Anyway with all this talk about urbanization - I'm just not meant to live in a city. I did for awhile but with increasing density I just can't deal with people's extremely poor behavior in addition to whatever is going on with homeless people. So yesterday I got sent a throw away article from one of my financial institutions trying to interest me in a home loan. The article itself was about the increasing demand for more larger homes in suburban areas. One of the reasons cited for this increase in demand had to do with people seeking refuge and privacy as part of mental health. So, for these urbanists, are they just blind to this need?
While a great deal of development and demand in cities IS manipulated (though mostly in favor of urbanists, contrary to their belief), things are built because people want them. People like living in houses, so houses are built. Some people just want to find a place that's affordable and not a dump, so new apartments are built. Most of these are built because they're still profitable, suburban developments have a better return on investment, while it's near-impossible to build a new development in the city that's not billed as "luxury living".
You can see this in some cities like Houston, of course, because the city builds around the edges and as these move out there's an onion effect of older development as you move into the city, and what things were in demand at the time. There's lots of 1970s-1980s era where lots and lots of mid-rise office buildings were built, which over time stopped being built because of recession and ultimately the irrelevance of office buildings. Another example, enclosed malls. There's new retail development in the outermost suburbs, of course, but a new enclosed mall even in the suburbs haven't been built since the late 1990s because development dried up for them. Long before Sears started closing their stores they had stopped building the 150,000 square foot boxes attached to malls, because they simply stopped being demanded.
It goes in reverse, too—the "Inner Loop" didn't have much in the way of chain restaurants surrounded by parking lots prior to the 1990s, because that demand came later.
What the urbanists do not understand is that these are natural reactions to trends and wealth level. There was no grand conspiracy by "the oil industry" to cause people to leave behind development where apartments were above stores, all buildings went straight up to the street, and any single family homes were inadequate. The ultra-wealthy retreated to exclaves that would be eventually surrounded by city but still allowed for large lots to be rebuilt in the future, along with ironclad deeds and other restrictions that kept neighborhood integrity. The middle class moved out to new houses in the suburbs (or what were suburbs in the mid-20th century), and the poor moved to the spaces that were vacated by the previous two. The inner city mansions of old were converted to smaller apartments, commercial use, or knocked down.
This theme repeated itself in cities across the country. Sometimes it was just the desire to move up, sometimes it was the desire to escape the corruption of city leadership, and sometimes it was because crime had gotten high enough that anyone with money wanted to get out.
You can question some of the bigger reasons of this reshuffling like "how did we become a low-trust society" and "were, perhaps, the original downtowns overbuilt to begin with" and try to resolve issues there. What you can't do is try to force your vision while trying to convince everyone that this is way people should live and would like to live if it wasn't for "muh propaganda", which is why we see so many articles about humans only "need" a coffin-sized apartment (figurative or literal), nor is assuming the worst in people.
Have you noticed, for instance, that there's the "people moved to the suburbs because racism" argument, yet they give the benefit of the doubt to every other group? If people moved to the suburbs because they hated black people, are black neighborhoods shit because black people are inherently a violent and uncivilized race? Urbanists and liberals don't realize the cognitive dissonance that both are blanket statements that assume the worst in people, and it's unfair if you only apply it to one group.
Maybe white people moved because it was better than what they had and they could afford it. Maybe black neighborhoods suck because it's more the result of a culture of drugs and single parent households.
By assuming the worst of people, you misinterpret what their actual intentions were and the exact situation was, leading to resentment and how they must be punished for imagined crimes of the past. This is why urbanists are so focused on ruining single-family subdivisions rather than looking at more practical solutions for housing, like rehabilitating brownfield sites into new housing (which can and has been done successfully within budget). They can't just understand that people can and still want large single family homes.