this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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New developments are more likely to be HOAs, as city governments realized that they can't afford the money bomb that is car-based infrastructure to support single-family housing. So they foist those duties onto the HOAs, essentially making small municipal governments for every new housing development.
So.... you can avoid them for now, but only if you live in developed cities.
How do countries do this without widespread HOA equivalents? In the UK we have similar arrangements for shared spaces but not anywhere near the comical level of control on private land as in the US
Perhaps the difference is that the UK is not so full of dickheads.
It is my understanding that suburban UK housing is still much more densely developed than US-style suburbs where having a few acres per house is normal (but makes the cost of roads unsustainable).
Most suburban lots in the US are definitely not an acre. Census Bureau Survey of Construction data says it's closer to 0.25 acres or less per house as of 2023. Most suburban sprawlscapes around me are closer to 0.15 acres per house.
Especially in the southwest, like Arizona, they're doing shared side yard nonsense to cram more mcmansions.
What about when you factor in land used for the suburb but not on lots, like roads?
The road outside my house now is pretty typical for everywhere I've lived (five states and counting). It's two lanes wide, so let's say 25 feet across (pretty sure it's not actually that wide but we'll go with it). One lane goes to neighbor across the street, one to me, so 12.5 feet by the width of my yard. It's been a while since I've measured my full yard, but it's somewhere around 60 feet I'd reckon. We'll go with a house that's wider rather than deeper for maximizing road space and round up to 100. That's 1250 feet squared for the road, or roughly 0.03 acres.
If you added up every tiny little bit of everything you could maybe add 0.1 acres with the neighborhoods that have entry signs or something, but I really don't see how you'd get up to an acre. And certainly most people aren't talking about lot sizing doing all this extra math. There's certainly inefficiencies in urban sprawl that come into play though.
I was thinking someone might have gone and simply taken the area of some suburb and divided by number of houses.
If you do this at a large enough scale you'd also catch stores and parking lots.
Stores shouldn't be included though. You still need stores whether the housing is dense or not. People still need to eat and need clothes whether they walked to the store next door or drove from their house. And parking lots again is weird because that's not a suburban sprawl thing quite as much either. You could do parking garage and walkable downtown areas much more than is done in the US. Sure it's still not the most efficient, but it should be counted separately from housing.
Stores should be included for both clearly. It's all part of the overall density.
Parking garages are expensive and still take space. More people driving also inflates roads, around stores just as much as elsewhere.
And the fact that suburban sprawl stores simply don't build garages and instead have massive lots should definitely be counted into density.
If you call it housing density or suburban density or any other density I don't really mind, but this is the metric to cut down to make places nicer. And cheaper. Since ultimately all of this is also paid for with the economy, i.e. the peoples money.
If your road bill is small but your store's bills huge, you'll still pay more.
But that's not housing density which is what this entire discussion has been about. That's city density (or urban density, depending on which city planner you talk to), an entirely different metric. You should not conflate the two as then discussing city planning becomes impossible because nobody will be using the same terms.
Housing density is, should be, and will always be, how many residences you have per chunk of land (acres in us, hectares in UK).
I would read that as the entire settlement. Same way as replacing "suburbs" with "cities" would also include commerical and utility.
If americans don't consider commerical areas part of suburbs, where do you go to buy stuff?
Suburb is specifically residential. You might have a pharmacy here or there but by and large it's residences. Thats the definition of suburb. The commercial area at the edge of suburbs you go to get groceries and clothes is exactly that, a commercial district.