First off, you get all the same mortgage benefits with a condo or townhouse; those benefits are not just for single family houses [1]. The Seattle area has an u

First off, you get all the same mortgage benefits with a condo or townhouse; those benefits are not just for single family houses [1]. The Seattle area has an urban growth boundary [2, see the red line] that effectively bans construction of new single family housing. The Seattle government also makes it impossible to get a project approved if it has "too many" parking spots and the the vast majority of the transit system is not paid for by its riders: Sound Transit, Seattle's train and express buses, has around 30-40% farebox recovery of operating costs, and capital costs are fully subsidized [3, Page 8]. King County Metro, the bus system, has a farebox recovery of around 25%, again with capital costs being fully subsidized [4, last graph]. User fees (tolls, car registration, gas taxes, etc.) pay a far larger percentage of roads than this: Washington collects 63.5% of road spending from user fees, which is a figure that includes both capital (new roads) and operational (maintenance on existing roads) costs [5]. So someone living in the Seattle area who wants to have a "different lifestyle" has to pay to subsidize the government's preferred lifestyle. Seattle isn't the only region with a strong bias towards transit (especially with new development), so generalizing across the entire country isn't helpful as different areas have very different urban planning cultures. [1] https://www.irs.gov/publications/p530 https://www.irs.gov/publications/p530 [2] https://www.kingcounty.gov/property/permits/codes/growth/GMPC/~/media/property/permits/documents/GrowthManagement/CPP_ugb_gmpc_Map.ashx https://www.kingcounty.gov/property/permits/codes/growth/GMP... [3] https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2018-fare-revenue-report.pdf https://www.soundtransit.org/sites/default/files/documents/2... [4] https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/about/accountability-center/performance/financial/annual.aspx https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/about/acco... [5] https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/ https://taxfoundation.org/states-road-funding-2019/