"We" have all kinds of different needs and desires. Not everyone wants to live in a densely populated area.

In any case, uncoupling the location of your home from the location of your job should improve your ability to live closer to the people and places you want to be close to in your personal life. That would go for everyone, those who want to live in densely populated areas and those who don't.

You don't get to decide what counts as "decadence". Nor are cities subsidizing suburban and rural areas; in most cases it's the other way around, it's the cities that continually get themselves into financial trouble and have to be bailed out, and the suburban and rural areas that are fiscally responsible.

> It's not a personal choice that doesn't effect others

Neither is your personal choice to live in densely populated cities.

> Development is a collective choice

And when there are significant sub-populations with widely different preferences, the right collective choice is to separate the sub-populations so each can have their own areas where they can implement their preferences, not for one sub-population to force its preferences on everyone else.

I don't, but the accounting does.

> Nor are cities subsidizing suburban and rural areas; in most cases it's the other way around, it's the cities that continually get themselves into financial trouble and have to be bailed out, and the suburban and rural areas that are fiscally responsible.

This is completely false.

It seems that way because of cities offering extra services get hit with austerity first, but the base line is is not no net subsidization. You are just observing cities being unable to fund those services and subsidize the suburbs at the same time.

Google "cities subsidize suburbs" and find things all across the political spectrum. For example, on the more right:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/16/when-apartment...

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/we-have-always-...

in addition to the original article on the left.

> And when there are significant sub-populations with widely different preferences, the right collective choice is to separate the sub-populations so each can have their own areas where they can implement their preferences, not for one sub-population to force its preferences on everyone else.

If suburbs can function without my money and without leaking their pollution in my air water, sure. But that is not possible.

Assuming your facts are correct--I have seen factual claims all over the map on this, and government subsidies and favoritism are all over the place, not just in favor of suburban homeowners--this is still not an argument for forcing everyone to live in densely populated cities. It's an argument for removing government subsidies and favoritism. Which I am completely in favor of doing; I'm quite willing to pay whatever the actual costs are of living where I want to live, and factoring those costs into my choice of where to live. What I'm not willing to do is force my choices to conform to someone else's idea of how people should live.

> without leaking their pollution in my air water

Where is that coming from? Certainly not from the references you gave. And if you think cities don't pollute, I don't know where you're getting that from either.

Would love to see a counter argument if there is one

> government subsidies and favoritism are all over the place, not just in favor of suburban homeowners.

There are many subsidies, but the magnitudes differ. Note it's not only home ownership subsidies, but zoning and other regulations, preference for building highways and not trains, low gas tax and lack of carbon tax, and many other such things.

The strong towns people also talk about longer and improperly financed pumbling and electrical lines, etc., but I don't know as much about that.

> Which I am completely in favor of doing; I'm quite willing to pay whatever the actual costs are of living where I want to live, and factoring those costs into my choice of where to live.

Great! But watch for big changes if this happens.

> This is still not an argument for forcing everyone to live in densely populated cities.

It doesn't need to be coerced, and properly accounting the externalities alone would make me quite happy too.

But some things like public transit the market just cannot do. The portion value captured is too small a portion --- while the operational costs can break even the capital costs might take > 50 years to recoup --- so that conventional finance says no. And that's not to say it's not worth, but it's a level of "risk" that even for truly great efficiency the private sector won't stomach. Also it is a natural monopoly so it would have to be regulated to death anyways if was privately run, basically defeating the purpose of trying to involve a market.

Also, note I said density not size. If people want to live in a https://media.timeout.com/images/103639693/1024/576/image.jp... in the middle of nowhere and there is a train running to it, that's fine with me.

> Where is that coming from? Certainly not from the references you gave. And if you think cities don't pollute, I don't know where you're getting that from either.

No not those sources but suburbs have far higher energy usage because the inefficiency of the sprawl and large homes, and even if we electrify everything with good power sources, there is tire pollution of electric cars, environment issues from the shear amount of land being taken (e.g. drainage like we saw in Houston during Hurricane Harvey).

--------

Bottom line is suburbs can work, but at great efficiency costs, so you have coordinate globally and fixing all our externalizes, and sacrifice the wealth that would come from greater efficiency in a rather heavy de-growth way, and probably rely on a shrunken population. In other words, if we were to do everything else right, this would be a "luxery" we can maybe get away with the next century.

But if so, what's the point? What's the point of individualist- nuclear-family-ist- vineer of that suburbanization if behind the scenes there is massive collecitivism to enforce everything to need it work? I do hope there is a time after this big mess of unsustainability to have more "ethical luxeries", but I can't imagine suburbanization would be one anyone would want at that point.

Sure it can. Many major cities in the US had multiple competing private companies providing public transit, and doing it quite efficiently and cheaply, up until around World War II. Then governments took over, drove the private companies out of business, and proceeded to make public transit in the US the mess that it is today.

But even with all that, private companies can still provide efficient public transit in the US today--if they're allowed to use buses traveling on roads to do it, instead of rail. For example, in the area where I live, a privately owned bus company was providing affordable bus service, faster than a driving commute, until the government stepped in and forced it out of business, in favor of a huge white elephant project to extend the rail system, giving people a longer commute (1 hour or more from train station to work, vs. a half hour to 40 minutes from bus stop, at the same location, to work) at a higher price (even though the rail system is government subsidized while the bus company was not).

> What's the point of individualist- nuclear-family-ist- vineer of that suburbanization if behind the scenes there is massive collecitivism to enforce everything to need it work?

You don't need massive collectivism to make suburbanization work. You need massive collectivism to make urbanization work. And the only reason we use the term "suburban" at all in the US is that we've urbanized so much. Before the massive urbanization of the US in the mid to late 20th century, the places we now call "suburbs" were just towns--towns that had developed naturally through freedom of choice and cooperation among people who wanted to form communities. Urbanization is what killed so many of those towns and destroyed what used to be a well functioning system of communities in favor of massive collectivism.

> this big mess of unsustainability

The claim that any lifestyle but an urbanized lifestyle is "unsustainable" is nonsense. What is unsustainable is massive collectivism. Massive collectivism killed more than a hundred million people in the twentieth century. It doesn't work.