Minimum parking standards desroyed density in downtown cores and were basically based off of no real numbers or data. The subsidizing of private vehicle ownership fueled the destruction.
The funny thing is that some guy i worked for complained a lot about not having a lot of parking in the middle of a dense city.
I said yeah maybe but do you want it to look like some american parking city?
And he was like yes, i'm going there next month.
No, a lot of people own condos. And even if you intentionally destroyed dense, urban areas for the sake of endless suburban sprawl, you would still have people needing or wanting to rent some of those houses. Students, people anticipating moving after a few years, lower-income folks, etc.
The entire point is they don't have to be that way. You are quite literally missing the entire critique. The US's focus on cars and suburbia make it that way.
NIMBYs think if they just ban density that the 8 billion people in the world who need housing will just poof and disappear.
Personally, I prefer dense, walkable, transit-oriented cities so we can preserve as much nature as possible, and so the people living in cities aren't separated from nature by a sea of suburban sprawl.
False dichotomies are fun! There's absolutely a type of beauty to a well-run, upkept city. Should everything be a city? Nope, we need green areas, probably even more green areas than cities. The two can and should coexist in harmony.
I think I'd rather have very dense population centers with intermixed accessible green spaces would be far preferable to the sprawling suburbs like you see in Texas
Walkable cities produce less pollution per capita than suburban or rural areas due to less pollution from commutes and increased efficiency delivering utilities (due to the population density).
Suburban sprawl is what truly makes ugly stains on our word - concrete everywhere, destroying the watershed, with no native grass in the medians, and so many cars spewing out fumes, micro plastics, and disrupting migration patterns. They're depressing places to live.
I feel the same could be said about industrial agriculture replacing the smaller family run farms. Nothing is more depressing than driving through hundreds of miles of monoculture fields in the mid west full of corn.
We need to tons of small permaculture farms to supply our dense cities. Not vast swaths of land devoid of native species to feed us as efficiently as possible with corn, the earth be damned. We need to learn to live in harmony with out stark urban rural divides.
Permaculture farming also has massive abilities to sequester carbon in the soil, as well as other farming techniques that involve plowing crop yields back into the earth, similar to the rich soils of the Amazon Rainforst which archeologists have determined was artificially made by man, and still holds the carbon they put into it.