Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.
We quite literally have the power to influence that instead of just throwing our hands up and saying "well gosh Americans want terribly designed communities whose long-term costs are completely unsustainable, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it."
This isn't some immutable law of the damned universe.
That's quite a strawman there.
Suburbs are not inherently unsustainable or terribly designed. Some are, but some cities are too.
I'm seeing a ton of strawman arguments, totally inaccurate descriptions of suburbs, unsourced hyperbole about "subsidies" and "externalities", and conflation of "suburb" and "rural" in this thread which certainly does not apply to any suburbs I've ever lived in.
I would guess that most suburbs are financially unsustainable in the long term because they pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain their infrastructure. Strong towns talks about this in great detail.
Again, that is something that might be true for some places but not others.
I know of suburbs that definitely pay for themselves. And it's not hard to see why -- the property taxes are high and many of the residents are paying high income taxes too. Plus, many residents of suburbs commute to work in cities, where they contribute to the success of businesses that pay taxes in those cities.
I also know that some of the new subdivisions outside of Sacramento have paid for all of their infrastructure via their HOA, so that all of the money to build and maintain the roads, sewers, and power lines was 100% paid for by the homeowners. That's also apparently a common model for new housing in Nevada.
These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.
But often not by enough to balance the amount of publicly-funded road space and parking they use.
> These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.
We absolutely get these arguments on other topics when public money is being spent on luxuries for the wealthy, which is what suburban living is. Police, fire departments, and schools are necessities. Zillion-square-foot homes and lawns are not.
Why should they be redistributed to the recreationally remote? Are they especially in need?
People with more resources and more power have taken larger living spaces for centuries, the idea of wanting more space isn't some creation of post-WWII America.
Nowdays we talk about trains in the US as a "let's get away from suburban development" but the train itself was a driver of suburbanization from London, historically - people opted for more space and a train commute when they got the option.
Do they really?
My country is a textbook case of the opposite, where the general population suddenly decided they don't really want to live in apartment blocks in the city - especially the type which was built in the communist second half of the XXth century.
What happened next was intense proliferation of sprawl. It actually was seen as a status symbol back then to be able to afford a detached house.
So much so that the urbanization rate actually slightly fell in the past 20 years.
People gravitate towards comfort and apparently needing to drive everywhere but having enormous living space is preferable to living in a relatively small apartment and walking/cycling.
