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I'd argue that the housing issue is actually downstream of the cultural issues. There are a bunch of large houses around me that could easily accommodate six or even eight people living them, but currently there are only two. People can and do raise children in their parents' house if it's respectable in their culture. One of the interesting things about current trends, is that it doesn't really seem to make much difference; countries with all different housing situations and acceptable arrangements are falling together.
Also, there are large areas of the US where it isn't all that hard to buy a house. I live next to a city of under a million people, and didn't bother saving any money in my 20s. I had a baby in a one room duplex, and we realized why families have houses, so we asked a local agency that helps people buy their first time home if we could buy one or not. They said, yes, up to $x. Then a year later we had bought a house, and it was all basically straightforward aside from a regionally specific appraisal issue on the first house we tried to buy. We aren't making a lot of money. It doesn't make any difference, birth rates are going down just the same.
You are techincally correct. The last couple of generations grew up in the suburbs and hated it. Now they don't want to go back.
With the demise of organic in-person culture, suburbs and small cities can feel isolating. Other than a few places like NYC, you'll quickly find yourself isolated because you never meet anyone. NYC forces you to collide with people like almost nowhere else in the US. The other big cities also achieve this to a small degree. But past that, every other place in the US makes a newcomer feel like they're trapped in their own head. Now newcomers suffering didn't used to matter as much, but pretty much every young professional is being forced to move into some other city as a transplant. They all get shuffled around, each getting more and more isolated.
So yeah, people want housing and they want it in a place where they won't be miserable.
I lived in SF for a decade. It had strong sense of neighborhood but without neighbors. We’d make friends for a short time, but everyone moved on, literally - to Oakland, Portland, Austin, or even just the Outer Sunset. I live in suburbia now which is exactly the opposite. Some neighbors have been here for 50 years!
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Ah, I see the problem. You don't just want inexpensive houses, you want inexpensive houses in Manhattan. Yeah, even Don Draper didn't live in Manhattan (or NYC at all).
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I loved growing up in the suburbs. I knew everyone on my culdesac. We were a ten minute drive from various friends of my mother who had children around my age. We went to church activities every week, sports, library events, etc. We weren't bored or bereft of social interaction.
In NYC I feel like being friendly puts a target on your back. But it might just be that I was socialized for one type of friendly, and don't recognize other forms.
I recently moved to a suberb outside a small city in a flyover state. I was quickly invited to attend a Welcome New People catered dinner at my new church, where we were paired with another family who checks up on us all the time. I am constantly invited to more parish activities, including a program that just pairs families with similar aged kids to meet up at least once a month to do whatever they want.
The nearest coffee shop has a consignment store with crafts made by local patrons. There's a festival every week in the downtown. I know most people on my street.
To some extent this is just what being settled in a place looks like, though. My parents have lived in Greenwich Village since the early 1980s (late ‘70s in my dad’s case) and sure enough they know all their neighbors, get greeted at their coffee place, brunch place, deli, cheesecake place etc by name, are part of many local organizations, can’t walk down the street on a busy warm weekend afternoon without meeting multiple people they know walking around.
But that’s a completely different experience to the one I have, let alone the one someone would have moving there from somewhere else with no friends.
Highly sociable people can make friends anywhere. If you were the kind of person in college who signed up to 20 clubs in the first week to see what they were about and to make friends then you’re never going to be friendless. But I think for the default person, who isn’t a recluse and enjoys company but who also isn’t highly motivated to make friends, living in a more atomized suburb exposes you to far fewer people in the natural course of daily life.
You talk a lot about your parish/church, but of course ever fewer people are involved in a local religious organization. I think generally you encounter more people in a city, and for people who are weirder there are also more likely to be others like you around relative to a small town where out of necessity social organizations are largely going to cater to the modal kind of person. Cities involve more incidental encounters with other people, for better or worse.
My parents moved into the state when I was 4. Six years later, they moved into a new-build neighborhood. My mom talked up the opportunity with friends and a couple of her friends also moved into the same neighborhood. I. Those six years in between, she had made friends with dozens of families, just by exchanging phone numbers with other moms at the playground, meeting their friends, arranging play dates, going out to coffee, etc.
My experience with cities, apartments, and dorms is the physical proximity creates emotional distance. People don't even look each other in the eye, let alone learn each other's names. It's too intimate by default, so people take steps to create boundaries.
This is greatly put, and matches my experience perfectly. Have people talking about how suburbs are isolating ever lived in a mid rise apartment building? Nobody ever talks to anyone else, people move every 1-2 years, your neighbors are entirely unknown.
On the other hand, when you live in a SFH neighborhood, just looking at people’s houses and yards and cars makes you wonder about the kind of people who live there. When you go out on a walk, you meet people who are your neighbors, and not random passersby, like you do in dense, busy areas. Because of lower density, you see the same people over and over, which facilitates remembering. When you ask them where they leave, they tell you something like “a green house with an American flag”, instead of “uhh in 1201”, which you’ll immediately forget.
There is nothing more alienating than living in a dense, vibrant city.
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