As an opinionated advocate who doesn't always know when to keep his mouth shut, I sometimes find myself getting yelled at (usually online, where the yelling is merely implied, rather than inflicted on my eardrums) by those who have decided that my interest in compact, walkable communities is an existential threat to their way of life:

"You can't expect everyone to ride bicycles, you know!"

"Some people like having their own house with a yard. We're not just all going to give that up."

"You want every one of us to sacrifice the lifestyle we moved here for to achieve your goal of radically transforming our city."

As an urbanist who spends plenty of time in conversation with others who have a strong interest in walkable, compact communities, I also get to hear a lot of things like these:

"The suburbs are dead. The millennial generation doesn't want to live in a cul-de-sac and have a three-car garage anymore, so those places are all going away."

"Low-density neighborhoods are not sustainable. We need to add a lot more density, everywhere."

Both of the above sets of perspectives are, in one way or another, detached from some basic mathematical realities.

Public debate about even minor changes to land-use policy often seems premised on the unstated assumption that the stakes are colossal. Sometimes, it can feel like we are being asked to either approve or reject a sweeping, wholesale redesign of our communities, which will no doubt be implemented by our city planner overlords with all the zeal of a Leninist Five-Year Plan. For example, the tentative proposal in Minneapolis's new draft comprehensive plan to allow (not require) duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes in single-family neighborhoods has been greeted with some stunningly breathless rhetoric about the "extinction" of single-family homes.

Extinction? Really? There are about 78,000 detached single-family homes in Minneapolis. To replace even half of them would mean more construction than has occurred in the entire city in the last four decades combined. And every one of those 39,000 single family homeowners would have to sell for that to occur. Most of those homes are going to be around for a long time yet.