cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26223998
Housing Rule
this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2025
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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.
Those are all true things, but they're what I'm talking about - this isn't a cohesive plan, this is a bunch of very rich people doing what's best for them at any given moment
Europe built back so beautiful because they organized to optimize from the organic layout they developed slowly before cars. They designed the cars into transportation, but they didn't compromise the cities for the cars. They can have a suburb that is surrounded by parks and nature, that mixes all sorts of housing together, because they don't let money do whatever it wants
Here, they'll set aside a nice bit of forest and say it'll never be developed... But there's constant pressure to do it anyways, and now the planned community is out of balance
They'll plan out a commuter rail line, and a billionaire will block it. They'll plan out a bus route, and they'll manufacture consent about crime or something. They'll talk about mixed used zoning, and people will worry about their house prices
Yes, there's a lot of planned aspects to this, but this wasn't designed to suck - it was a million little concessions to money.
This is what happens when you don't plan, when you aren't organized - companies are organized, and they'll get a great ROI if they manufacturer consent. Each for their own issues, for whatever is best for them at the moment, with no concerns for what it leads to. All they have to do is block things that hurt their interests and whittle away at things they want to make money off of
Cancer. Cancer isn't trying to kill you. It's not planning on disrupting your organs. It's just trying to grow without regard to anything else