Suburban sprawl is the law. These subdivisions off the side of the highway full of large lot single family homes aren’t even what developers think people want.

Suburban sprawl is the law. These subdivisions off the side of the highway full of large lot single family homes aren’t even what developers think people want. They are prescribed by the building and planning codes of nearly every jurisdiction. Developers do sometimes build new places in the urban style but every element of that is a hard-fought battle against the government for variances, zoning changes, special permits, etc. The New Urbanists have an interesting approach to this: “open source” planning codes that prescribe urbanism rather than sprawl, which they try to convince municipalities to adopt as their default. They don’t seem to have much uptake though. The postwar sprawl style is what was popular when the regulatory regimes as we know them today came to be, and there’s a lot of inertia behind that, whether or not people actually like it. https://youtu.be/NMvwHDFVpCE https://youtu.be/NMvwHDFVpCE