We just recently moved from a city to the burbs. Our choice was multi-factored. It was price of a bigger house, better schools, less congestion and crime.
My old house was 900sf, perfect for 1 to 2 people, but it got cramped when my son was born. We looked into expanding but for the cost of adding a room with a bathroom ($100k) we decided that it wasn't worth it.
With schools we got lucky, the elementary school was just recently built and looked great. But there was an issue, the schools that my son would be going after grade school were rated very poor. This was a concern.
Traffic bad and seemingly only getting worse. Traffic projects have been in endless gridlock between car commuters and the bicycle community.
Not sure about other large cities, but mine (Portland, OR) has a pretty big homeless and crime issues as of lately. Gone are the days of how clean our city is and now it's just littered with trash and tent communities. It's not uncommon to see a heroine needle if walking in a city park. In the last year, we had somebody try to break into my shed and my wife and 4 years old Son were confronted in our driveway by a homeless individual, who said that he was considering suicide.
I still have a soft spot for PDX and I think it's a great place, but we decided get out.
ha ha sounds like I'm repeating the same story of earlier genereations, ha ha nothing new.
> My old house was 900sf, perfect for 1 to 2 people
That is 80m2. I grew up in a 75m2 apartment (810sf) with my parents and two brothers.
I guess that "cramped" is a matter of perspective. :)
> Not sure about other large cities, but mine (Portland, OR) has a pretty big homeless and crime issues as of lately.
It makes me sad to hear about that. We are in the XXI century and we have good ways of helping homeless people and reduce crime. I understand that you leave to a better place, but that does not solve the problem.
> confronted in our driveway by a homeless individual, who said that he was considering suicide.
I hope that you have find a good place for you and your family but do not forget the people that you left behind. Their lives are a tragedy that can be averted.
> That is 80m2. I grew up in a 75m2 apartment (810sf) with my parents and two brothers.
I guess that "cramped" is a matter of perspective. :)
Also a matter of layout. The expected amenities in US apartments live little room for living space, particularly pantries and walk-in closets, and large appliances. Large bathrooms are also common. Having just moved to Europe, I am acutely aware of the trade offs; we have a lot of living space, but we also have had to buy wardrobes, get used to a much smaller bathroom, and generally adapt to different expectations.
I often wondered while seemingly 20% or more of a small apartment's floor plate would be dedicated to the bathroom. Turns out the answer is simple: ADA requirement.
For some anecdotal evidence, I've never seen an actual walk-in closet in Switzerland or Spain where I've traveled and/or lived so far, though I'm sure they may exist somewhere.
To be fair, a builtin wardrobe is different to a walk-in wardrobe. The latter _tends_ to be builtin, the former tends be built into "the space between walls". I'm not 100% sure I would call them more space efficient, however they don't poke out into the room, and so you end up two rectangular rooms, and with their wardrobes next to each other, as opposed to two non-square spaces with the wardrobes (typically) backing onto each other. So you typically end up with extra usable space.
A walk in robe on the other hand typically wastes space since it (in effect) introduces a new hallway into your house, since that is effectively what the wakling area in your walk-in robe is.
It would be kind of selfish to put the burden of "fixing societal problems" on a little kid. You're _most_ responsible for your children, full stop. Doesn't mean you stop trying to help, but trying to make OP feel bad for making a choice for the safety if their family is pretty weak.
I think this comparison is interesting. I recently relocated to Norway from Portland, OR and find the design and use of space in Oslo to be excellent. However the way space is utilized back in Portland isn’t that efficient and/or is poorly designed.
Also extremely intrusive urban planning, which put into place minimum parking capacity, minimum house sizes, single-family dwelling zones in the middle of what should have been highly developed cities, residential neighbourhoods with no commercial space (and thus very few amenities), etc..
In most European cities there is a lot of planning and regulations to follow. Barcelona Example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample) is an example of 19th-century planning.
In most Europe, you can't build a tall building in a rural town, a skyscraper without the proper open space around it or a factory in a residential neighbourhood. But, those rules have been more sensible to the city needs and have had less pressure from car makers. Old towns are usually compact and easy to walk because they predate cars. Cities have very good public transportation systems as cars were too expensive for most of the population. Living in the city centre has been seen as a luxury. At least for me, "suburvio" (a suburb in Spanish) has always had a negative connotation. Nobody wanted to live in the outskirts of a city.
So, I agree that American cities are, in general, poorly designed. And public transportation is almost nonexistent. The problem is not urban planning but that the cities are designed for cars, not for humans. Carmakers had too much power for too long. Urban planning worked really well to achieve its goal: to sell more cars.
> The problem is not urban planning but that the cities are designed for cars, not for humans.
That is part of urban planning here. Public transit simply can't be both good and cheap at these densities, which were mandated explicitly by urban planners. You complain about height limits, but there are many places which you can't (or recently couldn't have) house more than one family in a certain amount of space by law.
There are lots of post-car places where you can get around great on foot, it's just that a lot of the post-car places in the U.S. and Canada have many layers of planning and regulation which make you dependent on a car.
We live in a suburb of Portland. To be honest, Portland itself has become so terrible that we have not set foot in the city in over 5 years. 10+ years ago the city was amazingly clean and beautiful. The last time I visited it was so filthy and overrun with needles and homeless camps that we haven't returned since.
Both can be true. Portland has some nasty parts (inner downtown, anywhere near a trail or a body of water) that are riddled with needles or feces, but there are also some very nice parts like the suburbs or anywhere that can afford private security.
I don’t know if that last bit is completely true. Portland was worse on my last visit earlier this year than it was on my first visit almost ten years ago. On the other hand, my wife grew up in Oregon and from her account, the city was dirty and full of drug addicts when she was growing up in the 1990s.
Now the mayor is also giving Antifa full license to harass and disrupt with impunity. Every couple months they'll come out and start disrupting and redirecting traffic because they feel like feeling powerful. This has now been going on for a few years.
I would also add that the mayor and police force are doing nothing to address the increasing lawlessness. The situation with antifa injuring a journalist is a perfect example.
It's almost like every generation complained about the suburbs being boring and then had kids and figured out why suburbs exist. This comment could have been written any year since the early 1900s.
The economist Edward Glaeser, despite being a big fan of cities (he wrote a book called Triumph of the City), ended up moving to a suburb. In addition to the reasons you mentioned, he cited America's ridiculous federal home mortgage interest deduction, which incentivises spending more on a bigger home, with obvious negative outcomes (environmental and otherwise).
> ... he cited America's ridiculous federal home mortgage interest deduction, which incentivises spending more on a bigger home, with obvious negative outcomes (environmental and otherwise).
Canada does not have such an interest deduction and has roughly the same home ownership rate as the US.
(What Canada does have is no capital gains tax on one's primary residence, so any profits when selling are tax free.)
The mortgage interest deduction doesn't incentivize getting a bigger home. Or even a more expensive home. It does incentivize getting a bigger mortgage. Frankly you can borrow a lot to buy a place in the city or in the suburbs.
Homeless people tend to gravitate to where there's more services and public transport.
Usually. I live in a semi-rural town (Katoomba) in Australia, about 100km from the biggest city, and we have a lot of homeless people from rural towns, people who have lived their lives in the country. Turns out my town is as close to Sydney as they're comfortable being, there's good services for them with a big hospital, accommodation, a train line etc.
>Homeless people tend to gravitate to where there's more services and public transport.
Exactly. In the USA, the downtown area of cities might have a van driving around with meals to distribute to homeless people on the sidewalks. The homeless don't even have to walk to a soup kitchen; the vans bring the food to them. Some downtowns also open a shelter of "last resort" when the winter temperatures drop to inhuman freezing conditions. In downtown Vancouver during a record-breaking winter, I saw a city van driving around asking the homeless if they needed a warm place to sleep for the night.
In contrast, the suburbs will not deliver meals nor will suburban residents open their homes to random homeless vagrants. The town councils of suburbs also don't usually vote to spend tax dollars and open up a soup kitchen and shelter in their neighborhood. They don't want their neighborhoods to be attractive to the homeless.
Being homeless is already a hard life but it would be an even harder existence in the suburbs.
For a start, in many American suburbs, just walking to get food can be a four hour round trip. And a four hour round trip to do absolutely anything else. Without a car, that's totally untenable. You may or may not have anything better to do with the time -- but there's definitely no way you can spare the calories.
This is explicitly a reason some people in the suburbs don't want public transit to expand out to them. Some'll tell you. No public transit effectively puts a floor on how bad things can get, crime-wise, school-wise and, therefore, property-value-wise (each feeds back into the others, of course). Provided the property starts out pretty expensive, anyway—obviously doesn't apply to the actual sticks.
We had a homeless person living in a car on our street (in a Portland Oregon suburb). Some neighbor called the cops and they would come around and tell him to move on. He would be gone for a few days and then come back. Rinse and Repeat for about a year until we took him dinner on Thanksgiving day. The next day he was gone and never returned. It was the strangest thing.
I unexpectedly became homeless a year ago in SF and I notice that I disappear from places as soon as I interact with someone beyond politeness, like tell them details of my situation. I avoid it but when they take interest my social programming kicks in and I feel kind of sick after. Grocery stores, cafes I go to for months never feel safe after a conversation. Sleeping without shelter is incredibly vulnurable.
Sadly its become real again. Cities were starting to pick themselves up. Now this new generation is doing exactly what their parents did, run away. It is not a 'woke' generation.
Ironically, if you can afford it, cities are better than suburbs for schools etc. You can have two layers of people in exactly the same place and never have them interact. The richest and poorest schools are just blocks apart.
We can't, that's why we're moving. It's not to get away from "elements", like prior generations. It's simply too expensive to raise a family in the city. Not to mention, if you moved into the city, your family support structure is likely to be back home.
You know how large organizations tend to be poorly run and non-responsive to their constituents? Well, large cities have large school districts, whereas suburbs have small school districts...
My impression is that the size of suburban districts varies greatly by state. Of those I am acquainted with, in Colorado, Maryland, and Virginia every county or county-equivalent city has one school district. In Pennsylvania there can be several school districts in a county, some small enough to have one high school. I think that New Jersey is very fragmented also.
On the west coast it seems like school districts often only cover a single city. Here are the lists for Washington, Oregon, and California. There are tons.
This article blows my mind due to this single sentence:
The couple found a sprawling five-bedroom house next to a horse farm for $782,000, half the cost they would have paid in the Seattle suburb they left behind.
This implies that the family in the article was shopping for a $1.5M home in a "Seattle suburb" that is most likely in the Bellevue/Redmond area in the year 2015. In that year, the average sale price in the region was between $855K (Bellevue, WA) and $598K (Redmond, WA), implying that they were aspiring to live well above the median lifestyle in two of the richer suburbs in the Seattle area. [1]
I don't know how to square this family's story with the surrounding narrative in the article. This family could afford to live almost anywhere. They could afford to pay taxes to fund schools and other municipal services. They could choose to live somewhere that has none of the problems the article decries, simply by buying in.
Methinks this is a story about false advertising on the part of "Millennial Mayberry", rather than suburban flight.
That's not what it implies. The article is just talking about the price of housing in Seattle. The journalist was comparing the cost of the home the family bought, with a theoretical similar house in the city.
Moreover, almost everyone is highly leveraged when "buying" a home. Hell, I my wife and I could swing a 1.5m mortgage if we really wanted to. According to mortgage calculator, a 1.5m house would take 60k down-payment and 1.5k/month[1]. That's very reasonable for a large portion of the population.
I've paid triple that amount in rent for apartments.
>According to mortgage calculator, a 1.5m house would take 60k down-payment and 1.5k/month[1].
Did you miss a zero somewhere or did the calculator have a bug? There's no way 60K down and 1.5k/month is correct. It's much higher than that for a $1.5M home.
I was about to say the same thing. I put $33k down and financed $208k at around 3.5% (in the Upper Midwest). Three years on my payments are about $1280, after increased taxes YOY.
Fannie Mae's "jumbo loan" policy means you have to pay huge money down and also prove that you have enough in the bank to fund like 6 months of payments.
I grew up in the suburbs outside of Atlanta, and last year I moved from rural East Tennessee to the Bay Area. Having lived in all three (rural, suburban, and city), the suburbs are definitely my least favorite.
Suburbs sort of combine the worst aspects of city and rural life; too many people around that you don't really get space, privacy, or scenery, yet not enough people for there to be any interesting restaurants, farmer's markets, museums, coffee shops, or really just anything to do.
I love the Bay Area because it offers all the amenities of a big city, yet all sorts of natural beauty is within an hour's drive away. One of my relatives visited recently and was shocked at how you can be in downtown SF one minute and then standing in an old-growth forest of redwood trees twenty minutes later.
Unfortunately, I imagine once my wife and I have children, expenses will become rather difficult. I'm not sure how well a tiny apartment will accommodate a growing family, especially if we have two or three kids. So... I'll probably end up back in the suburbs eventually, but I'm not in a hurry, and it certainly isn't my preference to be there.
> Unfortunately, I imagine once my wife and I have children, expenses will become rather difficult. I'm not sure how well a tiny apartment will accommodate a growing family, especially if we have two or three kids. So... I'll probably end up back in the suburbs eventually, but I'm not in a hurry, and it certainly isn't my preference to be there.
You may find that your preferences change as a result of having children. Also - there are a lot of different living options falling somewhere between San Francisco and Atlanta suburbs with regards to population density. E.g. a small city with a walkable downtown, restaurants, etc., but affordable enough to own a decent-size house and a car.
Suburbs are way worse for children than cities are. As a teen/pre-teen in a city you have independence, you can go to places with your friends and hangout. Suburbs make your children dependent on you for rides and consequently stunts their emotional maturity.
I have no doubts that a city is better for teens/pre-teens, but I don't think growing up in a suburb stunts their emotional maturity. I grew up outside of DC in a decent suburb, and was able to get around via bike and meet my friends at the mall, the movie theater, etc. This was 2004-2007ish, not the 80's.
I spent a lot of time exploring with my friends, and being independent. I think it would be hard to have this kind of experience in a rural town, but in a suburb, it seems pretty normal.
A typical suburban-sprawl house is in an exclusively residential pod, separated from the nearest commercial pod by several miles on a fast road with no bike lane. If a teenager on a bike can reach any kind of business without mortal peril, it’s a different kind of suburb from the ones people react so negatively to.
> Suburbs sort of combine the worst aspects of city and rural life; too many people around that you don't really get space, privacy, or scenery, yet not enough people for there to be any interesting restaurants, farmer's markets, museums, coffee shops, or really just anything to do.
This is interesting. I live in a suburb and my suburb along with many of those neighboring all have good restaurants, farmer's markets and good coffee. I will admit that we don't have many museums, but the city is only a 20 minute drive if you want to do that.
I will say that we have a plethora of nice parks and a great library system. I've noticed that they are all cleaner and better maintained than that of the city too.
Yeah I grew up in the outer suburbs of the Atlanta metro and now live in the suburbs of a smaller southern city. And I see absolutely no reasons why suburban life would appeal to a young, single male especially like myself who can't drive. Im planning to get the hell out in a few years and live in a denser city, and maybe, if I'm able to retire, live in a rural area somewhere off a nice river.
Interestingly, the suburban are I live in now if in the middle of a lower income neighborhood and a typical middle-class southern suburb. There is slight walkability, but only towards the poorer area, the sidewalk abruptly ends heading the other way
The lack of amenities in most suburbs has nothing to do with "too few people around", it is actively enforced. Residential-only zoning, vs. natural "mixed" development in long-established towns and cities.
Kevin Drum's rebuttal, citing census data and Brookings estimates:
"there never really was much of a back-to-the-city trend in the first place... With only tiny variances, the suburbs have been gaining population for 70 years relative to cities (and rural areas)..."
Millenials' preferences appear roughly similar to the preferences of other generations.
It's almost as if millenials don't love avocado toast so much as they love defying sweeping stereotypes about cohorts divided by arbitrary birth years.
What's not talked about so much is the ghettoization of the suburbs.
If you look closely, many of the houses are rooming houses. It's harder to tell because 4 or 5 cars parked in the driveway is not abnormal in the burbs.
The suburbs built in the 1930s are being gentrified, and are now considered 'downtown'.
The suburbs built in the 1940s-1960s are in now the edge of the city, inhabited by an older generation or retires that vote very conservatively as they try to stop change in their neighborhoods.
The suburbs built in the 1970s and 1980s are starting to show their age. They are at the ends of public transit lines where rents in rooming houses are the cheapest. This is the area new immigrants are moving, as it saves money, but the commute is long.
The suburbs of the 1990s till now are eating up small towns. This causes some tension between the new burbs and the more redneck locals that have never liked the city.
There's a widespread NIMBY view that small apartments are part of a "race to the bottom," and by enforcing a high minimum standard for living space, we can make all families better off.
But of course, if you're in the market for a small apartment, you're not getting a large-lot single family home to yourself. You're getting a roommate situation in one. Five commuting adults in a house is arguably a worse strain on infrastructure than a small apartment building would have been.
That article might be dated considering it's only got an estimate for 2010 and I don't see a published date. And that vertical axis seems to be representing different things, or is the remainder rural?
Anecdotally I see more families in inner city Melbourne than there was a decade ago, but I also see things like kids sporting events becoming local affairs when they used to involve driving kids around the city a lot more, so some areas are definitely adapting to more inner city parents with no cars.
People generally seem to prefer cities when they're single and/or childless. Maybe millenials are just taking a bit longer to leave that phase than previous generations?
The split I see. Progressive parents are staying in the city and fighting. They're Hipsters, and they are organizing; community events, volunteering in schools, etc.
The ones that are moving to the suburbs are the ones that are bit traditional, not into fighting for social causes.
My take is that there is no clear-cut cultural dynamic. The article even tacitly admits that by explaining that the new so-called trend is limited to very specific areas centered around employment centers.
The notion that culture is a predominate driver of urban-suburban migration never sat well with me. In nearly every place around the world these migrations are driven predominately by economic factors, particularly employment and housing costs. Except for the relatively wealthy, every other preference necessarily takes a back seat.
The post-WWII generational migration to suburbia beginning in the 1940s is arguably an exception. OTOH, it was clearly driven by the automobile and accelerated by the interstate system opening up cheaper land without losing access to employment. But now traffic and other factors, such as regional industrial and commercial specializations, have made distance relevant again.
The same trends that drove the return to urban areas persist. Because NIMBY suppression of housing development accelerated the rise of housing costs, we very quickly saw counter pressures back out to the suburbs. I'd argue this is still very much inline with an overall trend back toward cities, because the economics of distance and employment continue to favor density now more than ever. Again, the article admits this by explaining that the newly growing suburban cities are conspicuously close to urban centers generally, and employment centers specifically.
Culture, racism, schools... these reasons resonant with people, but all these preferences take a back-seat to economic realities. If you're lucky enough to be able to say that you forwent opportunities for non-economic reasons, you're almost by definition part of a minority because the vast majority of people in this country do not enjoy such privileges of choice, at least not to any substantial degree. To that extent expressed preferences are incapable of explaining the fundamentals of large, national trends. When people give a reason for choosing a city or a suburb, they're often missing the forest for the trees--they're explaining their choice among a small set of options filtered by their means, not the reasons for the set of options they could realistically choose from.
The cultural dynamic is intertwined with economic factors.
If you will have a 2-income family, you'll want to be where multiple jobs are within a commute. The 1-income family or single person can simply move as needed.
If you will have a large family, you'll prefer a location where a large house is affordable. If you won't have a family, that doesn't matter.
Cause and effect go both ways. People following a traditional lifestyle are pushed out of cities by economic factors, and people following other lifestyles are pushed into cities. Meanwhile, city dwellers are discouraged from living traditionally due to economic factors, just as non-city dwellers wanting two incomes have trouble finding that second job.
> The 1-income family or single person can simply move as needed.
Move where? I've known plenty of both singles (white collar, blue collar) and married couples and on reflection every single one of them is living and working in a place principally because of job opportunities, not according to their preferred locale. Likewise for families. Many have relocated several times in the past 10 or 20 years.
I think it goes without saying that the unwashed masses the world over will choose larger accommodations (up to some limit), all things being equal. You can't go wrong assuming the masses will choose more for less. I used to think otherwise until I began reading that even the French had begun leaving their small walkable cities for either the major cities or suburbs. That's when I had to face the reality that the French are no different than the Americans, who are no different than the Nigerians.
Given the universal pressure to spread out (at least in the aggregate), if we want to explain trending migration patterns the controlling factors are almost certainly going to relate to the more mundane economics of housing prices and employment opportunities. Those are the relevant variables, everything else is relatively fixed by comparison.
All the other narratives, such as the supposedly unique Millennial preference for urban environments, seem hopelessly tainted by the culture wars. I have my own opinions and anecdotes on the matter, but I've come to think they're largely irrelevant. Why resort to them when the more obvious explanations are not only sufficient to help explain the trends, but also have greater predictive power.
Also, FWIW, I've noticed that our perceptions of suburbia are changing. What constitutes suburban development these days would have been considered overly dense and undesirable by suburbanites 20-30 years ago. I mention that because I think people will rationalize the choices they face and the choices they make. If they prefer suburbia, they're likely to perceive themselves as in suburbia and describe their surrounding as suburban even when their community is better described as more urban. People have preconceived notions of what urban means that don't suffice to explain contemporary patterns of development. I have a two-car garage in the San Francisco Richmond neighborhood in a house that, when built in 1926, would have been squarely considered suburban--presuming the term had been coined at that time. Today most would consider my neighborhood urban, notwithstanding the absence of skyscrapers, but there are plenty of new developments popping up that people describe as suburban but which are not appreciably less dense than many neighborhoods in San Francisco.
But, again, we needn't delve into that minutiae if we instead look to more fundamental and objective qualities, such as cost of housing relative to distance to labor centers. Do I prefer the ideal of the city, where my kids can walk to the neighborhood school, library, movie theater and church, more than the idea of their ability to frolic in open pastures and virgin forest? I realized several years ago that it doesn't matter what I would prefer because the next time we move, if we move, I'll not likely have the privilege of choosing between such stark choices; rather, the reason for moving (i.e new job) will almost certainly narrow my options down not only to a particular city but to a particular neighborhood.
> San Francisco Richmond neighborhood [...] most would consider my neighborhood urban
The whole western half of San Francisco is zoned to mostly only allow 1 unit per lot, much of it requiring detached houses. Here’s a map, see the sea of pale yellow low-density residential. http://default.sfplanning.org/zoning/zoning_map.pdf
The Richmond is definitely not “urban” by standards of people living in cities. I would rate it much closer to “sleepy beach town” than “dense cosmopolitan city”. The “most people” in your description must be suburbanites through and through.
(This zoning should change; SF housing would be a lot more affordable if every part of the city were zoned to allow 3–4 story buildings with multiple units per building. We should get rid of RH-1 zones altogether, and upgrade most of the pale yellow part to e.g. RC-3 or NC-2 zoning. The increased density would then support better infrastructure, such as dedicated bus lanes with frequent and reliable service, significantly improving quality of life for people living in those neighborhoods.)
And yet many days I take one of 4 bus lines (each two blocks apart, traveling in parallel) which collectively move more than 100,000 people per day.
I used to live in Lower Pacific Heights, two blocks from Van Ness, and walked ~1 mile to the Financial District every day. We regularly ate out at North Beach and Chinatown (and still do, as my office is still downtown). There may be more bars downtown and around Japantown, but the Geary corridor all the way up to 25 Ave has a far more diverse and trafficked street scene. The Judah and Irving corridors in the Inner and Outer Sunset even more so. The Mission more so still, but it's not skyscraper-urban, either.
Relative to almost any neighborhood outside San Francisco, the Outer Richmond is absolutely urban.[1] And I can say this because even though my commute takes 45 minutes (30 minutes if I drive, 15 minutes without traffic), it's about on par with almost everybody else in the city and incomparable to those living outside city limits. More concretely, the Outer Richmond has a population density of over 20,000/sq mile--not bad for a sleepy beach town of single family homes.[2] And ultimately that's what I'm getting at--we should be using objective criteria, both to describe existing situations as well as trends.
FWIW, I agree with you that zoning needs to change and that the Outer Richmond could use more density.
[1] I first moved to San Francisco in 2000. My first place was in the Outer Richmond, moving from Foggy Bottom in D.C. My roommate, from Philadelphia, used to say it was too far from downtown. Fast forward 20 years and after having lived in multiple cities and towns around the country, he told me that he changed his mind about the Richmond. His conception of what urban meant has changed, especially after he realized how difficult it was to find a job in a locale as dense as that. I also moved around a bit after that (Arlington, VA, Long Beach, New Haven, and several months in Quito and then Santiago), though I never held the opinion that the Richmond wasn't "urban" enough to be urban.
[2] Which says something about how dense cities and towns can get while still clinging to the ideal of single-family homes.
You’re right, the parts along Geary and Clement are fine. Looking more carefully at the map, the Richmond is mostly RH-2 (allows duplexes) and RM-1 (1 unit per 800 sf). It’s the Sunset (pretty much everything south of Golden Gate Park) and all of the that is really absurdly low density (RH-1).
The Richmond feels significantly more suburban than the Mission (where I live) though.
I don’t think “skyscraper urban” is all that necessary (in SF, my impression is that the skyscraper boom is mostly a result of a few areas with very lax zoning combined with massive demand because everywhere else the zoning is absurdly limiting), but the USA could use a whole lot more low-rise and mid-rise apartment buildings.
Relative to almost every other locale in the United States, and especially according to most Americans' perceptions, it's a stretch to call any neighborhood in San Francisco suburban.
Relative to urbanized areas in the rest of the world, especially Asia, only a few neighborhoods in the U.S. are comparable, and only one or two in SF, if any. (Northbeach/Chinatown has the population density of Manhattan.) But that gets back to my basic point--urbanizing and suburbanizing trends are principally functions of various costs, most importantly those relating to housing and commuting. And whatever we want to call it in the U.S., the trend is still clearly toward greater density after decades of fanning out.
"Streetcar suburb" is correct. The Outer Sunset formed around the old "Carville" site, and the district's development was mostly complete by the '50s. But the blocks of row houses on a grid are such an old planning concept that it's almost unrecognizable when compared with late-20th century suburbs. The hills are a bit too steep and the streets a bit too busy for a young child to safely bike around or play in. On the other hand, skaters enjoy the slopes and curb cuts and often film there.
Move to "a place principally because of job opportunities".
I'm saying that 1-income households can do that. They can go anywhere affordable even if there is only 1 employer with 1 opening. The 2-income households, with notably different culture, can't move unless they find a pair of jobs. Finding a pair of jobs is far easier in a large city. There are plenty of jobs outside the large cities, possibly even most jobs depending on your definition of "large city", but they are too far spread out to select the location first. You select a job, and that may take you somewhere rural. If you first select a specific rural location, you are unlikely to find a job.
So for one culture, with the single-income family, it is no big deal to move for a job. If that fails, you move again. For the other culture, with two incomes, you have to move to a place that has a high probability of having jobs for both people whenever that is needed. Moving is less of an option.
there are some neighborhoods that are close to the city center, but remain very affordable. "gentrification" is a buzzword that describes the rent steadily creeping up, and the demographics changing accordingly.
> Seriously, no one I know my age (35) willingly moves to the suburbs. Curious if this is my bubble or consistent.
My anecdata is the total opposite. Every newly married couple I know that’s looking to have kids has either already left city living or the migration is in progress. The well off ones keep their old spots as a pied-a-terre for a distant future but there’s a universal distain for city life.
I wonder if part of the problem is differing definitions of 'in the city'.
Incorporated Seattle, for instance, is truly massive. It includes many, many, many neighborhoods that are really the innermost suburbs rather than the outermost urban neighborhoods. I have lived in the first ring and just outside of it several times, and people farther out would call that 'downtown' but people actually in downtown did not, despite the fact that in 2 cases I could, in a pinch, walk home from downtown while carrying bags.
Yeah, these things are very hard to talk about precisely. "Suburb" can mean a rural wasteland with nothing for miles, or a very much urban neighborhood with tiny, connected houses with no yards.
I think it's heavily dependent on how you grew up and where you currently live. To a city dweller, a dense suburd looks like an urban waste. And to a small town dweller, even a small City feels crowded and messy.
Same here. Almost every single one of my peers who moved to cities in their early 20s have moved back to the suburbs after having kids. Across many cities and states as well.
Where do you live? I can imagine that the suburban exodus is more true for Midwest and southern cities and less true for west coast and northeastern ones.
Most of the people I know in the Bay Area are leaving SF and headed to either the Peninsula or East Bay when they have kids. Most people I know with kids are in the Peninsula. I do know a couple in their 40s with kids in the city. They did the opposite, went from the Peninsula to the city years ago (before the city became very expensive).
I’d argue it’s a lifestyle decision more than anything else. Each couple or family has their own reasoning about why they moved. The attitude in the city is much more keep to yourself. Suburbs are gossipy and people tend to pay attention to everything.
I would argue there are much more ‘mega wealthy’ people outside of the city.
San Francisco has seen an exodus of families because it's simply too expensive and the school system is simply a gigantic mess (more affluent families are really dissatisfied with the lottery).
Someone is buying up all of king and pierce counties in Seattle. For those who don’t make 6 figures it’s the only way they’ll ever get wealth. Those making less rent with roommates in the suburbs. Plenty of non urban lifestyles out there, even for those counted among the big metro areas.
Same experience here. Well off parents tend to move out of the city if conditions allow it (kids, house, multiple cars, etc).
Mainly because it is much better for kids to see a tree from time to time and that they can roam around freely, the air is much better, you don't have to deal with congested traffic, but for most noise was the most important factor.
In the 19th century people outside of cities were looked down as stupid and lacking any culture. Because they had no access to it of course. But it is questionable if that remains true in the age of universal global communication.
Given, this experience is from Europe, where living outside of the city means you can get back to it within about 20 Minutes.
> Mainly because it is much better for kids to see a tree from time to time
Is that a hyperbole or meant literally? I live in a mid-sized German city (500k inhabitants) and find it hard to come up with any place in the city where you cannot see multiple trees.
It is of course an allegory for the general lack of nature within cities. Of course there are some parks and German cities tend to be green. But that is all relative and for many people no substitute for "real" nature, where you can leave your kids on their own without needing to worry about traffic or other dangers. That is the thought process of most couples that had kids in my circle.
Of course cities offer more childcare services, but that isn't an argument for people having a certain mobility.
Some lone trees on some boulevard or avenue just doesn't cut it for many people.
Obviously hyperbole, its more about access to proper nature, be it in form of vast forests or even better mountains. There is something about soothing touch of nature that can't be mimicked by any other means. Especially important for kids
be it in form of vast forests or even better mountains.
If you are within walking distance of vast forests and mountains I would argue you're almost per definition not in the suburbs any more. And ironically in many places living in the city might give you better access to nature. Certainly the suburb where I grew up getting to the 'real' forest required a car, while when I moved to the city the forest was a short walk from the last stop on the subway.
> If you are within walking distance of vast forests and mountains I would argue you're almost per definition not in the suburbs any more.
We may be thinking different scales of “vast” here, but where I grew up in the suburbs of Boston, I could walk 5 minutes from my doorstep and be on a pretty much endless network of nature trails running through the forest, along rivers and ponds. I spent a decent portion of my childhood and teenage years goofing off in the woods with friends away from adult supervision. A lot of New England suburbs are like that.
But moving to the suburbs doesn't give immediate access to nature - you still need to drive to find mountains/vast forests? I live in the city centre and I'm a 25 minutes drive from a woodland, or an hour's drive from an ancient forest and mountains. You definitely can have the best of both living in the city
I live in a city the same size in the UK, in a building with 11 other flats, less than a 15 minutes walk from the center, and there are trees and parks everywhere.
Kids can roam much more freely in a city that the suburbs. You need a car to get around in the suburbs and so kids need their parents to drive them everywhere. Cities are much better for kids because they can take the train or bus and gain a sense of independence.
For my group of friends, about 2/3 got out of the city as quick as they could. For the same price house, the suburbs offer a lot more bang for the buck, significantly less crime, and several of them don't even have kids yet.
Granted, we don't live on one of the coasts. Part of what makes flight out to the suburbs easy is that public transit and driving in for commuting to work isn't terrible, though about half of us are working remotely now, so it's really more about access to occasional entertainment than anything.
Personally, I moved out to a cabin in the woods, though I'm still close enough to the big city if something comes up. It does crimp my job opportunities since I don't want to commute in on a daily basis- I'm now limited to remote work, which has a much larger talent pool to compete with. Even still, there's nothing I would trade it for. Maybe when I'm old and senile, but until then, you won't catch me moving back.
Do you and your friends make a lot of money? I’m the same age, and the only people I know starting families in the city are high income professionals. My wife and I (snobby city people) toughed it out until our daughter was ready for kindergarten, but even we weren’t willing to spend $1 million+ on a house in one of the few good school districts in DC when the time for that came.
I’ve traded cocktails at the Peninsula for, well, cocktails at the Maggianos, but I can park right next to the entrance and not have to drag a stroller around, so that’s pretty great.
I’ve traded cocktails at the Peninsula for, well, cocktails at the Maggianos, but I can park right next to the entrance and not have to drag a stroller around, so that’s pretty great.
Driving to a bar to drink alcohol is great? It's better than being able to walk to a bar or take public transit? How? To me that sounds incredibly reckless.
If you’re planning on having more than a couple of cocktails with dinner, you can always Uber. Ride sharing has been a huge boon for suburban areas. We can actually walk to a bar from our house (there happens to be a bar in our car dependent suburb) but it’s only a $10 Uber ride to the downtown of the satellite city where we live. For the two of us, Metro fare in DC wouldn’t be all that much cheaper.
I have a distinct memory of you taking the other side in a comment a couple years ago (too lazy to dig it out now) talking about how easy it is being in nyc transit with a stroller
Oh man. When my wife and I were in our 20s with one kid in New York, being hip urban parents was easy. I did not realize how unscalable that was. The second kid kills you.
No, most older millenials with kids that I know are moving to less expensive cities or the suburbs. I think it's mostly because in the US we have this idea that middle class+ kids need to be raised in detached SFH with front and back yards.
The thing about SF and NYC (and Seattle and Chicago) is that most of the nicer, semi-affordable areas with SFH are actually in suburbs: the peninsula, Long Island/Westchester/gold coast, Bel-Red, North shore. There are definitely cities where affordable, nice SFH areas are not in suburbs, but usually they are the smaller ones that don't have/need the same degree of density
> I think it's mostly because in the US we have this idea that middle class+ kids need to be raised in detached SFH with front and back yards.
The ones I know mostly moved back to near where their parents live, because childcare and housing in SF are expensive. If they could have e.g. taken their rent-control with them from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom apartment, or had better family leave and subsidized daycare, I get the impression a good proportion would have stayed for at least several more years.
Raising a kid in a city is the "ultimate status symbol" exactly because it is very expensive and difficult. Most people would prefer a more comfortable, more affordable life.
Plus your savings on rent would buy you a very nice "status symbol" car and pool.
Same (age) demo as you. Among my friends and expanded co-worker circle, folks with kids split ~50/50 "would prefer urban"/"would prefer suburban or country". 100% are suburban. Deciding factors? Proximity to family (all 'burbs) and/or school quality. You live in the city if you're too poor to live where the good schools are, or you're so rich you can afford very high housing costs for a good in-the-city neighborhood plus tuition for private school. Out in the country, all the schools are bad—not inner-city bad, but bad. That leaves the 'burbs.
[EDIT] I take back the 100%: a few former co-workers without kids are urban-dwellers, and exactly one who took a chance on the charter school lottery and would surely have moved out if it'd gone the wrong way.
>having a kid or two and staying in NYC or SF is the ultimate status symbol
I understand it's expensive but it reads like you're tied to the city, I'm missing the status symbol portion, likely because I'm nowhere near either location.
I've seen some of this, people move out because of schools or sports/events for kids specifically. To your point there are definitely more staying put than I would have initially assumed, I like a bit of each. Many suburban homes are massively oversized and have sprawling neighborhoods. Again, personal anecdote, I am seeing a lot of action in suburban governments focusing on connecting neighborhoods and rectifying some of the massive sprawl issues of the 90s by filling in differently and adding connecting trails/sidewalks.
I'm from one of those smaller cities. It is not a liveable city without the suburbs for most families, soon it really won't be without generational wealth. A majority of the millennial families are moving to the suburbs (or forced their by increased prices). The downtown areas are heavily skewed towards tourists or the childless/single similar to my previous post. I'm bullish on them too but, then again, there's a financial interest in my having that stance.
EDIT: I'm curious what you think is a reasonable salary to live in the downtown/midtown areas of the smaller liveable cities.
>I understand it's expensive but it reads like you're tied to the city, I'm missing the status symbol portion, likely because I'm nowhere near either location.
To be able to swing a suburban lifestyle in SF or NYC, you need to be able to compete with more of the top x% of the population than other places. Or have generational wealth.
Urban SF dwelling elder millennial here. My experience is the opposite. Everyone seems to end up in the suburbs (the peninsula). Eventually, I'd like to too.
Depends where you live! I’m in Pittsburgh and there is still a culture here of bailing to the well heeled suburbs (cough cough Fox Chapel) when having kids. You couldn’t pay me to leave the city core, but the Midwest still clings to that suburban status symbol life more than the rest of the nation.
> but the Midwest still clings to that suburban status symbol life more than the rest of the nation.
I can't speak for all of the Midwest, but to add an anecdatum: I live in a suburb of Minneapolis/St. Paul. As (relatively) nice as those downtowns both are they are both still far noisier, dirtier, and more expensive to live in than the suburb I'm in; further, I look out at wildlife daily at my backyard that extends 1.5 acres, which I find quite pleasant. "Status symbol" has nothing to do with it.
I'm not sure other than my own anecdotal experience. I have a number of coworkers who as 20 somethings lived in the city and said they never wanted to leave. But then in their 30s they started marrying and having kids and without exception moved to the suburbs.
Depends on the person. Personally you couldn't pay me enough to live in a big city. Looking out the window and not seeing trees, hearing an unending background of vehicles, and the smell all made me want to kill myself. These days all I hear out the window are insects and birds and when I look up I see stars, not advertisements. It feels so, so good.
Doesn’t jive with my experience either. Out of my 10 or so closest married friends, only one moved outside of the city (Atlanta). I have several friends trying to move back to Atlanta from much more expensive cities. I think cost is more important than city vs suburb. There are ridiculously expensive suburbs outside of Atlanta.
This article doesn’t jive whatsoever with my anecdotal experience as an urban dwelling elder millennial.
My personal anecdotal experience is that it was pretty much 50/50. Half stayed and half left as soon as they could afford it. But even among those that stayed in the city most eventually left 'down town' for more quite and residential parts of the city.
edit: Furthermore I'd say that of those that left half did so gladly and half did so reluctantly.
Commute times keep us in the city with a 10 month old. By the time he is 5, we are going to have very tough decisions to get the right set of tradeoffs.
It reflects a decent chunk of people, but you’re in a bubble for sure based on the data of the article. Data point: just had over half my friends move from cities (SF) to the burbs (peninsula) as they had kids.
This is my experience as well, that some people are moving the the burbs, but those who are complain about it and basically say “I didn’t really want to move but I got priced out.”
Living in the St. Louis area, I can say that this example of Glendale used in the article is awfully strange. Makes me suspicious of other conclusions drawn by the author.
> Glendale, Mo., which is hobbled by the loss of such St. Louis corporate anchors as Anheuser-Busch."
Glendale is a very tiny municipality (1 of 88) in St. Louis county with a population of 5,924 in 2010 and 5,886 in 2017. Over the same time period, median home prices are up from about $340k to $390k. Hardly what I'd call "hobbled."
In fact, St. Louis County as a whole (which doesn't include the city but does include some rather dense urban "suburbs") has remained relatively flat and St. Charles County, the next ring out, has seen steady growth.[0]
People who don't live in the area are thoroughly clueless as to the geo-political makeup of what we citizens here call St. Louis. Proof of that are the countless articles pointing to the population of the city being less than 300K while completely ignoring the nearly 3 million of us who live in the area outside the 66 sq miles of the city.
And I haven't a clue how they make a connection between Anheuser-Busch--which is just as active in the city of St. Louis--and Glendale down the street from me.
There are so many confounding factors in any discussion about this, it's almost meaningless to try and draw generalizations across an age cohort without first stratifying by city.
The urban design of a region dictates what "suburb" means. A New England suburb is vastly different from a Florida suburb.
The zoning laws and building regulations of the past few generations dictate what older housing stock is available. In most cities this means the housing stock is overwhelmingly suburban thanks to the sprawling postwar housing policy.
Today's zoning laws and regulations decide the same but for the newer and nicer end of the housing stock. Some cities have moved to more density-friendly policy for new construction, some cities are still sprawling, and California is largely frozen in amber.
The composition of the housing stock as discussed above play a large part in the pricing of suburban vs urban living.
Another confounding factor is what the commute looks like, which again is dictated by the past century+ of public policy. A driving commute in greater Boston is generally worse than in your average midsized American city. But rail commutes are viable in many greater Boston towns, and demand trends upwards near rail lines.
Finally, as always, education is a big factor in housing for anyone with children. If all the urban schools suck I expect that pushes some families out of the city.
One thing is that "suburb" doesn't necessarily mean the sterile tracks of ranch houses with nary a store or restaurant within miles that is the cliché. Many smaller towns/cities are technically "suburbs" in that they are within commuting distance of a large city but are still walkable/public transit friendly and have their own downtowns.
I like to fantasize sometimes about having a giant house in Raleigh for the price of my one bedroom in SF. I just don’t know anyone moving from SF to Raleigh. The people I know are moving to Berkeley or the peninsula after they have kids.
It’d be nice if they had done data to back up their demographic trend other than just claiming it based on anecdotal stories.
I went the other way, bringing my family from Raleigh to SF. There are tradeoffs, but its worth it overall for the cultural and natural amenities for the kids and for the chance to be in the heart of the tech industry.
I do sometimes think about moving back to have nicer housing, but our net income is much higher here despite the cost of living, so the option to “retire back” someday will probably always be there.
Curious, would you not prefer a modest house and early retirement or options to a giant house in another area? Maybe you can grab both right now, I don't know, but 3-400k can buy a house in extremely nice areas in flyover states, why not find a nice one, buy that and live relaxed?
> ...3-400k can buy a house in extremely nice areas in flyover states, why not find a nice one, buy that and live relaxed?
Although the general sentiment is agreeable, there's nothing relaxed about maintaining a $400k home. I like to think of it as a different class of stress that's decoupled from work that pays the bills.
It's annecdata but I just had a coworker move from Alameda to NC. Combination of home prices and avoiding the miserable commutes. Probably mostly the later since they could have easily afforded to buy here and Alameda doesn't share SF's problems with schools and crime.
I’d love to see a study more controlled for cost of living.
> In the early 2010s, after the financial crisis walloped the housing market, average growth rates in cities with populations greater than 250,000 outpaced the suburbs. But over the past five years, the average annual growth in America’s big cities has slowed by 40%, to 0.69%, according to census estimates.
I think it’s no coincidence that when prices dropped significantly, Millennials flocked to cities. That’s where the jobs are, and they could afford it.
Since most cities are not really accommodating growth, prices have ballooned, and people are being priced out.
I used to live in Raleigh and I knew a few people who moved to Apex. It was always the same story: “I’d rather stay in Raleigh but we can afford Apex.” That’s not to knock on Apex, it is a cute town, but the migration was driven much more by the simple price tag than anything else.
The thing that blows my mind the most is how easy it is to accommodate massive growth by simply requiring a connected street grid — what almost every American town and city did before WW2 and the suburban design social engineering projects of the FDR and Eisenhower eras. A grid can scale. The stupid cul-de-sac design is literally engineered to create traffic congestion. How much more land are we going to inflict that abomination on?
Really that’s what this all comes down to: there are straightforward, known solutions to scale urban populations well beyond the relatively modest growth that we have in the US, but as long as we refuse to pull our heads out of the sand and grow intentionally we will continue to have this phenomenon where growth ruins places - first in quality of life, and fiscally in a generation when Apex is not the hot new suburb any more but is saddled with the maintenance cost for hundreds of miles of unproductive infrastructure.
> The thing that blows my mind the most is how easy it is to accommodate massive growth by simply requiring a connected street grid — what almost every American town and city did before WW2 and the suburban design social engineering projects of the FDR and Eisenhower eras. A grid can scale. The stupid cul-de-sac design is literally engineered to create traffic congestion. How much more land are we going to inflict that abomination on?
Cul-de-sac design (and the related 3-leaf clover design where you have multiple cul-de-sacs all emptying into a single artery, allow for more private front porch experiences and kid-play areas.
It was a reaction to the inability of most residential towns to keep out the gangs, racers and high-speed commuters (ie, bad combo with pedestrians, kids playing in the street).
Cul-de-sacs without pedestrian (or cycle) path cut-throughs make journeys that could be a 3 minute walk unnecessarily long on foot, leading to a general increase in car use.
You said it in your reply: all the streets emptying onto a single artery.
The fears of gangs etc that you cite are the common defenses of why people left specific inner cities in the 60s, but small towns (like Apex, in the source article) don’t have that problem and they do have the grids.
The main issue affecting safety is simply traffic speed and street width. It’s quite easy to design a safe street for children by making it hard for cars to go fast, the best example of this being the Dutch “voonerf,” (https://youtu.be/bSBdshn2tUM). You can accomplish the same thing with more spread out garden style homes as well.
I appreciate your perspective, given that you've spent time in the area (PNW local here). I'm confused, though, since it seems like Apex has been far more expensive than Raleigh since 2015 (and likely long before). [1] Is this a function of micro-communities within the two cities? Any ideas what is going on here? I just can't believe the $758K home in Apex as a discount option (per the family in the article).
Agree with you on the unintentional growth at the root of all this. Even the article calls out the schools not funded/steered by the city itself. I wouldn't be surprised if more folly lies in municipal codes near Apex.
Raleigh includes everything from downtown apartments to suburbs. There's quite a spread. Apex is mostly suburbs, albeit the nicer suburbs where stores are a quick drive (5-10 minutes) away.
$700K is definitely at the upper range of new construction in Apex. That new house will also have a lot of upgrades. There's also a particular part of Apex (the parts that are basically Cary) where you'll see those prices. Move further south away from Cary and Raleigh and the prices in Apex drop very quickly.
I think where you'll also see the "We could afford Apex but not Raleigh" also has to do with the age of the home. ~$450K will get you a nice new home in Apex in a community with amenities (e.g. a pool, clubhouse, etc). In Raleigh you may end up in a smaller older home that needs a substantial amount of renovation.
There are 1000 other nuances of course, but hopefully you get the idea.
$700K+ is not a "discount option" in Apex. It's at the high end of the market. Average new construction (let alone existing home sales) in the area is probably around $400K for a 2500 sf house. The house in question is probably over 4000 sf on a decent sized lot (most lots for new construction are under 1/4 acre) and built by one of the "luxury" homebuilders like Toll Brothers.
Definitely still depends on the area within the town/city, but Apex in general is still cheaper than Raleigh comparing neighborhoods of similar demographics.
For half a million bucks, down near my SoCal office, you can get one of the two or so available listings with about 1k sqft and maybe two bedrooms. You probably have to be a dual professional income household to live down there. Want a couple of kids to have their own rooms? Tack on another 50-100% of that price. I don't even get how folks in San Fransisco do it.
Go inland an hour or two, hundreds (thousands?) of listings with 3, 4, or 5 bedrooms and 2.5k+ sqft at the same or more affordable prices. You are literally going to double or more your housing costs by being in the city close to work.
I decided to go full remote and moved to the middle of beautiful nowhere. I'm closer to the grocery and restaurants (limited as they are) than before. My commute is going across the hallway to my own office space. My three kids all have their own rooms. Unfortunately, they will probably have to move closer to some city when they look for careers.
The idea the article proposes, that $782,000 for a house in North Carolina is an example of "affordable housing", is incredible. Is the article's author a Rockefeller?
The triangle tends to be pricey. Good public schools, both primary and Uni level, lots of tech work, nice weather 10 months of the year, close to the coast and the mountains. Apex and Cary tend to get lots of Yankee expats (compared to Long Island 700K is nothing), also driving up prices there. Drive 20 minutes and you can get a nice place for half that.
I live in the same neighborhood as the individuals profiled in the article and my house (new construction, 2500 sf) cost less than half of that price, purchased around the same time. Even though Apex is growing quickly $782K is still very high by local standards. I’m sure it was still a “bargain” compared to Redmond.
They're comparing it to the Greater Seattle Area (specifically Bel-Red) housing market. Don't they mention that the same house would cost double there?
This might be a good time to mention a documentary called The End of Suburbia[1], which lays out the case for the existence of the suburbs being fueled and sustained by the easy availability of cheap oil and then goes on to forecast the death of the suburbs as cheap oil stops being so easily available.
Peak carbon-sink will probably be a bigger factor than peak oil, all things considered. But the social consequences are not that different - especially since most "enhanced", unconventional oil sources are quite dirty and require a lot of energy to extract.
Electric cars are going to stay low cost per mile indefinitely.
That does not mean suburbs are going to thrive long term. But, it does give them more sustainability.
A much larger change imo is developers are no longer heavily promoting the lifestyle which is changing how people think about them. Older suburbs are basically left to stand on their own which means some thrive and other die off.
A lot of the other infrastructure involved in sprawl is not sustainable, since it was funded by federal dollars but its upkeep/replacement will not, especially water and sewer mains/service
I suppose it depends on what we're defining as infrastructure.
* Roads can be built to last 15 years before needing additional work (routine maintenance extends this to 20 years), same with sidewalks.
* New sewer and water pipes will last ~50 years.
* Copper electrical cabling will last at least 100 years, but lets be conservative and assume only a 50 year service life before you have to pull new wire through underground conduit/concrete channels. Let's also assume more solar goes on suburban roofs (and batteries in garages) as the cost continues to decline, taking load off of the traditional electrical distribution network
* Estimated service life of fiber optic cabling is 25 years (fiber to the home)
* The suburbs will never be dense enough to satiate transit demands using busses or light rail exclusively; it's EVs most of the way (sustainably powered by either distributed or utility generated renewables). I am a huge proponent of electric busses and dedicated lanes for them in high density areas whenever possible. Faster and cheaper to deploy than light rail, and more versatile for changing needs.
Nothing above seems unsustainable to me, but I also agree the suburbs should not be subsidized.
Why would anyone think the infrastructure business with extremely high marginal costs, low reproducibility (each situation is different), high labor costs, high legal costs is comparable to technology (presumably electronics), which have low marginal costs, and more one size fits all solutions.
Yeah, I don't see many obvious places to trim. Living spread out like as in the suburbs but with city-like infrastructure seems like just a fundamentally expensive way to live. Good for stimulus spending, except that these aren't really assets that boost output to cover the interest, so then there's the maintenance hangover.
Do we have any estimates on when oil will stop being cheap. It was my understanding that the planet will be well and truly fucked beyond repair if we ever managed to use up all the easily available oil.
Well, OPEC feels it needs to artificially limit supply to keep prices from cratering, while fracking has basically permanently displaced several producers.
Also, electrification and renewables threaten future demand (though that may be taken up by plastics).
At some point between now and the heat death of the universe, the Earth will stop pumping oil. I wouldn't bet that peak oil is super imminent though.
I think the decision to move to the burbs is almost entirely out of the question as an LGBT. Urban centers are the only places with thriving LGBT communities, and I think I would feel very alone if I moved away from one.
I doubt it's a net loss for cities and compliments the swing a decade ago now that people have families and the suburbs offer more of the amenities they're looking for, similarly to downtown offering more amenities for the childless or single. Of course downtown's have things for families but they have a lot of other bosses, business, tourists, industrial...suburbs tend to serve families and retirees and businesses related to those demographics.
It wouldn't be an "escape" for me, it's just if I want a decent amount of space and good schools and a subjectively "nice" neighborhood then I have to look at more suburban areas. I would like to be able to afford a reasonably big place in a nice green, walkable neighborhood in the city but I don't want to spend 10-20 extra years of my life working to afford it.
Is there a way to live in the city without paying exorbitant fees to an HOA for crumbling infrastructure and their cronyist maintenance contracts?
Every time I look at real estate, the HOA fees pretty much make condo living a no-go. I'm somehow supposed to believe that it takes $800/mo to service a small 2-br apartment? In many cases that doesn't even include utilities.
This often includes either a) full-time staff, in the case of building with doormen or maintenance staff, or b) payback of construction loans or mortgages taken to pay for maintenance.
But: do you live in a house? I assume you haven’t had to maintain it much yet...new roof, new heating, new sewer line, renovations, etc. all cost tons of money. I’d be surprised if for a house > 50 years old, you’re paying less than a few hundred a month on maintenance on average.
The rule of thumb for home maintenance is 1% of purchase price per year. Which isn't $800/month for most people, but is around the few hundred per month you mentioned.
I actually have already (replaced the AC compressor, which cost ~$1600).
Landscaping was about $500 for the whole year. Either way, that's only $2100, compared to something like $10,000 I would have paid in HOA fees in an older condo around the same area.
Renovations are not-at-all comparable, as they are strictly an improvement. I don't know of a single HOA that came in and renovated someone's condo for free.
1% of house/land value is still cheaper than HOA fees in 90% of cases.
I lived in a condo which was 2/3 owned by one corporation. The high-cost maintenance that only happens every 20-50 years was NOT amortized into the HOA fee. It was expected that special assessments would pay for such things. And the corporation for its part was happy with that arrangement. In the short term the regular HOA fee was lower.
Nothing sucks the soul and joy of life out of me more than a suburb, yet cost of cities and the space needed to raise kids mean they're not all negatives. I just wish we could do better, because no one should be forced to live in such soulless place,yet no one should have to pay so much to afford an extra bedroom.
My old house was 900sf, perfect for 1 to 2 people, but it got cramped when my son was born. We looked into expanding but for the cost of adding a room with a bathroom ($100k) we decided that it wasn't worth it.
With schools we got lucky, the elementary school was just recently built and looked great. But there was an issue, the schools that my son would be going after grade school were rated very poor. This was a concern.
Traffic bad and seemingly only getting worse. Traffic projects have been in endless gridlock between car commuters and the bicycle community.
Not sure about other large cities, but mine (Portland, OR) has a pretty big homeless and crime issues as of lately. Gone are the days of how clean our city is and now it's just littered with trash and tent communities. It's not uncommon to see a heroine needle if walking in a city park. In the last year, we had somebody try to break into my shed and my wife and 4 years old Son were confronted in our driveway by a homeless individual, who said that he was considering suicide.
I still have a soft spot for PDX and I think it's a great place, but we decided get out.
ha ha sounds like I'm repeating the same story of earlier genereations, ha ha nothing new.
https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/our-city-has...