a long story, but it involves the post-WWII economic boom, White Flight from the inner cities to the suburbs and away from the Black people in the cities (along with Redlining to keep the Black people from following them), the construction of Eisenhower's Interstate Highway system in the 50s, and many other factors I'm sure I'm missing.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted - this is a well researched phenomenon. The interstate system opened up access (ie, subsidized) land for single family residential. And yes, one factor why white people moved there was to get away from black people - and even enacted covenants to keep out black buyers and real estate agents practiced what was called “red lining”.

This was turbocharged by court losses saying that cities had to serve all of their citizens. Many white people were okay living in the same city with brown people as long as there were white neighborhoods with schools, pools, etc. only used by white people. Once black (or on the west coast, Mexican) people were legally allowed to use them, some cities shutdown city pools and many people moved to suburbs where the infrastructure was technically open to all residents but since things like the design & covenants were created to limit who lived there, it was de facto segregated.

Lobby

Because of the constant growth any real reduction in housing costs would have be temporary. Or it would have been in the 1945-2020 period.

Also, it would have created an environment that would have been totally unaffordable for families. Families don't work well in cities, because you need space. So that means a family of 4, with each kid a room, needs to pay 3-4 times the price a single person needs to pay, just for housing, while only making, at best, twice as much.

So families moved away. Families are also the ones that have the numbers, for voting, and the money ...

That, and stress in cities is 10x what it is in suburbs.

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