Sublurb 
On Mar 30, 2025, Hank Green posted on BlueSky:
Some of the critiques I’ve seen [of abundance liberalism] do seem to boil down to the old mainstay of “people should stop wanting the things they want” and I don’t really know how to handle that.
“We don’t need more houses if they aren’t in dense cities!” Ok, but I don’t know how to make a bunch of Americans fundamentally different than they are. People really do like their big houses and their yards. They aren’t pretending.
This bothered me when I first read it. Gathering my thoughts into a post on why, I realized that I hadn't actually read Abundance yet, so I decided to do that first. In the end, I felt my thoughts on the book were more coherent than my thoughts on Hank's post, so I published those first.
Then, in late November, we were treated to Will Stancil's similar take:
Stopping sprawl, creating density, enticing people back towards the core - these are much harder problems than a lot of people realize, because fundamentally, people who are choosing where to live have a set of preferences that, in the aggregate, create sprawl.
Right. So I went searching through my sadly extensive unpublished archives to necro this post and restart my thought process on why these takes touched a nerve in me.
Was I annoyed by these takes because they were true and I didn't like them? Did I think they were false and misleading? Something else?
Part of the difficulty in writing about this subject is that its facets are interconnected in a complex network of relationships that make organizing it into something approaching a coherent narrative almost impossible. There isn't anywhere obvious to begin, no clear destination.
So let me start with the simplest and most core issue, which is fundamentally.
This word betrays not just a particular position on housing, but a broader center-left philosophy where the only meaningful politics is the one that wins elections, and that winning elections is about meeting people where they are rather than leading them to something better. If the approval ratings of our elected officials are any indication, Americans recognize the carefully curated, poll-tested modern Politician as a liar without convictions, and they don't like it.
This is also the language of conservatism.
It's a language that treats the status quo as essential, and to adopt this framing with housing preferences is to implicitly pick up all of the other troublesome baggage that goes along with American conservatism.
This is why presupposing that suburban preference being a majority viewpoint makes it an intrinsic American ideal is an echo of the urban/rural divide in our national politics, where politicians are free to use "New York City Values" as an epithet completely unquestioned, but no amount of empathy from "the urban elite" is enough for the poor rural communities in West Virginia or Alabama inhabited by "real" Americans.
If you recognize the racist undertones in this kind of phenomenon, it's no coincidence, because this rhetoric is a reflection of the racist history of the residential zoning that was developed explicitly for racial exclusion. This doesn't make you a racist for not wanting an apartment complex near your house, but the interconnectedness of the issues of race and housing is deep and persists to this day.
Still, even given these problems, the underlying claim that Americans prefer less density is supported by several lines of data. This polling by Pew on the subject of housing preferences is titled "Majority of Americans prefer a community with big houses, even if local amenities are farther away" and is cited by Stancil in his thread.
This seems pretty clear cut, but the poll results also show considerable changes over several dimensions.
One way to understand these results is to look at them over time, where the spread across all Americans in 2019 was +7 for "prefer larger houses", broadening to +21 in 2021 and then shrinking to +15 in 2023. Presumably, something must have happened in 2020 that made Americans suddenly want more isolation from their neighbors, but it's impossible to say what that could have been.
The differences are substantial when broken down by different demographic groups, too. Asian Americans prefer "higher density" by +26 points, so to pretend that this preference is somehow not "fundamentally American" is implicitly ascribing racial essentialism to housing choice.
Conservative Republicans are shown to hate being near their neighbors the most of any major group tested, so of course asserting that this preference is "American" cedes that identity to white conservatives. Not coincidentally, white Americans are the only ethnic group for which there is more than +10 spread in preferring larger houses to closer amenities.
I think the conservative and racial undertones are structural and not explicitly intended by the rhetoric. People are reacting to their communities as they are, and in America, those communities are shaped by racially exclusive zoning, red-lining, sundown towns, and white flight, regardless of their current cultural conditions.
But one of the reasons I'm on the left is there is a strong desire there to identify these structural inequalities and to struggle against them, not to simply surrender to them because you perceive them as popular or, worse, natural.
The other main line of data through which these claims are supported is revealed preferences, and I find it highly dubious that you can learn anything meaningful about housing preferences through consumer spending habits.
For starters, people can only buy what's available. There is a finite amount of residential land in the United States, and according to the NY Times, nearly 75% of it is subject to single-family zoning. This results in roughly 65% of all housing units in the country being single-family homes.
People don't only shop on price or size, either. As the old saying goes, there's also location, location, and location. Embedded within location are many other considerations, which includes access to amenities, the quality of those amenities ("good schools"), proximity to friend and family networks, and access to a good job market.
However, the Times article does touch upon the other great assumption in all of this, the one so commonplace across the US that it is nearly invisible. When up-zoning from single-family is proposed, the concerns among existing homeowners reveal the real root of the issue plainly:
High-level arguments about the environment, affordable housing or equity invariably meet more prosaic objections: What if some neighborhoods lack enough parking?
It's car-brain all the way down.
The core component of the "big houses and yards" lifestyle is not big houses or big yards, but cars, and cars degrade urban life. They make it more noisy, more polluted, and less safe.
Cars are not referenced in these posts about people's preferences, even indirectly; Green says "big houses and yards" but not driveways or garages. But it's cars that define these environments, because sprawl doesn't function without them. They are the.. well, fundamental issue with the American lifestyle, and relaxing the grip of the automobile on the built environment is the big issue that urbanist YIMBYs are fighting for.
Ultimately, I'm not that bothered if the the claim "Americans prefer big suburban residential neighborhoods" is true, because unlike Green, I'm comfortable saying "people should not want what they want."
The answer to "what kinds of housing do Americans want?" is not the only relevant input for answering the question "what kinds of housing should we be building more of?" Can we actually afford to maintain an expanding suburban infrastructure? How should we adapt our lifestyles to decelerate climate change? What fosters interconnection between individuals and increases trust in their local communities? What living arrangement brings about better health outcomes?
Centrists recoil from this type of thought, worried that it sounds too moralizing, too much like left-autocracy, or elitism, but it's not any of those things. To say "I think you should want what I want instead of what you want" is advocacy.
I refuse to believe that Americans at large are a lost cause on these issues.
Outside of a small number of intact urban cores, our great walkable spaces are our universities, and the Pew polling suggests that the people who have spent the most time in this spaces, those with postgrad education, prefer walkability.
Even among the wealthy and middle class, I think there is an intrinsic understanding that dense urban living has its benefits. Every year we're treated to the trope of Americans traveling to European cities only to return both unable to shut up about it and astonished that they've lost weight. This is so common that it's ushered in new frontiers of nutrition woo, when it's more likely that they have simply walked habitually for the first time in years and snacked less throughout the day.
Preferences themselves are also fickle, and are reactive to context and to cultural influences.
In 2007, the high-status smartphone of choice was RIM's BlackBerry. Many of our modern concerns around smartphone addiction started with the BlackBerry, though the blast radius only included finance at the time and not every child in the country. RIM's stock doubled between June 2007 and 2008. Precisely no one wanted a smartphone without a mechanical keyboard.
When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, many people at the time who loved the multimedia capabilities still felt they could not give up their BlackBerry's keyboard. It was good as a toy but not for real work. Barack Obama famously clung to his BlackBerry upon entering office in his first term. In June 2008, RIM's stock was $144. Today, it's $4, and the BlackBerry is irrelevant.
In the 1960s, US cities were so depressed and crime ridden that using an inner-city street as the setting for Sesame Street was considered bold and unconventional. By the 1990s, sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends and the first reality show The Real World made the city into the place to be for young professionals. This shift in desirability fed into a broader back-to-the-city movement where Gen X and Millennials led a net migration back into urban centers across the US.
The pandemic retraction and the gradual out-migration of Millennial parents to suburbs have been counterbalanced by immigration, itself largely an urban phenomenon. The concept of the city as a regional center for employment, enjoyment, and cultural variety is something that is even part of the suburban identity in the US.
If the abundance agenda ends up driving a new center-left coalition into power, it represents a huge opportunity to develop more economically and environmentally efficient towns and cities. There is no way to do this that doesn't involve developing more densely.
It's an opportunity that urbanists don't want squandered. We want places where people can walk to the market, have comfortable third places to enjoy time with their friends and family, and cycle safely.
Maybe if we had more of these, they'd be more affordable.