What other options provide good public schools, homes that are pleasant to be inside, and a clean/safe/well-functioning environment?

I hate sprawl and fast-casual architecture as much as the next guy, but it is the only thing that can grow at scale under our economic and political reality. Alternatives only exist because they were created in a different era, under different constraints. Their supply is fixed and dwindling. So of course we are going to see a large and growing segment of the population in the only kind of housing it's both legal and profitable to build.

Also, by the way, the median driving commute is closer to 25 minutes. Commuting 1-2 hours each way is something transit riders do; for drivers it's very rare.

Try traveling to Europe or Japan sometime. They have dense cities with nice homes, great public schools, and a clean and safe environment. Japan in particular has basically zero crime. Cities in Europe are walkable and bikeable, and it's commonplace to have residential units on top of commercial space so that people can easily walk to a nearby cafe or restaurant or grocery store. You see this in NYC too to an extent.

>I hate sprawl and fast-casual architecture as much as the next guy, but it is the only thing that can grow at scale under our economic and political reality.

Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Sprawl doesn't scale, that's the whole problem: you're just going to get worse commute times, more traffic congestion, etc. It isn't going to help, it's going to hurt.

>So of course we are going to see a large and growing segment of the population in the only kind of housing it's both legal and profitable to build.

Then you need to change the laws.

>Commuting 1-2 hours each way is something transit riders do; for drivers it's very rare.

Here in the DC area, it's extremely common.

Most people shop for housing where there job and family are; international migration is a big deal. Japan is very hard to immigrate to if you lack Japanese ancestry.

>Continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity

>Then you need to change the laws.

Land use policy is made by a small, elite, politically active subset of incumbents. People looking for a place to live, and choosing the best of the available options for their circumstances, are not to blame for the abysmal nature of the available options. This is the whole problem. Market demand has little to no influence on what can be built. It's inappropriate to look down on people for moving to suburbia. The scorn is rightly placed with activists and politicians for crippling our cities so badly that suburbia manages to be better.

>Here in the DC area, it's extremely common.

The data say 32 minutes [0]. This is high compared to the national 25, but no, 1-2 hours is not the norm even there.

[0] https://wtop.com/traffic/2017/04/dc-area-has-2nd-longest-ave...

Cities at one time were far superior to non-cities in precisely those ways. It is not an inherent flaw of cities, just a problem with how we manage American cities.

Some studies have basically found that people chronically overvalue how happy a nice house will make them, and undervalue how unhappy a long commute will make them. I don't know if Americans are uniquely guilty of this, but humans are prone to lots of little errors like this.

Neither the 4 mile walk through congested, diesel-fumed London or the small, expensive flat with single glazed windows did make me happier.

I now live 30 miles outside London and take a 30 minute train to work. It is much cheaper, much more pleasant (I stand on the train most of the time) and I get to hear the birds and smell the fresh air when I wake up or go outside.

You're assigning beliefs to Americans that, in my experience, they don't have in any significant numbers.

And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way.

When I lived in Brussels, Belgium from 1999 to 2006 and worked for a Dutch consulting company, there was a period of time where my commute was 1.5-2.0 hours one-way to go up to the company offices in Veldhoven, or to a customer site at Eindhoven.

Living here in Austin since 2006, during rush hour, any commute involving any of the major infrastructure (360, MoPac, I-35, etc...) is likely to take at least 30 minutes, if not an hour or more. When there isn't any traffic, that same commute might take just fifteen minutes.

When my brother-in-law lived and worked in the LA area many years ago, until he made a point of moving to an apartment that was ridiculously close to the office, he was frequently spending two or more hours on the road, one-way. And that's when traffic was reasonably good and there weren't major jams that turned into eighteen-plus hours on the road, one-way.

Just because you don't have a given type or amount of experience, doesn't mean that your experience is universal in this regard.

I certainly realize that my experience is not universal, but I do have multiple instances in my life where I saw those kinds of numbers on a regular basis. And I knew plenty of people at the time who had similar experiences to mine.

It hasn't changed, and if anything it's worse. The traffic on I-66 into town every morning looks like a parking lot, all so a bunch of people can live in McMansions in Manassas and Haymarket and Gainesville.

>And at that time, I knew people who commuted down to the Pentagon from Baltimore, so spending 2-3 hours on their commute, one-way.

Yep, I've met people who live in DC and commute to Baltimore (because they don't want to live in Baltimore...), and people who live in NoVA and commute to Annapolis.

This stuff is common here. You can see it in the massive traffic jams on I-66 and on the beltway every workday: those people aren't getting to work in 15-30 minutes in that traffic.

That would be a poor decision indeed. But more likely, in my experience, is that they live far from their work because there is no affordable housing near their work.