I think it's possible to make apartment/condo living more attractive in the US, but you'd need a few changes. For example:

* American apartment complexes are typically ugly as hell. They're little building islands in a sea of asphalt, disconnected from the wider street grid too. They'd be more attractive if they were more like the complexes I saw while living in Munich: more green up front, car parking basically all underground.

* Require substantial backyards/courtyards for said complexes.

* More tenant protections that prevent landlords from arbitrarily non-renewing a lease, so that people in apartments can have long-term stability. If you break the rules repeatedly or severely, then sure, landlords should be able to remove you, but otherwise you should be left alone to live your life.

While in Munich, we lived in the Solln neighborhood. It's mostly apartments of some kind (we lived in an apartment, and then a backyard duplex), but they just look a lot less ugly than they typically do in the US. Example area: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Munich,+Germany/@48.081098...

> The problem with "increase supply" is that existing property owners rarely want that.

Yup. I'm a weirdo who owns his home but wants a shit-ton more housing built in his city, even if it means my home value goes down. I do know some like-minded folks here, but I would be very surprised if we weren't in the minority.

And it makes sense. We're taught (in the US) to treat our primary residence as an investment, and for most US homeowners it's the most expensive asset they'll ever own, and will be their main vehicle for maintaining their wealth through their later years, and for transferring the remainder of that wealth to their children.

Given that, you'd either have to be self-sabotaging-ly altruistic, or otherwise wealthy enough (outside of your home) that a significant dip in your property's value doesn't tank your finances. I expect that describes a small number of people.

> In almost all cities land has run out, so the only way to actually increase supply is to increase density. That means fewer single-family-homes, and more townhomes, multi-family, condos, and apartments.

Existing property owners can only afford to hold this opinion because land rents are insufficiently taxed. Through some sort of monumental stupidity we decided to tax labor instead of land. In this sense the SFH, “Americans like suburbia” problem is just a function of poor tax strategy. If homeowners were faced with the economic reality of their choices then markets would fix land use by themselves.

That means the American Dream is unsustainable, and until people can break through the entrenched interests and do something rational, American cities will continue to decline.

Where else do we simply accept that incumbents get to have full protection from loss at the expense of literally everyone else? Certainly other examples exist but we certainly wouldn’t tolerate wheat farmers stopping their neighbors from growing wheat.

> In almost all cities land has run out

That's incredibly untrue. There are numerous cities, even in CA and NY, that have plenty of room for new single family homes.

The response to that is usually some variant of "eww, gross".

No, we threw it away because executives wanted their control fantasy of being able to push people around like little chess pieces, as opposed to setting a vision, hiring professionals, and then giving them the tools to achieve the vision and staying the hell out of their way.