Comments by "" (@kaitlyn__L) on "Can we fix the suburbs?" video.

That “missing middle” graphic actually blew my mind. Most “single family houses” in the UK are “semi-detached”, which in that graphic is called a “side by side duplex”. And a lot are “terraced”, which… I guess is “row houses” over there? No one over here living in those houses would answer no if they were asked “do you live in a single family house?”! Which made me realise the key factor in the USA is whether you own every brick (or… I guess plank?) in the entire structure. Though funnily enough we consider the “2 level duplex” to be flats (apartments/condos). Or often say “a house converted into flats”. So I suppose what really matters to us here is whether you have your own front door and garden, even if it’s squeezed-in next to others’ with some shared walls, or whether you have to share a front door and a garden. It’s also kind of funny to me you just brushed away the parking availability thing. As over here most of the suburbs ARE impossible to park in, even with permitting systems, and plenty of them have no buses whatsoever. (“I don’t want them waking me up in the morning!”; maybe a valid concern about diesel buses but not modern electric ones. Then they complain about all the parked cars!) What’s also funny is they’re still considered part of low density suburbia here even when they’re fully terraced. To think that’s what those dedicated American suburb-defenders are railing against when they decry density… like, it’s not that dense. It’s just not big luxury. Even luxurious high-end suburbs over here have a mix of detached and semi-detached, rather than 100% detached.
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@thewhitefalcon8539 The dry answer is it costs more in labour AND more importantly in land. The space you’d fit 2 detached houses in could fit 3 semi-detached ones. Also you go from 8 outside walls’ area down to 7(.. or 6?), so it’s a bit of savings on raw materials too, plus marginally simplified plumbing and electrical. This is all reflected in full-detached usually being, last I looked, 20-50% pricier than semi-detached in the same development. Then market demand does the work. There’s definitely no widespread romantic attraction, it’s just a more accessible option for Owning Your Own House. Though I know a few people actually prefer it because it feels less lonely or whatever. (And sometimes there’s a wider goal like converting a big barn into a house, where it’d be an outright mansion as just one house and one unit is still absolutely huge and sound-isolated even when built semi-detached.) So I can understand why, when the land was cheap and the roads weren’t so long, they made use of the extra space over there and just defaulted to detached. But keeping it as a forced policy choice, expanding further outward so every new development is an ever bigger drain on the finances of the region, is bonkers to me. Especially when house prices are a known issue!
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@mohammedsarker5756 yeah like. I think the larger goal was at best misguided, to just hope we’ll always be able to build enough individual houses all diffusely, but given the goal at hand I can see how it happened. It’s been the refusing to change after, yk, even 20-30 years of evidence about how it played out which has more moral culpability. Let alone 80-odd years to course correct! Though it’s gotta be said, Levitt himself designed his “template suburb” specifically to try and avoid the possibility of a revolution. Not just in having to drive someplace to social areas, and therefore maintain the car, but also the entire system of HOAs enforcing mown lawns and paintwork. He literally said (paraphrased) that if a man owns his own house he will be too busy maintaining and paying for it to have time to revolt. And I’m sure other high-up people involved with pushing it as a national solution for housing liked that aspect too. So my first two paragraphs are more about the public-at-large’s goals and desires, which of course are not entirely separate from that wider context but are largely driven by more simple goals like housing security.
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