[xversilov]

It's hard for a non-American to appreciate just how different their urban environments are compared to the US, and vice versa.

It was certainly a shock to me when I first arrived to the USA... "Why is everything so far away? Why does every building have a bunch of empty space around it? (i.e. mandated setbacks)" etc.

The lack of real cities is probably my least favorite thing about the USA.

[influx]

The USA is so big and diverse it's silly to say that the it doesn't have any "real cities". I suspect New York City, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Portland and others would be proof otherwise.

[davidw]

NY, Boston, kind of. Portland... a little bit, downtown, and starting, a little bit to be that way in some areas.

With the Supreme Court's Euclid decision in 1916, we've had zoning that has only gotten worse and worse since then, so most things built in the years following that have deviated from that sort of walkable, incremental city that we used to have here too.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...

[TulliusCicero]

Even 'real cities' in the US have a lot more garbage urban design than most cities in, say, western Europe. Even the denser ones like you frequently have silly car-oriented design, like minimum parking requirements, and huge swathes of the city that are mandated single-family housing only.

Comparing Seattle's transit system to, say, Munich's (where I currently live) is a sick joke. Munich is far more walkable and bikable, too. Of course, a big part of this is that a majority of the land in Seattle is zoned exclusively for, you guessed it, nothing but detached single-family homes.

As an example, I sometimes visit smaller cities (< 50k) here, and even then they still are highly walkable, moderately dense, and they usually have pretty good transit connections to other places.

[InclinedPlane]

There is a wide diversity of cities in the US. You can go to places like NYC, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, etc. and see examples of cities with decently dense cores and functional public transit. But then you can go to cities in the South, for example, where it's almost impossible to get around without a car.

[ars]

And it's one of my favorite things about the USA. I hate dense European style cities.

Different people like different things. The nice thing about the USA is you can pick. You can live anywhere from a remote farm to a dense apartment.

[rayiner]

But you don’t really get to pick. Dense European style cities are outlawed in the US. Hell, dense European style suburbs are outlawed here. My pre-zoning code suburb has lots that are less than 3,000 square feet. It’s awesome—easy to walk and you see your neighbors all the time. But it’s completely illegal to build more neighborhoods like mine. The minimum lot size now is more than five times bigger—we have legally mandated suburban sprawl. And there is no justification for it. If people wanted to have big lots, developers would subdivide lots that way. There is no reason to mandate it by law.

[cmurf]

It's hugely wasteful and ultimately not affordable, to build out such massive infrastructure that then needs to be maintained with taxes. Most cities have extracted the initial funding for this infrastructure: roads, water, sewage, storm drainage, sidewalks, overhead or underground cables from the developer. But the tax base can't really support that beyond the initial life for that infrastructure without raising revenue. All city and county fees, taxes, and fines all inevitably go up and quality of infrastructure still goes down.

And that's in cities. Extend it out to podunk and they have to be subsidized, even when they don't know that's what's happening. And it's getting bad enough many counties in the U.S. have started to revert paved county roads back into gravel because they simply don't have the money to maintain the paving. They're worse full of pot holes than gravel. And the locals don't want to pay their fair share which might mean a dozen families sharing 50 miles of road - it's the exact opposite of economies of scale. Their incomes obviously have not kept up with the cost of even maintaining local roads... but there's no market force that's really correcting for this either.

[549362-30499]

Maybe your favorite thing. As a urban dweller, I'm a little fed up by subsidizing people living rural lifestyles only to see them have (in some cases) 4 times as powerful a vote as my own. I suspect that if we removed the federal interstate subsidies, farm subsidies, internet subsidies, etc. your lifestyle would not be self sufficient.

[TulliusCicero]

Simply false. There are virtually no European-style cities in the US. If you think otherwise, maybe it's because you haven't actually lived in Europe? I live in Munich right now, and I've lived in several regions of the US, visited lots of places too, and can't think of any city that felt very much like Munich does, or even German cities as a whole for that matter. Perhaps you could enlighten me.

[CalRobert]

Except you can't, really, unless you're quite wealthy. There's a clear expressed preference for more housing (note massive rents on very small apartments in major US cities) but those cities forbid people from building more housing.