Our choices are not the result of a free market, but one highly constrained by land use restrictions.
This is seen very clearly in housing prices. Dense living is hugely undersupplied, and therefore very expensive.
Not everyone wants to live in the country or the suburbs. I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
Noise in cities is mostly from cars, as is the dirt and death and destruction. Which is why I advocate so hard for allowing low car lifestyles and building, something that is largely banned in the US.
The only reason there would be madness, filth and ugliness in a rural area is if you left it there, because you are the only one living on your property.
Obviously, you have to sometimes go out into a hub of activity to get groceries or whatnot, but the onus is on you to provide evidence that those hubs are epicenters of madness and filth in a rural area, but not the urban area.
Your argument makes 0 sense without any evidence.
This makes me think you don't actually live in a rural area. It's not like you're pioneering, no connection to the rest of society. There's still school for the kids, church, stores, and yes, even neighbors.
Plus, most humans find having a social life to be one of the greatest joys in life.
I find it fascinating that you think it's acceptable to call cities centers of madness, filth, and ugliness, but think it's completely unacceptable to think that of rural areas. Have you actually lived in a city? Or are you just basing it off of perceptions you get from media?
Use of sulfur by farmers causes asthma: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5783654/
Stockyards smell awful.
My childhood friend's grandfather owned a silage plant. Ever smelled silage?
The local pig farm has created the worst smell I've ever directly experienced, and it's been a problem since the 90s.
These are just a few examples of filth and ugliness. As for madness, meth use and inattentive, drunk, or road-raging pickup truck drives with provide you that.
There's too much "trad life" larping on Instagram these days, and one of the many many parts of the experience that viewers miss is smell.
There was noise from constant tractors running around (for both cereal agriculture and cattle farming), even more noise from the nearby gigantic steel building company. People constantly driving around for any reason with stinky noisy vehicles (often poorly maintained). You would get bad smells from the cattle farmer muckspreading or the porc farmer cleaning out. Sometimes you would actually need to stay inside because the nearby cereal farmer thought it was a good idea to spray pesticide with a helicopter.
And that's before even talking about the "nature" part, like a swan chasing you because for some reason he thought you were a threat when you were just passing by, a random confused board wondering if he should charge you or just go about his life, gigantic carnivore fish that will bite you if you are not careful (silurid fish, they caught one over 2m in the river next to my house). You can add the random stray dog (or just common farmer dog) that may not be that friendly and agressive bulls that may catch you by surprise if you unknowingly walked on their territory (to take a shortcut or whatever).
I have learned the hard way that nature is a bitch and rather nasty most of the time. We built society/civilisation because otherwise we wouldn't fare very well alone or in small groups. And the parts of nature we exploit for civilisation are not better than cities, in fact they are often much nastier (you get the nature default, plus the crap humans put on top).
I think people who have some sort of fetish for nature are low IQ or weird excitement with unnecessary risks. My experience living with/around the people there taught me that indeed, most of them are quite dumb and that's probably the reason they are here.
There are plenty of small developments (e.g. 100-150 houses with 2-3 acre plots with some basic amenities like road clearing) that are far away from anything you describe.
The beautiful areas are breathtaking if you can afford to live there.
I experienced both. I grew up in a beautiful pastoral landscape with prosperous dairy operations and a mix of tourism and small business. Small scale dairy farming is dead, and that death caused a chain reaction. My old home is a rural ghetto at this point. Distribution centers are the big thing that was supposed to save the day, but they have high turnover and generate truck traffic and other issues.
It’s nice we get the choice though, and I do like to visit it still. I could just never return to such isolation and poor services.
And on that front, prices in dense areas are way way above suburban areas. Even if you subtract the lawn. People will pay far far more per sqft for a home in a dense urban area without a lawn! Which indicates that dense living is far undersupplied.
Not coincidentally, we don't have to ban suburban living, we only ban dense living. Literally anybody could buy an apartment building, tear it down and build a single family home, but how often do you ever see that happen? But you can't go the other direction, by law.
One more thing to consider - no U.S. city has “excellent” infrastructure so it’s difficult to know what the demand would be like if that kind of city existed in the US. NYC doesn’t count, the subway is good by US standards but it’s junk compared to asia standards. Slow, loud, disgusting, lots of delays and maintenance on weekends.
For example how much would a nice apartment in manhattan be worth if i could easily hop on a bullet train and be in the Hamptons on Long Island within 50 minutes? Or in Mystic Connecticut within 45 minutes?? Suddenly commuting from the suburbs daily, so i can relax in nature on the weekends loses its appeal. Just one example.
With that said it’s good the market offers different housing “products” based on personal preference or life-stage (young, kids, older, etc)
How bizarre you think you can talk for literally everyone in existence.
This is easily disproven by the state of the real estate market and relative value of said urban condos to suburban sfh
Glad to see different people want different things in life.
Price in the full cost of that sprawl and it becomes less desirable.
2/3 of home buyers have single family detached as their preferred housing, so more people want to live in that type of housing than currently do so.
Much of the rest of what is said here contra your viewpoint is also readily observable common knowledge.
Here's a quote:
> To be clear: Climate change is a very important problem. It needs to be solved, along with other problems like malaria and malnutrition. Every tenth of a degree of heating that we prevent is hugely beneficial because a stable climate makes it easier to improve people’s lives.
Reducing sprawl is plainly a good strategy to reduce transportation and infrastructure needs, and preserve wildlife.
You'd be correct if you referred to some people, but acknowledged that for plenty of people, a detached home with a yard is the last thing they want. Lawn care and home maintenance, no thanks. Let me just pay a fee for my share of building maintenance, please.
I want to be in the heart of a bustling city where I can walk to everything and do something different every night. That's not possible in suburbia.
They'd probably rather live in a single family home in NYC.
They have to choose between contradictory desires: single family home over condo, but NYC over suburbs or rural.
Absolutely untrue. My own desires are quite the opposite of what you describe. Besides which, tiny downtown places can often be more expensive than considerably larger ones in the suburbs.