This is a very backwards way of looking at the issue. The public transportation infrastructure and denser housing used to exist throughout north American cities, but was bulldozed to make room for comically wide roads, oversized single family houses (increasinly occupied by empty-nesters not utilizing all the now empty space), parking lots, malls, and big box stores.

Car centric design caused these problems, and moving away from car centric design is how you fix them.

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whatever1 6 days ago | parent [-]

Did they also bulldoze the skyscrapers that we are missing to house all of the suburbs population in the cities ?

It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely.

	▲	tialaramex 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Skyscrapers aren't practical in most places. On Manhattan you've got sky high land prices and excellent rock, so hence skyscrapers. But in a lot of places the bedrock isn't very good and the prices are lower and it just does not make sense to build a skyscraper. Urban densification is a real thing if you don't legislate to prevent it and create a culture which abhors it. The street I live on was here a century ago, but back then it'd have a few dozen scattered family homes. Over time there's infill, maybe we knock down a big house and we put up a semi (I think Americans would call this a "duplex"?), sell both units and so by the 1980s the street has a lot more individual homes, with smaller lots. But there's still densification pressure, so two things begin to happen. One is that people buy a family home, cut it up and sell the parts. So maybe you take a 5 bed, slice it up, re-plumb and offer three small units each contained to one floor of what had previously been a house. The other is what happened where I live, builders buy a house with excess land, knock the house down, and put an entire block of dedicated flats ("apartments") where it stood, designed so that it looks basically like a single large house from the street.
	▲	eigenspace 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Skyscrapers add density but they're only part of the solution. North American cities have plenty of skyscrapers and plenty of single family homes but they have a servere lack of dense multi family housing units. > It’s nice to believe in fairytales, but what you are proposing is effectively cutting access of poor people to opportunities so that the rich can bike to their cafe safely. This is such a stupid populist argument. It's poor people that are hurt the most by lack of access to affordable dense multi family housing units in north american cities. Making poor families move further and further away from cities to find housing and then waste multiple hours a day sitting in traffic (and waste huge amounts of money on cars) is a ridiculous solution to affordability in cities. It's rich people who can afford detached single family houses close to city centers, or fancy condos in skyscrapers. It's everyone else who are better served by more modest 3-4 story tall dense housing units.