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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

there is a huge market distortion in that dense, walkable living is illegal to build in most of the country. i've seen polling that suggests walkability is in demand for about 40% of the population but there isn't 40% of available homes in such a configuration, so there are also a lot of people who get priced out of that and into suburbia.

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To be fair, my impression is most people have highly contradictory desires along these lines.

They say they want to be able to walk to places more. But they also want a big suburban-style house with bedrooms for everyone and storage and garage and lawn etc, easy parking for them, nice wide roads to drive everywhere on and tons of free parking when they get there. This makes it impossible for the area to be walkable unless everyone else lives in small apartments and there's actually only enough parking for just them to drive if they feel like it.

In my opinion, it doesn't work that way. Yeah everyone wants to be the special 1% like that, but only actually 1% will be. If you really want to be walkable, you personally will need to live like that too.

My understanding of the issue is that while walkable communities are in demand they are a minority and generally speaking, also a minority that is less politically active than single-family homeowners.

Pretty much everywhere has a political majority of single-family homeowners, and if each locality decides on its own it doesn't want to have multifamily housing, then you wind up in a situation where almost nowhere actually allows it.

This is so weird to read. My cultural bias is showing: I'm from the Netherlands. As most of you know, walkability is the norm here. And while the country is flat, so is the area described in this article.

Most of the country by land area has no zoning and people can build whatever they want. Despite that, where I live the only thing anyone does is the SFH and the occasional duplex.

That isn't especially surprising, given that there's no point in raising (or using) the capital to build urban infrastructure where none exists. It's a flywheel-shaped problem; the fact that the average American lives in a local optima of suburban sprawl doesn't itself indicate the absence of a better optima.

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