> why is there a huge preference for SFH in the US
Single family homes are typically more spacious than apartments, come with a yard and driveway, have less noise polution from the neighbors, and are often located in lower-crime areas than dense apartments. Most importantly, owning your home in full means that you're not paying a landlord each month and it can also be passed down to your children.
> most people prefer Apartments because of how many amenities you can get
Some single family neighborhoods have a homeowner's association (HOA) that maintains a community clubhouse with stuff like a swimming pool and tennis courts. A bad HOA can be obnoxious, but in many cities you can choose whether to buy a home in a HOA or non-HOA neighborhood.
> apartments can house a lot more people compared to a row of SFH houses
Correct; Dense apartments and condos are far more space-efficient than single family housing, and suburban sprawl creates a lot of problems like car dependency.
Understandably though, for the reasons mentioned above, most people would prefer to live in a SFH if they're able to.
I'm not really sure what the ideal apartment:SFH ratio would look like, but practically speaking to bring housing costs down we probably need to focus on rapidly building large amounts of dense apartments in high-demand cities like San Fransisco that have failed to permit anywhere near enough new housing to meet demand.
> Most importantly, owning your home in full means that you're not paying landlord each month and it can also be passed down to your children.
You can own an apartment in full and not pay a landlord. You can even own the land the apartment is standing on[1].
I don't know if that exists in the US, but legally that's how it's managed in some of Europe (The Netherlands at least).
What you will have to pay indefinitely is a membership fee for a housing association, which owns the common parts of the building (stairwell etc.).
That's still going to be way less than the costs of maintaining a yard, driveway etc.
1. The other owners of apartments in the same vertical stratum can also "own" it. It's a legal mechanism that essentially comes down to forms of property tax.
In apartments/condos, the owner association doesn't own just the common parts but the entire building and sometimes the land underneath (sometimes the land is leased). You buy shares in the association, which comes with exclusive right of use of a designated subunit of the building. But the legal entity that owns the building (including your subunit) is the association rather than yourself.
In the end, all property ownership rights are legal fictions and abstractions, even for American SFH where you pay yearly property tax to keep using the house/land that you "own".
Whether or not ownership is fiction does not make owning and not owning equal. There is a real personal security advantage to ownership and a real perverse incentive to renting.
Note that in some places most people will consider that an “apartment” cannot be owned by definition. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an “apartment” - they would use a different name for it.
> Most importantly, owning your home in full means that you're not paying landlord each month and it can also be passed down to your children.
You can also own an apartment in full, and pass it down to your children. At least where I live, this includes a fractional ownership of the building and land itself (that is, the owners of the apartments collectively own the building and land). You don't have to pay rent to a landlord.
Of course, you have to pay monthly to the "condomĩnio" which manages the common areas of the building (and, in older buildings, the water bill is shared and paid together with that; newer buildings have it measured individually for each apartment). But that's still less expensive than renting (especially because, when renting an apartment, you also pay the "condomínio" bill together with the rent).
I think condo is meant to imply that the individual unit is owned at all, vs the whole building being owned by a corporation. Eg a landlord might say they're renting out their condo.
Single family homes are typically more spacious than apartments, come with a yard and driveway, have less noise polution from the neighbors, and are often located in lower-crime areas than dense apartments. Most importantly, owning your home in full means that you're not paying a landlord each month and it can also be passed down to your children.
> most people prefer Apartments because of how many amenities you can get
Some single family neighborhoods have a homeowner's association (HOA) that maintains a community clubhouse with stuff like a swimming pool and tennis courts. A bad HOA can be obnoxious, but in many cities you can choose whether to buy a home in a HOA or non-HOA neighborhood.
> apartments can house a lot more people compared to a row of SFH houses
Correct; Dense apartments and condos are far more space-efficient than single family housing, and suburban sprawl creates a lot of problems like car dependency.
Understandably though, for the reasons mentioned above, most people would prefer to live in a SFH if they're able to.
I'm not really sure what the ideal apartment:SFH ratio would look like, but practically speaking to bring housing costs down we probably need to focus on rapidly building large amounts of dense apartments in high-demand cities like San Fransisco that have failed to permit anywhere near enough new housing to meet demand.