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Comment by youngerdryas | Hacker News Reader

This is market forces in action. If more people wanted to live stacked on top of each other then more of those projects would be built. Families with children want to have a backyard, treefort, garage etc. To a large extent space is freedom.

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And yet, let's take a look at the market. A one-bedroom Manhattan condo costs more than twice what a two-story house almost anywhere else does. There's no lack of demand.

Building more housing in a city is hard. You have to buy out all units in the existing building, and the current residents may be quite reluctant. And actually extending a city is even harder.

Unfortunately there are are many contributors to suburban sprawl other than market forces. Zoning and regulations like parking minimums contribute to suburban development and prevent developers from building housing that would otherwise be in demand; the way property taxes are calculated also encourages sprawl.

An interesting article from a little while back - "How Suburban Sprawl Works Like a Ponzi Scheme" http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/10/su...

Not entirely market forces. City zoning often requires housing over there, shopping way the hell over that way, and your work miles away in a different direction. Which means that you have to drive to go anywhere. So everything is built to move cars around as quickly as possible, at the expense of making walking so unpleasant that nobody wants to go out there. There are a lot of intertwining forces here that have nothing to do with the market.

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