The Future of California’s Suburbs

Here is my cross-post about Wendell Cox’s “California Declares War on Suburbia” published in today’s WSJ.   His piece raises a classic issue in urban economics.  Why do so many Americans like the suburbs?  How much do they prefer the suburbs to living at high density near pubic transit nodes?  If urban planners nudge people (through SB375 and other planning tools) to live at higher density, will those people, who would have suburbanized and driven their cars around, come around and be happy that they were nudged to live the “green life”?  When people live in the suburbs, how large a social cost do they impose on the rest of society through excess resource consumption?