It's common to see arguments of this form, which are essentially "the current state of the affairs is simply the result of what people prefer: they prefer to drive everywhere, live in big houses with big backyards in sprawling suburbs, etc." In other words, just explaining (and excusing!) the state of affairs as being "what the market wants." I do think there is some truth in these arguments. Of course there will always be some people who prefer that and some people who prefer living in more dense communities/cities. But what's missing from this is discussion about how non-market forces affect the state of affairs? What about city planning, zoning, even direct subsidies like paying for freeways and streets?
100% I am in the suburbs because the two cities we love (Portland and San Francisco) have inconvenient busing and/or lottery systems for their public schools. And we would prefer to use public schools over private.
That being said we picked a suburb that is actually quite walkable for our daily needs due a good public trail system and being adjacent to a large community college campus.
With low birth rates, certainly a lot of people may have large backyard suburbia as the ideal but do not want to deal with single family homes for their small family of 2 or 3. A condo or townhome with green space can be a life with much fewer hassles.
Detached homes, especially the lovely ones with mature trees and gardens, require a lot of work. Things like snow removal, leaf pickup, scrubbing mildew off the siding, tree trimming, concrete repair, roofs, hvac maintenance, cleaning and servicing multiple vehicles, and the list goes on. And of course older homes are booby trapped wrecks of lead, asbestos, cloth-insulated wiring, corroded pipe, and shoddy insulation. Naturally, in many desirable locations old is the only affordable type, too.
There's also the observation that indulging everyone's preference doesn't necessarily lead to a global optimum. A straightforward analogy is traffic, or crowd control - if you let everyone follow what they perceive to be the optimum route, the flow becomes dysfunctional as everyone tries to occupy the same space, and occasionally people even get squished.
Subsidies are a big one. All the core aspects of American suburbs have been subsidized for 70 years: oil, autos, highways, single family homes, freight (via highways), service lines. People talk about a free market but there was a great deal of post-war central planning which decided this was the community of the future (Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Moses come to mind but it began as early as Roosevelt). Part of this was the dual-use aspect of oil and auto industries and highways for the military.
strongtowns.org has ongoing research that shows most suburban communities are not self-sustaining as a tax base and rely on nearby cities and outside investment to support their infrastructure.
That's a good point. I think there's also the question of us this really the result of what people prefer? Maybe there are other inefficiencies that are not non-market forces that caused this.
