Well no not necessarily - a lot has to do with the car lobbies starting around like 1920s time. They invented jaywalking, bought up land to put in car infrastructure, got rid of tram cars etc…
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I would argue that you’re wrong here, and overlooking one of the major true issues preventing good urbanism in the US: zoning.
Buyers definitely want walkable, urban, sustainable living. It’s the reason why the most expensive area of any city is the one with good urbanist living. Supply is low and demand is huge, which is why the downtown apartment buildings have essentially zero vacancy on average, despite charging 4x market average per square foot for their units.
So why dont developers build more of this highly in-demand urbanist housing/communities? Because they legally cant, due to zoning. Home owners associations and other NIMBY groups have been lobbying the government for decades to create and protect single-family zoning requirements in nearly every city, county, and state in this country. These zoning laws carve out huge sections of every city and make it illegal to build anything other than a detached single family home.
This was done deliberately to artificially inflate the prices of single family houses, at the cost of enshrining suburban sprawl in law and setting us on the path we are currently driving down. Endlessly increasing car traffic, housing shortages, unaffordable living, car dependency, divestment from transit, bankrupt cities/counties, etc etc etc, can all be linked back to single-family zoning laws warping the market pressures of city development in favor of cars and suburban hellscape.
There’s hope though. Many cities (big and small) in the US are figuring out the huge flaws of the current system, and are abolishing single-family zoning. Oregon abolished single-family zoning laws statewide in 2019, and it’s already radically reshaping cities and towns to create more places that are clearly in demand.
TL;DR There’s tons of demand for walkable, mixed use, multi-modal communities and developments, they are just illegal to build in most of America.
Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
P.S. If any of this is interesting, these videos are a great place to learn more.
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this is what I wanted to say in a much deeper way 
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I take long poops, so I have plenty of time to type 
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love Not Just Bikes by the way - great content
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ANYY time an urban planner gets busy creating a liveable neighborhood with mixed use etc, the right wing goes ballistic calling it communist. We are too cool for good design.
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Some do, there are lots of people that want to live in cites because they like those factors. But the vast majority don’t, the majority of Americans live in the suburbs because they want to, they want space to raise a family and a backyard to entertain people in. There should be changes to some overly restrictive zoning laws and other things like not requiring as much space to be used for parking.
You can see it in any map, people aren’t leaving expensive cities and going to cheaper cities San Francisco to Sacramento for example, they are moving to the suburbs because they are no longer going into their office everyday so they are free to live where they please and when given that choice they often pick the suburbs and increasingly have started to pick even more rural areas.
The cities in America have lost a lot of their desirability regardless of price, from the rampant crime in San Francisco, Oakland and some parts of LA to the lack of in person business forcing people to live close to their office to make commute easy.
Nothing is forcing people to live in suburbs, it’s just what the market wants at this time.
Spoken as someone who lived in a city for the first half of my life.
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@ARCTIC the urban cores you’re identifying as less desirable became that way because they were bulldozed and turned into giant parking lots. It’s probably fair to say that once economic incentives dissapear, people want out.
This hollow model of urban development does not exist in contrast to the suburbs, but because of them. All that car infrastructure exists to support people from outside the core.
@BenjaminF is talking about areas that aren’t touched by this effect, and still retain their convenience and charm. They are indeed the most intensely demanded type of space in the nation today, relative to the amount of housing stock.
This is a sampling error. You can’t record migration to walkable neighborhoods that don’t exist. If suburbs are the only legal thing to build, you’ll record migration to them as soon as people want to migrate.
A zoning code that only permits frying pans and fires would generate the impression that frying pans are a highly desirable form of housing.
The fact that walkable neighborhoods barely exist in the US also shapes your stats culturally, in the sense that people will asses where they want to go based on what they perceive as available.
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I think some people want to live in the city and some don’t.
I think some want to drive cars and some don’t.
and I think all of those options are fine.
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Yep! Agreed there.
The only issue is that in the US, suburbs are often not built to be self sufficient. Few job opportunities and so forth. So the issues of car dependent development will find their way to you as a city dweller, whether you want it or not.
(Source: used to live next to an elevated highway, nearly gets run over every few months while skating to work, bus commute takes an hour due to car traffic, etc.)
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Yeah, I dont know the right answer to any of this. All I know is Im happy in life and I would never live in a city haha.
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Do I get the appeal of being able to walk or bike to many amenities? Yes.
Do I get the appeal of having my own space and land and no wall neighbors? Also yes.
So my rural/suburban area of the city is building bike paths to the downtown city center. This isn’t a huge metropolis, but there are lots of bars, restaurants, etc centered around a few main streets. You’d likely have seen us on a hallmark movie your grandmother was watching. I see this as win win for both sides of the argument as it improves mobility that doesn’t require cars while still giving me the affordable living and space I crave. If these smaller city centers each had reliable train/bus to the big city centers (Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, etc) we would have a subnetwork of efficient transport. Many of these large metro areas are already connected via longer bus lines or rail.
I fully believe the bridge gap is right there:
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bike paths from suburban areas to smaller city centers
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Bus/train paths from smaller cities to their largest metro areas
Hypothetically, I could go to any large city center with what I could carry on my back/PEV.
There was an article I read a few weeks back about the imaginary boundary between downtowns and suburbs and how it is unnecessarily costly for either to venture into the others area (car based) so it often dissuades both sides. It really made it clear how needed the gap infrastructure is when you’ve got city centers spread so far out from one another.
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I think its fair to want to live in a city and both not want to be killed by a car as well as not want to die by a fire caused by shoddy li-on batteries being worked on in a building zoned for residential.
Of course regulations can go too far, but I don’t think I can defend allowing large quantities lf li-on batteries to be kept under housing.
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There was actually a pretty good episode on the 99PI podcast about this so called “Missing Middle”, something larger than a tower condo to support a family but not a suburban sprawl. It would make the most sense to a large majority of the population, but current development focuses on the two extremes.
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Cars dont kill people. The people who operate them do.
Unfortunately the majority of people drive cars.
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Cars kill cities.
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Cars, and the infrastructure required to accommodate them in large numbers, turn normal human failings into lethal situations. It’s not the most lethal form of transportation for nothing
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a walkable neighborhood doesn’t instantly mean giant city. This is a common misconception. A neighborhood can still be friendly to pedestrians and cyclists and allow children to safely play in the street without it being a metropolis. The real problem is neighborhoods like this aren’t very common here and instead you get these places where it’s outright dangerous to walk at all let alone have kids play outside because there’s a 4 lane stroad in the middle of it.
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This sounds like where I live. Northern Jersey, alot of small towns with walkable stores, restaurants and more. It’s very nice, minus the winter. I don’t like being cold.
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that’s because you’re one of the lucky ones
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