You all do realize that suburbs existed before the invention of the car right? American infrastructure is bad but it’s not irredeemable, the assumption that we can’t provide public transportation to these places because of a lack of resources is malthusian. And sure some places like the American Southwest and Florida are legitimately over human population carrying capacity due to climate change but in general the earth as a whole isn’t, and cities like Amsterdam are just as unsustainable as Miami since even though has one of those le epic reddit notjustbikes cityskylines approved infrastructure, both are below the sea level.
I think in general our message should be abolish the need to own the automobile, any measures meant to limit car use should target the rich before the poor. And that trains are good, and that a high speed train across the United States would be a rather popular project in the eyes of even the chuds. And by god stop calling for the suburbs to be razed, stop trying to be zoomer Robert Moses.
Streetcar Suburbs are an entirely sensible and sustainable format for lower-family-count living spaces. You can have other names for residential-dominated communities, but lots of people don't want to live in house that's directly between high street stores or industrial factories. It's also not sensible to put every single person in a 50-story apartment building downtown, or you're just going to make a Skyscraper Suburb that's an insane heat island. You need to stagger your density levels, and intersperse green space to build a sensible city, or else you'll just be fighting the city's microclimate harder than you can counter with HVAC and insulation, and you'll have demand spikes for your transit services that are impossible to overcome. There are actually limits to how dense you can build a high density city sustainably. Obviously that doesn't mean we need a bunch of single-family mcmansions and sprawl, but we also can't build sci-fi megacities.
Does every family need one home? I disagree. This leads to concepts like cluster flats.
High density low rise is a concept for a potential sustainable solution.
Since you are likely from the US your attack against high rise cities is just though. Urban heat island effects are real.
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Low rise options like cluster flats are generally what I'd consider medium family count housing options, certainly smaller than high-rises.
Other options like row houses or townhomes are a good low family count housing option as well. I don't think most people need individual houses, and lots of the older Streetcar Suburbs and similar in the US and here in Canada are generally based around small apartment buildings and rowhouses.
I used to live in Toronto, which definitely has heat island problems. Crappy in summer and not as helpful in winter as one might hope. But it's even more of a concern in the US, where things are getting really hot as well.
Cluster flats are also more pro-social. I've always been much happier sharing a kitchen with my neighbors because it usually turns into shared meals and a lot of community in a way you don't get in apartments.
We used to have that system back in the 40's where I lived and from what I've heard it was fantastic. Then the tire company came in and fucked everything up.