Bullshit!
Look at the zoning codes for most cities. This is one of the most regulated markets in the US!
Minimum setbacks, heights, parking minimums, lot sizes, allowed uses - the list goes on and on, and is extremely prescriptive and detailed.
For instance, here in Bend Oregon, you can look through the city code for parking minimums:
"Beauty parlor and Barber shop: 3 spaces for each of the first 2 beauty or barber chairs, and 1½ spaces for each additional chair"
And this is pretty typical in the US.
Edit: I'll add that I am not a libertarian "markets solve all problems" kind of guy, but housing/land use is absolutely something where I think we could use more markets. I highly recommend these books:
The Rent is Too Damn High: http://amzn.to/2cxlP87
The Gated City: http://amzn.to/2cf7jBo
As well as this site: http://marketurbanism.com/ (some of those guys are pretty hard core libertarian, but I guess we can agree to disagree on many things and concentrate on markets and urbanism).
http://marketurbanism.com/2016/06/02/houston-beautiful-yet-p...
But it is affordable, which is good.
This is specifically the opposite of the case. Developers would happily build New York and San Francisco up into the stratosphere if it were legal. It's not, so they have to build out instead. This is 100% determined by the regulatory structure that legalizes sprawl and prohibits densification.
In these "rest of the country" places, you can't have a meaningful conversation about housing problems, because the residents will point to the suburbs/exurbs and say "those are still affordable -- that's where the middle class should go". Which is a better situation than say San Francisco, but it's still bad -- it's generating even more sprawl and further kills public transit (as this article highlights).
New dense urban construction in small Midwest cities is close-to-identical (within 10-15%) to top ten market pricing, even though wages are still 20-40% lower on average, and construction costs + land costs are lower. Small and medium sized Midwest cities cut themselves off at their own feet, building lots of "urban" housing that's priced identically to places like Seattle / Portland / Denver. They then act really surprised/frustrated when working class people complain about housing costs and gentrification in their "low cost of living" cities.
A $300k housing unit in "the rest of the country" is often just as unaffordable as say, a $600k housing unit in Seattle, if you measure that cost in terms of percent of paycheck -- which is what working class people rent/purchase housing with.
It's simple math. If the cost of building the development + required infrastructure is less than the price can sell it for then things will get built. It's the responsibility of the city to bundle the infrastructure requirements onto the building permit.
Trains do not get a lot of eminent domain help, instead their is a lot of work to build within existing right of ways.
A good example of this is Level of Service, a policy that dictated for decades that roads be evaluated by how many cars they moved in a given amount of time. People going by other modes? Safety? Measuring how long it actually takes people to get where they need to be? Not important; always cars, always faster.
One of the dumb things about American cities is that you have big cities with large apartment complexes and sprawly suburbs and not a whole lot in between, which is entirely due to policies, not the choices of individual families or developers. See: http://missingmiddlehousing.com
And kids, in my experience, hate suburbia, especially as they get into early teens and want some independence. It's like living in a giant protective bubble where there's nowhere to go and nothing to do, without having to have someone's parents cart you around.
Surely whatever dangers kids are exposed to in cities absolutely pale in comparison to the increased risk of car accidents caused by living in the suburbs, where virtually every outing requires a lengthy trip by car.
Look around "kid-friendly" suburbia, and there's practically no kids outside.
Then again, suburban dwellers aren't totally crazy because our large cities are also built for cars with space for people as a complete afterthought most of the streets in Minneapolis need a road-diet. In Minneapolis, we invented the mall (Southdale), which sucked all the retail life out the city then we added the 'Mall of America' just to finish the job, to add insult to injury we built preposterous skyways which divides what's left of our paltry street-life onto two levels.
I really should move to Europe: Paris, Milan, Utrecht, Munich, London, Budapest, Prague... heartbreaking beauty.
What people are referring to on this thread is really exurbs.
The one catch is the risk of my kid being squished like a bug by idiot suburban drivers.
Good for them. If that's what they want then they should pay for it in a free and open market. I shouldn't have to subsidize their preferences via restrictive zoning.
That is your rightful opinion, but it's not everyone's opinion. As someone who already lives in SF, I believe SF exists to stay nice and to not be overrun by more people/cars/traffic/pollution. In other words, the exact opposite of what you want it to be.
I guess some people were born in the right place though, in which case you can only commend them for having worked so hard to be born there.
This doesn't follow. It's incredibly efficient, in time and effort terms, to get around sprawl. You just drive at 65mph on the wide-open freeways and up the parking lot with plenty of open space in front of every conceivable destination. I've never spent more than 30 minutes making a point-to-point hop where both points are in sprawl. Average case, more like 10. Traffic jams == not sprawl-y enough.
Thirty minutes for any public transit trip in San Francisco or Chicago (at least the parts I can afford) is like a once-a-year pop-the-champagne-corks celebration. Ten, forget it. Not gonna happen ever unless it's the corner store. Getting anywhere useful is usually abut 50 minutes. (I'm pretty sure this is the CTA's SLA. No matter the distance - past a point, roughly 50 minutes. Implies some design effort and a sophisticated balancing of slower and faster lines).
Sure, bus tickets are cheaper than car ownership, but our time is worth something too.
>just agglomerations of many towns without a center
This is precisely what the pro-density anti-car people on HN advocate: dense walkable neighborhoods, with no real solution for medium distance transportation. Tiny markets where local businesses get to price-gouge you because going to a competitor means lighting your afternoon on fire.
My time is valuable, and I spend none of it stuck in traffic or looking for parking.
Advocating for density means that more people have the option of living this way.
You've been served badly by public transit, but you seem to be saying that public transit should be as bad for everyone as it is for you.
Suppose you live in the premium housing really close to the BART, so your walk is only five minutes to the station. Then another five getting through the fare gate and waiting for your train. Then your destination is an easy ten-minute walk from the BART. Great, but that's not a 30-minute trip, it's a 50-minute trip.
Developers do what they can in the tax and legal climate they operate in. Incentives are always extremely difficult.
developers aren't to blame, zoning laws, political payoffs, and more, are to blame. Your so called bogeymen have to play by the rules set by the politicians who are concerned about reelection, post office income streams, and fame. They want to name bridges, buildings, and more, and get credit for stadiums and such. They certainly are not interested in the lives of residents until an election roles around
Cities exist to make it easy for everyone in them to meet or work with anyone else as cheaply as possible. They are markets for jobs, goods and services. When cities make it difficult to meet and work with others, as they do when they sprawl, they have effectively failed. In a sense, they are not really cities, but just agglomerations of many towns without a center. This describes many so-called cities in America, with LA being one of the most egregious examples.
One of the reasons cities have sprawled is because their development has been entrusted to, well, developers. Those are the contractors that Buildzoom addresses as its audience, and the website is flattering their sensibilities. They like a supply chain that involves suburbs with lots of cookie-cutter mini-mansions. Easy to commodify and sell, and someone else can worry about the commuting headaches.