That's fine, so long as you're willing to pay for your infrastructure. Low-density suburbs with full utilities, storm sewer, etc, must have it's cost paid for by those who choose to live that lifestyle.

Those of us living 27 stories up are more efficient and shouldn't have to pay for your roads.

Because you grow crops on the roof, weave cotton in the basement, and build for furniture on another for? Roads are used for more than moving people around, they also move good around,which almost everyone partakes.

>Because you grow crops on the roof, weave cotton in the basement, and build for furniture on another for?

There's this thing that lets you present those expenses to consumers - it's called pricing.

You have to pay more for road maintenance - you raise prices to cover it - I now see the actual cost of your product instead of it being subsidized by my tax money regardless of using them.

A vanishingly small proportion of suburbanites farms, weaves or works in furniture factories. Indeed I wouldn't be amazed if more apartment-dwellers are engaged in those activities than McMansionites.

People growing food and making goods should embedded the cost of those roads in the prices of their products.

What percent of highway traffic is delivery trucks? The trucks need 1 or 2 lanes, not 8.

It's weird how efficient city living translates to 5-10x more expensive rent than wasteful suburban living, isn't it?

Not when suburban living is subsidized.

It seems to me that both urban and suburban landlords charge what they can get away with (aka "what the market will bear",) which is a much larger number in sought-after urban areas than in the suburbs. The kind of subsidies you talk about may also exist, but they're not the primary factor.

Except you can't. Your choices in the US are almost always suburban to rural, especially if a) you don't have a lot of money to afford the desirable urban areas and b) you don't want to deal with the crime in the undesirable ones.

This is the largest factor.

I love cities. But I'm having a hard time with so-called "urbanist" people/policies.

A lot of the philosophy boils down to intentionally make life harder for anyone who isn't living in Downtown urban cores -- areas so expensive, no one who works for a living can ever afford them.

Effectively, they want to punish poor and middle class people simply for being poor and middle class, through the design of the place we all live in. Which is counter to the whole point of cities in the first place.

Just the opposite. The right policies would make city living cheaper.

See eg https://www.jstor.org/stable/3159005?seq=1 (Sorry, can't find an open source right now. Basically, regulation caused the elimination of cheaper housing.)