> One reasonable argument I've seen is that once you factor in car+gas, the difference narrows. There's also an element of the suburban "ponzi" scheme.

There are very few cities in the US in which owning a car is optional. Only one (New York City) has an outright majority of people who don't own a car. The next two, D.C and Boston, are the only others that have more than a third of households without a car[0].

The reason is that most cities just don't have the infrastructure necessary to facilitate car non-ownership. It's not that everyone wants to own a car; it's that you have to own a car anyway, at least some of the time, and once you already own a car, the impetus to live in higher-density, more expensive areas drops dramatically.

[0] You can inflate those numbers a bit by counting Jersey City and Newark as separate cities from the New York City metro area, but no matter how you slice and dice it, it doesn't change the numbers much.

Tokyo is the only city I've ever lived in where I didn't have to own a car, so I didn't. Everywhere else I've lived, I have had to own a car to get to work. Even in New York, I had to own a car to get to work. I hate everything about driving—other drivers, cops, accidents, detours, traffic, etc. I would never own a car if I could get away with it. Unfortunately, I've only been able to do that for about three years of my life.

I can't think of a single European city that I've personally been to in which car ownership was required. There were some in which it could be viewed as helpful, but the vast majority are car optional, especially in the NW of the continent.

I'm happy to be proven wrong, but in all honesty, I moved 4 cities in as many years, all in different countries, and all of different sizes.

> Even in New York, I had to own a car to get to work.

I'm assuming you lived in the outer boroughs? In Manhattan, it's painful to own a car unless you're really wealthy.

I've lived in Sydney and even though I had a car, I did not actually need it. I think I drove it less than once a month, and usually just to get out of the place.

I've visited NY a few times and if you can live along the subway corridors then you don't need a car.

Right now I'm in Europe, and own no car. But realistically the roads here and the driving is far more intimidating than in Australia.

Suburban infrastructure is massively subsidized by taxes paid by cities. There was a good article linked from HN last year.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/6/14/the-growth-pon...

> I've asked this before on similar articles, but I just can't wrap my head around why suburbs are intrinsically cheaper than cities.

You can't understand it because you have it backward.

If land is cheap you have urban areas.

If land is expensive you have dense cities (since a small apartment is all you can afford).

Once you realize that cause and effect are the reverse of what you think, it will make more sense.

When land prices go up, lots get rapidly subdivided with more houses, and then apartments (as prices go up higher).

When land prices go down, buildings get torn down, and the (now vacant) adjacent yards get added to existing homes.

You basically described SimCity, but it's not so simple in real world: 1) you can't build high-rise buildings anywhere and must follow zone planing (especially relevant in old Europe cities, where old town located in the core of the city and is strictly preserved). 2) People, especially older, get attached to their homes and don't sell it as soon as land price increases; some homes stay in the same family for generations. 3) Increase of land price doesn't necessarily leads to high-rise apartment buildings, but sometimes to luxury homes with big gardens if it's a beautiful area located in close proximity to the city.

Suburbs aren't intrinsically cheaper than cities. In places where suburban living isn't massively subsidized by urban taxes, it's far cheaper to live in a city. Just look at the urbanization rates in countries with poor/ineffective central governments. Poor people wouldn't be migrating to cities en masse unless they had a damn good economic reason for doing so.