On the flipside, I don't want a huge place to live, so I am actively trying to find (or build) a small (less than 1800sqft) narrow (3 stories, like a detached townhouse) house that is extremely ecological (passive house standards) in a walkable area. When I considered permanently moving to Europe, places like this were actually not horribly uncommon, although they weren't as common as apartment blocks. In the US, places like this are near impossible to find because most houses are built by "production builders" who optimize for the largest square footage possible on a lot space allowed by local code to increase selling price, and do it as the lowest cost (meets code, maybe, basically same as getting a C grade).
It's only one neighbor out of the 6 I would share separating walls with, but one is all it takes.
Zoning that allows ONLY single-family detached housing, and no retail or business, forces car-dependency.
"Detached home or high-rise apartment in a city" is a false dichotomy.
Not really. Small grocery stores lack variety (by necessity, when their potential market is limited to families living in a 1-2 mile radius). Two restaurants lack variety. It makes for stupidly boring food choices over time.
Frankly, I'd end up not using them, ordering even more over the internet, and interacting even less with folks nearby.
And people living downtown still do the same - driving to same big malls in outskirts, restaurants in other towns etc. The funniest case is when people live downtown and drive to non-downtown workplaces :)
A lot of suburbs are not like that. I've lived in the Bay Area suburbs for most of my life and I don't think I've ever lived more than half a mile from a shopping center with a grocery store and restaurants. Every main road has them. Between the main roads, there are houses.
Same thing. I found that people who could afford cars bought them for the convenience (despite the 100% import duty and $100,000 COE charge for 10 year permit).
And same with detached housing. It’s was pretty much the ideal for families. Constant complaints of noise in apartment buildings, crappy neighbors, limited space.
Don’t get me wrong, many people like the apartment living car-free. Mostly, young, childless people. But when kids came into the picture or even wealth increased and people got older, preferences changed.
Meanwhile, the American suburb seems to have been modeled after manor estates but shrunk down to a level where it doesn't make sense. Each property has more personal land, but not enough to be "self-sufficient". That slight lowering of density prevents easy walkable access to any sort of central community hub, which makes it financially unviable to have a small community shopping district. That makes a shared public transit access point difficult to implement, since there's no community hub. Everything else spirals from there, making cars (and particularly bigger cars - remember, you need to keep the "estate" supplied with the necessities from a store located a 20-30 minute drive away) the only way for a family to function.
I don't want to live in Hong Kong density, but I absolutely don't want to live in the typical American suburbia.
> remember, you need to keep the "estate" supplied with the necessities from a store located a 20-30 minute drive away)
People don't live in the suburbs to start a mini-farm. If you have to drive 20-30 minutes just for necessities you live in a rural area, not suburbs.
Yeah - they could go out. But they’ll come back in and its messy and noisy everywhere.
It’s just the way kids are. I guess folks need to be careful what they wish for. I’m all for accessible and densely populated housing. But I’m used to the noise.
I can watch movies at cinema reference volume at home at 3am and my neighbors don't notice it either.
Your problem isn't with apartment buildings, it's with shoddy american construction standards.
I've lived in all concrete apartment buildings and you can still here some noise as it travels through solid concrete pretty well.
My girlfriend and I are about to move to the suburbs to be closer to her family, but it’s to an inner-ring suburb with excellent transit back into the city. There are maybe two towns for this in the area that aren’t outrageously priced, and even those two are above average.
See also, “The myth of revealed preference for suburbs”: https://cityobservatory.org/the-myth-of-revealed-preference-...
The average American wants to live in a detached house that they own. This does not lead to dense cities. It leads to sprawl, which is what we got because it’s what we want.