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I agree with you that people should be allowed to live in the time of communities they prefer, and if hose are suburban mansions so be it. If they also want cars, so be it.

Where, perhaps, you and I disagree is that I think that people who buy these houses and cars should pay for the full cost, including all negative externalities, of their choices. Taxes should be imposed that should then try to reverse those negative externalities where possible. And I assure you, those taxes will easily double or triple the price of gasoline and those houses. Getting CO2 out of the atmosphere is really really difficult, and infrastructure costs of cities vs suburbia obey power laws.

I mean... You don't even need to impose new taxes. Just having people in suburbia actually pay the actual costs of maintenance of the existing infrastructure, would make them rethink their decisions.

There are plenty of dense cities around the world where I'm sure the owners of apartments in the (walkable) center would have enough money to buy a house/McMansion in a nice suburb.

And some do. But plenty don't. And building dense walkable cities with nice public transportation works very well and does not make these cities less attractive as far as I can tell.

Setting aside that your opinion is not data, this is how you mentally entrain the future of society in a terrible moment in an unsustainable industrialization ramp.

What people want is incredibly malleable. To behave otherwise at a policy level is to enslave yourself to the lowest common denominator.

Nonsense. What people want is a hard reality compared to the 4 year political cycle which ultimately drives policy.

You are, of course, free to devise strategies to win the public's hearts and minds. I will root for you in this endeavor. But what you aren't allowed to do (outside the comfort of your armchair) is to deny political reality. Your constituency simply won't stand for it, and will root you out like a bad tooth - and I say that as public policy practitioner, that was voted in and out of office.

It's for this very reason that moneyed interests that outlast the political cycle have an outsized policy impact: they can push their agenda for decades until they manage to change "what people want", forcing the politicians to follow suit or disappear. Car dependency is a good example.

You seem to be arguing for my point. Just because you couldn’t deal with what people want as an elected representative doesn’t mean it can’t be changed, isn’t being changed right now.

I wasn’t encouraging anyone to run for office.

If that were true, you'd expect suburban houses to be more expensive than those in the city, but in reality it is generally the opposite. Here in Seattle, we watch the urban population grow in lockstep with the availability of new housing, year after year, while the cost of that housing continues to rise - much faster than the general rate of inflation. Simple economics suggests that city life must be very desirable, and that the urban population would be growing even faster if more housing were being built: therefore, some fraction of those people who end up in the suburbs are moving there not because it is their preference, but because wealthier people have outbid them for the more desirable city life. This is what people mean when they complain about gentrification.

You cannot be sure Americans actually want to live in suburbs when that is all that most of them have to choose from, and that is the case because American zoning codes adopted in the mid 20th century made it difficult to build much of anything else. Car dependency was created, by law; do not mistake it for revealed preference.

It's possible to have both: bike stations near train stations. Ppl from suburbs/low density areas go with bike to train station, and to their destination with the train. You may say ppl don't want this and this may be true, it's about tradeoffs: do you optimise for medium-high density or for low. Nowadays us/canada&even some europe does for low density

And yet skinny houses in dense neighborhoods are always scooped up the moment they hit the market in my area.

> Just look at almost any billionaire's mansion and you will see this pattern which becomes an aspiration for the middle class. Most people, given enough wealth, desire and choose the McMansion.

Billionaires tend to have lots of houses, including condos in Manhattan and London. And probably a yacht too. Not sure if we can derive a lot about general housing preferences from that.

Suburban sprawl is literally a result of policy, not just "what people want". Most people would love to live in a gigantic castle in the Loire valley with a helicopter taking them to the office - should we subsidize that as well?

Enabling people's wants by subsidizing it from other people's pockets - makes for a very bad result.

Start removing tax breaks for home ownership, rationally spreading the burden of maintaining infrastructure and other fun things that are subsidized today - you'll quickly learn that most people will weigh their options and think twice about McMansions.

The reality is - many people would love to live in a small town, with a train station to take a reliable ride to work in the city. Look at what happened in England, when already subsidized train tickets from satellite towns rose in prices.

The 'we' subsidizing the middle class is the middle class. "We" are paying for it. What 'we' are also forced to subsidize is the everyone else on top of our choice of accommodations.

I can compare old houses at the edge of a city which cost four times as much to new builds at the far edges of that city's metro area which cost significantly less. The more expensive houses require significantly less infrastructure and cost the government less to support because of their location.

A huge undercurrent in urban planning discourse right now (e.g., Strong Towns), is that if all subsidies and taxes were removed both the poor and rich living closer to the city (or in older, denser suburbs) would have more money at the end of the day, while most living in significantly less dense housing would not be able to afford to pay for their lifestyle.

I'm certain this logic only applies to mega cities. The vast majority of smaller cities and towns are like one or two streets of high density and the rest is suburban or rural. There's not actually anyone in the 'city' to subsidize those around it.

There are a lot of cities in the Rust Belt and Midwest like I described, with the regional population around 1-2 million which are far away from being mega cities.

In the few examples I've personally visited, the residential density in the older "upscale" neighborhoods tends to come from duplexes and single family houses on small lots (or larger lots with a comparatively small amount of street frontage). There's some large buildings mixed in along with some very upscale condos and row houses.

Outside of extreme cases, infrastructure costs tend to become dominated by how long the road or pipes are, rather than the number of people using them.

Those are not suburban.

You're equating rural areas, with suburban.

And no, it's not about mega-cities. Detroit is not a mega city.

In large part, people want what we are taught to want. A hundred billion humans lived and died without ever knowing about or wanting Coca Cola or a Ford F150s or a McMansion or a photo album of their children or a poster of Marilyn Monroe in primary colours or a Fabergé egg or a KFC bucket or a private jet or a luxury yacht. Such things didn't exist, and nobody suffered a moment for it. The things we want as animals are such things as warmth, shelter, calories, respect. Most everything else is a manufactured desire, and a lot of the remainder is "wanting nothing, seeing someone else have a thing, wanting that thing".

Marketing turned women on to smoking, turned Americans onto sodas, turned Americans onto cars, onto basketball, onto Nike sneakers, onto fast food burgers, onto SUVs and are now turning Americans onto pickup trucks - it's not accidental, it costs billions and takes years. Billionaires don't want luxury yachts because they develop a mysterious desire to go boating, they want luxury yachts because they are useful tax vehicles.

Talking about "what people want" without taking into account that what people want is malleable and flexible, is missing something important.

This argument is overly general, allowing you to dismiss any expressed desires as "not real".

There is, in a sense, genuine suffering from not having a dishwasher or a bike or a basketball or a poster of the horsehead nebula even though we lived without them for millenia.

I'm not saying they aren't real desires, I'm saying that "the future can be whatever we want it to be" is hackable by advertisers and we should want some defense against that.