Yet, in the U.S. they mostly achieved that. 60% of the population live in separate houses. And yes, living space per capita is 2x-3x the EU level. Would be a no problem at all to put 100% in them, if some didn't live in large cities where it's impossible.
Just the economic and yeah, transportation infrastructure we have in Europe won't support that. It's not even the population density really.
Having lived in the US I know what it means to have "mostly achieved that". Gridlocked highways, unwalkable neighborhoods, the requirement of owning and driving a car (at least one car per family, usually 2 or more), and catastrophic CO2 emissions, both from cars, and from the fact that heating free-standing houses is way more expensive than heating apartments that share walls/floors/ceilings.
Until we invent teleportation, putting everyone in their own separate house is unsustainable.
It's hard to see that perspective when you have never seen it. It's funny because I would think that for someone with some knowledge of IT could understand the argument that it just doesn't scale.
For most people, the ideal life is having your yard and be able to drive everywhere with enough lanes on the street to be sure you never hit traffic. Except that ideal situation rarely exists, all the roads are clogged (induced demand!) and having a large house for every person means a big desirable city to work can't scale. Even LA has understood they couldn't keep building highways and needed to densify, it just doesn't scale.
Having lived in a European city I was appalled of how bad the air quality was, how noisy the streets were, how annoying trash collection at 5am was, I had to use a wet mop on the hardwood floor almost on a daily basis to and it was black every day. I had to walk a half a mile to a tiny parklet, always packed with kids as it was the only location in the play. Every morning on the packed subway and street buses. It was awful, I couldn't wait to get back home.
Back home I live in a green environment, trees everywhere, I got my lawn, there are no fences, I forget to close my garage door at night no problem, nothing is ever missing ... I use a wet mop every other week and it is never dirty.
Do you know what generates the CO2 emissions? All that useless junk we buy shipped from all corners of the world. The fix is buying less junk not blaming on someone that happens to want to live in a green environment.
The funny thing is that this has all been measured. Shipping emissions are nowhere near what they are for personal vehicle transportation. On top of that, all suburbs still require shipping in an even more unsustainable way (you need a truck to go around the neighbourhood for hours instead of having a single truck that can fulfill a single condo tower).
I know it's hard to be criticized for your lifestyle, but please do your research, suburbans lifestyle is nowhere near sustainable. That's not anecdata, that's data.
Honestly, it is not so obviously better to have hundreds of tiny stores in each neighborhood, stocked every day rather than going out doing grocery shopping once(!) a week! I am sure there is a tradeoff there - the many delivery trucks suffocating the same space they are supposed to serve.
I don't actually live in the suburbs, just a small town that looks like a suburb, and I also lived in European style cities hence I understand the attractiveness of a suburb. It is a different lifestyle and you can't "fix" the suburbs with the wrong kind of arguments - "you my friend suck for wanting to live there" Find a suburb looking place in Europe and check the prices ... now think about it, do Europeans assign value to that?
The vast majority of cities do not even remotely look like some of the elite and lucky European cities that are built on the many advantages they got from (not looking for a flamewar here) but exploiting other nations (the behavior is in the past, but the advantages remain and accumulate), all I am saying is that it cannot be a model for <insert eastern european city here>.
If anything the clean, quiet, well kept European city is non-sustainable and non-replicate-able as a global model. We need to fix the problems of the suburbs but not by imposing a model that cannot work.
I know this might be a tangent, but separate houses has caused HUGE housing problems. Wealthy homeowners refuse to give up their single family homes near large cities where that space should house 30 families.
I vastly prefer living in my apartment in Europe than living in a house, especially a US house.
Also, putting every family in a separate free-standing house is ridiculous: there is physically no way to achieve that.