Because of when they were built, the sheer scale, and the commodification of housing
In Europe, do developers buy several acres of land to build on all at once? Do they do that continuously, for decades on end?
People never want inconvenience, they want quiet “safe” neighborhoods where their children can play and their house goes up in value. Developers want to continuously build the most valuable ROI, which right now is a neighborhood of hastily thrown together McMansions, and they’d rather build stuff at the fringes of an already built community so they can mooch off existing infrastructure
The overstuffed communities grow in a decade, and all these people now have to commute further to do anything, so they want bigger faster roads. The original layout is now cut into segments by more and more 4 lane 35-45mph roads to alleviate traffic
I’ve seen it happen in real time, and I’ve also experienced what the planned European communities are like. This is what happens when you don’t force better designs, when you don’t regulate growth. It’s cancer
America looks this way because it was precisely regulated to be this way. You got some knowledge gaps or you are naive how this really went down.
A few pointers:
Car lobby: dismantling of public transit system in major urban centers while along with obstruction of any public transit construction
Classism with a super heavy dose of American racism: People did not want to live among the “crime” and “undesirables” and government was more happy than codify racism into zoning laws
Financial institutions enabling all of this with their “informal” (aka) racist under writing requirements.
Again, EU has suburbs and their not nearly as bad as whatever US cooked and a lot of EU has to be rebuilt after WW2 and but they managed to maintain some sort of social cohesion in their infrastructure and urban design.
This is the most generous interpretation of the fact I have seen short of being. a bootlicker…
I not big advocate… Nobody could see this coming, nobody is really at fault.
Suburbs existed ever wince the city existed technically.
EU has suburbans but nothing comes close to the disgusted shit we have in Us and Canada. Why is that?
Because of when they were built, the sheer scale, and the commodification of housing
In Europe, do developers buy several acres of land to build on all at once? Do they do that continuously, for decades on end?
People never want inconvenience, they want quiet “safe” neighborhoods where their children can play and their house goes up in value. Developers want to continuously build the most valuable ROI, which right now is a neighborhood of hastily thrown together McMansions, and they’d rather build stuff at the fringes of an already built community so they can mooch off existing infrastructure
The overstuffed communities grow in a decade, and all these people now have to commute further to do anything, so they want bigger faster roads. The original layout is now cut into segments by more and more 4 lane 35-45mph roads to alleviate traffic
I’ve seen it happen in real time, and I’ve also experienced what the planned European communities are like. This is what happens when you don’t force better designs, when you don’t regulate growth. It’s cancer
America looks this way because it was precisely regulated to be this way. You got some knowledge gaps or you are naive how this really went down.
A few pointers:
Again, EU has suburbs and their not nearly as bad as whatever US cooked and a lot of EU has to be rebuilt after WW2 and but they managed to maintain some sort of social cohesion in their infrastructure and urban design.