To me the hell is in the middle.

Your own single-family home but so close to the neighbors that it's basically "I'm not touching you!" with enough space for the HOA-paid lawn service to squeak their mowers through twice a week.

Perfectly manicured grass, and no trees except a few sproutlings along the road because they were all cut down to raise the fill for the new roads and houses.

Your friend could live half a mile away as the crow flies, but they live in a different gated HOA community than you do, and you'd have to trespass through yards to walk directly there, so the route by road is more like 5 miles.

Every task you may want to do requires getting in your car and sitting at three traffic lights minimum.

The car pickup line at the elementary school overflows onto the main road everyday at 3pm with hundreds of Chevy Tahoes each picking up one child. These children may live within a few miles of the school but sending them out to walk or bike along the 50mph six-lane road that connects all of the gated communities is of course outright dangerous.

Shops and restaurants are dominated by chains because there's so little spontaneity of finding a new place, and not enough concentration of population or foot traffic for cool local businesses to find a niche.

...

I'm totally cool with living out in the woods, in a true rural lifestyle. I also like being places where maybe my personal living space is a bit more closed in but I get something in return for that. Walkable amenities. A sense of neighborhood or town community. Walking and biking trails. Cool local restaurants and shops and breweries that couldn't survive in the low-density rural environment or in the suburban hellscape.

It's that weird in-between that the US loved to build for the last 50 years, and is still building in a lot of places, that just seems dystopian to me.

Edit: And ironically lots of us Americans love visiting both of those other ends of the spectrum, and talk about what a lovely time they had, and then go back to their gated HOA suburb and get ready for the next day's school run.

I’m currently living in a place a lot like you describe, and I hate it, but for now it’s the only economically feasible option for my family. Walkable neighborhoods in my town are outrageously expensive, and while I could appreciate living in a more rural setting, anything reasonably close to my town that would allow for reasonable commutes is also outrageously expensive. The current economic climate kind of forces people into these suburban hellscapes :/ I would move in a heartbeat if there was an economically viable option.

> Walkable neighborhoods in my town are outrageously expensive

Yep, bingo. People asking whether we really want these kinds of development only need to look at the price of housing in desirable walkable town centers. The home-buying market craves more of it.

I’m in a fairly small town but the price of a townhouse walkable to downtown is easily double an equivalent single-family detached suburban house a 10 minute drive away.

That is not the alternative being discussed here. 80% of the US population is urban. We could not undo that without a huge degradation is quality of life. Cities are incredible engines for wealth creation. The alternative more or less imposed by law is suburbs that don't have access to communal space or nature.

// The alternative more or less imposed by law

What do you mean imposed by law?

I'm referring to things like single-family zoning, minimum parking requirements, and the subsidization & forced construction of highways through city centers. The situation we have today isn't some spontaneous expression of consumer preference. Federal, state and local governments have made building walkable alternatives nearly impossible and prohibitively expensive.

This is an interesting set of points, thank you. But they seem a bit orthogonal to the conclusion. For example - the town I live in is fairly compact (.15 acre lots, people can easily walk to main st.) but does not have a lot of multi-family. When the state attempted to push through multi-family zoning, the town and every other town like it pushed back. Because it is our preference to live in this style, and we're not eager to lift zoning even if it can eventually mean I have to walk 5 mins to a Starbucks rather than ten.

One town over has many more 6+ story buildings and townhouses. So folks over there have made a different choice about what kind of situation they want to live in. Is their town more walkable than mine? Not really but it does have even more variety on Main St due to increased density - great. They were clearly able to do the thing you're talking about because they wanted to.

Sounds like you live in Long Island. You seem to admit that if not for the local government putting restrictions on how people use their land, individuals would choose to build multi-family structures. It is a compelled choice, even if only for a minority of the population.

You're right about where I live.

// It is a compelled choice, even if only for a minority of the population.

I think we agree here, the point is that the law aligns (rather than contradicts) the desires of the local population. Which is different than people dying to replace their colonials with tenements but the government not letting them.

To some extent "everything" is compelled choice. I am precluded from building a cement factory in the middle of Bryce national park, but that probably is in line with the majority of people's desires.

The original comment above asserted that laws are forcing our communities to look as they do. My point is that the laws seem to by-and-large enable us to have our communities as we wish them to be.

> the town I live in is fairly compact (.15 acre lots, people can easily walk to main st.)

This type of construction does not fit in the zoning requirements of many American suburban areas. That is a walkable community by your own description.

Building walkable communities does not require high rises.

Mostly zoning.

That doesn't make a ton of sense. Zoning is controlled at a very local level (NY and CA had recent controversies with state attempting to claim that power.) My town is zoned for small single fam homes so people who want that kind of life come here. The town next door is clearly zoned for higher density, so has more apartments and townhouses. A different type of people live there. If you want more density, you go another town over and now you're in Queens, and you can keep going until you're in Manhattan with one of the highest densities in the world.

Seems like zoning reflects people's desires and provides a diversity of lifestyles which is good. If a community/development wanted to be more walkable, they can make the zoning call on a very local level.

What if more people want to live in a place like Queens than there are housing units there?

Prices increase, and some people cannot afford to live there. Where do they go?

If they move to your town, they are now "dissenters" for being the less-than-50% part of the population that might vote for things like higher density or mixed-used developments.

It's difficult to vote your choices in a place you don't already live.

You also describe a spectrum of types of places to live in a close geographic area that is not at all representative of most of the US. Being two-towns-over from Queens puts you in a majorly urban metro area with a level of density somewhat unique to older American cities and the Northeast in general.

In my experience the towns and neighborhoods with close density building (not necessarily high-rises, you can get way high density with single and double story development than the average Target/Costco suburb), are seen as very desirable in the housing market and generally command very high prices. Places with a Main Street, with local shops and restaurants, with walkable housing and mixed development.

These are the "cool neighborhoods" that people visit but often can't afford to live in. If supply of these places met or exceeded demand I would think they would be more affordable to buy housing in.

> many thousands of miles of off-road wilderness

That's a form of third place. You don't need to be actively sharing it with other people but everyone still agrees that it's shared.

Move to Ottawa Canada to get the best of both works. Gatineau Park, which contains hundreds of kilometers of wilderness trails is 3 miles from the Parliament buildings in downtown Ottawa, population 1 million. You'll meet people at the trail head but it's easy to hike 20 km without seeing another.

https://www.google.com/search?q=gatineau+park&tbm=isch

If you work a "normal" job eg one that requires proximity to people this is basically a role play lifestyle. Subsidized by the cheap gas and roads that make personal vehicle use affordable. We'd all love to cut out to nature at will, and we should build infrastructure that does allow us all to.