That's not even the issue. Suppose that more people wanted to live in a city than currently do. The market implies that -- the price per square foot is higher in cities.
And that's the problem, when the city isn't allowed to grow. The existing city already has tall buildings, so if there is more demand than supply, to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else, i.e. build some taller buildings where there are currently suburbs. Which is the thing that's banned.
But then more people can't move into the city, even if they want to, because the units in urban environments are already occupied and converting more land to urban developments is restricted by law. So the existing units get bid up until the price difference is high enough to deter people from living in the city and everyone else has to live in suburbs or rural areas whether they want to or not.
Knock down three adjacent homes and you can get maybe 6-8 levels, which would be no more than 40 families.
Infinite cities only yh happen with infinite population.
(others have already pointed out that populations are on track to fall shortly and there is no reason to think that trend will reverse though nobody knows)
This is impossible. Look at even the densest cities today such as Hong Kong, with many 50-storey buildings packed closely. HK as a whole has maybe 25% land area allocated for buildings and the rest is forest and green space.
Or consider Tokyo - sure, it is a big sprawling metropolis and pretty much an uninterrupted patch of concrete. But the urban area does eventually end, and much of the land area of Japan is mountains, forests, farms, etc.
And most importantly there's a million people here, statistically there's a good chance you run into people who're in the top 5% of whatever their field is in. Whether it's musicians, engineers, athletes, philosophers, there's a good chance you'll run into a lot of interesting ones.
My friend lives in a village and he has 1 pizzeria and 1 italian and 1 chinese restaurant. There's no gym. There's a very basic park with grass and some trees. There's no museums, architecture is all the same. There's no nightlife whatsoever. There's no real amenities, not even a library. There's a few shops with the basics, with very limited opening hours. There's as much nature nearby as there is for me. Tere's also no real way to make friends, and there's a few hundred people to meet at most, statistically most of them aren't very interesting to you (not 'not interesting in general', but 'to you'. It's easier to find 'your tribe' if you can select from a million vs a hundred).
So it's really the 'commute' or I should say proximity to culture, i.e. people, their thoughts and their creations, that sells the city for me, not the proximity to the company I happen to work for, which is sometimes in another city.
I have a season ticket to a theater about an hour away. There are also local concerts/theater out where I live. I see theater when I travel. I actually have decent restaurants out where I live but don't use them much.
I guess I'm also not sure how this running into philosophers and musicians works. Maybe if I were actively involved with a university which I actually am to some degree.
Of course, different people have different preferences.
Commute time has been 30 minutes for a large portion of human history:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti%27s_constant
It's just as technology has developed different means of transportation (from walking to rail, automobiles) the distances involved have gotten greater because speeds have increased.
Quality matters just as much as quantity, and often more when they're close together. (I would of course prefer a 10 minute drive to a 90 minute walk, for example).
Historic cities and castles are almost always wrongly depicted in movies. They are always placed in a grace field in the middle of nowhere, but there should be farmland everywhere.
I live in an area of the US that the vast majority of US citizens would describe as "city" yet it doesn't conform to your description. The kids here get along just fine. But it's an important distinction because it would have been described as more of a suburb 100 years ago in that we are a few miles away from the heart of downtown.
But a lot of people will pop up and say that 80% of the US is urban with the implication that 20% of people are living in the back of beyond in Wyoming and it's simply not true.
My daughter has slept under the shark tank at the aquarium as well as with the mummies at the local cultural museum. The local university runs summer camps for everything from engineering to gymnastics. The Museums run programs, too. Her grade school has a thriving parent community because the parents stand together when school is let out instead of forming a long line of cars, I've made new friends myself this way (the number one complaint I get from parents that do move out is that they know no other parents in their kid's school). Because I walk everywhere, I don't ever deal with traffic.
I'm not saying it's perfect, either. Urban areas vary a LOT, including within any single city and within the country. My child's been directly exposed to poverty, homelessness and mental health issues, etc. I'm comfortable enough to explain the complexities of this to her, but some people would rather not.
This is not to criticize people who want to live in a rural or suburban life. I grew up in a small town and got myself out of there very quickly, mostly because I felt isolated and trapped growing up. But cities are very much places you can live in, kids and all.
The automobile, at least insofar as it impacts the urban landscape, is only incidentally about transportation. It's really about leverage in real estate markets.
I think there's a tie-in between suburban sprawl and the explosion of the middle class. It allowed middle earners to escape the urban "law of rent."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent
This is really what led me to stop being an unreserved advocate for urbanism. The dark side of urbanism is that nobody but the property owners can accumulate wealth.
Tangent but: I also see a hidden legacy of racism here that probably still impacts black net worth in the USA. Early suburbs, before the civil rights act (which the right still hates) and similar laws, were often red-lined. This probably did a double whammy. On one hand, blacks were prohibited from participating in the automobile-driven escape to affordable home ownership, and the exodus from the cities probably tanked that home equity some of them might have had there.
I'm not at all the first person to point this out, but it's something people forget about.
Of course now the suburbs are getting unaffordable, so now everyone's on the Titanic arguing about deck chairs. In the long term the automobile can't keep driving sprawl forever. The law of rent catches up.
Suburbs not only aren't required for this, requiring them to be suburbs actually makes it worse.
Suppose you have 1000 parcels of land and you need 3000 housing units. Obviously you need an average of three units per parcel. If 950 of the parcels are zoned to allow only one unit, the remaining 50 parcels then need to have an average of 41 units each.
Those parcels then become dramatically more expensive because they're the only place additional units can be added. Rents then have to rise to reflect the higher costs. Worse, some of those parcels already have e.g. 30 units but the cost of demolishing a perfectly good 30-unit building to build a slightly larger one is prohibitive, so now there is a shortfall and even the one-unit-per-parcel land ends up with higher rents.
I do not understand: why did you stop being pro-urbanist? How does urbanism stop the middle class from accumulating wealth?
I am not sure that this phenomenon is unique to cities, in fact, but rather an inevitable endgame to the idea of owning land in perpetuity. It creates a permanent class divide.
Of course that opens the question: why should real estate be a continually appreciating asset? There are other countries where it isn't.
i do live here with my children, and it's just because we grew up in similar environment, and works well for other logistical arrangements, etc. i love it for many reasons, but outsiders do see the issues that i have become blind to.
the problem really is all of the above. it is the fast, heavy cars with texting drivers, it is the schizo's yelling at people as they shuffle around, it is the long distances between anything to do, it is the lack sidewalks, it is the gerrymandered school districts, it is the - if not criminal - at least trashy neighbors playing loud music, ...
it's a wonder if it comes together at all, and when it does, it is very expensive. and it isn't even necessarily the "city". it's usually the nice suburb, with the community pool, and your neighbors are doctors, and it's in a "good" school district,... it is such a narrow target.
i want the city to rebound, be a welcoming place for families, but it will take addressing all of the above.
i see people who don't want to live there because of their overestimated risk about the crime and vagrancy. it is a foul atmosphere, fomented by a mix of local news hysteria, malicious internet commenters, and statistical ignorance.
i get the lightbulb stolen from my garage light every month. that sort of petty crime is non-existent when you live in a nice suburb. but it's only a lightbulb, not that hard to replace.
am i worried me or my family will get shot? no, my neighbors are actually all very nice. but the family pizza place on the commercial strip a block over has a shooting once every year or so. in the integration of everything, it's somewhat of a non-issue, but it i real, and again, something that never happens for many decades if you're out in the burbs.
there's a real stark difference between the two. how a place feels in your gut, is different from what the numbers show, and it's not always clear what's real and what's not.
But the relative comparison works over distance as well as time. For example in the city center 25 minutes from me the violent crime rate is about 1,000 per 100k people. In my suburb, it’s 80. The difference in property crime is even worse.
Edit: 80/100k is also an overestimate because they included simple assault, and the violent crime stats I was looking at for the city center only included aggravated assault. Also if you look at murders, we haven’t had one since the late 80s.
So apples to apples it’s essentially 0 compared to 1000/100,000
So yeah maybe the statistics say something else (I wonder how many people like me just don't report crime -- the police do nothing in such places) but I'm not eager to relive that experience.
That said your immediate neighbors in these areas can be incredibly nice and protective of each other as a survival mechanism, because everyone else is quite literally out to get you.
You could have suburbs designed as walkable neighbourhoods with shops. Look at Japan, each area around a station is like a small village. Even if you commute to the "big" city, the area you live can still be a nice walkable place.
You can see this all over the east Bay in the San Francisco Bay Area, where its just miles and miles of residences, with all of the commerce on 880, 580, or all the various names for 185/238, from Gilroy to Vallejo. If you're more than a few blocks from any of those roads, you're driving or taking a bus to get to any shops. And East Bay surface streets are not exactly pleasant.
The existing "city" was the suburb of the past:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
And as you say, the current suburb isn't allowed to change because of zoning and NIMBY. Even the current city hasn't been allowed to change and grow in many places (e.g., Toronto)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing
* https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/491-the-missing-middl...
Most major US cities have plenty of room for densification, except that the local zoning and other processes don't allow it. Of course, the ur-example here is San Francisco, which has some of the most expensive real estate in the country even while most of the city is single-family homes with large (for a city) backyards.
