Not that there isn't a time for trying to bring a different perspective. But we should do it with humility, rather than assuming they're just wrong or misguided.

So... yes "stop convincing them" is a valid argument. "convince them not to" is slightly shakier moral ground.

Meanwhile people in Europe live in denser areas with smaller, more fuel-efficient cars or where they can do most of their commuting by foot, bike, or rail. That is the norm for people from those cultures, and so they—like us—largely choose to continue living in a world similar to that in which they grew up.

Given that one of these modes of living reliably produces a happier population and is significantly more environmentally and economically sustainable, that we're already in the business of promoting one style over another via housing policy, and that one of the core purposes of cooperative government is to find ways to promote outcomes that benefit everyone despite going against individuals' self-interest… what on earth is the problem?

Is that really a "given"?

> Given that ... one of the core purposes of cooperative government is to find ways to promote outcomes that benefit everyone despite going against individuals' self-interest

As I see it, government promotes outcomes that benefit "everyone" only by protecting individuals' self-interest.

It’s in my self-interest to take everything you own and to dump my waste in the nearest available yard that isn’t mine. Nobody wants to live in a world where people act like that, so we collectively agree that things are better off for everyone if we respect one another’s property rights and pay someone to take our trash and sewage somewhere else to be dealt with.

But to say that Government exists to promote outcomes that benefit everyone against individuals' self-interest is like saying that pit-mines exist because we enjoy creating giant pits. Or that cars exist so that we can burn a bunch of fuel. The restrictions on individuals' rights are necessary evils, which need to be carefully considered and minimized.

Hearing it framed the way you did does help me understand many peoples' points of view better though.

We accept bureaucracies because it helps us achieve common good that wouldn’t exist if everyone only looked out for themselves.

Roads and other infrastructure. Plumbing and water treatment. Sewers. Building codes. Schools for everyone. On and on and on these are things we’ve decided we’re better if everyone has access to or has to abide by, even if individually nobody would make it happen.

I am obviously biased given that I currently exist in a suburb.

I've got no objection to people who want to live a particular lifestyle doing so. But they should pay the costs that it inflicts on the rest of us.

Now they're getting bought up and the people are literally building houses from every end of the lot, often time getting variances for setbacks. They've decided that yards and green space are no longer important. They want wedge a three story 5K sq ft house on the same lot where a much smaller home fit.

So, I would agree and say to an extent, people are already there in terms of dealing with no lawns, now its just getting them to accept several houses on the same lot instead of their massive mcmansion.

I think we are on our way there, most new developments around here have houses that are nearly the size of the lot, with a tiny back yard and smaller front yard, and little room between houses. Developers get more money by making lots small and houses big, so there’s little incentive to have the large suburban d yards that wises to be common.

Of course, the houses are much larger than their Japanese counterparts. My Japanese mother in law thinks we are wealthy based on the size of our house, but we’re one of the smallest homes in the neighborhood,

My big problem with cities is the people.

If these buildings were properly soundproofed, in many ways I'd prefer living in the city, but as things stand the only people who get to enjoy that in cities are those at the tops of skyscrapers renting penthouse suites, all of whom reside in a plane of existence entirely separate from my own.

The number one thing I've enjoyed about suburb life, particularly as a remote worker, is how much more dramatically quiet it is, primarily thanks to not sharing a wall with anybody.

I do enjoy walking on the grass and taking care of some plants, but I didn't really need so much land if not to keep neighbours away (I used to live in an apartment where a neighbour made my life hell, never again).

My family member just bought a ridiculous gas-guzzler to drive even more ridiculous distance to their job and still manage to muster up courage to complain about gas prices to me. It is not the use ( or lack thereof ). It is the lack basic sense.

I don't have a mega yard, because I can't afford the upkeep. If I could, I would consider it.

In the case of your family member sure they lack sense, but I've found for lawns at least, to lean into that and use arguments like, 'hey clovers are better because you don't need to mow and barely need to water, this means you can sit on your ass more!' (something like that).

Understand that most people over manage their lawns. You can get your lawn a little more green (the color, not the environmental green) with excess water and chemicals. They are not needed at all though.

Americans in the same situation would not have built something like Tokyo.

If you're going to bring up Tokyo you should also bring up Houston. Houston is what most American cities would look like if the people who lived there were able to build what they wanted. Most Americans want to live in detached homes that they own, and they prefer cars to public transit.

Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.

We quite literally have the power to influence that instead of just throwing our hands up and saying "well gosh Americans want terribly designed communities whose long-term costs are completely unsustainable, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it."

This isn't some immutable law of the damned universe.

That's quite a strawman there.

Suburbs are not inherently unsustainable or terribly designed. Some are, but some cities are too.

I'm seeing a ton of strawman arguments, totally inaccurate descriptions of suburbs, unsourced hyperbole about "subsidies" and "externalities", and conflation of "suburb" and "rural" in this thread which certainly does not apply to any suburbs I've ever lived in.

I would guess that most suburbs are financially unsustainable in the long term because they pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain their infrastructure. Strong towns talks about this in great detail.

Again, that is something that might be true for some places but not others.

I know of suburbs that definitely pay for themselves. And it's not hard to see why -- the property taxes are high and many of the residents are paying high income taxes too. Plus, many residents of suburbs commute to work in cities, where they contribute to the success of businesses that pay taxes in those cities.

I also know that some of the new subdivisions outside of Sacramento have paid for all of their infrastructure via their HOA, so that all of the money to build and maintain the roads, sewers, and power lines was 100% paid for by the homeowners. That's also apparently a common model for new housing in Nevada.

These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.

Why should they be redistributed to the recreationally remote? Are they especially in need?

But often not by enough to balance the amount of publicly-funded road space and parking they use.

> These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.

We absolutely get these arguments on other topics when public money is being spent on luxuries for the wealthy, which is what suburban living is. Police, fire departments, and schools are necessities. Zillion-square-foot homes and lawns are not.

People with more resources and more power have taken larger living spaces for centuries, the idea of wanting more space isn't some creation of post-WWII America.

Nowdays we talk about trains in the US as a "let's get away from suburban development" but the train itself was a driver of suburbanization from London, historically - people opted for more space and a train commute when they got the option.

Do they really?

My country is a textbook case of the opposite, where the general population suddenly decided they don't really want to live in apartment blocks in the city - especially the type which was built in the communist second half of the XXth century.

What happened next was intense proliferation of sprawl. It actually was seen as a status symbol back then to be able to afford a detached house.

So much so that the urbanization rate actually slightly fell in the past 20 years.

People gravitate towards comfort and apparently needing to drive everywhere but having enormous living space is preferable to living in a relatively small apartment and walking/cycling.

Houston has space to expand so it can easily keep building outwards without bulldozing shit (which requires people wanting to sell their land, etc, etc). Development is easy if there's nothing to displace. NY? LA? SF? Not so much. No coincidence that Chicago is much cheaper than those geography-bound places too.

Compare Houston to other cities in Texas *that have plenty of zoning of the sort that would be immediately recognizable in the Bay Area) and it no longer looks like any YIMBY miracle of affordability. Just... basically the same...