Good for you then. It's your right to buy whatever kind of home you want. But it is also my right to do the same. If I want to live 50 feet even 50 miles away from the nearest neighbor, you have no right to stop me and no right to insist that I live in some dumpy NYC highrise.
If sprawl were a reflection of a desire for living space, it would be people moving into the countryside to live on farm-sized plots.
Your lack of familiarity of Houston is showing again. Despite our reputation as the "sprawl capitol" of America, you will find that what you just described is exactly what many people are doing. The largest of the new developments in our outer suburbs all resemble exactly what you describe, or at least the next closest thing: houses on large lots and acreages that used to be farmland and that are still surrounded by farmland. Those are the types of developments that are selling big right now because they are what people want. In my own case, I grew up on a plot of wooded acreage on what was then the outer suburbs. There was a farm on the other side of the nearest major road. I looked out the windows of my highschool and saw cows grazing. It was a desirable high-market area with the benefit of being close enough to the country for space yet also close enough to Houston for a commute.
On the contrary, it is a consciously dictated outcome of a number of building and engineering codes intended for a specific social purpose - soceital atomization, and thus the neutralization of the public square.
BZZZT! Wrong. That's the kind of nonsense that zoning commissions institute. Want to know a neat little fact about Houston? IT HAS NO ZONING COMMISSION. People build where they want to build and buy where they want to buy - anything and everything goes!
The chief stroke of genius in getting America to adopt the Communist urbanform has been the addition of prosperity to this commuist nightmare world. Instead of identical little cube dwellings, Americans were given identical large houses fitting to their wealthy status in the world.
Don't be silly. Suburbanite houses recycle home plans to SAVE ON COST and home buyers like that cause it means cheaper houses for them. There's no evil "conspiracy" behind it - it's simply the market at work. Instead of an urban wasteland, a suburban wasteland, where it is impossible to go anywhere without a car.
If I so desired could walk to the grocery store, the convenience store, and the nearest elementary school from the uber-suburban enclave where I grew up and do so in only 10-15 minutes time. Yeah, if I wanted to go further that required a car, but so what? 100 years ago it would've required a horse and I don't see you complaining about the communist conspiracy to force horses on the people. Some of us actually LIKE to drive and LIKE the convenience and mobility it provides (not to mention the freedom from the fat smelly tattooed vegan goths who frequent public transportation in all the major urban cesspools of the northeast).
Implements of freedom, like the personal home and personal automobile, are turned into necessities, which means they are not freedoms at all.
Uh, shelter IS by definition a necessity and has been since people lived in caves, huts, and teepees. Nobody "made" it into one. Just the same, means of transportation be they on foot or by wheel, are and always have been necessitities. You may prefer foot. I prefer the wheel, which allows me to move faster and go farther than you can.
The personal freedom offered by a car is the ability to choose to use it or not.
No it isn't. A car is simply a mode of transportation that happens to be faster and more efficient than other modes, like the foot. Nobody's prohibiting you from using your feet and for all I care you can relocate your residence into a grocery store restroom stall so that you don't even have to use them anymore to get the food you require. But that doesn't give you a right to demand that I forgo my mobility advantage in a car and relegate my position to one not unlike your own, nor does it give you a right to accuse me of supporting a communist conspiracy since I choose not to.
The thing that many around here find so objectionable about your postings is not that you desire to live in an urban cubicle, walk to the grocery store, and ride some smelly train to work. What's so objectionable is the invective you direct at those of us who don't want to mimic your lifestyle. What's so objectionable is the hatred you exhibit against those of us who want and live in something different from your own system (and yes, whether you intend for it or not it comes accross to others as hatred). What's so objectionable is the fact that you do not seem content to simply live and let live, to let others make their own choices of where or how to live like you did and do so free from your harassment, your invective, your insistence that they are somehow doing something "wrong," and your implication that by not mimicing you that they are somehow mindless and unwitting tools of a nefarious scheme, conspiracy, or ideology.
If you want to live in an urban city, squeeze into tight spaces with smelly people on the subway, get harassed by disease-ridden bums on your streetcorners, roll around in the urine-drenched sidewalk in front of your cube of a dwelling, endure the 2AM catfights of the unhappily wedded couple on the other side of your bedroom wall, and shake your fist angrily from your window sill at every nefarious automobile that passes by, be my guest and do it. It's your choice and nobody's stopping you. But please leave those of us, who choose for reasons we find self evident not to partake in that sort of living situation alone to our own ways and our own choices just as we respect of you, ALONE.