The longer answer is a combination of:

- poor people want what rich people have. And if they can't afford the substance (private country estate), they'll still get the style (McMansion). They particularly want last generation's rich people's things, as this generation's rich people's things are have not gained widespread popularity.

- suburban sprawl has low up-front costs with real costs coming in decades later, as North American suburbs are starting to experience today

- suburbs offer a very seductive lifestyle proposition - the space and privacy of the country and the convenience of city life. In my experience they fail to deliver, offering the traffic and neighbours of the city, without the convenience of dense, walkable neighbourhoods, proximity to downtown and quick transit.

- more privacy and space are quite nice.

Would you mind elaborating more on this? More specifically about the cost the North American suburbs are starting to experience.

thanks

As the article mentions, suburban municipalities made money primarily by selling land, however the price almost never accounted for the true, high cost of servicing low-density communities. This is usually made much worse by developer lobbying. Eventually the land runs out and the municipality has to either stop growing and start raising property taxes to make up for lost sales, or start densifying to keep growth going, neither of which are popular with people who though were getting a certain deal. For a lot of suburbs densifying is not even an option (no one wants to go there), so sometimes they spiral downwards.

Calgary makes a good example. Prior to 2010 it had the image of "redneck sprawlville", but it elected an urbane, muslim, gay-welcoming mayor. One of his major issues was tax savings via ending public subsidies for suburbs. Turns out when you did the math, each mcmansion received a hefty public subsidy because the cost of servicing that house exceeded what developers paid the city. Similar patters can be seen throughout North America.

I've yet to see someone make the point that there are solutions, such as using electric self-driving cars as public transport, will work. Assuming of course, the price can be made low enough.

Maybe I'm a horrible human being, but I have a family, and I want space (incl. a garden), NOT living in a big city, and a car. I do not think this is too much to ask. Solutions (and politics) should focus on how to make that possible, not on how to prevent it.

I live in a suburb that is constructed like a small town. The streets are a grid, and there is a "main street" that puts the essentials within walking distance of many of the houses--groceries, restaurants, hardware, even elementary and middle schools--and a few smaller shop areas sprinkled on a few other blocks.

My mom lives in a suburb that was constructed by a suburban developer in the 1970s. The streets are all curved and hierarchical (i.e. connect like branches on a tree), and all the shopping is concentrated in a big strip mall at a major intersection.

The result is that the traffic is far worse for my mom. Everything requires driving, and the street layout extends travel times, while concentrating all drivers into a smaller and smaller set of roads. They also have a worse time in winter. They are totally dependent on plows when it snows; whereas in my neighborhood most folks can walk to a store if they need something.

Edit to add: I can't prove it, but my subjective perception is that average health is lower in my mom's neighborhood, with more fat people. There's no reason to walk besides exercise (i.e. walking in circles just to walk). In my neighborhood it is often more convenient to walk, so people do it a lot more.

I don't think so. The parent was pointing out that suburban living requires a subsidy from elsewhere to support business as usual. This is more a question of equity than of someone imposing their will about some idealized way of living.

> I've yet to see someone make the point that there are solutions, such as using electric self-driving cars as public transport, will work. Assuming of course, the price can be made low enough.

First, transportation is relatively small potatoes compared to the costs of sewer and water systems. The marginal cost of bringing sewer and water to a suburban / exurban home tends to be quite a lot more than the average cost of supplying those services.

Second, I'm a huge proponent of self-driving cars, but they will not solve land use inefficiency. The biggest gains from self-driving cars will be from higher fleet utilization (think car share), and those gains will be best realized in higher density areas. If everyone in the suburbs still has their own car servicing their single-occupant commute, self driving cars really do nothing from an efficiency perspective.

> Maybe I'm a horrible human being, but I have a family, and I want space (incl. a garden), NOT living in a big city, and a car. I do not think this is too much to ask. Solutions (and politics) should focus on how to make that possible, not on how to prevent it.

Nobody has said this, and you're lapsing into victimhood thinking. But here's a couple of other things to keep in mind. First, the US didn't really have a taste for suburbs the way we do now until WWII. And this was very much the result of government planners stepping in and telling people how they should live. We (planners) poured money into a freeway system that in many places primarily displaced minority and poor residents to ferry predominantly middle-class white people from new suburbs, through formerly integral neighborhoods, to central business districts. We (the country by way of our politicians) backed this up with home mortgage lending programs that basically required returning GIs to live a suburban lifestyle.

We already have a solution on how to make widespread suburban living possible--it requires money and energy, just like any other relatively inefficient system. I don't think people who have a taste for it are bad people. However, neither do I think the societal benefits of suburban living are so intrinsically great that we should continue a wealth transfer. Put another way, the externalities of suburban living should be better internalized.

Finally, far be it for curmudgeonly me to suggest to anyone how to raise children, but I'll just point out that the desire to isolate children from society in a suburban enclave is not a value universally shared throughout the world. Here are some young men describing their experiences growing up in the suburbs of Toronto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYdQB0mkEU

Infrastructure to serve the new developments is paid for by the developer, more or less directly ("development charges", etc). That keeps local taxes nice and low for existing residents, until 50 years down the road the watermain needs replacing, there's lots of it because of low density sprawl, it's more complex now that construction will disturb existing traffic and business, and no one wants to pay more.

As an example, here's a story about Mississauga, a green-field suburb that proudly ran a balanced budget for decades... until they ran out of empty land to build on recently. Now they're joining denser cities in asking for more money from senior governments: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/the-maturation-o...

Developers are much more grudging in taking on the economic risks of infill projects with higher densities, but even low-rise, 3-4 story buildings are sufficiently dense to push this equation in the other direction and make city services more sustainable and cost-effective.

For almost 40 years Portland Oregon has been developing light rail all over the metro region. Rail has been extended to the major districts within a 10 to 15 mile radius of downtown. (Which is a good share of the "spread" that the regional urban growth boundary allows.)

MAX and street-car lines are heavily used but there are still many cars and traffic can be terrible. So I guess light rail/public transit are never the whole solution by themselves. Then again, what single modality is ever the "magic bullet" answer to enormously complex problems?

You don't need to be NY for transit to make a huge difference. Portland is a squarely mid-size American city and its quality transit is a key selling point.

Any way. Nominally DC has a population of 646,449, however the DC metro area is 5.8 million. The Baltimore Metropolitan Area has grown steadily to approximately 2.7 million and has fewer issues with transit, but it's getting steadily worse.

And the NY metro area is 23.5 Million people.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/blame-the-...

Our decisions are tend to be highly local, with little thought given to the broader environment, other people, or the future.

Chinese suburban sprawl shows that no matter the style of governance or how markets deal with housing, it seems like people converge on the same poor urban planning practices.

Or, you could interpret the similar mistakes as proof that real estate in America is dealt with in a way that's far from free. Texas, the heart of the mainstream right, is where much of the sprawl is. In the greatest irony, the strongly-left economist Paul Krugman is saying Texas has economically positive liberal housing laws.[1]

Does the liberalization of housing law lead to sprawl? How could a place with top down bureaucracy like China produce the same outcome as right Texas with left-approved policy?

It's all a big mess. Nobody has figured out modern living in an efficient way, I think. I don't think Paul Krugman, Rick Perry, San Francisco housing reform activists, San Francisco status-quo activists, AirBnb, etc. have the answers.

The natural experiment in China shows radically different laws and market practices still lead to problems. No one has figured out an optimal idea for land ownership and housing.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/opinion/paul-krugman-wrong...

I'm sure there are many interacting reason for this, e.g. Japan's poverty in the decades after the war meant that cars weren't even a possibility for most people, and the sheer population of cities like Tokyo meant that mass car usage wouldn't be remotely practical even if everybody could afford a car.

But surely China has many huge cities as well, and the average citizen still isn't very rich...

My guess is that in Japan, developers just followed the money and did what's practical, and that meant building transit and transit-oriented housing. In China, on the other hand, with its strong centralized control, developers are probably more likely to be influenced by what the fat cats in the party hierarchy want—which is more roads for their Mercedes, and more "western-like" development which they associate with wealth and privilege—even if that isn't so sensible according to the situation on the ground (and isn't so good for the average citizen, or for the future)...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyu_Corporation

Tokyo, for instance, has plenty of relatively empty space around it even today; it isn't severely geographically constrained in the same way that Hong Kong or Manhattan are.

Not far in from the coast, China turns into 2500m+ mountains with Siberian winters and few flat places. Then comes Tibet, the Mongolian desert, and the Gobi desert. None of those places will support cities, and most are dominated by non-Chinese people like Uigurs, Tibetans, Mongolians, and such. The vast majority of China on the map will never be Chinese and never support a major city.

Actually, the USA is known for its soviet style command and control urban planning. China is known for direct state control as well. In either country you can expect to be told what you can build, how big it can be, setbacks, parking, street access, and lot sizes. USA cities are laid out with some of the worst urban planning practices in the world and markets have nothing to do with the rules and regulations imposed.

So recent bad Chinese practice and the USA are two examples of the same model. Neither is liberalized.

Does the liberalization of housing law lead to sprawl?

Actually, market oriented building doesn't lead to much sprawl anywhere. Sprawl must be imposed by law or central direction of development or it isn't economically viable.

Nobody has figured out modern living in an efficient way, I think.

Of the world's eight big (10MM+) first world cities, half of them are famous for housing and transportation that is affordable to the middle class. And each of them has found its own way to achieve that happy situation, so there are a lot of models for efficient modern living, even under the stress of a large population. All of them have medium density (150/hectare or 40k/mi^2), more than SF but less than Brooklyn, big subway systems, high rates of home ownership and low rates of personal car driving, but the differences are substantial.

Seoul has lots of apartments and high rises mixed into its tightly packed single family homes with a variety of street widths. Tokyo has very narrow streets and small blocks with mostly new single family homes on small lots. Mexico City is more European with low rise flats and apartments and mews townhouses mixed with small lot single family tiny homes in the suburbs that are expanded with new floors and extensions on the lot as the family grows. Osaka has a mix of those.

Each of those cities is nice and and reasonably low stress place to buy a home and get around the city.

The other four large first world cities are driving out their middle class. London and New York are famously unaffordable, possibly with prices driven by sprawl and water or a greenbelt. Los Angeles is choked with sprawl and traffic. I don't know what's going on in Paris but I hear it's expensive.

So some places have figured it out. And some haven't.

It ends up with the worst parts of state control and capitalism by being rather corrupt at the local level. It subsidizes new development and creates barriers to redevelopment. Rent control, NIMBY, etc etc it's a mess.

Because they're both the product of private developers working on isolated blocks of land. Their concern is fast ROI, which doesn't coincide with what's good for quality of life or the long term.

If China and America follow this route, that's only 2 examples, not a universal trend. In Europe the cities are much more walkable.

Cars are a problem because of the amount of traffic around the city center. To address that, the goverment mandated that private cars could only drive in the city once a week during weekday rush hour. New drivers can only get a license if they pay a hefty tax or win a lottery (only about 2% who enter win). These restrictions don't apply to electric vehicles. There is also a network of public electric cars that can be rented for personal use. They are about the size of Smart cars.

The article points at the suburban sprawl starting to spread around cities like Shanghai. But what it doesn't mention is that most of these homes are super expensive or so far away as to require a lifestyle which most Chinese couldn't afford. Those who could afford these houses are likely to also be able to afford an even better lifestyle overseas. The middle-class can scarcely afford to buy a small apartment in China's top-tier cities. So I'm not too worried about Western-style sprawl taking over all of China.

Do people use these in your experience? I've noticed them pop up all over Germany and then Taiwan too, but I found it hard to spot anyone but tourists riding public bikes. I always wonder if these are simply prestige projects to impress green-minded citizens (like myself).

It probably helps that biking is already a strong element of Dutch culture, but if I'm not mistaken the Chinese bike a lot too so I guess it could work just as well.

This, along with other problems, like an exponentially expanding middle class population that can suddenly afford vehicles, is only one of the many different challenges most western governments have not experienced, which China currently faces. It may be unfair to quickly jump to conclusions and simply say the Chinese have not learned from the history of urban planning by western countries, when there are very few references from which the Chinese government can draw on, for the unique problems that they are facing.

TL;DR: Chinese urban centers have problems that cities in Western countries have not faced.

Beijing bikes don't go very fast, probably because the lanes are all choked by cars, though it was like this in the late 90s also when Beijing still had segregated bike lanes.

Chinese urban planners are just uneducated people who got their jobs via guanxi, especially in a corrupt city like Beijing (Shanghai, Guangzhou are much better, of course).

Because numbers on charts matter more than people on the streets being safe. This is sad.

Cities with functional public transport and walkable neighborhoods: Tokyo, Seoul, London, New York City, Paris, Berlin.

Maybe also Madrid and Singapore, but I don't know much about them. Edit: Maybe Osaka and Nagoya, too (I don't know much about them either).

All these have over 5 million population.

As soon as you get go outside, you have suburbs with no life and poor transportation. RER and SNCF trains are late when they're not in strike (1).

As a result, everyone wants to live in Paris or very close, so the prices of housing are very high. And even if you can afford an appartement, it's very hard to actually sign a lease because there are so many potential tenants wanting to rent it.

Add to that the fact that there are very few tall buildings in Paris because they want to keep it some kind of museum city stuck in the 19th century with Haussmanian buildings, the housing problem is not going to fix itself.

(1) In Paris suburbs, most child care provider refuse kids whose both parents use the RER. Because they will have no control on the time they'll be back to pick up their kids. Not exactly what we call "functional public transport".

Mexico City deals every day with the challenges of having grown very fast to 20 million before it became rich. New subway and BRT lines, infill development, upgrading properties, and progressive transit and construction planning keep the place getting better to live in and easier to get around every year. Phasing in pollution and emission regulations as they became affordable and regulating polluting industries out of the region step by step worked well, too. In spite of the famous chaos of Mexican government, Mexico City will soon mark thirty years of effective governance and planning, so it can be done. If Mexico can do it, China and the USA -- which are usually considered to be only somewhat worse governed than México -- could probably do it, too, someday.

But there's also a lot of traffic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_by_p...

Portland is a great city by American standards, but its public transit mode-share for all trips in the metropolitan region still hovers around 4% -- with an additional ~2% coming from cycles -- making Portland ~94% dependent on private cars. (Note: you'll see statistics claiming a much higher mode share for Portland; this is done by excluding the other municipalities which account for >70% of the population in the metropolitan region, as well as by excluding the >60% of trips that are non-commuting trips). China is already doing much better than that, so it would be a shame if Portland were its target.

I live in Oregon, where we have strict urban grown boundaries. Here in Portland, light rail has been developing since the 1970's and still expanding. Bicycling is pushed by city leaders. "In-fill" housing is going up in most every part of town.

Utopia? Not everyone thinks so. Sure "urban sprawl" is mostly avoided, and farmland is preserved. But road traffic is a nightmare, and the toll of increasing population density is palpable.

Now there's talk of the undesirable effects of "vertical sprawl", a reaction to the ever-increasing height of new condo buildings and the like. There's a growing murmur of objection to the "canyon-like" landscape that many feel has a negative impact on urban quality of life.

So here we are again, there are always trade-offs, which is less corrosive, suburban or vertical sprawl? Maybe it just goes to show, we can overdo any good thing.

Standard mansion blocks of six stories still have a much higher population density than suburban sprawling single-family homes while avoiding some/all of the issues with too high a population density – two-lane roads are usually quite sufficient and the sun does reach the ground from time to time.

See e.g. Berlin and Munich for (IMHO) decent examples of this.

Every job I've expressed an interest in recently has an office outside of the main centre, normally near a major road junction. This makes the office inaccessible by public transport and much easier to get to by car. These are IT jobs in different industry sectors: retail, defence, finance, utilities etc.

I suppose this is due to the price of land and availability of office space out of town. There is no incentive for most of these companies to be in a city centre.

This is the major reason I'm likely to continue to drive to work. At the right time of day it takes 20 mins to drive, proabably over 1.5 hours by public transport - a mixture of train, bus, walk and much more expensive. How dissappointing!

Of course this isn't an issue in London, I'm talking about provincial towns and cities.

http://www.urbanrail.net/as/asia.htm http://www.urbanrail.net/as/cn/shan/shanghai.htm