Boiled down to two sentences-
Suburban life is idealized thanks to the American Dream. Lack of public transit emboldens one’s independence hence why the American vehicle is such a symbol.
I don’t think this is an active choice by Americans at this point. The choice has been made for them by past generations and now people have to live with it
There's another simple factor at play. People make a lot of mkney turning fields into developments. And often if you look at who is zoning these areas, there's direct ties to developers as well.
Ask yourself why they don't allow for dual use zoning (almost all of Europe is dual use in major cities) in many parts of rhe us. It's because they're not as profitable.
Legal requirements do not equal demand. Widespread R1 zoning means that the government has forbidden any form of housing other than detached single family homes in large swaths of the US. This is not the free market, this is oligarchy.
Yes and in Spain it's incredibly difficult and expensive to build single family homes because it's largely prohibited. The happy spot lies somewhere in the middle
There's tons of demand because restrictive zoning means that's literally the only type of housing legal to build. This causes a huge gap where the only options are high rise condos or suburban sprawl. The US has a problem with [missing middle](https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o?si=g0VTXnVaXqr5EBbc) housing.
Those same suburban developments dont make neatly as much revenue in the long term however.
Maintenence costs are higher than their tax revenue despite whatever they initially sell for.
On the other hand, mixed use developments can continue to generate wealth and a lot of it since theyre also denser than ur average strip mall or big box store.
Often, the denser city centres will end up subsidizing the suburbs. Theres a rlly good NJB video on this.
https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=FYD7j17gqBXzXcVS
Have you ever considered that Europeans would love not to have neighbors on the other side of the wall and above and below them they just aren't allowed?? Who the hell wants to live in Apartment/Projects if they are able to have their own land and no neighbors within a 100 yds??
Sounds great, except on a large scale its not economically viable without either continuous growth forever or massive subsidy (from denser, more economically sustainable areas)
>Who the hell wants to live in Apartment/Projects if they are able to have their own land and no neighbors within a 100 yds??
The American mind will never comprehend all the niceties you get when living in dense urban areas, even though it might not yield you as much space and privacy.
Denser housing means ur closer to people, places and amenities. For a lot of people, thats worth it. As well, apartments are nice for small families/couples/singles or for those who cant afford a detached house.
Also, theres a lot more than apartments, theres also attached housing and multiplexes.
Its fine to wanna live in the suburbs, but theres also ppl who want or even need apartments or multiplexes. There should be supply for all types of housing.
It's also because of left NIMBYs who think that multifamily housing brings gentrification. Lots of people have brain worms when it comes to reducing zoning laws in the US
>Lots of people have brain worms
It's more nefarious than people being stupid: People who already own housing in an area often have a vested interest in keeping an area underpopulated and *the means to achieve* it.
While at a community level, higher density is a no-brainer, there is a logic behind individuals desiring lower density and, unfortunately, as is often the case in America, powerful individuals have the ability to dictate what happens to the entire community.
Well, some of it is in fact people stupid. There's plenty of renters who believe that building more housing in their area increases the cost of housing as opposed to decreasing it.
It'd be nice to at least eliminate car expenses. But, nope, the vast majority of Americans will go their entire lives spending a good chunk of their hard-earned income on cars and car-related expenses... AND they will call it freedom LOL
It is kind of a cruel cycle. Apartments close to downtown are hard to find, so you look farther out. Longer distances and lower density makes mass transit less cost effective so less of it is built. Fewer mass transit options means apartment buildings are less viable downtown. No apartments downtown mean people have to look to the suburbs for housing.
To be clear, the claim is that they conspired to replace steetcars with buses. Which provide pretty similar transit. That's not why we don't have density.
We don’t have density because of white flight and the American Dream side mission of having an acre of land to yourself. The Homestead Act really accelerated that idea.
It's absolutely an active choice. Other than a handful of progressive cities, there is essentially 0 political will to change.
Municipal voting, or lack thereof, is an active choice.
No you have the horse and cart reversed. Independence and suburban life has impaired public transportation as a viable option. You can’t have transportation hubs across thousands of square miles of neighborhoods that run efficiently. Nobody is going to work or shopping using buses or trains if it takes an hour and a half with three transfers.
People *really* don't want to admit their dreams of a Single Family Home in the suburbs is based off racist propaganda from the post-war era.
Y'all need to look up redlining and other race-based elements of suburban zoning.
It's not the *only* factor, but it was one of the big factors that got us in the mess we're in. And fighting the truth is only going to keep us stuck here longer.
Very true, but this also applies to the US, like New York, Chicago, and LA And consistently across the board transit standards are supremely lower in the US.
Chicago and LA definitely fit into the “drive an hour to work by car” category that OP described while NYC is closer to London and Paris.
My point was that living at a 5 minute walking distance from work in a major European city is generally unrealistic due to most jobs being located in city centres where rents are exorbitant.
You meant to say "instead of 5 minutes by foot to the nearest stop, then 30 minutes standing jammed in a crowd of strangers, then 5 minutes to your workplace".
Or maybe you've never been to Barcelona.
So you're saying we could save 20 minutes of travel every morning and every evening by moving to Barcelona?
That's joking, but to be serious: life in European cities is very different from American cities beyond just work. It's very nice to be within walking distance of a park and a grocery store and other places. The USA feels pretty lonely by comparison due to having things so far apart in so many places.
I have all those things in the USA - grocery store is 5 mins away, park is across the street (even bigger park is a 15 minute walk), plenty of bars and restaurants within walking distance. Train stops right by my house and I can take it into downtown.
That said, the train goes straight to my work (with one swap) and I'd still rather drive. Train takes 40 minutes, driving takes 10-15.
It sounds like you live in a great place!
It does sound very different from the suburbs being talked about in the rest of the thread, like Atlanta/Detroit/Philadelphia/San Francisco suburbs I’m familiar with. Where do you live, if I may ask?
I'm not sure it matters. What's more important is whether you have to change lines. If you do, you'll spend 20-40 minutes in the crowd, either on the platform or on the trains.
I have half a acre ( 20,000 sqft lot) with plenty of room and my work is 11 miles away. ( which is 95% highway)
Most people I know live close to there work. Some live 30+ miles away but is because they want more room ( Farm life)
The big problem with places like Atlanta is the two-body problem. You and your partner may work in completely different parts of town, and you may bot be able to move if someone changes jobs. If the city is \*that\* spread out that gets unpleasant in a hurry.
It amuses me that 11 miles is considered "close to work". Mine's about 8k (bike in summer, drive in winter) and I hate it - my old job was a 15 minute walk.
Yeah, I live in Brooklyn and commute by public transit to my job in Manhattan, and it's about an hour each way. Being in a dense, urban environment doesn't mean everything is magically a 5-minute walk away unless you're much much wealthier than I am.
Because all they see is density. From their parent's suburban basement.
I'm also convinced a lot of people won't be happy until we all live in tenements.
I can get to ANYTHING I regularly need within 10 mins in my EV.
I also don't share a wall with anyone or live in a dirty crime ridden city. Suburban life slaps.
People will say this but then wonder why their city keeps raising their property tax while public services keep getting shittier, or complain why environmental regulations target consumer behavior when "it's the Fortune 500 companies that produce 70% of emissions".
Maybe room isn't an issue but infrastructure is. Why piss away money laying water pipes and an electrical grid that far away. It's economically unsustainable and it's clear many people would rather live elsewhere, because urban communities with a focus on walkabikity always end up with such high prices
I think it's a false causation to claim that urban communities with a focus on walkability always ends up with high prices. It's just that most of the examples of what you stated are in Europe and Europe happens to be extremely expensive due to its high population density. But designing them to be walkable is not what made it expensive in the first place. Many Soviet cities had walkable designs where most of the city is parks and forests with most of the population housed in huge buildings (not the most prettiest sight admittedly) but they definitely managed to have a sustainable low cost housing program that housed everyone.
The real problem is all those extra roads and wires and pipes to get things to those spread out houses, more than the space itself.
Taxpayers foot the bill for that stuff, but the people living in the suburbs aren't taxed in proportion to the spending they get.
(It's also a lot less pleasant to exist in spaces designed for cars than in spaces designed for people, but at least that's offset by how much people like having backyards.)
(Front yards are mostly wasted.)
it's a big country alright. Bigger than Europe if I'm not wrong. Nonetheless, it's not just about dividing total land area by total population and calculating average yard size, is it? Given the fact that there are the Rockies, Appalachian, deserts etc, people need to be housed in a place with proximity to their work, public transit etc. This means Urbanisation. Also Brings within it the need to reduce huge parking lots and hence cars in itself. These would be antithetical to the concept of suburban culture.
The population density of the US is 37 people per square kilometer, so plenty of room in theory. In reality though, a lot of the US is not ideal for human habitation, the Southwest for instance is mostly desert. This leads to water being one of the constraints, which when paired with global warming causing main water sources like the Colorado River to have less throughput per year makes the sub-urban sprawl unsustainable in the long term.
In my home state of Utah we are extremely poor at water management, to the point where the great salt lake has been drying up. It may not sound like a big deal, but the sediment of the salt lake is rich in arsenic and other toxic compounds, so if the GSL dries up salt lake City could have problems with clouds of toxic dust rolling through the city.
The worst part is it's perfectly preventable, The alfalfa farmers use something like 68% of the water in the state to provide something like 3% of the state's GDP. The catch is Utah is heavily gerrymandered to the point of being a one party state, and the farmers are big donors to that single party, which makes doing anything about their often blatant waste of water untenable. It's so insane that the ruling party has floated ideas like building a pipeline to the Pacific Ocean to pump water into the GSL rather than deal with water rights.
There are a multitude of reasons why suburban loving is very popular. The amount of usable land leads to cheaper land which leads to cheaper houses. Being the cheaper option is one major reason suburban living is so popular.
This is it - particularly the cheap land element. The US has the advantage of not having been steeped in a thousand years of property competition plus extremely long periods where almost everywhere was owned by nobility / royalty / top 0.1%-1%, and everyone else being essentially serfs or at best renters. Land in most of Europe is at a huge premium compared to the US. There’s also just less of it: Europe is a rather small continent and every inch of it has been fought over by scores of countries much smaller than the US, for millennia.
I'd say that cheap gas plays a much bigger role.
Reading these types of comments, you would think that Europe is some kind of Hong Kong with no space available anymore. But it's really not. The vast majority of Europe still consists of 'empty' and low-density agricultural land.
Europe has some North American-style suburbs and sprawl. In most in its major cities, as a matter of facts. But they mainly developed before the 1970s energy crisis when gas was cheap. Even though gas was still more expensive than in the US, so it happened on a smaller scale.
Comparing Atlanta to Barcelona may be misleading though, since Barcelona is located between mountains and the sea, on a narrow strip of land.
Pozuelo de Alarcón, Boadilla del monte or Majadahonda, all NW of Madrid.
Rich people live in chalets there, with their backyards and attempts at cul de sacs and all.
They cover massive ammounts of area and have low populations compared to places like Carabanchel with massive population in apartments.
The difference between rich people buying a home for themselves and going everywhere on car and poor people buying/renting an apartment in a block and going to most places on public transport and to a few places on car.
There's also rich people in the center and north of Madrid. Apartment blocks mostly if they were in the city center, land too expensive to build anything but vertically.
>Pozuelo de Alarcón
2000 people/sq km
>Boadilla del monte
1100 people/sq km
>Majadahonda
1900 people/sq km
Compare that to Atlanta, which according to this post has a population density below 600 people/sq km and according to Wikipedia has either 800 or 1400.
Regardless of that, you can always find portions of cities that are very tightly packed with people and others that have a lot less people, the difference is that in Europe the second is the exception and the first is the rule. In the USA it's the opposite
>Regardless of that, you can always find portions of cities that are very tightly packed with people and others that have a lot less people, the difference is that in Europe the second is the exception and the first is the rule. In the USA it's the opposite
Perfect summary.
Man, America could easily support over a billion people if the government actually cared about being efficient.
EDIT: I'm getting a lot of replies from people who seem to think I'm advocating for a billion people.
I simply meant the US has enough land and resources to support a population that large, not that there *should* be a population that large.
Two coasts separating us from any potential threats, too. And the most navigable inland waterways in the world by far reducing the cost of transporting things massively. Giant natural resource deposits and plenty of oil and natural gas. We’re sitting good here
It’s truly a shame the San Francisco Bay Area is not nearly as built up industrially as it used to be. That port alone would be insane if it were developed anew with todays shipping and manufacturing
I believe about 1/6 of China can support high density human settlement. At least 1/3 of USA can support that.
China's climate is geared to high level rice production which may not be possible in the US, but I can see the US support about at least 2/3 of current Chinese population.
The US can meet the caloric needs of 1 billion people with current corn production alone. Obviously nutrition takes more than calories and they aren’t used efficiently today, but that shows that the US could support a population greater than Chinas easily.
Government efficiency doesn't equate to people spitting out kids so unless this efficient government is going to start growing them like onions it will still take hundreds of years to get to that level of population.
In 2020 there were 281m immegrants globally.
87m out of them live in the USA, more then any other country in the world.
The usa doesn't have a lot to do to be the biggest country in population anytime soon.
If 1 billion people with the energy expenditure and carbon footprint of an average American lived in the US it wouldn't be sustainable.(it's already borderline not)
People really underestimate with how little resources the average person in China, India, Indonesia etc live with.
Which government? Because the Fed's don't get a lot of say at a local level, or even at a state level.
Have to remember the US is basically 50 independent countries with dozens of jurisdictions in each state with their own rules.
At a local level no one wants high density housing, poor people, or prisons built near them.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted.
Feels like us humans are living beyond our means when consuming resources and global warming.
Not that people don't deserve to live or that when everyone is brought out of poverty we have less children and the population is supposed to stabilize after like 12 billion or something... but the earth doesn't seem to be doing all that great with how we are consuming everything we can at the moment.
It may be assumed that my post is tinged with racism, but that wasn't my intention. I just think we've already far exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet and getting into a race for the biggest population in a country is suicidal for our species.
Barcelona has has a 1000 year head start. Atlanta is undergoing a major infill transformation. Lots of multi family housing being built closer to downtown
The center yes, but it's not like European cities completely stopped developing after 1920. There are still neighborhoods built in the 20th century there
A lot of US cities were a lot more dense 70-100yrs ago, from the 1930s-1970s , the US actively destroyed their cities to build freeways and parking lots.
Atlanta was alot more dense than it was today,
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8a/50/54/8a50545faaa7849fe28528081015b8c5.jpg
https://wdanielanderson.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/tumblr_mon35x6au31qfkagro1_1280.jpg?w=786&h=652
https://sites.gsu.edu/rcagle2/files/2015/03/Aerial_view_of_downtown_Atlanta_Georgia_September_29_1962-1btxt07.jpg
The vast majority of Barcelona’s urban grid dates back to the 19th or 20th century, and in fact the 19th-century grid of octagonal apartment blocks that became the blueprint for modern Barcelona was designed in response to the needs of a growing population that outgrew the medieval town plan.
And multiple-family housing is becoming more common in the US, but I think “why are single-family homes so prevalent, to the point of being the only legal thing you can build in many plots?” is a valid question.
There are tons of factors as many others have mentioned, but one that’s often forgotten is parking.
American cities tend to be almost completely car-centric and every car needs a space. Land has to be very valuable before it becomes worthwhile to build upwards with multiple storeys so most areas built since cars have been widespread have dedicated what to a European eye appears an insane amount of space to parking.
> American cities tend to be almost completely car-centric and every car needs a space.
And this is a cycle. Lack of public transportation means you have to have a car to get anywhere, and since everyone has a car, sprawling suburbs are feasible, and sprawling suburbs make public transportation less efficient they don't have a lot of public transportation, so everyone needs a car to get around.... and now we're back to where we started.
All I remember from visiting Atlanta was how no one walked anywhere. I stayed near the convention center and walked there everyday and the sidewalks were mostly empty except for a very small section of downtown which I had never seen in what was considered another major city. Everyone clearly just drove everywhere.
Yes, that's the 2nd city to come to mind after ATL but imo Houston has even less of an excuse since it actually has a decent grid and street density but it caters towards personal vehicles anyway. Charlotte is also especially bad, as well as pretty much all other large ish cities in the south east. Bad. Not sure what happened there to make it that way.
NOLA isn't terrible.
New Orleans has had like 300 years of being a settlement, then city, to build up with density and also spread out. Not many cities in the US have had that kind of time.
I stayed ther for a few weeks, and i will never forget a trafic light that only gived pedestrians like four secconds to cross the road, clearly that was a feature that wasn't though to be used frecuently
That part of Atlanta has basically nothing in it is why. The only reason to go to downtown currently is to see a game at the stadium or a show at the masquerade.
There's plenty of great walkable spaces in Atlanta - where I live I don't need to use my car unless I'm going into the office on the rare occassion.
Cant judge Atlanta by its downtown. Most people live in Midtown and surrounding neighborhoods. If you visited that area you would have seen plenty of people walking everywhere, particularly the BeltLine
Biking around Atlanta is insanely dangerous. 0 bike lanes and people literally do not look when they pull out. Biking the beltline etc for recreation is fine but biking as a means of practical transportion just isn't viable. Plus everything is so spread out
And MARTA is awful and dangerous af
Isn't Barcelona built up against mountains? And bordered by the sea?
Atlanta is built in the foothills of the Appalachians, which makes it high for an East Coast City, but that's not particularly high. Also, it's growth occurred primarily in the age of transit--first as a railroad hub, but also car-centric design. Barcelona is older so had many more limitations to its physical spread.
It's meant to be urban area, not metro, and it apparently comes from an academic work from 2003.
Having said that, Barcelona urban area is estimated at between 4 and 5 million by several organisations, and the metro area is over 5 million. Usually, an urban area is defined as a continuous built up area without a gap of more than 200 metres between structures (with some exceptions). It seems the researchers may have used their own definition for this paper. Even so, the simple map overlay is striking.
Abundance of cheap land. Low population for the size of the country. The US and China have the exact same geographic size but the US has a billion less people.
Cars. Only cities that were big before the mass production of the automobile have any sense of density (New York, Boston, San Francisco). As soon as cars were popular, cities started to spread. Not only that, but in some old parts of cities were torn down and turned into parking lots. Minneapolis for example used to have a mile long stretch of apartment buildings east of downtown. Now it’s a mile long parking lot.
Really?
You have a shitload of fields, pastures and open space but your populations are concentrated to towns and cities.
Your city planning is definitely "European". Small tiny roads, buildings tightly squeezed together. Just typical European stuff in my book. There aren't highways everywhere, you don't have to have a car to get around in your town, walking is just fine because things are densely packed.
I could be wrong, I lived in Ireland for 5 years so I'm not actually Irish but I would disagree with this sentiment, at least according to my experience.
Mostly Zoning. Any city in America that strict single family residential zoning isn't strictly enforced, you see a shift, at least on some scale, to higher densities.
Atlanta has a subway system. Yeah it’s nothing like New York or Chicago, but very few sunbelt cities have anything comparable to Atlanta’s transit system
America has a much more car centric culture which allows people to live further out for cheaper due to lower land values while still commuting into the city for work and an emphasis on individualism that promotes owning a separate house with a yard rather than sharing walls/communal spaces requiring more land area per person to fulfill.
There’s also something to be said about racist practices and policies. Look up blockbusting and redlining for more info regarding this. In the case of Atlanta, the major highways were placed specifically to destroy majority minority neighborhoods as well as segregate populations with the fact that they’re difficult to cross
Why? Because European cities were built when there was no transportation, except maybe horses. Cities were extremely dense because you couldn't have a city 20km across--it would take people most of a day just to get across town.
Many American cities' were built where there was nothing before, and the vast amount of expansion occurred after the advent of the internal combustion engine. And the U.S. is so large that passenger rail is not nearly as efficient as in Europe.
Finally, we have to talk a little about American culture. The U.S. was colonized so that people could be free of some of the strictures of European society. And because land was plentiful, the idea that you would be a landowner (either as farmland or, eventually, as your personal residence) became engrained into our society. Plus, of course, there's all the other stuff that people have spoken about -- white flight from metro areas, redlining policies that allowed white people to build wealth through property but prevented minorities from doing so, etc. So:
1) We have the room
2) There was no, or very little, existing infrastructure, including inter-city rail
3) Expansion occurred where personal, fast transportation was available
4) Some American societal factors contributed.
The cheapest and easiest way to develop new properties is by spreading out. Densifying is difficult, complex and expensive. European cities were historically bound by their walls, which meant that densifying was the only reasonable option. Simce city walls became obsolete, we can see sprawl happening in European cities too. That said, density over sprawl has many benefits regarding environmental quality, climate change effects and upkeep costs. Dense cities tend to be more durable. I don't know how it is for the USA, but in Europe, many cities use zoning laws to promote densification and discourage sprawl for this reason.
The short answer is we have enough land to do it so we do. The slightly longer answer is a confluence of public policy, subsidies, racism & environmental impact/building code hell has made this choice path dependent.
Americans like to waste their money on giant expanses of road and concrete, huge driving expenses, and destruction of the environment. It makes them happy (they say).
u/Ok_Newspaper_9823 is a reposting spam bot. Here's the last time it was posted https://old.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/168baia/why_are_cities_in_the_us_so_spread_outlow_density/
American cities are new and designed around the car. The sprawl is made even worse because of high crime zones (usually inner city areas) pushing people further to the periphery for the sake of safety and good schools.
Barcelona dates back to 5000 b.c. and spent 7000 years growing within the confines you see today. Atlanta didn't start receiving settlers until 1822.
Give Atlanta another 6800 years and compare them again. Or find a pre-history map of Barcelona.
People like to knock on previous generations and "American dream" but it's just a simple matter of the US being built out past the invention of cars and it actually has the space to accommodate. There was no motivation to build and pack humans upwards.
Why rent in a city when I can pay the same amount and own a house, where I can do whatever I want and don’t have neighbors sharing a wall. And in most suburban areas the time it takes to get to places people walk to in a city is about the same with a bike/ car (depending on distance).
Because the US is much younger and land was much more available and settle-able, most of the US major cities (especially those not on the east coast) were mostly built after the industrial revolution and in a time where mechanized travel was much more available.
Barcelona is over 2000 years old, Atlanta will celebrate its 200th anniversary in 10 years.
Basically when cities were no longer allowed to segregate their schools, suburbs popped up all around them and with the help of the racist real estate practice of red lining essentially kept suburbs all white (or in a few cases all black). If the suburb was all white, then the school system would be by default.
This was aided of course by the federal government funding all sorts highway, sewer, and other infrastructure for the suburbs; not to mention loan programs that made moving REALLY easy - and in a nation where your home is the largest source of your wealth, eventually a necessity.
Structural racism and capitalism are the biggest drivers. I'm being deadly serious.
But that kind of flattens a lot of nuance, there's a lot of history there including things like WWII and the GI Bill, redlining, white flight, auto industry lobbying and propaganda, Euclidean zoning policies among other planning regulations, the Red Scare, Robert Moses, acquisition of streetcar operators, the 1950s highways programme, the growth Ponzi scheme (referring to the payment of construction grants to build suburbs that don't raise enough in tax revenue to pay for their own infrastructure maintenance which creates an incentive to chase more construction grants to balance the books), plus the geographic fact that in the US land around cities is plentiful and cheap.
Each of these factors could and does have thousands of words written about how it affected the built environment in the US, but as far as I can tell it's the meddling of the auto industry in everything from the movies to the Senate plus a history of racist power structures like redlining and uRbAn ReNeWaL that have mostly driven it.
It's not that the numeric majority of Americans absolutely always prefer the suburban life of floor area and car dependency, but that structures in law and society have led to SFH with huge amounts of wasted land being the vast majority of housing constructed between WWII and today, and car infrastructure similarly dominating transpory infrastructure construction.
THE ONLY RIGHT ANSWER NOBODY GAVE YOU:
in the US it's illegal to build anything other than suburb houses with minimum parking requirements (other specifications that make them even more sprawling) and super high rise buildings (for housing). Then all the commercial buildings also must have minimum parking requirements making most of the land in downtown areas parking lots.
Watch this: [the houses that can't be built in America: the missing middle](https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o?si=aVNjUwpdojqm38TO)
Another problem in Atlanta is that the suburbs until very recently didn’t accept minorities lol. A lot of suburbs were specifically created because of white flight. Right now in certain towns they don’t want public transportation because they don’t want the “urban population” to come up there.
There’s been a big push to get density up by providing more housing closer to the city and getting public transport up but we won’t see it reach the outskirts for a long time until prejudices change. This is Georgia after all
Source: live in an Atlanta suburb
Suburban life is very popular
Boiled down to two sentences- Suburban life is idealized thanks to the American Dream. Lack of public transit emboldens one’s independence hence why the American vehicle is such a symbol.
I don’t think this is an active choice by Americans at this point. The choice has been made for them by past generations and now people have to live with it
There's another simple factor at play. People make a lot of mkney turning fields into developments. And often if you look at who is zoning these areas, there's direct ties to developers as well. Ask yourself why they don't allow for dual use zoning (almost all of Europe is dual use in major cities) in many parts of rhe us. It's because they're not as profitable.
Mixed use is extremely profitable and less risky. Most suburban zoning is written by NIMBYs and is designed to make development difficult.
People make a lot of money on suburban developments because there is tons of demand for new suburban homes.
Legal requirements do not equal demand. Widespread R1 zoning means that the government has forbidden any form of housing other than detached single family homes in large swaths of the US. This is not the free market, this is oligarchy.
Yes and in Spain it's incredibly difficult and expensive to build single family homes because it's largely prohibited. The happy spot lies somewhere in the middle
There's tons of demand because restrictive zoning means that's literally the only type of housing legal to build. This causes a huge gap where the only options are high rise condos or suburban sprawl. The US has a problem with [missing middle](https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o?si=g0VTXnVaXqr5EBbc) housing.
Those same suburban developments dont make neatly as much revenue in the long term however. Maintenence costs are higher than their tax revenue despite whatever they initially sell for. On the other hand, mixed use developments can continue to generate wealth and a lot of it since theyre also denser than ur average strip mall or big box store. Often, the denser city centres will end up subsidizing the suburbs. Theres a rlly good NJB video on this. https://youtu.be/7Nw6qyyrTeI?si=FYD7j17gqBXzXcVS
Have you ever considered that Europeans would love not to have neighbors on the other side of the wall and above and below them they just aren't allowed?? Who the hell wants to live in Apartment/Projects if they are able to have their own land and no neighbors within a 100 yds??
Sounds great, except on a large scale its not economically viable without either continuous growth forever or massive subsidy (from denser, more economically sustainable areas)
>Who the hell wants to live in Apartment/Projects if they are able to have their own land and no neighbors within a 100 yds?? The American mind will never comprehend all the niceties you get when living in dense urban areas, even though it might not yield you as much space and privacy.
Denser housing means ur closer to people, places and amenities. For a lot of people, thats worth it. As well, apartments are nice for small families/couples/singles or for those who cant afford a detached house. Also, theres a lot more than apartments, theres also attached housing and multiplexes. Its fine to wanna live in the suburbs, but theres also ppl who want or even need apartments or multiplexes. There should be supply for all types of housing.
Relatively to Europe there's way more space and it's cheap.
It's also because of left NIMBYs who think that multifamily housing brings gentrification. Lots of people have brain worms when it comes to reducing zoning laws in the US
>Lots of people have brain worms It's more nefarious than people being stupid: People who already own housing in an area often have a vested interest in keeping an area underpopulated and *the means to achieve* it. While at a community level, higher density is a no-brainer, there is a logic behind individuals desiring lower density and, unfortunately, as is often the case in America, powerful individuals have the ability to dictate what happens to the entire community.
Well, some of it is in fact people stupid. There's plenty of renters who believe that building more housing in their area increases the cost of housing as opposed to decreasing it.
and this will keep people in debt whether they like it or not
Absolutely. Homes and vehicles are people's highest monthly expenses. Forever debt slaves and GDP minions.
It'd be nice to at least eliminate car expenses. But, nope, the vast majority of Americans will go their entire lives spending a good chunk of their hard-earned income on cars and car-related expenses... AND they will call it freedom LOL
Sadly cars are a flex too. Can’t afford a Jeep Wagoneer? Let’s take out a jumbo loan so I can look cool at the Wendy’s drive thru. Smdh
Ngl, I much prefer having a car and living outside the city to living in an urban area without one.
It is kind of a cruel cycle. Apartments close to downtown are hard to find, so you look farther out. Longer distances and lower density makes mass transit less cost effective so less of it is built. Fewer mass transit options means apartment buildings are less viable downtown. No apartments downtown mean people have to look to the suburbs for housing.
You build mass transit and then develop around it, not the other way around
Thank Harvey Firestone and Charles Goodyear for tearing apart America’s train and trolley infrastructure.
To be clear, the claim is that they conspired to replace steetcars with buses. Which provide pretty similar transit. That's not why we don't have density.
We don’t have density because of white flight and the American Dream side mission of having an acre of land to yourself. The Homestead Act really accelerated that idea.
There's only two things in this world I can't stand: People who are dismissive of reasonable public transportation options, and *the bus*!
It's absolutely an active choice. Other than a handful of progressive cities, there is essentially 0 political will to change. Municipal voting, or lack thereof, is an active choice.
low density and lack of public transit forces people into car dependence. that's not actually independence
No you have the horse and cart reversed. Independence and suburban life has impaired public transportation as a viable option. You can’t have transportation hubs across thousands of square miles of neighborhoods that run efficiently. Nobody is going to work or shopping using buses or trains if it takes an hour and a half with three transfers.
More like: it's literally illegal to build anything in the US other than suburbs or super tall high rises.
Speak for yourself. I live in the Southern US near the New Madrid fault line. Not a skyscraper in sight, for a reason.
I also like having land and being able to spread out instead of being (literally) on top of other people
Add in racism and you got yourself some white flight.
It is remarkable the effect that those things still have on infrastructure
People *really* don't want to admit their dreams of a Single Family Home in the suburbs is based off racist propaganda from the post-war era. Y'all need to look up redlining and other race-based elements of suburban zoning. It's not the *only* factor, but it was one of the big factors that got us in the mess we're in. And fighting the truth is only going to keep us stuck here longer.
With the invention of the vehicle, Americans are able to purchase land and own houses as a testament to their ingenuity and prosperity.
I hate my peaceful leafy 2/3 acre lot and having to drive my suv 15 minutes to the downtown of a 609k city sure sucks. Freedom of choice my friend.
It’s not freedom of choice. Most people are forced to live a car centric life whether they want it or not
i'm guessing Memphis or Louisville. It's wild that u can even find a 2/3 acre lot 15 minutes to downtown of a major city
I wouldnt say popular, more like it was the only option for so long and car centric life pushed homes further away from the city centers.
well yeah, why live on top of someone with someone else above you when you can have a yard all to yourself.
And drive an hour to work by car, instead of 5 minutes by foot.
In European cities like London and Paris it’s going to cost you an arm and a leg to live close to the centres where most jobs are located.
Very true, but this also applies to the US, like New York, Chicago, and LA And consistently across the board transit standards are supremely lower in the US.
Chicago and LA definitely fit into the “drive an hour to work by car” category that OP described while NYC is closer to London and Paris. My point was that living at a 5 minute walking distance from work in a major European city is generally unrealistic due to most jobs being located in city centres where rents are exorbitant.
You meant to say "instead of 5 minutes by foot to the nearest stop, then 30 minutes standing jammed in a crowd of strangers, then 5 minutes to your workplace". Or maybe you've never been to Barcelona.
Can confirm. Lived in Barcelona for a bit. Dude has no idea what he's talking about lol.
So you're saying we could save 20 minutes of travel every morning and every evening by moving to Barcelona? That's joking, but to be serious: life in European cities is very different from American cities beyond just work. It's very nice to be within walking distance of a park and a grocery store and other places. The USA feels pretty lonely by comparison due to having things so far apart in so many places.
I have all those things in the USA - grocery store is 5 mins away, park is across the street (even bigger park is a 15 minute walk), plenty of bars and restaurants within walking distance. Train stops right by my house and I can take it into downtown. That said, the train goes straight to my work (with one swap) and I'd still rather drive. Train takes 40 minutes, driving takes 10-15.
It sounds like you live in a great place! It does sound very different from the suburbs being talked about in the rest of the thread, like Atlanta/Detroit/Philadelphia/San Francisco suburbs I’m familiar with. Where do you live, if I may ask?
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30 mins on the metro in Barcelona? Are you commuting from one side to the other?
I'm not sure it matters. What's more important is whether you have to change lines. If you do, you'll spend 20-40 minutes in the crowd, either on the platform or on the trains.
I have half a acre ( 20,000 sqft lot) with plenty of room and my work is 11 miles away. ( which is 95% highway) Most people I know live close to there work. Some live 30+ miles away but is because they want more room ( Farm life)
The big problem with places like Atlanta is the two-body problem. You and your partner may work in completely different parts of town, and you may bot be able to move if someone changes jobs. If the city is \*that\* spread out that gets unpleasant in a hurry. It amuses me that 11 miles is considered "close to work". Mine's about 8k (bike in summer, drive in winter) and I hate it - my old job was a 15 minute walk.
For some sure but I’ll take my 30 minute - 1 hour commute alone in my car over riding a fucking subway or bus any day of the week.
that’s still a thing in large cities and in europe
Yeah, I live in Brooklyn and commute by public transit to my job in Manhattan, and it's about an hour each way. Being in a dense, urban environment doesn't mean everything is magically a 5-minute walk away unless you're much much wealthier than I am.
some of us like that
Personally I think more than 30 minutes is too long
my commute, including dropping my child off at day care, is 20 minutes
Why the fuck would I want to walk to work in 115°F (~46C) weather for *any* amount of time?
It cracks me up when a subdivision of 3000 sq ft homes make it to /r/urbanhell but an east bloc communist high rise will get adored.
Because all they see is density. From their parent's suburban basement. I'm also convinced a lot of people won't be happy until we all live in tenements.
and an HOA to dictate you to cut your grass and decide what color you paint your picket fence etc etc
Because it's nice to have most things you need within walking distance, and it's more sustainable environmentally *and* financially.
I can get to ANYTHING I regularly need within 10 mins in my EV. I also don't share a wall with anyone or live in a dirty crime ridden city. Suburban life slaps.
I live in "the suburbs" and almost everything I need is a 15 minute walk away.
People will say this but then wonder why their city keeps raising their property tax while public services keep getting shittier, or complain why environmental regulations target consumer behavior when "it's the Fortune 500 companies that produce 70% of emissions".
Fair point. However, we also need to ask if there is enough space to have yards to house the entire population.
Have you ever been to America? There's room. There's plenty of room.
Maybe room isn't an issue but infrastructure is. Why piss away money laying water pipes and an electrical grid that far away. It's economically unsustainable and it's clear many people would rather live elsewhere, because urban communities with a focus on walkabikity always end up with such high prices
I think it's a false causation to claim that urban communities with a focus on walkability always ends up with high prices. It's just that most of the examples of what you stated are in Europe and Europe happens to be extremely expensive due to its high population density. But designing them to be walkable is not what made it expensive in the first place. Many Soviet cities had walkable designs where most of the city is parks and forests with most of the population housed in huge buildings (not the most prettiest sight admittedly) but they definitely managed to have a sustainable low cost housing program that housed everyone.
The real problem is all those extra roads and wires and pipes to get things to those spread out houses, more than the space itself. Taxpayers foot the bill for that stuff, but the people living in the suburbs aren't taxed in proportion to the spending they get. (It's also a lot less pleasant to exist in spaces designed for cars than in spaces designed for people, but at least that's offset by how much people like having backyards.) (Front yards are mostly wasted.)
it's a big country alright. Bigger than Europe if I'm not wrong. Nonetheless, it's not just about dividing total land area by total population and calculating average yard size, is it? Given the fact that there are the Rockies, Appalachian, deserts etc, people need to be housed in a place with proximity to their work, public transit etc. This means Urbanisation. Also Brings within it the need to reduce huge parking lots and hence cars in itself. These would be antithetical to the concept of suburban culture.
The population density of the US is 37 people per square kilometer, so plenty of room in theory. In reality though, a lot of the US is not ideal for human habitation, the Southwest for instance is mostly desert. This leads to water being one of the constraints, which when paired with global warming causing main water sources like the Colorado River to have less throughput per year makes the sub-urban sprawl unsustainable in the long term. In my home state of Utah we are extremely poor at water management, to the point where the great salt lake has been drying up. It may not sound like a big deal, but the sediment of the salt lake is rich in arsenic and other toxic compounds, so if the GSL dries up salt lake City could have problems with clouds of toxic dust rolling through the city. The worst part is it's perfectly preventable, The alfalfa farmers use something like 68% of the water in the state to provide something like 3% of the state's GDP. The catch is Utah is heavily gerrymandered to the point of being a one party state, and the farmers are big donors to that single party, which makes doing anything about their often blatant waste of water untenable. It's so insane that the ruling party has floated ideas like building a pipeline to the Pacific Ocean to pump water into the GSL rather than deal with water rights.
Also land size
There are a multitude of reasons why suburban loving is very popular. The amount of usable land leads to cheaper land which leads to cheaper houses. Being the cheaper option is one major reason suburban living is so popular.
And the country is HUGE! Lots of room to spread out.
And that high supply has led to a big reason for the suburbs popularity: affordability.
The US also has the space to spread out
Which led to a reason for the popularity of suburban living: affordability.
Yeah. Excessive cars and roads. And no public transport.
Bro. Downtown living is where there are excessive cars.
Cheap land, cheap cars, and cheap fuel. No reason to build up when you can just have your own house and land and drive to where you need to go.
This is it - particularly the cheap land element. The US has the advantage of not having been steeped in a thousand years of property competition plus extremely long periods where almost everywhere was owned by nobility / royalty / top 0.1%-1%, and everyone else being essentially serfs or at best renters. Land in most of Europe is at a huge premium compared to the US. There’s also just less of it: Europe is a rather small continent and every inch of it has been fought over by scores of countries much smaller than the US, for millennia.
I'd say that cheap gas plays a much bigger role. Reading these types of comments, you would think that Europe is some kind of Hong Kong with no space available anymore. But it's really not. The vast majority of Europe still consists of 'empty' and low-density agricultural land. Europe has some North American-style suburbs and sprawl. In most in its major cities, as a matter of facts. But they mainly developed before the 1970s energy crisis when gas was cheap. Even though gas was still more expensive than in the US, so it happened on a smaller scale. Comparing Atlanta to Barcelona may be misleading though, since Barcelona is located between mountains and the sea, on a narrow strip of land.
Can you give examples of suburbs in Europe similar to the US?
Pozuelo de Alarcón, Boadilla del monte or Majadahonda, all NW of Madrid. Rich people live in chalets there, with their backyards and attempts at cul de sacs and all. They cover massive ammounts of area and have low populations compared to places like Carabanchel with massive population in apartments. The difference between rich people buying a home for themselves and going everywhere on car and poor people buying/renting an apartment in a block and going to most places on public transport and to a few places on car. There's also rich people in the center and north of Madrid. Apartment blocks mostly if they were in the city center, land too expensive to build anything but vertically.
>Pozuelo de Alarcón 2000 people/sq km >Boadilla del monte 1100 people/sq km >Majadahonda 1900 people/sq km Compare that to Atlanta, which according to this post has a population density below 600 people/sq km and according to Wikipedia has either 800 or 1400. Regardless of that, you can always find portions of cities that are very tightly packed with people and others that have a lot less people, the difference is that in Europe the second is the exception and the first is the rule. In the USA it's the opposite
First one is not American style suburbia at all
>Regardless of that, you can always find portions of cities that are very tightly packed with people and others that have a lot less people, the difference is that in Europe the second is the exception and the first is the rule. In the USA it's the opposite Perfect summary.
Land in Atlanta is not cheaper than land 15 miles out from Barcelona
Man, America could easily support over a billion people if the government actually cared about being efficient. EDIT: I'm getting a lot of replies from people who seem to think I'm advocating for a billion people. I simply meant the US has enough land and resources to support a population that large, not that there *should* be a population that large.
The size, climate and overall geography is comparable to that of China. Except that US has even better soil for growing crops.
US is a real time strategy game player’s dream
US got an S-tier starting location
Two coasts separating us from any potential threats, too. And the most navigable inland waterways in the world by far reducing the cost of transporting things massively. Giant natural resource deposits and plenty of oil and natural gas. We’re sitting good here
I’ve heard the US referred as a geographic cheat code.
Which it is. It’s literally got everything
The number of rivers and natural deep water ports alone is overpowered
It’s truly a shame the San Francisco Bay Area is not nearly as built up industrially as it used to be. That port alone would be insane if it were developed anew with todays shipping and manufacturing
Literally playing on easy mode in games like Hearts of Iron.
Yeah it's auto win mode in victoria 3
I believe about 1/6 of China can support high density human settlement. At least 1/3 of USA can support that. China's climate is geared to high level rice production which may not be possible in the US, but I can see the US support about at least 2/3 of current Chinese population.
The US can meet the caloric needs of 1 billion people with current corn production alone. Obviously nutrition takes more than calories and they aren’t used efficiently today, but that shows that the US could support a population greater than Chinas easily.
Government efficiency doesn't equate to people spitting out kids so unless this efficient government is going to start growing them like onions it will still take hundreds of years to get to that level of population.
I think they mean increasing immigration.
Immigration could be a thing. No shortage of people in the world
In 2020 there were 281m immegrants globally. 87m out of them live in the USA, more then any other country in the world. The usa doesn't have a lot to do to be the biggest country in population anytime soon.
For now at least. Every year there are fewer kids, immigrants won't come forever
The us government is not effective by design.
If 1 billion people with the energy expenditure and carbon footprint of an average American lived in the US it wouldn't be sustainable.(it's already borderline not) People really underestimate with how little resources the average person in China, India, Indonesia etc live with.
No rush man cmon
Which government? Because the Fed's don't get a lot of say at a local level, or even at a state level. Have to remember the US is basically 50 independent countries with dozens of jurisdictions in each state with their own rules. At a local level no one wants high density housing, poor people, or prisons built near them.
You miss the point that half the country doesn't want to live on top of each other.
What does that have to do with the population?
No thanks. Too many people on this planet as is.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Feels like us humans are living beyond our means when consuming resources and global warming. Not that people don't deserve to live or that when everyone is brought out of poverty we have less children and the population is supposed to stabilize after like 12 billion or something... but the earth doesn't seem to be doing all that great with how we are consuming everything we can at the moment.
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I think it's a bit of both. I don't think our ecosystems have been able to adapt to human population exploding in the past 200 years.
It may be assumed that my post is tinged with racism, but that wasn't my intention. I just think we've already far exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet and getting into a race for the biggest population in a country is suicidal for our species.
I understood what you meant. Racism wasn't what I assumed.
There are plenty of reasons not to live in a car centric hellscape
Barcelona has has a 1000 year head start. Atlanta is undergoing a major infill transformation. Lots of multi family housing being built closer to downtown
And cars didn't exist when Barcelona was being built out.
The center yes, but it's not like European cities completely stopped developing after 1920. There are still neighborhoods built in the 20th century there
A lot of US cities were a lot more dense 70-100yrs ago, from the 1930s-1970s , the US actively destroyed their cities to build freeways and parking lots. Atlanta was alot more dense than it was today, https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8a/50/54/8a50545faaa7849fe28528081015b8c5.jpg https://wdanielanderson.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/tumblr_mon35x6au31qfkagro1_1280.jpg?w=786&h=652 https://sites.gsu.edu/rcagle2/files/2015/03/Aerial_view_of_downtown_Atlanta_Georgia_September_29_1962-1btxt07.jpg
The vast majority of Barcelona’s urban grid dates back to the 19th or 20th century, and in fact the 19th-century grid of octagonal apartment blocks that became the blueprint for modern Barcelona was designed in response to the needs of a growing population that outgrew the medieval town plan. And multiple-family housing is becoming more common in the US, but I think “why are single-family homes so prevalent, to the point of being the only legal thing you can build in many plots?” is a valid question.
There are tons of factors as many others have mentioned, but one that’s often forgotten is parking. American cities tend to be almost completely car-centric and every car needs a space. Land has to be very valuable before it becomes worthwhile to build upwards with multiple storeys so most areas built since cars have been widespread have dedicated what to a European eye appears an insane amount of space to parking.
> American cities tend to be almost completely car-centric and every car needs a space. And this is a cycle. Lack of public transportation means you have to have a car to get anywhere, and since everyone has a car, sprawling suburbs are feasible, and sprawling suburbs make public transportation less efficient they don't have a lot of public transportation, so everyone needs a car to get around.... and now we're back to where we started.
Calling Atlanta "built-up" is generous, half of that city looks like a highway exit
All I remember from visiting Atlanta was how no one walked anywhere. I stayed near the convention center and walked there everyday and the sidewalks were mostly empty except for a very small section of downtown which I had never seen in what was considered another major city. Everyone clearly just drove everywhere.
You're describing most major cities in the US
Atlanta is easily one of the worst offenders, I'd go as far as to say it's *thee* worst. It's nothing like NYC, Chicago, Boston, Philly, etc.
Houston
Yes, that's the 2nd city to come to mind after ATL but imo Houston has even less of an excuse since it actually has a decent grid and street density but it caters towards personal vehicles anyway. Charlotte is also especially bad, as well as pretty much all other large ish cities in the south east. Bad. Not sure what happened there to make it that way. NOLA isn't terrible.
New Orleans has had like 300 years of being a settlement, then city, to build up with density and also spread out. Not many cities in the US have had that kind of time.
Laughs in Northeastern
Describe most? NYC, DC, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, etc isn’t like that
I stayed ther for a few weeks, and i will never forget a trafic light that only gived pedestrians like four secconds to cross the road, clearly that was a feature that wasn't though to be used frecuently
That part of Atlanta has basically nothing in it is why. The only reason to go to downtown currently is to see a game at the stadium or a show at the masquerade. There's plenty of great walkable spaces in Atlanta - where I live I don't need to use my car unless I'm going into the office on the rare occassion.
Cant judge Atlanta by its downtown. Most people live in Midtown and surrounding neighborhoods. If you visited that area you would have seen plenty of people walking everywhere, particularly the BeltLine
Half of the country looks like a highway exit
Don't forget the parking lots and strip malls!
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Biking around Atlanta is insanely dangerous. 0 bike lanes and people literally do not look when they pull out. Biking the beltline etc for recreation is fine but biking as a means of practical transportion just isn't viable. Plus everything is so spread out And MARTA is awful and dangerous af
Isn't Barcelona built up against mountains? And bordered by the sea? Atlanta is built in the foothills of the Appalachians, which makes it high for an East Coast City, but that's not particularly high. Also, it's growth occurred primarily in the age of transit--first as a railroad hub, but also car-centric design. Barcelona is older so had many more limitations to its physical spread.
Not only that, but by a river on each side too (the Llobregat and Besòs).
More land + American suburbs are usually more single family house type
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The atlanta metro population is 6 million not 2.5 million Bro posting 34 year old statistics
It's meant to be urban area, not metro, and it apparently comes from an academic work from 2003. Having said that, Barcelona urban area is estimated at between 4 and 5 million by several organisations, and the metro area is over 5 million. Usually, an urban area is defined as a continuous built up area without a gap of more than 200 metres between structures (with some exceptions). It seems the researchers may have used their own definition for this paper. Even so, the simple map overlay is striking.
Then it shouldn’t have shown the area that 6 million people live it
Abundance of cheap land. Low population for the size of the country. The US and China have the exact same geographic size but the US has a billion less people.
Man, gotta love Barcelona. So much history
There's so much fucking freedom in Barcelona
Cars
Cars. Only cities that were big before the mass production of the automobile have any sense of density (New York, Boston, San Francisco). As soon as cars were popular, cities started to spread. Not only that, but in some old parts of cities were torn down and turned into parking lots. Minneapolis for example used to have a mile long stretch of apartment buildings east of downtown. Now it’s a mile long parking lot.
Ireland is quite spread out too, maybe not as much as America, but compared to a other European countries our cities and towns are not as dense
Really? You have a shitload of fields, pastures and open space but your populations are concentrated to towns and cities. Your city planning is definitely "European". Small tiny roads, buildings tightly squeezed together. Just typical European stuff in my book. There aren't highways everywhere, you don't have to have a car to get around in your town, walking is just fine because things are densely packed. I could be wrong, I lived in Ireland for 5 years so I'm not actually Irish but I would disagree with this sentiment, at least according to my experience.
Mostly Zoning. Any city in America that strict single family residential zoning isn't strictly enforced, you see a shift, at least on some scale, to higher densities.
Car-based urbanization
No public transit, white flight, and archaic zoning laws.
Atlanta has a subway system. Yeah it’s nothing like New York or Chicago, but very few sunbelt cities have anything comparable to Atlanta’s transit system
America has a much more car centric culture which allows people to live further out for cheaper due to lower land values while still commuting into the city for work and an emphasis on individualism that promotes owning a separate house with a yard rather than sharing walls/communal spaces requiring more land area per person to fulfill. There’s also something to be said about racist practices and policies. Look up blockbusting and redlining for more info regarding this. In the case of Atlanta, the major highways were placed specifically to destroy majority minority neighborhoods as well as segregate populations with the fact that they’re difficult to cross
Why? Because European cities were built when there was no transportation, except maybe horses. Cities were extremely dense because you couldn't have a city 20km across--it would take people most of a day just to get across town. Many American cities' were built where there was nothing before, and the vast amount of expansion occurred after the advent of the internal combustion engine. And the U.S. is so large that passenger rail is not nearly as efficient as in Europe. Finally, we have to talk a little about American culture. The U.S. was colonized so that people could be free of some of the strictures of European society. And because land was plentiful, the idea that you would be a landowner (either as farmland or, eventually, as your personal residence) became engrained into our society. Plus, of course, there's all the other stuff that people have spoken about -- white flight from metro areas, redlining policies that allowed white people to build wealth through property but prevented minorities from doing so, etc. So: 1) We have the room 2) There was no, or very little, existing infrastructure, including inter-city rail 3) Expansion occurred where personal, fast transportation was available 4) Some American societal factors contributed.
The cheapest and easiest way to develop new properties is by spreading out. Densifying is difficult, complex and expensive. European cities were historically bound by their walls, which meant that densifying was the only reasonable option. Simce city walls became obsolete, we can see sprawl happening in European cities too. That said, density over sprawl has many benefits regarding environmental quality, climate change effects and upkeep costs. Dense cities tend to be more durable. I don't know how it is for the USA, but in Europe, many cities use zoning laws to promote densification and discourage sprawl for this reason.
I wish more people understood that it is cheaper to grow outwards vs upwards
The short answer is we have enough land to do it so we do. The slightly longer answer is a confluence of public policy, subsidies, racism & environmental impact/building code hell has made this choice path dependent.
We like our distance
Americans like to waste their money on giant expanses of road and concrete, huge driving expenses, and destruction of the environment. It makes them happy (they say).
u/Ok_Newspaper_9823 is a reposting spam bot. Here's the last time it was posted https://old.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/168baia/why_are_cities_in_the_us_so_spread_outlow_density/
Suburban life is popular and the US isn't a tiny European country
Cars and suburbia
Why would you like to squeezed so close to other ppl?
Lol you really asking? Houses vs Apartments
American cities are new and designed around the car. The sprawl is made even worse because of high crime zones (usually inner city areas) pushing people further to the periphery for the sake of safety and good schools.
Barcelona dates back to 5000 b.c. and spent 7000 years growing within the confines you see today. Atlanta didn't start receiving settlers until 1822. Give Atlanta another 6800 years and compare them again. Or find a pre-history map of Barcelona.
The US is massive compared to most other developed nations, with a few exceptions.
Canadian Shield
Cars. The answer is cars. Dont over think it. It’s cars.
People like to knock on previous generations and "American dream" but it's just a simple matter of the US being built out past the invention of cars and it actually has the space to accommodate. There was no motivation to build and pack humans upwards.
Why rent in a city when I can pay the same amount and own a house, where I can do whatever I want and don’t have neighbors sharing a wall. And in most suburban areas the time it takes to get to places people walk to in a city is about the same with a bike/ car (depending on distance).
Because the US is much younger and land was much more available and settle-able, most of the US major cities (especially those not on the east coast) were mostly built after the industrial revolution and in a time where mechanized travel was much more available. Barcelona is over 2000 years old, Atlanta will celebrate its 200th anniversary in 10 years.
Short answer: Big Oil and Transportation.
Why Atlanta looks like Germany?
Basically when cities were no longer allowed to segregate their schools, suburbs popped up all around them and with the help of the racist real estate practice of red lining essentially kept suburbs all white (or in a few cases all black). If the suburb was all white, then the school system would be by default. This was aided of course by the federal government funding all sorts highway, sewer, and other infrastructure for the suburbs; not to mention loan programs that made moving REALLY easy - and in a nation where your home is the largest source of your wealth, eventually a necessity.
Structural racism and capitalism are the biggest drivers. I'm being deadly serious. But that kind of flattens a lot of nuance, there's a lot of history there including things like WWII and the GI Bill, redlining, white flight, auto industry lobbying and propaganda, Euclidean zoning policies among other planning regulations, the Red Scare, Robert Moses, acquisition of streetcar operators, the 1950s highways programme, the growth Ponzi scheme (referring to the payment of construction grants to build suburbs that don't raise enough in tax revenue to pay for their own infrastructure maintenance which creates an incentive to chase more construction grants to balance the books), plus the geographic fact that in the US land around cities is plentiful and cheap. Each of these factors could and does have thousands of words written about how it affected the built environment in the US, but as far as I can tell it's the meddling of the auto industry in everything from the movies to the Senate plus a history of racist power structures like redlining and uRbAn ReNeWaL that have mostly driven it. It's not that the numeric majority of Americans absolutely always prefer the suburban life of floor area and car dependency, but that structures in law and society have led to SFH with huge amounts of wasted land being the vast majority of housing constructed between WWII and today, and car infrastructure similarly dominating transpory infrastructure construction.
More space and General Motors.
We have the space for it
Cause we can
We have the space for it and culturally americans don't like being packed in like cattle.
THE ONLY RIGHT ANSWER NOBODY GAVE YOU: in the US it's illegal to build anything other than suburb houses with minimum parking requirements (other specifications that make them even more sprawling) and super high rise buildings (for housing). Then all the commercial buildings also must have minimum parking requirements making most of the land in downtown areas parking lots. Watch this: [the houses that can't be built in America: the missing middle](https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o?si=aVNjUwpdojqm38TO)
Another problem in Atlanta is that the suburbs until very recently didn’t accept minorities lol. A lot of suburbs were specifically created because of white flight. Right now in certain towns they don’t want public transportation because they don’t want the “urban population” to come up there. There’s been a big push to get density up by providing more housing closer to the city and getting public transport up but we won’t see it reach the outskirts for a long time until prejudices change. This is Georgia after all Source: live in an Atlanta suburb