That's decidedly not what the article claims. It claims that there are people who live in the suburbs but would prefer not to, and provides evidence to support that claim. The same evidence acknowledges the existence of people who are happy living in suburbs.

I believe the article has failed to realize that "self-reporting" evidence is weaker than actions, not stronger. If you listen to the Freakonomics podcast for any length of time, you would realize that the weakest, most likely to not really be true, form of evidence is self-reporting. When self-reporting/answering surveys, people commonly give the answer they are "expected" to give. The actions then reveal their real preferences, which can differ substantially.

With a topic as sensitive as urban density, where city planners have been bombarding us with the "right-answer" of high-density living for decades, I would expect people to over-report preferring high-density living, especially on a survey conducted by someone trying to prove their case that people prefer high-density housing.

Given that we've made it illegal to build anything other than low-density suburbs in most places, actions aren't good evidence.

>Given that planning and zoning boards making it illegal to build anything other than low density suburbs are elected officials, their actions are pretty good evidence of preferences...

... of the voting population, whose demographics unfortunately don’t match up with the population at large.

There’s also a vested self-interest for property owners to vote in such a way that preserves their property values. And what better way to do so than to restrict supply?

Big caveat: My opinion comes from large amounts of anecdata. But at the same time, it has often been noted (especially on HN, given its demographics) that San Francisco, where there is a huge demand for dense housing, is fraught with many barriers to actually build dense housing.

You can see City Observatory’s (an urbanist publication, so YMMV) take: http://cityobservatory.org/homevoters-v-the-growth-machine/

Sure, voters' demographics don't match up with the population as a whole, but they're certainly not more skewed against the tastes of the poor than an idealised free market. (I don't think they're likely to be well represented in Levine's survey or the central San Francisco housing debate either)

Your linked homevoter article underlines the point by suggesting that low density housing areas are more likely to be downzoned than zoned for higher density, which is odd if a majority of their population has an unexpressed desire to live in a less suburban area, especially since it's most likely to happen where residents are homeowners and wealthy and white enough to be an influential voting bloc.

Restricting supply is itself a perfectly valid reason for actually preferring lower density housing, but it's only part of that equation. It turns out that many people who might answer survey questions saying that they ideally want a walkable neighbourhood with better transit actually end up obstructing plans to put a train line through their leafy suburb and a mixed-use development towers a few blocks away from their house.

That's an interesting point. I would point out another problem with this article based on my own experience living in metro Atlanta since 2001: many people, especially those moving to Atlanta from the Northeast, would likely have said that there was no good urban neighborhood in which to live in Atlanta in 2005. I think that was more of a chicken-and-egg problem than a zoning one. Midtown Atlanta had the right zoning and had neighborhood civic associations that were working toward urbanizing the neighborhood, but it wasn't until several years later that significant amounts of neighborhood-serving businesses started to move in.

OK, so tell me why housing prices in high-density cities are significantly higher than in suburbs. Isn't that a revealed preference?

Massive demographic and socioeconomic class differences.

I worked in a city where only the very richest people could live in the very expensive high-density areas. A tiny condo being perhaps four times the cost of my very large luxurious suburban house, maybe ten times the cost of a cheap suburban house. They had experimented generations ago with high-density poor people housing; that was not exactly paradise for anyone involved, so high density is only approved if the rent will be over $3000/mo otherwise the police budget cannot handle the crime issues. There is a self imposed demographic separation where only wealthy live in the penthouses therefore being wealthy the prices charged to fit their budgets are high. Of course there are maybe 1000 suburbanites for every CEO in the nicest five million dollar penthouse. And the population of the burbs combined is approximately 20 times the population of the high density areas. Its possible to cheat such that you are "in the city" but in a tiny house near the dangerous part of town that hasn't been gentrified into unaffordable condos... yet. But I'm not counting SFRs as "high density urban" because its basically substandard suburban lifestyle.

Housing projects are another question altogether, since people who live in subsidized housing don't really have the same choice and don't participate in the market the same way.

Let me ask you this--why don't the very richest people in your city live in very expensive suburbs instead of very expensive high-density areas?

> why don't the very richest people in your city live in very expensive suburbs instead of very expensive high-density areas?

Don't they? The only rich person that I know that lives in a penthouse is the dropbox CEO. Bill gates, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy, Mark Zuckerburg, Larry and Sergey all live in suburbs as far as I know.

First, this depends a lot on the city as to whether it is true.

For example, MTV/Palo Alto have the same per sq ft price as san francisco. There are sources showing each one as higher than the other, but not to any significant degree.

Second there are a tremendous number of factors that affect housing prices other than personal preference.

I'm really unsure if you are trying to be serious here, because it's so rare a preference like we are talking about here really has a majority at one of the extremes.

It's certainly a revealed preference for allowing denser development and reducing square footage of housing when land is expensive...

What the article shows is that lots of people who say they want to live in an urban area are forced to live in the suburbs. This has nothing to do with people who want to live in low-density suburbs, except to the extent that those people voted to make it illegal to build anything other than low-density suburbs.

I'm not sure how you get that from the article - could you cite where it argues that people who want to live in less-dense neighborhoods don't actually want what they think they want?

The point I got from it is that some people want to live in dense neighborhoods and others want to live in less-dense neighborhoods - and in certain areas that were built up more recently (e.g. Atlanta), there is more demand for dense areas than there is supply, while in some older cities (e.g. Boston) there is a short supply of both dense and less-dense neighborhoods.

If anything, your comment dismissing dense areas as "cramped arcologies" is more dismissive of other people's desires than the article is. Do you have trouble believing either or both of the following: (1) some (though not all) people want to live in densely populated areas where they can walk to most amenities and (2) modern urban building patterns have underserved such people?

> It’s not possible that we actually love it here, that we like the clean air, wide open spaces, huge yards, non-crowded downtown, small family friendly parades, and our rodeo.

Nobody wants to outlaw suburbs and single-family homes with huge yards and setbacks via zoning fiat, people want other options to not be outright illegal.

I'm sincerely sure you enjoy living where you do, we're just asking for such preferences to not be encoded and mandated in the zoning/land-use laws and regulations and procedures.

The best standard HN automobile analogy would be that the average teenage boy knows Ferraris are the coolest car. Surely that would win every poll of the "right" way to answer that question of what car is the correct car to drive. Yet its incredibly unusual for all but the very wealthiest to give their teenage son a Ferrari as their first car. Everyone knows they should say we need to outlaw teen boy ownership of worn out unreliable rusty beater cars for all kinds of health and safety reasons, but no one wants that law actually passed, especially not the teenage boys. If you can't afford a Ferrari for yourself or your teen son, you're just not cool, not in the cool driver club at all. God forbid you say in public that you want a nice boring reliable commuter car instead of a Ferrari, you know, like most people very successfully drive. But, maybe that is exactly a good way to live, just a very bad thing to say in public? Proven successful via vast population migration to where its possible and successful over many decades. Sure people will wail away at how boring and unexciting that broke down old F150 was or that rusty Dodge Omni and everyone should be forced to buy Ferraris, and thats why the cool kids say Ferraris are teh coolest, but it doesn't really MEAN anything in actual lifestyle, in what it means to live a good life. Sure, OK whatever, we should all buy Ferraris, now get off my back, because I gotta get on with real life, and go drive the Yaris or Sienna tomorrow.

That doesn't sound like a suburb to me, it sounds like a town. The suburbs I'm familiar with don't have a downtown to be non-crowded or in which to have a small family friendly parade. I like towns too, but the ones where I live are still expensive akin to the cities in the area, whereas the non-town residential + strip mall only suburbs are where it is cheaper to live.

Probably depends on the area and country. In parts of the US I suspect the average 'suburban' area doesn't have a downtown or local shops or what not, but in much of Europe and other parts of the US it often does, with 'suburb' often being taken more to mean 'smaller town just outside of a city'.

You’re not living in or visiting the same suburbs I am I guess...

Could you quote or otherwise cite where the article claims that?