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No, they don’t. This is a classic example of listening to what people say vs observing what they do. And it’s a good lesson in product development. Ask your us

• reportingsjr 5y ago
  It's not a hard choice when suburbs have been subsidized like hell for about 70 years while money has been drained out of cities to pay for said suburbs. Here in Ohio there is this garbage designation for "rural farming areas" called townships that get huge infrastructures subsidies/grants, even though they are all just suburbs/exurbs. Look at any of the areas around Cincinnati, Columbus, or Cleveland and check out how many of them have township in their name. It's pretty incredible and absolutely disgustingly dishonest.
  • Rapzid 5y ago
    Drained out of the cities? Nearly all of Texas is what most people would consider "suburb". Even the "urban" areas are mostly sprawl. Very little of Texas is walkable by any stretch.
    • whalabi 5y ago
      Out of curiosity, is Austin an exception?
      • freeone3000 5y ago
        Austin is a giant suburban sprawl that's better than most Texan cities because it has a reasonable bus line. It's all low density, all of it, with massive parking lots everywhere.
      • Rapzid 5y ago
        There are pockets of walkabality here and there but it's a drop in the ocean. Those locations are sparse, job and home location specific, and EXPENSIVE. I live in San Antonio. Low COL right? Ehhh, not where I live haha. The desirable areas near town are not cheap. Alamo Heights is super expense and not walkable at all. A 1 bedroom near the Pearl is over 2k/mo now essentially. Actually, I've seen effeciencies for about that much and there are not really grocery stores around within walking distance. Texas has a 1.9t GDP and it's almost entirely generated by people living in urban sprawl and rural areas. Austin is no exception as someone has pointed out. Most of the people who work in the smallish Texas high density centers live in the sprawl. We have no income tax so of court that's made up with prop tax. School quality is highly dependent on quality of the neighborhoods they are located near. It's not fantastic but the idea that the sprawl is "draining" the cities is off base since the vast majority of workers producing the value live in the sprawl.
    • reportingsjr 5y ago
      Yes, a significant amount of tax dollars come from cities and are funneled to suburbs/exurba via "grants" and other subsidized funding methods, which urban areas don't get the benefit of receiving.
• lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Once kids are in the picture, school districts with greater proportions of wealthier families is the priority. Plus, the easiest way to avoid dealing with homeless people and/or gangs is to live in far flung suburbs where everything is so far that cars are a necessity.
  • bllguo 5y ago
    "Avoid" being the operative word! Unfortunately we've chosen to slap on the suburbia band-aid that just introduces more negative externalities. Dense cities in Europe and East Asia are much safer _and_ score better on education metrics, so it's not like eschewing urbanity is working well for us comparatively.
• harryh 5y ago
  There is some truth in this post, but it's also important to understand that in most of the places with very large lots, it is illegal to subdivide the lots and build denser housing. If greater density was legalized, it would almost certainly be built and inhabited in a great many places.
  • notJim 5y ago
    People have this all-or-nothing thinking about this, but realistically most cities ought to have a mix. A single person in their 20s doesn't necessarily need or want a house with a yard, but they might want one later on. Right now, in most places that means allowing more options for apartments to be built, and more medium-density for people who are somewhere in between.
    • Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      I think it's largely because we're still at the point in American politics where the folks against densification are still strongly tied to a certain pastoral vision of America: large lot sizes, single family homes, easy parking, and heavily manicured neighborhoods. It's more than just density, it's a legally codified way of life. Folks understand that the moment restrictions are eased that this pastoral view of urban development will necessarily change. It takes a lot of restrictions to have a built environment like America's and the only way to maintain that built environment is to resist any change to the restrictions. But I agree. A vision of sustainable development would be a dense urban core with decreasing density away from the core, instead of endless SFH large-lot sprawl. Families or other individuals that want/need more space can live on the outskirts and take a train in to the urban core for work. Younger people or those who don't need the space can stay in the core, and folks in between can live anywhere in the spectrum of density.
    • xorfish 5y ago
      There needs to be a land tax that is high enough to cover the cost of infrastructure. This is currently not the case with single family homes.
• jdavis703 5y ago
  Not all Americans chose to live in the suburbs. Many Americans are finding themselves displaced from cities in to far out areas. This happens because demand to live in cities is causing increased rents. I know there are people happily living in suburbia by choice. But there are also many government policies from restrictive zoning to an imbalanced 80:20 highways to transit spending ratio that has profound impacts on how people live.
• bllguo 5y ago
  Agreed. If we truly wanted them we would be willing to give up car ownership, single family homes, and suburban sprawl. I doubt that will ever happen in this hyper-individualistic culture. Hopefully it is uncontroversial by now to say that an enormous swath of American society does not believe in self-sacrifice.
  • dorchadas 5y ago
    I would love to give all that up. But until change happens, I can't. It's a chicken-and-egg problem. I believe many would give that up if they could, especially younger people, but there's no option to give it up currently.
  • xnyan 5y ago
    I think you are dismissing or not considering a major part of living in a walkable area - the cost of housing at any square footage. I know I did until quite recently. I really want to live in a walkable city, and would be thrilled not to own a car and live in a smaller space. I'm a remote dev, and as my partner just finished graduate school and is starting their professional career I thought we'd have the perfect opportunity to live the dream and move somewhere where we could use walking/biking as our primary form of transportation. Turns out, there's a very limited supply of walkable communities in the US and they have a significant premium. We gotta pay off graduate school loans and even with higher salaries, it would be years of additional repayments living in somewhere like Seattle or New York vs a suburb of Raleigh, NC. There are small and more out of the way walkable communities, but not really any with good job prospects. Maybe at some point in the future, but right now I honestly don't think I can afford it.
• elihu 5y ago
  A quarter acre is a little over 10,000 square feet, which is what I'd consider a normal-size lot in a normal town. A 5,000 square foot lot is smallish, but pretty typical of new construction. I leave near Portland, OR. One way to have large lots and walkable cities at the same time is just to have smaller cities or towns. People are drawn to large urban areas because that's where the jobs are and that's where the interesting people and things to do are. If we had more towns that were desirable places to live, it would go a long way towards fixing the housing shortages and long commutes and so on that are typical of major cities. (This is easier said than done, though.)
• throw0101a 5y ago
  > In this case Americans have chosen the [car-centric] suburbs in droves. What alternative do they have if that is all that is being built?
  • cletus 5y ago
    For the record, I'm not defending car-dependent living. I wish there were more walkable options in the US for people to live in (myself included). But there's an awful lot of copium in these kinds of threads that shallowly blame the lack of choice as to why American life is so car-dependent. Housing markets are extremely good at responding to consumer demand. Here's a good quantitative data point of people expressing their preferences [1]: > In 1973, the median new single-family house was just 1,525 square feet, according to the US Census Bureau. By 2010, it had grown to 2,169 square feet. And, by 2018, it had bloated to 2,435 square feet. Who in 1973 would have believed that a newly built typical American home would be 60% bigger than theirs in 45 years? > There's another even more startling factor to take into account. Statista.com claims the average household in 1973 comprised 3.01 people, meaning the home offered 507 square feet per person. But by 2018, that household had shrunk to 2.53 people. And each had 962 square feet to stretch out. Houses have gotten 60% larger while households have gotten 15% smaller in the last 50 years. That didn't happen in spite of consumer demand. [1]: https://www.hsh.com/homeowner/average-american-home.html https://www.hsh.com/homeowner/average-american-home.html
    • throw0101a 5y ago
      > But there's an awful lot of copium in these kinds of threads that shallowly blame the lack of choice as to why American life is so car-dependent. Housing markets are extremely good at responding to consumer demand. With-in the limits allowed by zoning policy. I'm not entirely laissez-faire but I think a lot of NIMBYism and just plain old inertial has been baked into by-laws and such. Certain mandates can do good (tighter building envelopes, better insulation), while other mandates can do bad (minimum lot sizes).
    • strix_varius 5y ago
      While this suggests that people want more space in their homes, it doesn’t imply that they prefer car-dependent neighborhoods. That would only follow if > 2,000 sq ft precluded walkability. I paid a large premium to own a home in one of the east coast’s walkable areas. Lot sizes here average about 0.15 acres, which is over 6,500 (single-story) square feet. Homes have front yards, back yards, off-street parking, gardens, trees, and still easily fit > 2,000 square feet of living space. The dichotomy of “walkable vs comfortable” is a false one. There’s a middle ground between tiny high-rise apartments and sprawling McMansions.
• hanniabu 5y ago
  Many choose suburbs because there aren't walkable cities as an option
  • notJim 5y ago
    And because the walkable cities have been made unaffordable by those insisting that no one wants to live in such a place.
  • brandonmenc 5y ago
    I have never met anyone who lives in the suburbs because "the city wasn't walkable." It is always because they want a larger house, more land, and no shared walls.
    • hanniabu 5y ago
      If you live in a truly walkable city you don't need a yard because there's parks. You also don't feel crammed because it's walkable and spend time walking around as opposed to a small yard or no yard where your options are to be inside or drive somewhere. And you don't need a larger house if there's a more appealing outside. Ayooooo these issues go away for most people when you introduce real walkable cities
      • brandonmenc 5y ago
        > you don't need a yard because there's parks Americans want their own private spaces and that preference is not going to change, especially when there is so much land available. > you don't need a larger house if there's a more appealing outside The outside is intolerable at best, if not outright dangerous for up to half of the year in much of the US. imo, our attitudes about walkability are due in large part to not having a mild climate like Europe.
• 0xB31B1B 5y ago
  You aren't looking at the right variables. The revealed preference isn't shown by where people chose to move because pricing due to exogenous factors has a huge impact on availability. The right way to look is in some mix of "price per square foot" and "cost per dwelling unit" metrics, both of which show a strong preference for (1) dense urban living like NYC and (2) walkable suburban living like downtown palo alto, Berkeley, LA or many other inner ring suburbs in east coast cities.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  People do vote with their dollars. The walkable neighborhoods in my city tend to cost 2-3X more than houses in less walkable areas. There are actually huge swaths of affordable houses built on the outskirts of many towns, but people don’t want them because they’re not close to the walkable parts of the city.
  • taeric 5y ago
    This can be misleading. The supply in walkable areas will, by near definition, be lower than places you have to drive to. Such that the evidence isn't that houses are more expensive in walkable areas. The evidence is that it is not economically viable to build more walkable neighborhoods. Edit: I meant to say it could be an alternative, not that it is.
    • mulmen 5y ago
      I have lived in highly walkable neighborhoods. They utilize highrises to increase density (supply) of housing and commercial space. Walkable areas are by necessity higher density, meaning they pack more supply into the same footprint.
      • taeric 5y ago
        Some do. I lived in upper Queen Anne in Seattle. Very few highrise houses and all very expensive now. I would be a liar if I said I didn't miss how walkable it was. I also lived in Buckhead area of Atlanta. Also very walkable for me, though there were a few high rises.
        • mulmen 5y ago
          I lived in the Junction in West Seattle for 7 years. Highly walkable, lots of highrises in the core, but still lots of (very expensive!) single family homes. Now I live on Alki and it is much less walkable. I can get around but have to climb Admiral to get to a grocery store. Several of our bus routes were permanently closed. Queen Anne benefits from being in Seattle and the economic benefits that has to businesses that make a neighborhood walkable. It’s also just very old and was built when walkability was a necessity. Unfortunately it is prohibitively expensive because higher density development is difficult or impossible.
• jppope 5y ago
  > "In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves." "chosen the suburbs" implies that there was a choice. The limited walkable cities that have been built since 1950 (like Seaside, FL) are some of the most coveted real estate in the United States. The plain fact is that walkable cities are illegal to build now because of zoning laws and building codes.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > The limited walkable cities that have been built since 1950 (like Seaside, FL) I think you should check the population of Seaside (or Celebration). Oh that's right, it's never had a census scan. Suffice it to say that calling either of them "cities" is quite a stretch.
  • bluGill 5y ago
    Supply and demand drives prices up, but it doesn't tell us how large the demand is, only that there is enough to drive up prices. it only takes a small number of unmet demand go drive prices up.
• surfmike 5y ago
  At the end of the day most people want more of their bit of space (indoor and outdoor) for the money. Which inherently pushes them to suburbs.
• graeme 5y ago
  Your thesis is flawed. It is illegal to build new dense walkable neighborhoods in almost all of north america. But existing neighbourhoods of that style tend to be both highly priced to live in and also popular tourist destinations, implying high desirability. The older east coat cities built walkable neighbourhoods before they became illegal.
  • 542458 5y ago
    They’re illegal because people vote for representatives who makes them illegal and show up to city council meetings to petition for them to be illegal. Existing areas in that style tend to be expensive, but are often (at least where I’ve lived) some of the most NYMBY areas in a city. They like the benefits their density has brought, but won’t tolerate the lot next to them getting one iota more dense.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      > They’re illegal because people vote for representatives who makes them illegal Yes, but that's not because nobody wants to live in them. It's because a loud subsection of the people that already own single-family homes there don't want them built. You seem to recognize this. That's different from saying "Americans don't want to live in this sort of housing".
      • 542458 5y ago
        Ah sorry! That’s fair - I understand what you’re saying now. That said, I’d argue that this is a bit of people wanting their cake and to eat it too. They want a contradiction - to be close to everything (so they can walk places and be in the middle of the action), but also far away from it (so they have privacy and room). So - It’s true to say that people want density, but also true to say they don’t.
    • imgabe 5y ago
      The people who show up to city council meetings and pay attention to local politics are a tiny minority. It is not a stretch to believe that they do not represent what most people want.
• quicklime 5y ago
  This sort of thinking is how city planning and product design gets stuck in a local optimum.
• kgermino 5y ago
  Those neighborhoods are deeply subsidized. I don’t doubt that most Americans would like their exact house (or bigger) in a walkable neighborhood over something that’s actually be available in town today, but it’s not a purely market driven choice today.
• deleted 5y ago
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• dionidium 5y ago
  Suburban character isn’t the result of consumer choice. In most suburbs, alternative kinds of development are literally illegal to build. Cities regulate the number of units, the heights of buildings, how far they must be setback from the street, how many parking spaces they require, and so on and so on. Landowners lobby for and enact these regulations precisely because they know that if people were allowed to vote with their wallets they’d choose to live in denser developments. You can’t make cheeseburgers illegal and then argue that nobody orders cheeseburgers in restaurants because they’re unpopular.
  • dionidium 5y ago
    I hope no one will think it too unorthodox if I respond to my own comment just to add that given these constraints on land use patterns it’s obviously the case that Americans choose to drive automobiles. It’s fairly common to hear people describe this, too, as another kind of “revealed preference” for driving over the alternatives. But it’s a revealed preference in the environment as it exists today, which is the only environment that’s legal. If people were allowed to build other kinds of environments, then they would build other kinds of environments and in those other kinds of environments they would make other choices about transportation. If you only look at people on the beach, you’ll find a revealed preference for flip-flops. But in other kinds of environments, people wear other kinds of footwear. If you only looked at people on beaches, you’d draw some funny conclusions about what people like to wear on their feet. The big takeaway here is that the suburbs are the result of big government social engineering on a massive scale. You really can’t look at anything about land-use or transportation and conclude basically anything useful about “revealed preferences.”
• chapium 5y ago
  Americans choose suburbs in droves because the schools are more well funded. Most agree that this tradeoff gets the a far worse commute than if they lived in the city. I have many coworkers who commute 2 hours a day for their glorious backyards? No, there are other economic factors driving the decision, but the joy of having a lawn to maintain and living on a highway 4 hours a day are not among them.
• ramblenode 5y ago
  > In this case Americans have chosen the suburbs in droves. They've chosen their preferred option, given the current (meager) options. That doesn't mean people wouldn't choose walkable cities over suburbs---the option of walkable cities just functionally doesn't exist in the US for a middle income family. And this isn't due to organic demand for suburban neighborhoods, either. In the US, central planning has had a major role in accelerating the development of suburbs. Tax incentives for home ownership were first rolled out during the New Deal, and these especially targeted single family homes. After the war, the dual-use civil-military interstate system was created and highways were subsidized which allowed neighborhood development far from the city center. Auto and petrochemical development were targeted for national security, which acted as a subsidy toward the gasoline-heavy suburban lifestyle. The 1970s energy crisis shifted US foreign policy toward stabilizing petrol prices, which has resulted in various military and CIA operations to that effect (Paul Wolfowitz was talking about securing oil in Iraq before 2nd Bush was even in office). Suburban homes in many cities consume more resources via public roads, water, sewer, electric than they pay in property taxes, but taxes are kept low for political reasons, because that's where voters live. So there are quite a lot of extra-market forces that have shaped city planning. Now all of this has reached a scale where it is self-sustaining, but that doesn't mean people would have picked this route if the initial conditions were not so favorable.
• deleted 5y ago
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• hardwaregeek 5y ago
  Framing it as user choice ignores a lot of history and politics. Long Island, for instance, became suburban largely due to Robert Moses' starvation of public transportation and his prioritization of cars. Because Long Island lacked any sort of industry of its own, most inhabitants commuted into New York City. Because Moses built massive highways without reserving any right of way for a train, most of these inhabitants drove into cities. Because they drove cars, they would naturally prioritize living in spaces where they could have a garage, i.e. a suburb. As more people drove, the trains lost revenue, ran less frequently and lost more customers. If fast trains had been built to and from Long Island, it's not unbelievable to imagine it'd have become as dense as New York. Or take the white flight. A lot of movement to suburbs was predicated on fear of minorities and urban crime.
• afarrell 5y ago
  Yea, you have to ask people “do you like walkable cities enough that you’d be willing to let a for-profit developer build houses and vote for an otherwise-unsavory politician who repealed minimum parking requirements?”
• antb123 5y ago
  I agree - but the answer may lie in extensive bike "Roads" for walkers and bikers.