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.

> 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".

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.

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.

It will become a necessity in a few decades.

Single family homes that are up to code don't bring in enough tax revenue to pay for the infrastructure that is necessary to suport them.

Same thing goes for strip mals.

You can try to run a deficit forever, it is just a really bad idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...

Is that because they don't prefer that design, or because protecting the price of their house is so essential to their long term financial stability that they'll block literally any policy, no matter how good, if it threatens their house price?

> It is illegal to build new dense walkable neighborhoods in almost all of north america

Yes.. because of the people's representatives. Why is that do you think?

> The older east coat cities built walkable neighbourhoods before they became illegal.

Technically, they were built before the modern automobile era when there was really no alternative. Additionally, geography played a part. Manhattan is land-constrained. So is San Francisco. LA, Chicago and Atlanta are not.

By any quantitative measure, Americans have clearly chosen a car-dependent lifestyle. Since WW2, houses have gotten larger while families have gotten smaller. When given the choice between less space is a downtown neighbourhood or more space in the suburbs the vast majority of people choose the latter.

People will even choose more space and pay exorbitant private school fees rather than live with less space but get a "free" excellent public school system, even though the latter is almost always more economically sensible, even more so the more children a family has.

Nobody campaigns on parking minimums, setbacks, etc and most people you speak to haven’t heard of these things. Municipal election turnout is low.

I’ll admit it’s certainly possible. Or possible that decades ago people voted for this and the laws stayed.

But the argument seems pretty indirect given how few people are familiar with these issues.

> Why is that do you think?

Zoning is too local, so if I can't afford to live near my job I can't vote to allow me to live near my job.

I've never dealt with a city in my region that didn't have variance procedures for building and land development permits. In my own experience, these committees are nearly a rubber stamp unless an adjacent property owner expects to be inconvenienced. You're observing what's called realized preferences.

Coffee-table planners seem content to frame everything as a political problem, as if developers are an extended civil service or some kind of unthinking machines. There is also an unsurprising lack of investigation into places in the world where zoning free-for-alls actually do exist. Most are not like Martha's Vinyard. Many people don't actually want to live in a favela, and they vote and spend their dollars accordingly.

The east coast built walkable neighborhoods because they were built before cars existed. Several of these states have a net negative domestic migration, which does not suggest that people want to live there.

There were plenty of walkable places in the US. They were just bulldozed for the car.

https://strongtowns.org has a few good examples.

Housing is actually more expensive outside of San Francisco, at least suburbs close to the city.

I’d say there is more demand for a house with a yard in the suburbs than a 2 bedroom apartment in the city.

Especially in a post-Covid world where people are working from home, who wants to be stuck in an apartment during the next lockdown?

> Housing is actually more expensive outside of San Francisco, at least suburbs close to the city.

Not per lot SQ feet

Because it's the land that drives value in the Bay Area.

I suppose you can use some weighted combination of lot and house, but I haven't seen common and simple valuation metrics there.

> Because it's the land that drives value in the Bay Area.

I'd say that's kind of their point.

Land is 50-60% of the total value in the Bay Area. You can’t ignore the other 40-50%.

Wait why is it illegal to build dense walkable neighbourhoods? Which laws?

At a high level:

1. Zoning prevents density, which precludes having enough foot traffic for neighborhood stores to exist (if zoning actually allow them).

2. Parking minimums force things farther apart because so much of each lot is asphalt.

3. Street design that prioritizes car speed over pedestrian safety.

In the end, it's not safe, pleasant, or practical to walk in suburbs built from the 70s on. These things are a patchwork of local and state law so specifics vary by area.