Wrong. People respond to incentives. If you have 50 years of intensives pointing to one system, then that's what you are gone get. And then you have commenters going all 'see this is what people want'.

The reality is, there is plenty of evidence that people still like other types of building and other types of neighborhoods. They were simply made illegal, economically terrible or destroyed with some other means.

You act like there wasn't a massive top-down government program to produce exactly the system the US has. There is a reason only the US looks like the US (expect for maybe Canada). Its because its was top down government policy.

The US systematically red-lines pretty much all inner-cities. Created a mortgage market that financed only single family homes in suberbia. These were often cheaper then rent you had to pay in social housing at the time.

This was then cast in concrete with some of the most strict zoning regulation anywhere. Making it basically impossible to do any other kind of development outside of the already existing city (that was redlined).

To support this a massive highway building program, with highways rammed right into the city center. Destroying large parts of existing cities (not paying people properly). Then in those cities laws were imposed to create massive amounts of parking, at direct expense of the poorer people that lived in these cities. And of course the tax system made it profitable to rip down houses and put in place surface parking-lots.

Private cars blocked public transport (often private back then) and made it non-competitive, destroying mostly car free neighborhoods that depended on that.

And of course it continues. The way the tax system works it systematically distributes tax dollars from city centers to the outside. Even poorer districts closer to city centers are more productive then suberiba. So you have those areas that get neglected, but even if they weren't neglected, they would still overpay on their taxes.

The same kind of unfair structure exists when it comes to utility as well. With existing urban cores overpaying and suberiba under-paying. Suberbia using massively more shared infrastructure to produce the same service but paying the same or less.

And of course lets not forget that all those new roads and new highways were a massive infrastructure investment, something that street-car, bus and trains didn't get.

This isn't even all. We could go on to talk about how fundamentally unfair tax assessment rules for different housing types and income groups.

But yeah, it was totally 'culture' that lead to situation. It wasn't at all a top down system. To be sure, there were lots of willing people in power on the local level that were more then happy to follow those things.

People respond to intensive. If all of a sudden subberbia would pay fair taxes and far utilities. And that goes even more for Walmart and friends, the predators of the current system. If the zoning laws didn't exist. If those highways were ripped away. If parking all of a sudden had to pay. If highway money was reinvested in high intensity bases and trains. If all those things happened I described above changed, this 'culture' wouldn't survived for even generation.

Unfortunately people are mostly blind to the systematic structure that produce 'culture'.

> And one room cottages and the modern political vision of "social housing".

Clearly you have no understanding how 'social housing' works in places like Vienna.

> but you're not going to be able to practically deliver the homes people want for everybody who wants them.

There is plenty of evidence that there is high demand for things other then single family homes. This is simply a fact. You can see this in the property prices alone. Anywhere that has a nice mixed used development, prices go threw the roof because demand is so high. The issue is supply, not demand.

Go look at the data analysis by urban3, their data shows this pretty clearly.