I’ll add one more: there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly. We are very good at building that type of landscape.
The HN crowd tends not to be the target market for this though so it gets criticized and downplayed here.
There has been a shift toward urbanism in the last 25 years though, and prices exploding in the cities show that the market is lagging in satisfying that demand.
One needs to consider, however, why people prefer this kind of homes in the US, compared to most countries. It is probably because life is so hard and expensive on most American cities. And I say this as somebody from another country, where cities are livable and provide lots of advantages -- something that we associate in the US only to New York City and its high associated costs.
Just putting in a quiet vote for Chicago, that most underrated and magnificent of American cities. If you don't mind the risk of getting murdered once in a while, the city is affordable, beautiful, walkable, full of great food and good people, and has arguably one of the country's best public transit systems. It also has household garbage collection, unlike NYC's trash mountains. It reminds me a lot of the great metropolises outside the country.
It really makes other US cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. seem like quaint little backwater neighborhoods. Most of those have become little more than traffic-ridden strip malls, preserving a tiny downtown district but everywhere else is mostly just a bunch of drive-up destinations with little pedestrian activity and not much liveliness. Chicago's neighborhoods are still super vibrant and full of festivals, and even in the deep snow of winter people will bustle on the sidewalks and converge on the fun pubs and music venues and such. I've never seen anything else like that in the US.
But, yes, walk a few blocks in the wrong direction and you'll soon be dead. Despite that, millions make it their home. It's an amazing place to live.
The poor shape of America's cities is both a cause and an effect. There are numerous other reasons. Here's the big ones in no particular order:
(1) America's very old and ongoing racism problem, hence "white flight" and cycles of re-development due to segregation.
(2) The "law of rent" and the connection between the growth of the middle class and the use of suburbanization to escape high urban property prices and eternal rent to a landlord class: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent -- This one is tough to solve and is still a problem. There's a new re-suburbanization trend driven in part by young people realizing it's hard to build wealth if you can only ever rent. This is also a major driver of remote work. COVID just accelerated the remote work trend.
(3) A cultural legacy of preference for the outdoors and the frontier and a desire of a large number of people to have at least some land. This is a romantic idea in American culture that is not as strong in Europe or Asia.
(4) Cities were horribly polluted during the early to mid industrial era. Even those who lived in cities often maintained country homes or vacationed in the country whenever possible if they could afford it, with a major driver being to get away from the noise and pollution.
(5) Lastly, cars were invented in the USA and the automobile industry was and still is a major economic engine and employer in the country. America is where car culture really took hold if not originated. Car culture is still quite strong even though younger generations seem less enamored by it.
Fear of racism is a bigger problem than racism itself. Most people don't care, but the fear of that minority that does causes all sorts of bureaucracy to fight it (which in turn needs to feed racism to justify its existence). Also fear of that minority is causing lots of people to not buy near the out races for fear of not being able to sell, thus driving prices down.
Racism is like crime. It takes 0.1% violent criminals in a neighborhood to make it a "bad neighborhood." It takes just a few determined racists to make the entire neighborhood racist.
The people who are not racist generally don't know racism is even a problem if it's not affecting them. Fighting it would require bureaucratic trench warfare, and most people don't have time for that shit. There is probably an inverse correlation between people who have better things to do and racism anyway, since the racists tend to be the types who... lets just say have enough time on their hands to be actively racist because... well... lets just say there's probably a reason they don't have better things to do.
What are the net advantages of being in a city? It used to be access to good employment was the main thing but with remote work this often isn't as much of a factor anymore. Access to better restaurants, music and sporting events are definitely advantages but limited access to nature, traffic congestion, etc. are disadvantages. I'd say it is more of a lifestyle tradeoff.
>What are the net advantages of being in a city? It used to be access to good employment was the main thing but with remote work this often isn't as much of a factor anymore.
This is only really true for the type of privileged person posting on HackerNews (me included), other groups don't have that privilege in the same way.
>Access to better restaurants, music and sporting events are definitely advantages
Add to this the potential to live without having to own a car. The transportation infrastructure of good cities beat having to drive all the time.
One other popular thing I've heard is a much larger dating pool, which is probably true.
>limited access to nature
Good cities include good green spaces. I can access at least two major hiking trails that stretch for about a week with public transportation, and also a huge archipelago.
>traffic congestion
This is an issue unique to car-oriented development, though, because of how poorly this category of development scales. Cities with high-quality public transportation and bicycle infrastructure don't suffer from the same amount of traffic congestion, and the issue is less relevant as good alternatives for getting around exist.
> there is a strong preference in a large percentage of the population for suburban and rural style homes and light business areas. We build a ton of that and often very quickly.
Because that's the only thing you can build. The zoning regulations don't let anything else happen easily. You can't reason from this that this is what people actually prefer.
You can't reason that that's what most people prefer, but it likewise seems clear that if most people in some town/city did prefer something else, the zoning laws would be changed.
No, that isn't clear at all. Bad and unpopular laws can remain on the books for a long time if there is a politically powerful minority who benefits from them.
Also it might just be that most people don't even know about the problem.
In a world where there is little to no friction and no incentives to prolong the changing of those laws, yes. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in. Even something as simple as wanting to change it but seeing the immense amount of effort to try and get it noticed is enough to dissuade most people from trying.
The HN crowd tends not to be the target market for this though so it gets criticized and downplayed here.
There has been a shift toward urbanism in the last 25 years though, and prices exploding in the cities show that the market is lagging in satisfying that demand.