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Comment by HDThoreaun | Hacker News Reader

Railroads would still split cities. The reality is that American cities need highways. We have too much space relative to our population and our cultural focus on individualism mean that people will always prefer single family homes. Those cant exist without cars and people with cars need to be able to commute. The displacement was tragic but Im not if it couldve been done much better. If we're going to build the highways going through poor areas makes sense, eminent domain is much cheaper.

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> The reality is that American cities need highways.

Not through the middle of them.

> people will always prefer single family homes.

Millenials and genZ prefer walkable neighborhoods and public transit.

edit: pre-50s america had much more dense walkable urbanism. Just more distributed. There were many more '2nd cities'

Source? Most millennials live in the suburbs as far as I know.

Millennials and Gen Z make do with what they can afford.

This. It’s rather funny, because I observe among my peers, who are millenials, that if they can’t have a thing (cars, houses), then no one should have them.

No, we don't, the poor among us take it as a cope.

You're just running in the wrong circles.

> We have too much space relative to our population

If you're arguing that there's an abundance of space, this is true in many countries (and was certainly true prior to the Federal-Aid Highway Act or Levittown).

> We have too much space relative to our population and our cultural focus on individualism mean that people will always prefer single family homes

Why? There are plenty of locales in the US where this very much isn't the case.

> Those cant exist without cars and people with cars need to be able to commute.

If we're simply talking about the average daily commute for the average person, why? There are still plenty of cities in the US that have effective public transportation.

> There are plenty of locales in the US where this very much isn't the case.

No there arent. Even NYC is full of SFHs

People strongly prefer single family homes in places where zoning codes forbid the construction of anything else. It's not clear that there is any reason people should always prefer such homes, in the absence of such restrictive regulation.

I dont think this is true. Even in the densest places there are still tons of single family homes. Certainly many people dont care about having one, but I think most Americans always will. Of course you have to think about cost trade offs, but since we're talking about politics I think voters will consistently vote for policy that enables SFH living.

> Even in the densest places there are still tons of single family homes.

That is generally the case when the zoning code forbids the construction of anything else; otherwise, density would increase progressively, largely via conversion/addition, and you would never see neighborhoods of single-family homes abutting commercial/multifamily neighborhoods, with a sharp line dividing them, as frequently occurs in modern American development. Anytime you see such a dramatic transition, you are looking at an artificial boundary created by zoning, and that means the properties just over the line on the single-family side will be simultaneously overcosted (because they are close to an area of high demand) and undervalued (because they cannot be developed to meet the demand).

> people will always prefer single family homes.

The preference is so consistently overwhelming that we needed to make it illegal to build large apartment buildings in most major cities to enforce it.

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