But another problem: the suburbs are actually nice and in demand also. So how far do you want to live from your job? Freiburg (works for Bern and Lausanne!)? It’s like, ok I’m going to commute a lot and finding a place to rent is still hard. And Switzerland is not not dense.
True! But the suburbs seem much smaller than any I've seen in plenty of other similarly developed countries.
Like downtown Zurich to downtown Egg is 10 miles, yet it's almost all farms. Just in that small a radius alone you could make 10 additional Eggs (or 3 additional Usters), and house an additional 80k people with the exact same density.
Is there some kind of greenbelt restriction like the UK?
> the suburbs are actually nice and in demand also
Same in the US. In the Bay Area, the suburbs like the Tri-Valley, San Mateo County, Palo Alto, and southern Santa Clara County are all in greater demand than the city of San Francisco (it's cheaper to buy a family house in SF than it is in any of those suburbs). It's a similar story in Boston (Brookline), Seattle (Redmond, Bellevue, Bothell), Washington DC (southern Maryland), and New York (Hudson River Valley).
Yet why haven't construction companies in CH built similar high net worth suburbs? All the ones I am seeing are basically just historic villages.
In British terms, why isn't there a Milton Keynes or Reading in the Zurich metropolitan area?
Maybe because Zurich is so much smaller than London.
Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's similar in the UK I believe. Also vaguely reminds me of Speaker's Sqaure in Hyde Park.
> We also have zoning here
Why hasn't Zurich (or more like it's Canton's govt) expanded suburbs into the farmland surrounding it? For the size of city, it is quite small. And the southern portion towards Egg seems pretty flat and easy to build. Even with suburbs that have a fraction of the density that Zurich has, it would probably alleviate population pressures. I'm assuming local politics?
Actually, how is local politics (sub-canton level) organized in CH?