> hateful and bitter

Agreed. I am deliberate about what things I choose to be riled up by. American planning happens to make that small list.

My comment was a pure rant in a way that was unproductive.

I also agree that there is nothing objective here, which is why I tried to phrase it in the 'as objective as something subjective can be' form. But I guess it was a bit convoluted.

_____

Let me be specific: Post WW2 car-mandating endless suburbia built without any regard for financial or environmental sustainability is something I actively dislike.

> single, in a tiny apartment in a crappy, dirty apartment building

This gets to the core of the brainwashing I speak of. American cities were left to the dogs during white flight, and they haven't recovered since. There can only be one NYC in the nation. There a dozens of other ways to build sustainable & beautiful cities. NYC's subway system is pretty shabby for a city its size and the city feels haphazardly built. A lot of European capitals in comparison have wonderful examples of apartments that don't suck and subway systems that are a joy to use.

I am not anti-village or even anti-suburb. There is such as thing as well built suburbs. Plus,villages are bound to be low density by their very nature. But villages also tend to be quite sustainable. Strongtowns.org have written a ton of articles on this, and notjustbikes [1] does a great job of elaborating on this.

Urbanist communities have spent agonizingly long talking about the 'missing middle' [2] in housing. The options aren't NYC like shoulder to shoulder density or single family zoning. There are a plethora of options that lie in the middle.

> car-mandating

The car-mandating part is important too. It is one thing to want a huge house with a huge garden. It is another to protest building of non-single family homes in plots near you. Especially when asset prices continue to appreciate as wages stay flat. That's Nimbyism.

It forces a village level of density on any area that's a few miles outside the downtown mandating cars as the only possible form of transport.

> I love where I live and my neighbors do, too. We get along

Exactly, then why not let everyone have that choice?: The choice of living in an arrangement they desire in a manner that is reasonably priced. Imagine if it was illegal for you to build a house on your own land in a manner that you desired, even when it was safe and affected no one else. That's exactly what's happened to middle housing in the US.

> without any regard for financial or environmental sustainability

This is my last point. After all that, the cost of maintaining low density essential public infrastructure (electricity, water, roads, etc) is much much higher than that in denser neighborhoods.
This video by not-just-bikes go into detail on this point. [3]

> brainwashed

brainwashing is rarely implied in the literal sense. In most cases, it implies a situation where a person refuses to acknowledge negatives of a system even when it's staring them in the face. America has doomed its cities and implemented laws that strongly favor suburbs. If I grew up here, I would also think that cities were terrible too. Here, people live in cities transiently and usually in rentals. They never develop a relationship with neighbors or drop roots, because they move out the second they have their first child.

> I want my kids to live in a nice neighborhood and, overall, have a good growing-up experience.

The negatives of cities are very much the negatives of American cities. The many positives of American suburbs would look less great if they had to pay the real cost of maintaining their infrastructure. NotJustBikes has an entire video [4] on how sustainable cities provide a significantly better growing-up experience for children than American suburbs. I highly recommend it.

People spend thousands on visiting Europeans cities for the summer. People fantasize about how dreamy such a place would be and retiring there. By all definitions, these ARE their cities. That's what cities in developed countries could've been like. Alas, the New World seems to lack the creativity to imagine such a place back home.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A

[2] https://missingmiddlehousing.com/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul_xzyCDT98&t=1s