Mostly agree, but disagree slightly with number 5. In most places, it is illegal to build any denser. Town zoning laws are notoriously slow to change such that they do not keep up with the market and actually codify a lot of these problems in their regulations.
The poster you're replying to still has the cause vs effect right. That gets encoded into law because that's what a lot of people want. The law follows the demand - people know that there are developers out there with far more money to throw around then they have, so they fight money with law.
So when you get densification in US cities, it happens in districts that were formerly industrial/commercial only - where people aren't giving up the form of their existing neighborhoods - or in poor areas with little political organization.
(There's also a TON of underutilized land in industrial/commerical only districts in most US cities, so the focus on single family home zoning when all those lots are already there and similarly "underutilized" is foolish. Even if you abolished zoning overnight, a big industrial or commercial property is going to be much easier to acquire than a bunch of individual home lots.)
> The poster you're replying to still has the cause vs effect right. That gets encoded into law because that's what a lot of people want. The law follows the demand - people know that there are developers out there with far more money to throw around then they have, so they fight money with law.
This doesn't make sense to me. If single-family homes are what most people want, why would a developer bother to buy up land and build something denser if people don't want to live somewhere denser? That sounds like a dumb business decision.
Nearly the entire country is zoned for single-family housing. Someone who wants to live in a SFH has no shortage of options. Meanwhile, someone who wants to live somewhere denser has very few options; we've almost entirely banned building new ones, so what dense places do exist are mostly the ones built prior to modern zoning codes.
Not sure where you're living, but here in central NC we've got a record number of huge apartment complexes being built left and right over the last 4-6 years. Cheap too. It's never been easier to live "somewhere denser".
I think this is covered by (3), the anti-city sentiment.
This is why there are so few cities (in the European sense) in the US, and many of the largest 'cities' are just small downtowns in an ocean of suburban neighborhoods.
