> People usually prefer living in a detached house, especially when raising a family, I don't think it's that simple. I mean, everyone would love a big house

> People usually prefer living in a detached house, especially when raising a family, I don't think it's that simple. I mean, everyone would love a big house on a big yard that is close to everything, but approximately nobody gets to do that. In reality there are always tradeoffs, and the the tradeoffs build in incentives - sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, that people respond to. In a lot of the US those incentives have skewed pretty hard recently to exurban singles but that's not universal. These sorts of things are hugely affected by infrastructure planning and subsidies, etc. At the end of the day people choose between the options they have, not the ones they wish they had.