No, the point is that these neighborhoods aren't just relativist taste and opinion. Human-scale walkable life is more deeply and objectively a better way to live.
Your last sentence gets in the right direction. There are TONS of "right" ways to design a city. ZERO of them are car-dependent. Car-dependent building approaches are a completely new experiment that is less than 100 years old, and it is a failure.
This is not about styles and trends. All the changes in styles and trends across huge diversity of human societies went along for thousands of years without car-dependency.
Around 80 years ago, people started building fundamentally unsustainable, impoverished, inhuman, financially insolvent styles of development on a grand scale, and it turns out that about any place that has been protected from that experiment is now desirable, and it's not because the features are culturally associated with wealth or because they are in historic prime locations, it's because car-dependent life is crappy, and people with enough wealth to escape it without cramming into extreme density are often doing that, and it's possible to build medium-density non-car-dependent life for far more people and we should be doing it.
This approach seems to be based on “there is only one right way to live and that’s without a car”.
You may not like a lifestyle that is car dependent, but plenty of people do. I’ve lived in cities with high density and excellent transit and what do people buy when they can afford it? A car.
Your claim that these areas are desirable because they aren’t car dependent is clearly not supported by fact. Plenty of areas are highly desirable and people still want their cars.
This article is written like someone complaining about someone else’s taste in wine. It’s all arguments about subjective tastes.
That's an uncharitable and incorrect view of what I'm saying. There's TONS of right ways to build cities and communities, and ALL of them are not car-DEPENDENT. Whether some people want to use cars is a more fuzzy and complex question, and there's definitely a place for them and lots of good arguments for the benefits of cars, especially for specific cases. But there's no good case for building communities that are fundamentally car-DEPENDENT where you CANNOT live there other than by complete car reliance.
It's not about subjective tastes. Objectively, car-dependent places are financially and environmentally unsustainable. It's a matter of scale. Some individuals can live car-focused lives within a system that is not entirely car-dependent, and that can be fine. Cars can have a place. But if everything is car-dependent, we get non-resilient places that are not economically productive enough to maintain the massive amount of infrastructure that car-dependent communities have.
Subjective tastes are like choosing the color for painting a house. It's not subjective to notice simple facts like that cars take up orders of magnitude more space than all other forms of transit.
You are completely right that many people want cars. But people also want to be free of traffic jams. There is no actual way to build a system in which everyone has all that they want when our wants are incompatible. These things have to be balanced.
A lot of people might want to live in beautiful wilderness locations, but if we let everyone build homes there, the wilderness goes away. Saying that it's wrong to ruin the wilderness with suburban sprawl doesn't in the slightest deny the fact that many people like living in the wilderness and countryside. We simply can't all live in beautiful wilderness. But we COULD all live in non-car-dependent walkable places. So, while living in a special wilderness or ocean-side cliffs and so on is necessarily scarce and elite, it's possible to build enough human-scale walkable places for everyone who wants to live that way, and it's a tragedy and market-failure that we don't do that — and THAT is the point of the original article.
Your last sentence gets in the right direction. There are TONS of "right" ways to design a city. ZERO of them are car-dependent. Car-dependent building approaches are a completely new experiment that is less than 100 years old, and it is a failure.
This is not about styles and trends. All the changes in styles and trends across huge diversity of human societies went along for thousands of years without car-dependency.
Around 80 years ago, people started building fundamentally unsustainable, impoverished, inhuman, financially insolvent styles of development on a grand scale, and it turns out that about any place that has been protected from that experiment is now desirable, and it's not because the features are culturally associated with wealth or because they are in historic prime locations, it's because car-dependent life is crappy, and people with enough wealth to escape it without cramming into extreme density are often doing that, and it's possible to build medium-density non-car-dependent life for far more people and we should be doing it.