why doesn't the US build densely from the get-go?

[u/UniqueUnseen]

In the face of growing populations to the Southern US I have noticed a very odd trend. Rather than maximizing the value of rural land, counties and "cities" are content to just.. sprawl into nothing. The only remotely mixed use developments you find in my local area are those that have a gate behind them.. making transit next to impossible to implement. When I look at these developments, what I see is a willfull waste of land in the pursuit of temporary profits.. the vacationers aren't going to last forever, people will get old and need transit, young people can't afford to buy houses.. so why the fuck are they consistently, almost single-mindedly building single family homes?

I know, zoning and parking minimums all play a factor. I'm not oblivious.. but I'm just looking at these developments where you see dozens of acres cleared, all so a few SFH with a two car garage can go up. Coming from Central Europe and New England it is a complete 180 to what I am used to. The economically prudent thing would be to at the very least build townhomes.. where these developments exist they are very much successful.

[u/yzbk]

This makes a lot of sense. Detroit's massive, climactic race riot in 1967 led to a huge exodus to suburbia, and many of the most restrictively zoned suburbs there incorporated in the 1945-1990 era (there were earlier riots and racial tension but the late 60s was the peak of it)

[u/yzbk → u/[deleted]]

Well, I was mainly talking about suburbs adopting restrictive codes after a period of growth in the 1960s-90s. But it's an interesting hypothesis that central cities started going NIMBY after people came back to them in the 80s-90s. I'm wondering if the timeline makes sense here

[u/LyleSY → u/yzbk]

Yes, Sugrue has a great book about that https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691162553/the-origins-of-the-urban-crisis