Since I don’t see any other comments mentioning it: wow, Bell Labs was preserved as a kind of public multi-use space? That’s wild, I had no idea. I’m glad they didn’t tear it down for McMansions as the article explains was the plan before preservationists intervened. It’s a very cool structure with historical significance. Bell Labs is particularly relevant to this crowd here in HN - it’s arguably the birthplace of our whole industry, and people have tried replicating its magic over the years.
To me the architect in the article is too quick to dismiss the premise of Bell Labs — giving researchers privacy and pastoral views. Sounds a lot like early Silicon Valley to me. They claim that it’s actually just the chance encounters that were important. There’s some truth to that — Steve Jobs famously designed the Pixar campus to maximize chance encounters. But I wouldn’t be so quick to discount a degree of space and privacy.
That’s kind of central to the whole discussion: the human balance between a need for privacy and a need for community. People want space, and they also want to be able to visit areas of density, and walk around. This used to be the mall, the big box bookstores.
I actually think this article was very interesting, and the architect was very articulate about a lot of things. But I’m not sure we’ve actually solved the core question: why did the malls decay? What changed? Was it e commerce? The shrinking middle class? Traffic just getting too snarled with no real solution?
Knew I wasn't going to have to scroll far in the comments section to find discussion about Bell Labs. :)
That's a very cool office structure. I'm glad they repurposed it for a more cooperative use suited to the times.
To me the architect in the article is too quick to dismiss the premise of Bell Labs — giving researchers privacy and pastoral views.
A great discussion point re: Bell Labs that I read in an HN thread long, long ago was that research labs of this type (Bell Labs, Google X, Xerox PARC, etc.) only arise in monopoly conditions. Basic research only becomes supportable from an organizational overhead and ROI standpoint when there is no meaningful competition to the parent organization.
It implies another large and very interesting question: are the net benefits of places like Bell Labs worth the costs that come with tolerating monopolies?
More to the point of the topic at hand: is the monolithic structure of Bell Labs, the building, worth the costs it has imposed on the shape of its surrounding community?
It's not monopoly conditions per se, I think. It's just the lack of compelled profit motive that gets you the ability to do basic research/exploration.
Society has another mechanism for people to do research without a profit motive - the university - but for various reasons that's been working poorly. (One is that they've sort of developed a profit motive, and at the individual level, researchers need to chase grants.)
I don't think the answer is to tolerate monopolies; I think there are ways society can better support people doing open-ended research without just telling a company "Here, have all the money you want and no accountability." I don't think De Beers, for instance, produced much valuable research for the world with their monopoly.
The other thing with universities, comping from the perspective of someone involved with a fairly small corporate research department (which has close ties to a big one)--is that they can be very divorced from the practical/commercial. And it's not necessarily a good thing to be too ivory tower. In fact one of the reasons universities want to work with us (other than the fact we provide internships and jobs for their students) is that we help them to work on things that people actually care about.
Not that fundamental research is a bad thing but there's often a happy medium between near-term product development and totally blue sky research.
"People want space, and they also want to be able to visit areas of density, and walk around."
From the cell wall to the terminals of a battery to the crossing of the bridge from cow hollow to the Marin Headlands ... energy and potential are found in distinct things that are held apart from one another.
I’ve been to the Bell Labs Holmdel office in the 90s, and every single parking spot was taken, and with a mixed residential development it must be even more in demand. The article spouts a lot of trendy urban-planner ideology, trying to shoehorn facts into a predetermined narrative like hostility to cars. See this blog for why those policies are so misguided:
Yeah Nvidia has a self driving lab there. Interesting office space. I had a job offer from them a few years back but went elsewhere because my wife has no job opportunities in Holmdel.
That latter part sounds like another big part of the puzzle. In the last century, you could assume that a) a family had one breadwinner and b) he would expect to work at a single company his whole career. So it would make sense to tell your employees to move to a suburb that is powered by basically a single employer and buy a home there. They could go to "the city" (whichever city) with a 1+ hour commute on weekends or holidays. And employees wouldn't semi-expect to change jobs every few years, so buying a home made sense.
Now none of those assumptions hold. Even universities, which historically didn't care to be located in big cities or near other universities, are now facing the "two-body problem" - so many candidates are now part of a couple who both want academic jobs.
Even if they don't both want academic jobs, what are the odds that the half of a couple who are both STEM professionals who isn't offered the professorship is going to find the ideal job in a Maine college town? (Of course, perhaps going forward, there may be more possibilities to work remotely much of the time.)
> a) a family had one breadwinner and b) he would expect to work at a single company his whole career.
Not disagreeing here, just spitballing. Back then you were likely to live in a small apartment or a Levittown-type house that was about 850 ft sq, was poorly insulated and had no air conditioning. The family shared a single (comparative deathtrap of a) car, there were no cable bills, phone service was inexpensive, you dried your laundry by hanging it up outside, and there was just one TV. I bet one could still afford that lifestyle on today's average salary, no? It seems to me that we just want more stuff now.
Maybe in your very local calling area--not actually sure what local phone bills were like--but long distance, even to a few towns away in the same state were very expensive. Today, I could probably call London from the US (just using my regular domestic plan) for less than I could have called Boston 40 miles to the east in inflation-adjusted dollars in 1970.
Phone service was expensive. For calls to the neighbor it was okay, but calling that city an hour away quickly cost money. A one hour long distance phone call costs more than a months income.
Agree with all points about long distance. I knew I’d be called out on it but the difference between it and, say, cable was that you could control costs on a per month basis. We literally used mail for most of those purposes before the cost of long distance dropped.
Cheap cars really represent a missed opportunity for me. Imagine how inexpensive and reliable cars could be they could be if that was the prime buyer consideration? But instead, car manufacturers keep adding complexity (and take less risks) to stay competitive. On top of that, regulatory bodies are also demanding higher complexity (sensors and cameras, more airbags). This is not bad onto itself, however it means that the question of cheaper and environmentally friendly car vs luxurious, safe, and roomy car has already been made for us.
That's a part of why I love 90's cars so much. Reliability was paramount (especially in the Japanese brands) and luxury was just for the luxury cars. I will be upset when these cars start to die out.
I really hope that US/Canada's regulations change to allow microcars. We are still allowed motorcycles, so we are left with a fairly large gap between complete death machine and car-sized SUVs. Why not introduce the quadricycles legislation? Japan has KEI cars, Europe has microcars, yet the US and Canada have nothing of the sort. It is unfortunate.
You're right - we could absolutely make some amazing products. I'm not clear on the cause.
>if that was the prime buyer consideration?
Buyers less willing to pay for higher quality up front.
Companies reducing long-term profitability through less replacements/maintenance.
Buyers can be manipulated through advertising, and reliability isn't exciting.
Probably a mixture of human shortsightedness and emotional response, and corporate incentives. There's probably some cultural/social context here as well.
> The dead and dying malls, the vacated office parks, the ghost box stores left behind.
Interestingly, around here the Totem Lake mall was written off for dead for the last 30 years. Big boxes, big parking lot bereft of cars. It was a lonely place for a llooong time.
But the whole thing was redeveloped into another mall, pretty much all upscale stores, and the parking lot is jammed.
I can't explain it, but the developers knew what they were doing.
The explanation is pretty simple and has been comented on quite a bit [1][2][3]: they followed the money. Catering to yuppies and affluent tourists is a much better bet in the 21st century than competing against Amazon and big box stores in the mass market space whith widespread financial insecurity in America.
I remember totem lake in the early 90s, the compusa there was where I drooled over PowerPC Macs that were just released. It was never a nice place, frankly I’ve overlooked that area for the past 25 years unless I need furniture and don’t want to go to Lynwood.
> I can't explain it, but the developers knew what they were doing.
Asians, especially Chinese, tend to go for malls with upscale stores (if my experience living in Beijing is any indicator). I bet that’s what the developers were going after.
I live directly across I-405 from this redeveloped property. It’s been amazing to see the change.
I am in the process of buying a few acres of land further south of this area, in Buckley, WA.
I hope to build a garage/shop on the property, have space for my amateur radio hobby, and a few years from now, build a modest home. I would then sell my current home here in Kirkland.
Yet no one knows what tomorrow will bring. So I have no idea of how any of this will actually unfold.
Funny, I've been looking at buying large plots (50+ acres) of land with similar ideas. I have a hard time with pulling the trigger knowing that the projects become all-encompassing once you get started.
Totem Lake is being developed the same way all of Pugetopolis is. A giant box with upscale retail on ground floor and ~$2000 1-BR apartments on top. Or sometimes office space.
I think what’s dead is the typical 80s mall with massive parking lots and exclusively retail stores. BellSquare will be fine. But Northgate is a dead mall. Out in Cary, NC a dead mall was just bought by Epic Games for their new office. The old theater in Bellevue got turned into offices for Bungie.
Downtown Redmond is full of boxes. So is downtown Kirkland. I think most of the office space is Google? I’m not sure if Totem Lake boxes have much office space.
There’s boxes up in Kenmore. Capitol Hill has lots of boxes. Central District has several new boxes around Jackson and 23rd. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a mixed use box!
Northgate was doing fine but the writing was already on the wall as recently as 2017. The owners have demolished the middle (Nordstrom store #2 is almost completely gone) to make way for the hockey practice facility and several new office buildings, a couple of hotels, and apartments.
With, as you might imagine, retail on the bottom and a lot of walking space in the middle.
> You can’t throw a stone without hitting a mixed use box!
Sure, because developers and individuals have figured out that mixed use, if done OK, means stuff is more accessible. The problem is that we've only a handful of places where we zone to build mixed use so the spaces are super expensive because developers like to maximize profit.
We gotta catch up on housing, though. The close-in 'burbs are zoning for offices offices offices and not for people to live there.
Offices don't vote, so you can charge high taxes. Build a house and raise the taxes and you may be voted out. Or even build a house and a different party member may buy it and take your town in a different direction.
What I'm sick of is all of the suburbs doing their level best to try to convince businesses to not locate in the city while also complaining about the "housing crisis" and "traffic crunch" that their own policies caused.
Everybody griped that Seattle wasn't zoning for housing at the rate it zoned for offices, so the city has started upzoning and now the 'burbs are doing the exact opposite of what they lobbied the city to do for a decade.
Yea. That is the sad truth. I used to be a hard core YIMBY believer and advocated for more urban densification and taller buildings etc. etc.
Then one day I found out that the city was planning on building new student housing on the park where my daughter and I went to play every day. All of a sudden I found my unbridled YIMBYism becoming a lot more circumspect and nuanced and it turns out I was actually just a massive hypocrite. Urban densification is Great! and I still believe it is the right solution (just not in _my_ back yard).
PS: Now that I've moved 2 miles down the road and no longer go to that particular park I'm far more open to the long term benefits of it being used for student housing.
I think what is helpful is to define values. I think most people would value a park nearby - but how much park. A 500 acre park per apartment is obviously too much - you couldn't have a city, and I'm not sure if there is enough land in the world. You wouldn't want 1 square cm per apartment either - the few parks you would keep wouldn't hold all the people who want to use them. Someplace in the middle is a compromise - but I'm not sure what.
For the most part I don't think that the law should limit what buildings can be put up - factories/stores/housing can all share a neighborhood. However even if chemical factories don't release anything, there is still enough fire danger that they should be separated from anything else. Worse some chemicals are safe on their own but if they leak to a neighbor the combination is dangerous so such things need to be kept apart.
I don't really feel like trying to come up with a proposal of what the rules should be, but what we have isn't right.
IIRC it went through 2 failed attempts at revitalization over the years, but this one absolutely took off. My guess is it's just the influx of tech workers?
This article makes some pretty bold claims in the beginning and then totally fails to back them anywhere in the interview. It repeatedly decried the fall of the suburbs, and yet throughout the interview talked about how they're being revitalized. By the end it admits that the suburbs are seeing a huge resurgence due to covid and people fleeing the packed cities, but it even claims this was happening before, so what's with those false claims at the start?
I haven't looked into it, but I heard about it via the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes whose creator makes videos based on his experience and on his reading of Strong Towns. Starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
Disclaimer: I'm a dirty European with a natural bias against American suburbia and I haven't read the strong towns book. Also strong town's presentation looks a bit like a cult but that might just be my impression.
Ok looks interesting, I bought the book, it’s on its way, but again, just by browsing the website, it seems like they’re an advocacy for changing cities, not necessarily making bold claims about how stupid Ben Carson is.
> Strongtowns and Citylab were both conceived by single, childless white people
You're talking through your rear orifice. Strong Towns was founded and is led by a fairly conservative guy who lives in small town Minnesota and talks all the time about his wife, two kids and dog.
This. And much of the content is a constant advocacy for avoiding the type of infrastructure investments that become very expensive to maintain for rural towns/counties (where a paved road may cost an order of magnitude more for upkeep than a gravel road).
> NYC and SF are emptying, while suburbia is seeing bidding wars.
Yes, during the lockdowns. Let's see what happens in 1-2 years when people are allowed to socialize "normally" again.
Do you see the same thing in AU and NZ where they actually managed the pandemic in a proper fashion so extended lockdowns weren't as necessary? Are Sydney and/or Auckland emptying out?
> Are Sydney and/or Auckland emptying out?
Sydney and Auckland aren't, but Melbourne (in the State of Victoria) is, which endured highly restrictive lock downs for 7-9 months.
From friends and family there, it sounds like apartments in the Melbourne CBD (aka. Downtown / City Centre) are effectively ghost towns, with tenants leaving the city, while still paying rent, and rated rental prices dropping by 25%. The general sentiment seems to be that no-one is interested in being forced into close proximity in home & work situations like you'd find on public transport and apartment blocks. So free standing houses, townhouses with separate entrances are at a massive premium.
From friends and family in New Zealand, it's hard to tell, because the already over-priced and rising market is reaching utterly insane levels, potentially (disclaimer: anecdotal based speculation here) driven by New Zealanders returning home from overseas from countries that are now seen as unsafe.
Melbourne CBD is an exception because of the huge amount of residents on temporary visas and students, both of which are locked out of the country at the moment. The rest of the inner city is back to normal, some parts like Chapel Street and Fitzroy St which definitely weren't thriving pre-covid seem to be now.
It's like watching nature come back after a fire, not every tree survives but the forest rebounds.
The whole point of both of those is that suburbia as currently conceived is a massively-subsidized unsustainable mode of living that is an aberration from how successful settlements were built.
The whole point leans on the fact that building cities where residents are required to lock in 15% of their earnings to automotive expenses to be economically productive is insane.
I think Covid demonstrated that there's a much lower appetite for living in dense cities during pandemics, not in general. Maybe this will have aftereffects that extend into "in general", but it seems premature to say this.
As an NYC renter who's been spending a lot of time looking at sales listings in the NYC housing market recently: This is not true. You are repeating a lie.
If it were true, I and my other renter friends would at least be able to keep our rents steady. My rent went up during covid, as did others'. And we're in perfectly generic apartments.
A couple of loud rich people are posting thinkpieces about leaving. A couple of folks who hate NYC and SF are aggressively retweeting those posts. And, perhaps, growth is slowing down. But the city is not "emptying."
But if it helps you feel more oppressed and backs up your identity politics, believe whatever you want.
According to every major outlet NYC has like Crains' NY, Bloomberg, and even realtor reports, show that every indicator for NYC at least, that the city demand for real estate is dramatically shrinking.
Rents are down 22%. Listings at an all time high. Vacancies at record 6.2%. Time of listings are also getting longer. Some of these numbers are 10 to 20 year highs.
Hm. I wonder if what's happening is that the very top of the market is falling out. There exist apartments for rent in the tens of thousands per month range in Manhattan, and it totally would not surprise me that if you wanted a place to live with a large family, it's no longer interesting to do that in a skyscraper by Central Park.
If that were true, that would explain why the median rent is down 22% - the top end of the curve got lopped off - but I'm certainly not seeing rents down even 0%, let alone 22%, in my range!
(That would also line up with the article's claim that 80% of groups looking for homes are 1-2 person groups. The 20% is quite profitable.)
This feels right - the benefits of living in the city were always more about being close to other people for nightlife etc than being near the office anyway. Most people always did leave central London/NYC/etc in their 30s when they start a family - Covid may have temporarily changed some people's plans but I do think it's temporary.
But office space in major cities is looking pretty vulnerable I think. Moving from planning space based on everyone spending 5 days a week in the office to planning based on work from home 2/3 days per week on average allows you to give workers more space per head (for their days in the office) while also still using less space in total and saving money - it's a win/win. Not everyone will do this but it will be widespread enough to make a real difference I suspect. There will be knock on impact to that in all the businesses which serve office workers too. And eventually it probably feeds into a change in the mix between office space and residential which could (via more supply) put some downward pressure on residential rents.
Rents in my building in Manhattan have dropped by at least 15-20 pct. Sales prices for condos have gone down (I know people who had to lower prices). Forget both my and your experiences, just look at the median rents and look at any online publication on the topic, even a brokerage report that comes out every quarter.
I don't see it that way because title is "The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone" and then the whole article is saying how suburbs are revitalized to fit needs of those new inhabitants.
So from the start article never was about suburbs. It was about people and social dynamics.
The first 5 paragraphs go to extreme pains to describe suburbs as failed racist projects that only uncle toms and other racists support.
The actual interview spends most of its time focusing on how malls aren’t that useful anymore, and now that they’re changing to be useful people are moving back out to the suburbs. But the core idea of the suburbs: large SFU homes on large plots of land is never questioned.
Honestly that sounds like the author doing a really bad job at transcribing the interview, when you talk you repeat yourself if this was just a video maybe it would be ok, but the author says the same thing “8” times in the intro paragraphs and then appears to just transcribe exactly what was said.
One has to wonder how seriously to take your opinions on an article that you characterize as [a] "guy being interviewed", when the article starts off by introducing the two women interviewed.
the suburbs fell? suburban home prices are up 15% just from last year. homes overbid with multiple cash offers in most metro regions. meanwhile look at the exodus from NYC.
the defining story of human geography in the last year is a movement from cities to suburbs
despite that, "people want dense cities" is an evergreen meme on HN
There's a neighborhood nearby that I often go for a walk on. It was built probably immediately after WW2. Most of the houses, if you look closely, are of identical design. (Sometimes a mirror image.) But over the years, they've diverged as the owners would add garages, bedrooms, expansions, etc. They're nicely done, and it's a charming neighborhood.
Finland has this exact same thing. We call them "Rintamamiestalo", translates to something like "Soldier house".
They're all pretty much the same kind of two-story wooden house, people built them in bulk when they got home from the war. It was an event like an Amish barn raising, the same guys built a ton of the exact same house one after the other.
Now they've got maybe the second or third owner and the designs have diverged quite a bit, but you can still find the central house if you know how to look.
I grew up in such a neighborhood, built to absorb the baby boom. It took me a long time to figure out that the houses were identical except for being oriented in different directions, having different facade, and so forth. One day I realized that I knew my way around David's house because I knew my way around Kevin's house.
It doesn't have to be that long. My mom asked the city to put in some oak trees when I was a kid. It only took the trees about 15 years to grow to a pretty good size. In my opinion, it's worth the effort of lobbying the city.
My parents did it the unofficial way, put in 5-10 trees along the road, over a few weekends, with the same style of concrete surrounding that the city used. They are huge now, and nobody ever questioned how they got there. Not 50-years huge, and a faster-growing species than oak, but still a big improvement.
This is how many urban residential neighborhoods built before the 1950s are. Mine in CA is a such a neighborhood built between the 1920s and 1940s - originally very similar 1000sqft Craftsmans that have been incrementally enhanced over generations up to and including including now.
Where you find a distinct lack of this sort of organic variation is in suburban tract single family home developments where changes are micromanaged by neighborhood HOAs.
The first few citations are circular, they link to articles about the book being discussed or the authors of that book.
Where are they getting the “80% of new households ... will be these one to two person households” stat from? No citation, of course, because it’s not true. I won’t be surprised to see that used in future articles and linked back to this interview, however.
The anti-homeownership propaganda seems to be growing with articles trying to tell us “you don’t want to own a home!”. If an ounce of research was conducted it would be clear how many people want out of cities and into homes.
My wife and I are going into the third season of trying to buy a house (SoCal). Every half decent home sells in its first weekend and, in our experience (6 offers), for all cash and over ask. This is the norm in many other areas from what I’ve read.
To me, the real story is “Millennials want to buy homes and start families but the older generations aren’t moving out of the suburbs fast enough”.
"The anti-homeownership propaganda seems to be growing"
I see this a lot in UK articles too, berating people for wanting a boring detached house and a garden somewhere quiet, when they could live in a shoebox in the city. It seems to be a bit of anti-middle-classism, mixed with environmental concerns and a love of central planning. Some of the same thinking that lead to brutalism here, IMHO.
I’d love it if some of the people downvoting your comment would explain why. For me, it really resonates.
I think a major driver of anti-single-family-home advocacy is simply that the kind of people who become urban planners are the kind of people who personally love the crush of the city and the close proximity of their fellow man. It is also fueled by the interests of developers and, to a lesser extent, social justice advocates.
At least some it has aspects in common with other collective action problems. (See many of the current discussions around remote work.) There's a perception, somewhat warranted, that if they can't persuade other people to adopt their preferences, it's going to be harder for they themselves to live in a world where teams are colocated, cities ban cars, there's more mixed use zoning, or whatever. And the arguments perhaps work better if they're framed in terms of productivity, environmental impact, etc. as opposed to "I like it this way better."
Housing and transportation seems to have two local maxima: car dependent or high density. A walkable high density area with apartments and mass transit. Or free roads, free parking, and sprawl that reinforce each other. If you try to bring a car to a dense area you become frustrated with traffic congestion and expensive parking and insurance. Likewise if you try to maintain an urban lifestyle in most of America you will be braving long waits for a bus and pedestrian hostile layouts.
As usual in this type of threads, I don't quite understand what Americans mean by 'walkability'.
When I was in high-school, I spent 2 weeks in the USA, on Long Island. I could walk for an hour and not walk across a pedestrian. There were often no sidewalk (when there were, I wasn't sure I could use them, as to my foreign eyes, being detached from the road, they where running though properties :-D ), but what's the problem with that? There was almost zero traffic, since the areas are low-density residential; much less than on my country roads. I could reach the ocean, I could reach playgrounds/playfields, I could reach one street with shops, I could reach... the high-school. No transit was needed. But I was alone in the streets/on the roads. I didn't understand why the older kid (16?) of the house was already driving a big car to go to high-school...
When I look at Google Maps, a huge proportion of those suburbs areas seem to be within a mile of a either a shop street or a supermarket, and often some playfield too (we don't have that many over here). The grid pattern makes access easier. So I am puzzled. It seems very 'walkable' to me. Of course accessing those supermarkets by foot or cycle ranges from unpleasant to maddening because access was generally only planned for cars. But that's much more easily fixable than redesigning the whole zones.
Now if you work 15 miles away, that's something else, but does this come into 'walkability' concept? No density is going to fix that: even in a big dense city, your job, or your next job (and even more your partner's!) is almost always going to end up on the other end of the city after some time. Walkability cannot help there, so I reckon jobs location shouldn't weight on the concept much.
I lived abroad in a pretty US-sprawl-like place. A huge majority of detached houses, a few rowhouses, a handful of short flats buildings, with supermarkets in place of the town centre. Basically no small shops, but a few bars between the supermarkets. I was living on one side of the town, and I was walking (winter) or cycling (summer) everyday to my workplace on the other side of the town, 2 rivers and 1.5 miles away. I would shop on the way back home. Easy, simple, practical. No transit is needed. For me it is walkable. But it seems it isn't, for many people I read here, because they would declare similar areas in the US as non-walkable.
I now live in a municipality, where density is 8 inhabitants / km² (20-25 inhabitants / sq mile). But most people live within half-a-mile of the village centre. It has enough small shops for your daily or weekly needs; if you wish, there's a bigger shop/small supermarket in the next village, 2 miles away. There's a guy who is over 80 years old and who lives at the farthest point in the municipality, 1 mile away. He comes shopping almost everyday, by foot, on the road that passes in front of my house. So for him I guess it is walkable. But what if we ask all the 40-something who live 4 times closer, but who prefer to take their car, and drive 2 times 10 miles to go a big supermarket. They'll swear they need their car, for those countrysides are not walkable! Heck, my neighbour works in the centre, that is one quarter miles away (5 mn walk, 1 mn bicycle) and takes her car to go to work.
It's not well-defined. To many people, it has a pretty high bar. For them, it means you can walk to most of the shops you need, restaurants, public transit options, etc. in a comfortable way. And, yes, it often assumes there's a multitude of jobs that can be accessed without a car because the need to own a car--tends to make it more difficult to live in a walkable neighborhood.
> There's a perception, somewhat warranted, that if they can't persuade other people to adopt their preferences, it's going to be harder
Sometimes it is true. Imagine you wish something like the Spanish town model: a very dense centre, and nothing else than the centre, so wherever you are in the town, you just walk/cycle/drive less than a mile and you are in the fields, the hills, or other forms of 'nature'. Density located in a single point would also enable easy and efficient point-to-point public transit between similar towns, by the way.
Anyway, you can't have this if you take the French route and allow suburban sprawl. It will spread 5 miles around in all (free) directions. Then it doesn't matter if you densify the centre (following the mantra "density is good and efficient" which we hear all the time here), people living in the centre (and most of the suburb) will not have access to 'nature' unless they use a car.
(What actually happens in terms of densification in France is generally worse, because densification of the sprawl is not made in the US style with huge buildings in a very dense, punctual, centre, but it is made along some axes or in some areas here and there. You end up with some average density everywhere, while the infrastructure hasn't followed. And cannot follow, because the density itself is spread, instead of being in a single point easily served. The elected from those areas say they want to combat sprawl, but they make it worse for everyone this way.)
On the other hand, I agree that cities, or urbanism in general, shouldn't be designed for what I call the 14-28, like it is often asked on this site. Or at least it should be the only goal and it shouldn't be the goal everywhere. What I mean by 14-28 is people who are in a great demand of interactions, who want to meet people, a lot of people (of course it depends on individuals, I just arbitrarily peeked those figures). It has always been like that, teens and young adults have always wanted to leave and discover the world, to multiply experiences, good and bad ones, and are attracted by the city lights. That's something we must acknowledge, and we'd better provide an environment for that.
BUT that must not be the end of all things. When people get a bit older and become parents, most of them
tone down and wish to be in less hectic areas, that's just a fact we can observe, even if it doesn't match our own ideal. And that's like it until their death, you can find a few people who will move to a city for their retirement but most who move will move the other way. Same for kids: until a certain age, they are satisfied with the presence of their parents, schools, and a handful of neighbouring kids, they have no need or desire of a large and dense city.
So most of their life, people don't care for having a big concentration of people where they live, and on the contrary favour a bit more space and a bit more quietness. Urbanism shouldn't blindly optimise for the former (density).
Upvoting this comment while it's still visible... which it won't be for long. I too am a little saddened by what feels to me like a classist anti-suburb attitude here on HN. Maybe I'm just oversensitive. But I grew up not rich and not safe. Am very, very happy that I can own a few acres 2 miles away from a Costco and 13 miles from the (currently dormant) opera.
I didn't make a value judgement on those reasons, or at least that wasn't my intention, though I can see why someone might take it that way.
I think the environmental concerns that feed into it are often quite valid, spreading endless suburbs across places like the UK is not a great idea. But I don't think criticising those who aspire to have more space is a good outcome.
The tone of the comment is very whiny. There’s this sense of the poster feeling threatened by other people’s preferences. An article discussing how a lot of young people prefer cities is somehow “berating” them. It’s a small-minded and insecure attitude. I know we are not supposed to discuss downvotes on this forum, but that is why people are downvoting it.
I'm not threatened by anyone's preferences, if you want to live in a city that's great - I live in the centre of a small city (300k people?) right now. I wasn't specifically talking about the linked article either, I have seen a lot of articles in recent years in the UK taking an anti-suburban line.
What I'm drawing attention to is that the bien pensant class in the UK seem to have started to tell us it's wrong to want the life that people have aspired to before. And that this is something we saw some decades before with brutalism, pushing people into spaces that designers and architects wanted them, not places they wanted to be themselves. There seems to be a desire amongst some architects and planners to push people towards their ideals of higher density housing, in particular, trading out much in the way of private space to much more social living.
Not everyone wants that. It's not wrong to want to live in smaller urban spaces with that trade-off, but it's not wrong not to buy into it either.
It's also an under-discussed part of the YIMBY movement. Wanting a boring detached house and a garden somewhere quiet is generally categorized as NIMBY in these discussions in my town. I grew up somewhere quiet and residential with trees and sky and space, and I liked that. It has a ton of jobs nearby, so it's gotten crazy expensive. But if you don't want to bulldoze the single-family homes and build high-density, you're the problem. Doubly so if you are lucky enough to afford said home.
I sincerely hope remote work takes off so the geographic network effects of all the jobs being in the same place are less important. It would make low density much more viable for those of us who want to see the sky and maybe a tree every once in a while.
People preferring detached houses is fine. Just take off the subsidies and let the market choose the mix between suburban houses and high density housing.
It is literally illegal to build apartments in many areas of the United States. That's because of local zoning laws limiting how many residential units are allowed per acre, minimum parking requirements, height restrictions, setback requirements, etc. The US government intervened in the mortgage market to make low interest 30 year loans broadly available (if a homeowner defaults and the foreclosure sale is not enough to cover the loan balance Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac are the investors holding the bag). Toll-free highways make commutes from suburbs to downtown possible.
> People preferring detached houses is fine. Just take off the subsidies and let the market choose the mix between suburban houses and high density housing.
Exactly. If someone wishes to own a detached single-unit residence, fine. I'd prefer they didn't but that's not my decision to make for an individual.
The problem comes when people want to control what's built within a quarter or half or full mile of the residence they own. (And, no, before someone comes at me with this specious reasoning, there's a huge difference between "build a nuclear power plant next to a daycare" and "different types of housing near each other.")
As a matter of public policy, I will always advocate that we do the environmental and financially efficient thing of building closer-in and closer-together. (We gotta add in some standards for noise transmission, too.) But preserving a specific type of housing in a specific location in amber forever is not reasonable and should not be continued.
I wouldn't be surprised if what contributed to this message is the same emergent corporatist message that individualism /career progression is what really matters in life. Not that there is some conspiracy, but that media always tends to push whatever narrative requires people to give away the most money (or stay in debt working as wage labor).
The Enlightened Liberals Who Will Save Us From Ourselves cannot tolerate the unwashed masses living independently without big government and high taxes. This is why rural dwellers are cast in the media as knuckle dragging racists
Interesting take. You realize that suburban living is subsidized by urban living[1]? The suburbs don't generate enough economic activity to be self-sustaining.
Unironically this. If I stay in my big city my projected outcome is nothing but poverty in old age. Once a man stops caring about partying and getting laid the freedom to own something substantial and build on it is the new sirens call.
> The anti-homeownership propaganda seems to be growing
I don't read this like that at all. It seems much more a reflection of exactly the difficulty you're describing: lots and lots of people like you want to find big suburban family homes but are priced out, and the suburbs are (awkwardly and somewhat unfairly) infilling to accomodate more modest and denser neighborhoods to house them.
The unfortunate truth is that "The Suburbs", as you and many people imagine, simply don't scale. So the actual neighborhoods we're building in the urban periphery are having to change. Recognizing that fact isn't "propaganda".
It is not just a commentary on what's happening, as you describe in your first sentence. There's also a distinct assertion on what must happen going forward, to the opinion of the speakers.
Suburbs don't scale. Yet, cities don't scale either. This is why people get priced out or want to move out and most cities have been low growth modes for years.
I find it interesting that recognizing that the path of least resistance (suburbs) may be slowly and haphazardly changing (true), is ccheered by all academics.
Yet I don't see any expert opinion about about having cities be more receptive to change to accommodate growth....
Sure sounds like a NIMBY from academics about their cities, no?
Cities do scale though, they have scaled for thousands of years and will continue to scale. The history of human life has seen the median human living in a denser and denser living situation. People are priced out of US cities because the current cohort of property owners wants to treat cities like suburbs (slow growth, restrictions) not cities. Look at any major US city excluding NYC and the vast majority of land in the city is zoned for single family homes.
Cities do scale, but the low-density "Suburb City" that describes large parts of the US doesn't scale feasibly because the property tax / sales tax per square foot of property is insufficient to cover the city infrastructure to maintain it. The answer, unfortunately, is more growth, in an almost ponzi-scheme like fashion; new property tax revenue covers the cost of replacing roads and sewers from much older districts of the city and so forth.
You can see this in how cities tend to go full blight very quickly after the jig is up (e.g. Detroit, probably the largest example, but many midwest rust belt towns too).
I live in a "semi-rural" part of a European country between two major cities and I'm surprised at how immaculate the arterial road is that I live on, between the cities (kind of a "country road" that parallels the highway). Where I lived in the US before, similar roads were full of wheel-eating potholes. But then again, property prices here are through the roof because the government heavily regulates growth, so that's where they get the revenue.
> There's also a distinct assertion on what must happen going forward, to the opinion of the speakers.
I just went back and re-read the article. And... no, I don't see that at all. The tenor of the thing is almost 100% empirical, describing change without advocating for it. (To be fair this is largely a "book review" kind of thing and I haven't read the book itself.)
Politics really has infused everything now. Is it really not possible for you to read a straightforward description of urban growth patterns without seeing a... I dunno, I guess agenda-driven plot against your way of life? You do realize you can't vote your way back to unrestricted suburban growth, right? There just isn't the space for it.
Is it possible that there's a possibility that in fact, your assumptions could be wrong ? For an article that is 100% empirical as you say, i hardly see any citations, like user theNJR OP said.
Take for example my "way of life". How would you react if i told you that I am a resident of a major urban center of +2M people ? And I have lived in such a city all my life ,including my formative years ?
IMO a lot of the “propaganda” are people/planners just being realistic about your options. There’s not enough in it for most communities to build the new or cheaper suburbs you feel entitled to or legislate kicking older generations out of their homes by overturning Prop13 or whatnot.
Even when the olds do die out, you’re not going to get some discount. Newport Beach is never going to be Detroit.
I mean, you sort of prove the point: Right now you're trying to find a suburban home in SoCal. There are suburbs everywhere, and most of those places are far cheaper than SoCal. Likely with better schools, no bidding wars, and possibly even better "suburban" amenities. So why are you looking in SoCal and not those other places?
The urban core the suburb is tethered to matters more to buyers than they're willing to admit directly.
I consider it often but can’t find a suitable replacement. Having grown up in rural Maine I’ll spare you the other excuses and acknowledge that I just love the weather here.
> Where are they getting the “80% of new households ... will be these one to two person households” stat from? No citation, of course, because it’s not true.
Do you have a source to cite for your claim that it's not true?
This source supports the claim that "something like 80%" of newly formed households will consist of only one or two persons, at least for the period 2018 through 2028.
(Also, it seems odd to suggest that the reason a person didn't provide a citation for a statistic mentioned in the context of an interview is because the statistic isn't true.)
The link you provided does not in fact back up that claim. It shows a demand for 15.1m new homes, with 8.4m of those being one or two person. That’s barely over half - nowhere near 80%.
In fact it does. The projected 15.1M new homes needed is not the same number as the projected number of new households, for reasons the text explains clearly.
It projects 12.1M new households, 8.4M of them either one-person households or married couples with no children (which presumably means a two-person household, although I suppose it's possible some of those might have a third person living with them, e.g., an elderly parent). Only 1.6M of new households (married with children) are obviously more than two persons. The remaining households are 0.6M unmarried with children, which could be two or more persons, and 1.5M unmarried living with other adults, which could also mean two or more persons. It's not impossible to get somewhere close to 80% from that.
At any rate, the comment I responded to asserted that the expert in this field said something obviously untrue, yet offered no evidence except his own personal experience shopping for a suburban home in one particular American city, as if that proves anything at all.
"This source supports the claim that "something like 80%" of newly formed households will consist of only one or two persons, at least for the period 2018 through 2028."
It kinda makes sense that newly formed households will consist of one or two people. Does it mention how long they are expected to stay that way?
I lived in a condo for many years. Mostly worked pretty well, except when the one set of neighbors had a...sanitation...problem and we all got a rat infestation. (Ever seen what happens when rats knaw through the sewer drain stack? It's hilarious.) Or when the DJ-in-training moved in and we got to listen to his music until 3am.
I too have noticed a trend of anti-homeownership propaganda. Here's what I can't figure out. Why does "anti-homeownership propaganda" exist at all? Who has something to gain from it?
I don't know but it reminds me of the pro eating bugs propaganda, and this recent "You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy"[1] ad from the World Economic Forum. They're trying to get the plebs to not want their own homes or possessions.
I get no use out of the vast majority of objects in my house on a day-to-day basis. I know people in my community need objects that I have. I know people in my community have objects that I need. If they/I had those objects when they/I needed them, the entire community is more productive and "worth more."
If you have ever lent tools to anyone you will quickly realize why this kind of utopian sharing doesn't work. Most people have terrible standards for caring for or maintaining things even if they are their own things, much less someone else's. Thus the stigma against lending or borrowing tools in the trades.
I think we've been sold the suburbanized, car-and-home-ownership-centric, "American Dream" for so long, that other options have been actively neglected if not sabotaged.
* Stability is poor. You can lock in a 30-year fixed rate mortgage with a predictable payment (effectively hedging against inflation), but there's little to no recourse against landlords doubling your rent next year or refusing to renew your lease.
* Fully pedestrianized, live-work development is still a scattershot novelty, often requiring heroic efforts to get zoning and incentives set up, but the 1000-hectare, 900 houses and 4 golf courses, 700 km of roads that curley-Q and cul-de-sac, master-planned community, has been raised to an art form.
* Attempts to support public transit are not just forgotten, but aggressively fought, in part because buses/light rail/subways are considered services for undesirable groups.
* The whole urban-renter situation tends to be treated either as a "well, it's just poor/minority/etc." as a subconscious motivation to allow stagnation, or handwaved as a transient situation for the "successful professionals" -- they'll eventually move out to a McMansion so it doesn't matter that their experience is lousy for a few years while they save a down payment.
Unless the wealthy/successful/influential embrace this lifestyle, there will be limited momentum to improve it for anyone else.
I wonder if you (and OP) are conflating "anti-homeownership propaganda" (perhaps some exists) with anti-single family housing zoning "propaganda"? I follow land use topics pretty closely and I'm not sure I've seen any movement I would describe as "anti-homeownership" so I'm wondering if this is a perspective i'm just not familiar with.
Both can be problems. The lack of housing just big enough for a single, maybe couple, with an occasional guest (friend/etc) that later becomes the first baby's room. The lack of overall social stability to promote relationships.
In more modern terms, also the lack of a home office for each working adult; because society still hasn't digested the possibility of remote-mostly working and how that can be a good thing, rather than the hell many are facing during this pandemic.
My guess from most of my 20s and 30s living in big cities- when you live in a tiny apartment almost anything you do from food, entertainment, exercise, transportation is a repeated consumption expense since you don't have space to actually own anything, repair anything, wash anything or buy in bulk. Now that I live in a suburb I give away way less money just to exist.
Presumably if one owned many homes and rented them out they might benefit from increased renting demand. Though the resale value of the house might also go down with less people buying so Idk if it balances out. My perception from London is that resale prices continues to go up even if most people rent but Idk if that's accurate or generalizable.
People who are struggling to pay rent. American public policy favors homeowners over renters. Suburbs were popularized with government intervention (toll free highways and government backed mortgages). We could choose to relax overly restrictive zoning and change tax laws to throw city dwellers a bone.
Starting with Millennials and Gen Z, you've got 2 generations for whom homeownership is fast becoming a pipe dream without at least one of the following: very high paying job, inheritance or other help from parents, moving to a very low cost of living area (which the hurts job prospects).
Anti-homeownership propaganda appeals to them. Why wouldn't they look for upsides in their situation?
I don't understand all this hate against the suburbs. We lived in Jack London Square in Oakland in a 700 sq/ft apt until COVID made WFH easier. We moved to a suburban paradise in Colorado and life in the suburbs is so much better than Oakland. So much space for hobbies. I can drive 5 minutes and get anything I need. There is no noticeable crime. Cars are great. I own a truck and have a 16ft trailer. We can pack everything we own into the trailer and move somewhere else. These Millennials don't want to own anything and are just jaded.
For what it's worth, I believe that most families with kids thrive with a decently sized house and a large garden around it. I expect this is how most of HN's crowd grew up, too. With more people and shops etc in your neighborhood comes noise and chaos.
More than half of adults under 30 are living with their parents. Kids thrive best when they can't afford a home. The suburbs is an Obesogenic environment, just living in it leaves people prone to weight gain, and now 73% of Americans are overwreight or obese. Kids thrive best when they're overweight or obese. The suburbs are an environmental disaster. Kids thrive best on a destroyed planet. It's important that kids thrive best. Maybe there's a better way to do it. I wouldn't know, I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas.
This generally isn't true. Road maintenance is the cheapest form of public transit in the US, and the entire road system (in cost per users) is really low (in Michigan for example, this is between $10-$20/month per person. Lower for suburbs, higher for cities and rural)
If you have a county or municipality in mind, their road budget is probably public, you can probably get their actual numbers for last year and see this for yourself.
Road maintenance isn’t cheap, especially in low density areas. Using current figures isn’t useful because most roads in the US are very underfunded, and we get low scores on infrastructure quality as a result.
Plus it’s not accounting the full cost of roads given that you need a vehicle to access them. On average, something like 15% of a households income is tied to transportation (car maintenance, loans, gas, registration, etc), which is insanely expensive just to be economically productive.
And after the people who built the buildings have taken whatever money they did make and "left the building" too, then rezoning and repurposing can change the range of available lifestyles in unplanned ways.
>Overall there is no reason for them to exist unless people pay a massive premium.
One of the primary reasons for exclusive neighborhoods to exist is so they can exclude those who have average or lower ability to pay a premium.
Including the necessary car(s) as originally intended which are still insanely expensive & time consuming to operate even after they have long been paid for.
But after that sometimes no longer allowed to be parked in some neighborhoods depending on the ugliness consensus of the rulemaking body at the time.
Not even to be economically productive, rather to subtract from productivity during otherwise more fruitful survival efforts.
Road maintainence, energy usage of personal vehicles.
The US economy is so unsustainable on so many levels it's really hard to argue about anything like the status quo. It's an extremely convoluted and leveraged systems which cannot be fixed in a way that ends up with something similar.
> So, for example, a representative cost in 2014 for reconstructing an existing lane of a major urban freeway was $7.7 million per mile; doing the same on a collector street in a small urban area would have set you back $1.5 million per mile.
So at $20/person, you need a density of 4000 people per mile (assuming 18 year life for the road).
$1.5mil, assuming a 10 year life, would need 7500 people at $20/yr each, or 3000 households at 2.5 ppl/household. Assuming each household is a quarter acre, that's 750 acres, or about 1.2 sq mi. That's a depth of .6 mile on either side of the mile of road. (Which is a depths of 15 lots. I think.)
Edit: $10-$20 per month. Well, there's a lot of other roads needed, too.
You don't perform a reconstruction after 10 years.
You need a reconstruction when you have done zero maintenance for 30 years. Or else if there are 1000 loaded lorries roaming on your street everyday :-)
Otherwise you can do with some (partial or full) resurfacing after 5/10 years. That's much much cheaper.
I agree with Strong Towns that we've gone overboard on cars, parking, highways, and sprawl. But their focus on road costs is not based on facts. I checked my town budget and roads are <10% of the budget. The vast majority (2/3) is hiring cops and firefighters and parks staff.
But most suburban streets are very low traffic, and low-weight traffic roads. They are not arterials / collectors. And you rarely need a full reconstruct. So even trusting the given quotes, you generally are good with the "resurfacing" column, and you can aim well below the smaller price for arterial/collector.
If I take my local prices, resurfacing 1 mile of a 6 yards wide road, is less than $250.000. And that's with full refurbishing for a pretty damaged road + a new asphalt concrete surface! If you just do preventive maintenance with single-layer or bi-layer that can be 5 or even 10 times less...
(Sorry about the probably imperfect technical terms translations).
The question of the ideal environment for kids to grow up in is certainly an interesting one. I myself grew up in an apartment, but from visits to friends and family, I think I have a perspective on how having a wide, safe outdoor space can be good for kids.
The problems is that as children develop, their focus and needs change. A toddler needs little more than a small space and a parent's attention (this is obviously oversimplified, bear with me). Older kids enjoy running around and playing outdoors and can play just with rudimentary objects.
At some point, rocks and sticks stop being enough and the kids begin to form more specific hobbies and demand more autonomy. Group activities outside of school can be essential in developing those hobbies and now having a nice house isn't enough, you need a dense enough community to support these groups without long commutes. Safe walkable streets or public transport also help with the development of autonomy, which is at odds with the previous ideal of a large, secluded house.
High schoolers might go want to go to a school tailored to their interests, which will most likely require going to a boarding school for kids who don't live near/in a city, separating them from the family probably sooner than they'd like and separating them from friends on the weekends.
What's best for kids isn't easy to define and is also individualised. A kid who grows up to wanting to be a forester might appreciate living in the countryside, while a budding programmer might wish for more opportunities to meet likeminded peers. Thankfully parents' interests and the environment they live in reflect on their kids, so it's not all random, but there's probably no ideal environment for every kid, there's just pros and cons. That said, thinking about the requirements and maximising the pros isn't a bad idea, we just need to be careful to examine the problem from all perspectives.
I was, sadly, uprooted as a teenager from a dense city to a suburb. I cannot imagine worse situation for kids to grow up.
Everything you wanted to do, it took driving by your parents to get you there. Or relying on spotty public transit.
I grew apart from my school-friends, as they could share their evenings on fun and play, while I had to go back earlier (commute did take quite a long time) to be able to do my homework etc.
My sleep quality also plummeted as I had to wake up 1-1.5h earlier than my friends to be on time for morning classes.
It sounds like you were living in the suburb, but still going to school in the city—this is definitely not the norm even for a family that has moved from a city to the suburbs.
In general, if you live in a suburb, you go to school either in the same suburb or a neighboring one. Indeed, one of the classic reasons to prefer one suburb over another is which school district it's in.
What you’re describing are not suburbs. I’ve lived in suburbs my entire life, and have never been more than 10 minutes from a high school - let alone a middle school.
What your describing sounds a lot more like a remote rural town. And a small one at that!
There are definitely schools in both suburbs and rural areas. In the area I grew up in, each suburban village/town had its own school district and at least one building each for elementary, middle, and high school, and we were right on the edge of rural (the house I grew up in, within one of the aforementioned suburban school districts, was literally a 150-year-old farmhouse, surrounded by farm fields).
It's entirely possible—though quite unusual—that the specific suburbs you moved to had no schools to call their own, but it's absolutely untrue that "there's no schools in the suburbs".
Most of HN’s crowd? Hmm. Based on earlier polls I see that ca half of the visitors here are from the US and half from outside, and most in the US may have grown up like this, but outside the US, almost no one grew up in a big house. I grew up in an apartment.
> outside the US, almost no one grew up in a big house.
Neither suburbs nor detached houses nor private houses are specific to the US.
In France, primary housing is 57% individual house, 43% collective (apartments). But that's not all: if you consider families (with children), which is what matters when is "where did you grow up?", individual houses rise to 70%!
In UK, flats are a tiny minority, the form that rules there is of course the semi-detached house. But even there, there are still more detached houses than flats.
In the whole EU, the ratio is similar to France: flats are a minority with 46% of housing, and amongst the remaining 54%, 2 third are fully detached houses.
Another angle. If we take ze city, where almost everything is apartments: Paris. There were 25% *less* inhabitants in 1990 (when a present 30-year old was born) than there were in 1920! People have fled to the suburbs there as well (which doesn't mean 100% individual house, admittedly, but anyway a much much greater proportion than inside Paris).
And don't forget the idyllic car-free existence that almost everyone has in Europe. Meanwhile, in the actual world, I think I know one person in the UK who doesn't drive (and his wife does). European car ownership is lower than the US in general but it's a very very far way from zero.
> And don't forget the idyllic car-free existence that almost everyone has in Europe.
I don't think it came up this time but indeed it is common each time there is this kind of thread here. Same thing for the fuzzy 'walkability' concept.
> I think I know one person in the UK who doesn't drive
I don't drive, I never did (despite having a licence), whatever place I lived in (tiny village, small town, small town in the middle of nothing, small city, big city; detached house, semi-detached-house, flat) but I know I am the odd one. I am definitely not representative, the only thing cases like mine can prove is that it is doable (under some circumstances).
> European car ownership is lower than the US in general but it's a very very far way from zero.
Indeed. Let me pull a few more French statistics for a minute :-)
84% of households own at least 1 car (same ratio for the 25-39 years old, roughly the Gen-Y).
36% own at least 2 cars (40% of the 25-39 years old).
In 1990, when society and activity was already organised the same way as now, every home who needed a car already had one, yet owning rate raised by almost 10% since then, and the share of households who own 2 cars raised almost as much (for 3 cars it raised too).
In just the last 5 years, the number of vehicles raised by 4.5% for cars, 6% for vans, 3% for lorries. Meanwhile, the population only raised by 1%.
The number of vehicles has doubled since I was a kid (1980). Again, I was in the deep country and everyone who needed a car already had one.
1990, 1980, ... We had the largest superstore in Europe (or was it in the World?) a couple dozen miles away, that was already built in the 70s. France was a precursor in large supermarkets. So much for the image of the small village grocery (which exists too, but a large part (70-75%) of the consumption is made in supermarkets and superstores; even though now the largest of the latter decline, the former thrive).
Still somehow beats the places where I lived in Finland where the supermarkets and their car parks are in the centre of towns. In a small town, they actually are the town centre.
To be fair, National Rail seems distinctly worse compared to DB, SNCF, RENFE, etc. Greater London is an exception, but London has it's own problems with affordability near rail stations.
What kind of house in Europe? I’d guess most non-apartment family homes in Europe are row houses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraced_house
Much denser than a stereotypical US suburb.
> I expect this is how most of HN's crowd grew up, too.
To be fair this is evidence of bias, not evidence of superiority
> With more people and shops etc in your neighborhood comes noise and chaos.
This isn't necessarily true. Not all urban spaces are built like manhattan. If you live on main street next to the shops, sure, but a very easy and pleasant urban form is one with a main street with shops and quiet side streets with apartments and houses. For example, a lot of the neighborhoods in Brookline, MA[0]. The bigger issue is that because there's so few neighborhoods built like this, the few that exist are incredibly expensive and desirable, atleast in greater Boston.
[0] consider the map view here. Residential, tree filled streets all close to a shop-lined (and rail-lined) main street https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3396099,-71.1361021,426m/dat... . I lived 1 building away from the main street (just across from the school) and the only "urban noise" was the school. It was a peaceful and an amazing neighborhood. I would have moved there permanently if it wasn't like 700k for a 2 bedroom in an old building (or $3MM for a brand new 4 bedroom townhouse).
Totally agree. I grew up in a detached house about 1 mile from the town centre. We had fast internet, good schools and good neighbours. After moving to London I lived in apartments for a few years but decided to move back to suburbia as it's a much nicer environment to raise children in.
It's certainly how I grew up, albeit in rural Australia. But now that I rent in a true suburbia, I do wish were more pockets of commerce serving the daily needs of the neighborhood. If working from home becomes the norm, and zoning changed, I think you'd definitely see far more small coffee shops and bodegas spotted around suburbia.
Pockets of commerce is the thing that is totally gone from suburbia.
I went back to the Cleveland suburbs for a grandparent's funeral several years back and I could definitely see how in the 1950s the structure of the suburb would've been great for the large Catholic families that lived there.
It was centred around the VFW, several parks, and a school. Children could play in the streets. Parents could socialize at the VFW and walk home. Each corner had a shopping complex with a grocery, gas station, barber etc. It was never more than 1/2 mile to all your commercial needs -- and a safe sidewalk walk if you sent kids to go get milk or eggs. If you were working downtown there was public transit to take you from the suburb to the city center and back again. I could see how this would be a very nice set up for where my parents grew up.
Today this doesn't exist. The corner shopping complexes are entirely vacant. Grocery is now only available at bigger box-stores requiring an hour of commuting in traffic on roads that don't have sidewalks. The school closed. The VFW is no longer culturally relevant.
What you're describing actually has a name, "streetcar suburb".
Regardless of whether a streetcar serves the neighborhood, it is characterized by a town center (or "main street"). Retail, commerce, schools, and 3rd-places are nucleated near the main street. Distances are short, like you describe. It is in many ways an urban center and functions like a city. They're often just outside bigger cities and have multiple transportation options to get to the bigger city. These were the first suburbs but these days they're very much considered a part of the city at least symbolically or by name.
In the early naughts the "New Urbanist" movement among urban planners and architects sought to transplant this form of urbanism back to American suburbs. It was marginally successful but seemed to lose steam. The most relevant thing that remains from that effort was what is now called "complete streets" initiatives and measurements like "walkability score".
Many of the old streetcar suburbs still exist, and so do many new urbanist efforts. You can find these places if you look for them. I live in South Philly, but there are places outside Philly that are still streetcar suburbs. Walkability scores are almost as high as the big city, you can get to work in the city with a reasonably fast commuter train (septa for PA, patco for NJ). There's also office parks that are relatively short distances from these burbs-- Tech folks are vastly more likely to work in those than in the big city (which, sadly, is dominated by lawyers, hospitals, class-A corporate, retail).
Do you have any insight into why these commercial corners disappeared and if they were really common across the whole USA? The population density is still roughly the same in suburbs, so the only thing I can think of is consolidation into bigger stores and malls.
In places where they still exist, people drive past them to the mega-supermarkets and big box stores. Where the smaller shops exist, they no longer have general purpose retail, but are specialty shops, services, restaurants, etc. Or they are run down and occupied by low rent businesses. Or they've gone massively upscale. You can get anything you want except the basic necessities for daily living.
Actually I wonder if a rise in restaurants has crowded out other forms of retail.
And then in new developments, it may be that housing is more profitable than small retail shops.
I admit that there are 3 supermarkets within walking distance of my house in a pedestrian friendly neighborhood. I can reach them on foot or bike in a few minutes. But they are expensive and have limited selection so we drive a few miles to a huge discount supermarket at the edge of town, every 2 or 3 weeks, and only get perishables at the nearby stores.
Yeah. I live fairly near a fairly small (and admittedly somewhat downscale) city. Even if I lived walking distance from the downtown there which I don't I wouldn't actually shop there. There are a couple bank branches, a travel agency!, a convenience store, a few mostly downscale restaurants, etc. There's very little I would go there far. I'd drive to the local supermarket or Walmart.
An interesting thing in my neighborhood is that there are a couple of sizable retirement apartments, and also a row of apartments that have a lot of people attached to the university such as grad students and visiting scholars. These are people who might be less inclined to drive, benefit from shops that cater to them, and don't have space for huge bulk purchases. There's also a growing affluent population moving back into the middle of town.
A significant student population definitely helps lead to a happy medium between the hollowed out downtown and the boutique/art gallery/wine bar extremes.
Indeed, and the academic workforce helps too. For instance there's a premium on housing that's within easy bike commuting distance of the university, hospital, etc.
Big box stores (and malls) were killing most local downtown businesses before Amazon was a thing. The sad reality is a lot of small-scale local retail just wasn't very good. High prices, lousy selection.
It will be interesting to see what shopping patterns stay in place post-pandemic. On the one hand, even I who already shopped a lot online, have switched even more to Amazon rather than taking a run to the store for something I don't actually need right now. On the other hand, I was picking something up at an Apple Store a few days ago (for reasons) and it was a little bit surprising to me that the shopping mall was actually pretty busy.
Yes. Pretty much a club house, pub, community center whose membership consisted of veterans.
The suburb was built within a decade of the end of WWII and during the Korean war. So it was a safe bet that most households had a member who was a Veteran or related to a Veteran who could wave them in.
As time progressed, less and less households in the neighborhood would probably qualify. So its no longer a community centerpiece.
More generally, there were a number of fraternal organizations (Knights of Columbus was another) where the men, many of which probably worked in the same factory, would gather in the evening while their wives looked after the kids. Bowling was big for some of the same reasons. Look back at some of the TV shows of the era that featured working class people, or even a cartoon like the Flintstones, and you'll see that they were just an accepted part of life.
Much better than a private garden is access to public parks and playgrounds. This is where they socialize and make friends, where they learn to interact with others in a group context.
To you it may be "noise and chaos", to many others it's life and excitement.
No matter if you live in a dense inner city or a small village, open public spaces where they can meet other children are vital to children's growth and development.
I'm not sure they're _much better_ but in my experience (both as a kid and a dad) they serve different purposes. Parks and playgrounds are great, as you've mentioned (but you can also get socialisation through play groups, activity groups like swimming, school, the beach etc).
My kids do lots of stuff they couldn't do in a public space and I likely wouldn't let them do inside. They have outdoor baths in summer, grow sunflowers and herbs, collect eggs from the chickens, have 'outdoor movie nights', run around naked for hours etc. There's also social things, being in a playground or park means my kids often go and find things to do by themselves, which is great (they're great at independence). Being in our backyard forces them, most of the time, to work together to solve whatever problem they have. Those problems are often far different from what happens _inside_ the house and are just as critical to their development. Last week I saw my 2.5yo up our apricot tree throwing apricots into a bucket being held by our ~5yo because they wanted to make dessert. Could probably do that in a park, but yeah.
These experiences are all commmon in certain public parks in Lisbon. If there's political will, having meaningful natural experiences in community is easy, cheap and I'd say even more rewarding.
The problem is in the communities. I remember a sunny day back in 2015 - I was living in a suburb near Redwood City with lovely, expansive parks. Naively I decided to take my shirt off while I was lying in the grass and get some sun. It took less than 5 minutes for a group of concerned mothers (whose group was yards away from me) to come berate me for "exposing myself to children". What sort of education is this?
Or when emotional politicians decide that wrapping your mostly unused park with CAUTION tape is a good idea (it stops the virus, and my dance starts the rain).
Imo what kids need (in terms od environment) is locality with other kids to socialize with that is safe enough that they can navigate and play in independently from parents. By navigate I mean public transport or walkable distances.
I’m surprised this article was written during Covid.
2020 was the revenge of the suburb. Downtowns are depressing wastelands with increasing violence and homelessness. And the suburbs are... not too far from normal.
Do you realise how much this sounds like the stereotypical boomer argument for the suburbs if you replace 'scary strangers' or whatever with covid?
This is what created the malaise to begin with. People flee the city because of some temporary problem and create structural problems for generations. It's also a weirdly American experience in that you find practically nobody in Berlin or Tokyo or whatever whose going to move into a suburb and abandon urban life because of something that is an issue for a year or two.
Anecdotally, I wanted to leave the city for a long time but not lose the pay. While I have no statistics at my disposal, I've also seen a non-trivial number of HNers who shared a similar view (though I likely have cognitive biases towards this similar line of thinking).
Having lived in SF and San Jose, as well as having spent time in Chicago and New York... Give me a decent sized house in suburbia, a car, and a decent spot in town that doesn't look like it is just trying to die but people are keeping the husk of it alive for it's "charm". Surround me with food and entertainment that doesn't cost city prices to enjoy, passersby who greet you warmly instead of burying themselves in their phones or music, and feel free to let most of that experience be pretty generic - I don't need some to be sold on some place's history or background or mission statement when all I want is a burger.
Cities are many things to many people. I respect that people enjoy them and wouldn't want to take them away from anyone. But it's not for me, never has been, and likely never will be. I'm glad to have found a company that respects that.
>In September, 30,644 people moved out of Tokyo, up 12.5% year-on-year, while the number moving in fell 11.7% to 27,006, the data showed.
There was a net outflow of, wait for it, 3000 people out of Tokyo in September... the city has 14 million inhabitants. That is during a pandemic with a government that's actively trying to curb the inflow into the capital. The population right now actually appears to be up compared to one year ago crossing 14 million first time mid 2020.
It is not rational to choose something inferior for some unrecognized civic duty. The government heavily subsidies the live in a detached house and drive everywhere lifestyle via free highways and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. And by literally banning apartments in many areas.
it is rather unfortunate that we have people calling for the abolition of X in favor of Y, cannot see their own biases in the whole thought process.
Point to be made :
".....The expectation going forward is that something like 80 percent of new households that will form over the next 15 years will be these one to two person households. A lot of them would prefer an apartment or a condo—smaller units...."
This to me is at the core the problem. This statement is borderline revolting, with a holier-than-thou attitude. Why do we have an academic from an urban core opine on what everyone else wants ? Who said this person is an authority on how people that he does not know, want to live ?
The proof is in the details. People left cities to move to the suburbs because they hated what they had in cities. That was their solution. If people no longer want to live in the suburbs, they can do the reverse, or strive to change the suburb themselves.
Instead of advocating for "solutions" to impose on others, how about instead let people decide on their own ? Simply put, for people that want to change their lifestyle, they should be able to do so on their own.
Yet I never hear 1 expert - "let's open every metro city zone regulation to unlimited mixed use, and let's see what gets built".
These experts are probably afraid they may be dead wrong about what people actually want.
I hear the latter from plenty of YIMBY organizations. Even in so-called urban cores, there are often strict restrictions on what you can build, and demand exists for bland modern apartment tower blocks but they just can't be built. There are often rules on maximum height, mandatory parking (pointed out in the article), design / "character" requirements, etc. Getting rid of zoning and review processes and letting the market take care of things is exactly what folks are calling for.
But more generally I don't understand your complaint. You're saying that people should not advocate for changing how the suburbs work, because if people wanted to change how the suburbs work, they would advocate for it?
Like, I'm sorry you feel that a claim of fact comes with an attitude, but it's a testable, refutable claim. Do you think the claim is wrong? Or do you just not like it?
Correct > I'd like to hear about people with skin in the game, meaning residents or people tied to that land, about what they are looking to do, boots on the ground style, to change the situation they are in.
Not some outsider having an opinion on it with no stake in the outcome.
For example, if the academic was calling certain things he has an opinion on, about how to make things better, and to be done in the city of New York (presumably where he lives) then he would be a lot more credible.
I live in New York because it's where I can get a one-person home in a walkable neighborhood with good transit. If I could get that in a suburb, I'd be happy to live somewhere cheaper! What is so offensive about saying that people like me exist in large numbers?
Also... the point of academics is to study and report on things they're not personally involved with?
The article specifically talks about how these changes are already happening, driven by actual residents of the suburbs, and the academics found that there was little awareness of them and wanted to make more people aware of it.
With respect to moving, shouldn't the burden of changing something to presumably make something better, fall on people willing to take a risk, though ?
There is nothing offensive with you moving, yet the point of what is offensive was better explained by user theNJR
>>> the point of academics is to study and report on things they're not personally involved with?
This is right if we make distinctions on scientists vs academics.
Academics opine on things with no risk to themselves and usually what they report is a test that cannot be reproduced scientifically.
Scientists present facts on which they personally have a stake on (for example, a microbiologist studying a dangerous bacteria; a chemist trying not to accidentally blow up, etc)
.
To your point, you are correct RE: academic reporting. My argument is that maybe we should listen with a high degree of skepticism when such people talk. It doesn't completely invalidate any report (although in this example, there's no data to back assertions) , but as with most things from academics go, they are usually not testable, so.
(What people say and people do are different things)
I assumed they were just continuing a trend. But I looked at the US 1980 census and was surprised to find that the number of persons per household almost didn't change. 2.67 then vs 2.62 now.
Meanwhile in France, it dropped from 2.75 to 2.2, so I thought it was the same in the USA, hence my hypothesis. But it appears it isn't.
agree with the conclusion of promoting widespread mixed-use in urban areas, but not the takeoff point. the author asserted an opinion (their 'expectation'), not a prescription. many experts agree on more mixed-use, it's just that many others, especially those who grew up and were educated during the rise of single-use zoning and are now in positions of power and influence over zoning, oppose it.
I disagree people want less privacy. I certainly want more places to walk and exercise but not more people. Its a-shame some parks look like outdoor gyms. Keep it clean, safe and natural.
A lot, majority, of local parks in China cities, which are largely apartment living, have outdoor areas with various iron equipment like dips and pullup bars, rowing, basically calisthenics, and spaces for older people to do synchronised dancing or taichi. Benches (for sitting, not presses). Quite communial. A big positive if stuck in an apartment. But the park doesn't look like a gym and not a lot of the frames will be occupied, but if you want it, it's invariably there and pretty social; all free.
A park nearby has installed workout equipment along the trails. Basic outdoor swing-set type stuff but a real bummer when you want to enjoy natural scenery. Most parts of the trail are concrete slabs now instead of dirt...
It’s just gym equipment that’s designed to be durable outdoors. Kind of like jungle gyms but for adults. I’ve seen it in Cape Town, Milan, London, Auckland and always they are busy.
I have seen that, yes. Those jungle gyms are generally on a flat piece of grass that normally would be open and also relatively small. I thought it was more of a proper park - think full of bushes, trees, ponds, trails, birds etc. I haven't seen jungle gyms in places like that, which of course would be detrimental to the nature.
That seems to be more of a common theme in Seattle. From my experience there mostly are apartments with the occasional small home near the sea side. I can’t imagine what a large house goes for over there.
Bureaucrat plus agenda equals disaster. Maybe just let residents of each place figure out what’s best for their neighborhood. I’m reading a strong academic detachment from reality in this one.
Well, part of the author’s point is that there are a dearth of well-publicized examples of suburban redevelopment. The article is an attempt to raise awareness
to those who may be sitting on a really big opportunity without even knowing it.
Covid shows us that overcrowding in housing is bad, not that density is bad. There is no relationship between density and covid problems. The most-infected jurisdiction in America is Crowley County, Colorado, where fewer than 6000 people live in an area of 800 square miles, and where there are no cities.
Nahh, plenty of suburbs are set up with a nice quaint downtown area, with walkable housing surrounding that, and bikeable/driveable housing further out.
Clearly different people have different tastes; one benefit of capitalism is that it is supposed to provide more options than strict planning (though it requires planning as well).
But this comment of yours struck me in particular:
> It is impossible to have downtime when you’re surrounded above, below, and all around you with neighbors.
Where were you living? We lived in busy Paris and Berlin and were able to consider our homes quiet refuges. We had a kid and all the other reasons why people transition from city to suburb. It felt more accommodating than the German suburb my brother in law lived in with his kids, full of bike lanes and the like.
Now we’re in Palo Alto, a walkable suburb, which doesn’t seem much quieter. I still can’t see the stars, and getting to concerts, art exhibits and the like is inconvenient and doesn’t really happen. At least I can still walk to the grocery store or restaurants through of course the selection is limited.
To answer your question: The dense outer boroughs of New York.
New building or old, all it takes is one noisy neighbor to keep up half of the residents within a block.
Loud noise is a notoriously difficult problem, and especially difficult to manage in a true mixing pot like NYC.
Many years back: I was very annoyed to wake up at midnight on Christmas; some religious immigrants were going around door to door singing with their instruments (apartment building). They meant well, but that sound carries.
The neighbourhood I live in was originally for dock workers around the Thames. Then the docks containerized and electrified.
Then the neighborhood was for employees of the local Ford plant. Then they downsized and replaced most people with robots.
Now the neighbourhood is for a mix of people being housed by the state (the unemployed, single mums etc) and people working service jobs in Central London who take the train up every morning.
That's all in the last 90 years. Less really as my house is one of the older ones.
With covid meaning everyone works from home, us service workers might all move out over the next decade.
My point is, people (including governments, companies and other groups) find uses for the infrastructure (including houses) that they have. Not the other way around.
And this is all cyclical: I remember when the inner cities were "crime ridden hell holes". They depopulated. Then suddenly people (often gay men apparently?) moved in and suddenly you can't turn around with seeing million dollar appartments, 8 dollar coffee places and high fashion outlets...
This is mostly predictive - that 1-2 person households will become the norm. So the title is wrong to start with.
Then, they assert that most people don't live in houses, also wrong. 60% of Americans (and similar elsewhere) live in houses. Not apartments etc.
Then, the predictions. Why are 1-2 person households the trend? Is it because people don't want to live in a house and own a car? Are the so-called Millennials at the core of this? No. If they have the income, they buy houses and cars, exactly as people before them did.
So what is the supposed trend about? I imagine it's because of a lack of suburb development. Zoning, land use, distance to city centers. People don't live in suburbs, because for whatever reason they're not being built fast enough at a cost that is affordable.
All of these types of articles are just laughably wrong about the state of the world. They say 80% of new households will be 1-2 people as though this is a lasting trend towards smaller households. That's just people moving out of their parents house. The majority of those will eventually become 3+ households.
The people that the suburbs were built for still exist. People that aren't rich and want to have a family. They're just doing that in their early 30s now instead of in their early 20s.
[I replied to the wrong comment, so I copy my earlier answer here, at its right place, sorry.]
I assumed they were just continuing a trend. But I looked at the US 1980 census and was surprised to find that the number of persons per household almost didn't change. 2.67 then vs 2.62 now.
Meanwhile in France, it dropped from 2.75 to 2.2, so I thought it was the same in the USA, hence my hypothesis. But it appears it isn't.
> People don't live in suburbs, because for whatever reason they're not being built fast enough at a cost that is affordable.
Is it possible that it’s due to people feeling like they do not have the economic security to purchase homes and start families?
There are cheap suburbs all over the US. The question is can people afford them, including factoring in the volatility of income over the next few decades of your life.
I'm not so sure there are cheap suburbs all over. Housing occupancy has remained at the same, noise level for decades. You have to find a house for sale, in your price range, to live in a house. That's hard, which means IMO there aren't enough houses.
> The expectation going forward is that something like 80 percent of new households that will form over the next 15 years will be these one to two person households. A lot of them would prefer an apartment or a condo—smaller units.
I don’t get their conclusion, because I think there are many other benefits to home ownership outside of size typically being bigger than an apartment or condo. Having outdoor space, no HOA that can impose restrictions, added privacy, etc...
As written elsewhere and talked about on HN in the past, obe problem ist the upkeep of maintenance. Suburbs were build which cheap money and financed e.g. by tax on sold land whereas there was no plan how to pay for maintanace of roads, power, water and drainage for the next fifty years.
You mean the same exact problems urban areas have? Read about San Francisco’s sewer issues, state of roads, and how 1 mile of tunnel costs over 1 billion dollars. Read about NYC’s water issues and how one tunnel supplying water to the city is in disrepair.
Infrastructure needs maintenance everywhere. The problem with suburbs is that the maintenance is more expensive per capita. They work great while they get subsidies as used to be policy. Then it becomes more expensive.
Whether the local government is acually fixing stuff is somewhat different issue. This one is about it being overall more expensive when they finally have no choice but to fix it.
> The problem with suburbs is that the maintenance is more expensive per capita
This is the kind of thing people parrot because it sounds nice. But unfortunatly, this isn't actually true. Suburban maintenance is usually cheaper per capita than urban ones, in the real world.
Cities tend to need higher-quality infrastructure, which drives up costs. (Cities bury power lines in conduit underground which is expensive, suburbs string them from sticks in the air, which is cheap. Cities bury storm water drainage which is expensive, in suburbs a ditch in your yard is all the stormwater infrastructure needed which costs almost nothing, etc). So even though suburbs have less people-per-foot, the infrastructure costs are drastically cheaper despite the per-foot distances being higher.
The electric company can string up a neighborhood of 50 single-family homes (trunk and individual line replacement) without much fuss or trouble, just two guys and a truck. But the logistics to run a brand new power line for a brand-new apartment building with 50 units in it in Midtown Manhattan is way more complicated, time and labour intensive. (They might have to close down a sidewalk or entire street, they have to dig up chunks of the road, check for a dozen other things buried underground, the buildings are so close together they need to know the foundational stability of every other thing nearby, etc)
My assertion is that some progressives just want people to live in cities even if those people are willing and able to bear the supposed additional costs of living in suburbs. They see any extra consumption by another as an attack against the environment or as inequity.
Much of the additional costs are actually borne locally: water, sewage, roads, garbage. With increased installation of solar panels, even electricity is increasingly borne locally.
Also, given the inefficiency of large bureaucracies and the costs of scale in the US, it is somewhat unclear to me if urban areas are really lower cost per capital compared to suburban areas. Look at the Central tunnel project in SF.
I have seen people arguing to change zoning so that walkable city kind of building is legal. Because in many places, zoning excludes mix of houses and businesses. You have to have houses only place and then businesses place. That is pretty much opposite of what you claim. Maybe in some later step they someone would try to make suburbs illegal, but right not, the issue is "make walkable pleasant city legal".
Second, your claims about price are purely theoretical. As of now, suburbs require more money and dont have all that many solar panels.
I never claimed that suburbs were cheaper. Look at the comment by another party above. It conflicts with what you just said about suburbs being more expensive per capita. It would be better to have better data on this. Links please.
I just claimed that perhaps people should be free to do as they wish as far as living in suburbs vs cities.
You then claim that many places do not allow mixed use. I assume that this is part of your freedom argument. Guess what. Many of the smaller towns in the Bay Area have already changed zoning to allow this. My city did this.
The real conflict, at least in the Bay Area, is between the part of tech trying to limit salary cost by limiting housing prices and the part of tech (and non tech) who have already bought and want their housing prices to rise. It is mostly a zero sum game.
It isn't about equity and environment. If it were, then the part of tech trying to limit salary cost would actually lower their consumption and would actually contribute towards those less fortunate.
In reality, a very small percentage actually cared about the less fortunate. You should see how often volunteering was cancelled due to lack of participation. Happened multiple times in multiple large companies.
Also, very few people in tech even think about limiting their consumption. How big are the houses of the C levels? How many people bought Teslas, new houses, etc upon IPO?
Both sides are mostly act out of their self interest. Inequity, environment, character of neighborhood, quality of life, etc are mostly false warriors in this battle.
Housing owners want ever increasing housing value and all the associated amenities: quality of life, cultural events, fine foods, trips, etc...
Tech owners want to basically drive housing to as low as possible. Think Singapore or Japan.
Well, COVID-19 resolved this conflict of tech vs tech. Welcome to remote work which means that companies can hire anywhere.
This is kind of a silly premise considering the massive jump in housing prices in the suburbs with Covid. City core prices are dropping (at least for condos) and the 'burbs are jumping up, even in relatively remote locations.
If anyone reading this lives in Atlanta and actually wants to work on solving some of these problems reach out. I could really use the help. Email my HN username at gmail.
I understand the desire to do things cheaply and without mass political upheaval, but I don't see how the suburbs, and American's ideas about them can be reformed.
BTW, you can well partition American ideology as:
- let's go back to post war golden age, fuck disadvantaged people
- let's go back to revised post war golden age, but made good for disadvantaged people
- the post war boom was only possible because WWII destroyed so much of the rest of world and cars were becoming popular for the first time. We cannot go back.
The third camp is right, but very small and very different.
What will happen to all that parking real estate once automated cars are a thing and parking/owning a car is no longer the norm? They touch up on retrofitting parking lots but there is so much out there that will need to be changed once huge parking lots are no longer needed. If I had to guess, places like Walmart and whatnot may end up building strip malls on the empty half of their lots to take advantage of that in population dense areas. Perhaps even just extend their storefronts out another 100'.
Automated cars are still decades away. As road space is even more valuable than parking, that's a net loss. There would have to be a multiplier for people sharing use of a vehicle. But people already hate mass transit, people are still expected to get to work at 8 a.m., and ordering a ride will never be a convenient as having their own vehicle available 24/7 so the maximal size of the fleet of all cars might only 25% less.
I don't share your thoughts on automated cars, but assuming I'm wrong, lawns/greenspace seems like a good idea. They would absorb a lot of rainwater that would otherwise need to be managed, would reduce the "heat island" effect in the summertime.
The conclusion is clear—American cities are built for cars, not people.
I find it interesting how many posts here bemoan the lack of community in their lives when so many people live in isolated areas. For some reason the solution that comes to mind is more church instead of rethinking our housing priorities.
> lack of community in their lives when so many people live in isolated areas.
Isolated areas, or at least small towns, tend to have much stronger communities than I've found in cities. Anytime I've lived in a city most "communities" that evolve tend to revolve around work.
Live in a small town for a few years and you'll likely be part of multiple small communities interested in different things. I used to live in a pretty isolated smallish city and knew almost all of the owners of every restaurant I ate at and store I visited. I was active in a range of different communities with many different interests.
If you live in some extremely isolated area, like out in rural Maine, you'll likely be at least acquaintances with literally every person in town. The grocery store clerk and the owner of the town lumber yard will know something about you, at see you as part of their community. When you go grocery shopping it's rare to see only strangers.
Every apartment I've lived in in cities I've only vaguely known my neighbors, but in my first move to the suburbs I was instantly greeted by everyone around me, we exchanged numbers and had a small party.
My experience is that, generally speaking, community increases with the distance from the city center. One particular exception would be a dead zone in certain mass produced suburbs (the ring of death around Denver CO. being a good example).
> My experience is that, generally speaking, community increases with the distance from the city center.
My experience has been the opposite. Moreover, in a large city, I get to choose my community as opposed to being forced into being in one due to mere proximity.
This is a key, in a city you need to be proactive about it, or if not interested you can fully avoid any interaction and no one cares. In small places, you have to interact at least a little with people around you, or you'll be labeled as a weirdo. And also you're more often in need of someone helping you with something, as not everything is around the corner and readily available like in big cities.
Anecdotally, Texans as an example like their privacy, more 10/12 foot fences I’ve ever seen. The father you move into the suburbs, the more people value privacy in Texas is seems.
In general, American suburbs infrastructure-wise were built more for cars than people or other transit mechanisms.
I live in Texas and recently went to Missouri, I was absolutely flabbergasted that there were almost literally zero fences! Whole neighborhoods were just house after house and lawns in between. Was quite a refreshing new experience for me.
12 foot fence? That's got to at least double the cost. It’s hard for me to understand people who go to such tremendous lengths to hide from the world. Like my old neighbors who closed every blind in the house the day they moved in and never opened them again. I don’t care what people do in their house... but that’s weird.
People love fences so much, In 2015 Dallas made 9ft the maximum, Houston is 8 ft. In both the more wealthy suburbs can get permit exceptions for 10ft. Fort Worth you can see 12ft and 10ft more so, due to no restrictions.
Austin seems to care about this a bit less, but I think it might be due to terrain. In general a fence increases home value usually in most Texas cities.
I really should have clarified since I was thinking of my bias view of Fort Worth where we don't have city ordinances that prevent fences over 4ft in the front yard and 9ft in back yards like Dallas.
I lived in cities all my life and never lived in suburbs, but can't imagine cities being much better, as there's literally almost no community at all in cities either. People just don't do stuff with their neighbors or largely don't even talk to them. The older ones, who've been in the building for decades, at least know the names of the other older ones and maybe a little bit about them (where they work, what's their family structure etc.). Younger gen is mostly completely isolated though. At least that's my experience.
Indeed, but this is not new. There is plenty of literature about one of the main allures (and perils) of moving to the city: being free from your neighbours’ judgement and relationships. For many, this is still a desirable characteristic. Arguably, there might have been recent developments that removed even the last shreds of compulsory relationships, but we already were 90% of the way there.
When it comes to relationships, cities just work on a pull model, where small towns worked on a push model.
Interesting idea, but most cities I’ve lived in have even closer compulsory relationships via homeowners associations. Even if you rent it’s hard to get away from your neighbors if you want that.
I grew up in a block in Europe. The equivalent body met once a month at best, you could even delegate someone to attend for you. I don’t think that’s anywhere near the sort of web you end in when growing in a small town, particularly if your folks have been around for more than a generation.
I live in the city and can’t agree with this at all. Prior to the pandemic our building hosted mixers, Halloween parties, winter and summer parties. Our building is 70% renters / 30% owners. The tenants are constantly bemoaning the lack of community. But rather than engage their community most would rather drive back out to the suburbs and spend time in that community.
BTW, I was just about to agree with you. But I just realized that we’ve been social distancing for almost a year. It felt like centuries ago since I had more than a 5 minute conversation with my neighbors.
Except for a couple of years spent in apartments, this is not all my experience, either of cities or of suburbs. In my childhood and teens in the suburbs, kids would gather in a yard or a drive to play games--tag, hide-and-seek, kickball, touch football, basketball--and so one got to know them and their families. Now, in a city, and on a block mostly of free-standing houses, I know by name somebody or everybody in most of the houses on the street, and know some of them pretty well.
Agree. Lived in an apartment building in Chicago. Never knew anyone's name but the doorman. I could count on one hand the number of times I encountered a neighbor in the hall. It was like living in a hotel.
I like your suggestion but for many people, such as myself, church is probably not a solution.
It's not that I don't think that religion provides community or a decent ethical foundation. I just don't believe in the supernatural or any belief system that requires the breaking of the Second Law of Thermodynamics without any explanation of how.
Still the social aspects of religion are interesting. What does "more church" look like if you're an atheist? More participatory sports clubs maybe? Or, more things you can walk to and do regularly with the same people in general?
Churchgoers get moral guidance and philosophical discussion, communal introspection, and everyone knows they should go on their best behavior, bringing love to the congregation. Those things are fairly unique to places of worship, but there needn't be actual worship of God for them to exist, and that's something atheists tend to miss out on since not many other social groups/clubs have those qualities.
If you really want to get to know your fellow church goers, you’ll have a hard time passing as an atheist for long. Sooner or later you’ll be asked to lead a prayer, give ‘testimony’ to when you ‘got saved’, be tested on your working knowledge of the Bible in some way. And at a catholic church, there’s generally less close community beyond glad handing, but there’s a lot of ritual and recitation you’re expected to follow along with. On some level true believers will always be pinging you to determine your authenticity.
Maybe it's just me but I tend to lose interest in sports. That presents a dilemma. Either you have to attend something you are not interested in, or you stop hanging out with the people.
Like most things in life: You must be motivated by a need or really enjoy it. As you, sport do neither for me. As you get older working out will be more of a need and you find a good group of workout buddies and maybe a friend or two.
In Britain, Humanism was an early 20th century movement to try to bridge between the social benefits of church to - what was increasingly obvious to most people - the fallacies of legacy Christian doctrines.
It wasn't a total failure, but humanism never reached the mainstream.
Agreed, there is something unique about church. Maybe the spiritual and emotional aspect is too intertwined to separate. It is very easy to confuse emotions (i.e. feeling good about something) with spirituality when the two are very different.
Arguably humanism was an intellectually-driven pursuit. So it never crossed the chasm.
Growing up in Manchester, I found it was football that fulfilled the emotional and tribal needs of many of my peers.
Many people assume Britain and USA are the same. In many respects, that is true. But as to church and religion, they are poles apart. At least that was true in the nineties when I lived in USA.
I had been to a service, I think at a unitarian universalist church, which was accepting of atheists. As I remember it, it can still be a bit awkward with references to God being common, but you wouldn't be unwelcome on principle.
Having grown up in the Unitarian church, It’s more that Unitarians don’t tell anyone what to believe and everyone in a UU church might have different ideas.
I don't know how it might be called in the US but in the town I spend a good part of my childhood, we had a sort of hub for clubs.
Sports, craft, games, etc... it hosted scheduled activities like workouts, helped organize event like trips, there was a room with a piano where lessons were held but was otherwise freely accessible, a small library, a bunch of chessboards from the chess club, again, freely accessible, etc... A lot of activities were aimed at kids but it spanned all age groups, including elderly.
Of course, it created a strong, unreligious community. Unfortunately, as it is often the case with these organizations, the few key players lost interest and no one took over, so while it still exists, not much remains.
I get a kick off how consciousness is simultaneously fungible, able to react to stimuli without a nervous system, and ephemeral, with no ability to quantify any of that at all
Even the unorganized religions rely on this trichotomy without any explanation or coherence
I would be open to any outcome, just quantify the rules and mechanisms
There are some secular church equivalents as well. For example https://www.sundayassembly.com/ for people who want some celebration and community, but don't care about the religious aspects.
Otherwise as you mentioned, some hobbies are my church. Local coworking is my church too.
Soup kitchens? Many are run by religious institutions but you don't necessarily have to subscribe to all the ceremonies and such (there may be a perfunctory prayer at the beginning of the shift).
Plenty of secular NGOs. User groups (Linux, BSD). If you're into photography: photo walks.
> I just don't believe in the supernatural or any belief system that requires the breaking of the Second Law of Thermodynamics without any explanation of how.
Like the spontaneous generation of life that continuously grows more and more complex?
That’s not a violation of thermodynamics at all, since the earth is not a closed system, and it’s also about averages. You can have local fluctuations.
Well my fellow fluctuation of highly organized atoms, take luck. Let me know when somebody can explain how everything works without positing a magical thing we can't see, measure, or touch.
Hmm, I’m not sure I understand your point. Scientists explicitly try to avoid positing magical things, and even when things get into the realm of untestability at our scale, it’s hedged:
“Here’s a cosmological model that might be true given our current data”
Vs
“Here’s a magical anthropocentric religious explanation for anything I can’t immediately explain”
You’re revealing your ignorance of modern physics, as well as some pretty astonishing hubris. You’d compare dark mater, which has numerous possible explanations all of which are in search of empirical tests, to the panoply of human religions?
No. I'd compare faith to faith. One of which declares that there is something above this universe (God), while the other declares without proof that there isn't. (And then large numbers of proponents of the latter posit that we are living in a simulation, thus demonstrating that... they believe there is something above this universe. lol.) Either way it's faith.
Entropy must increase in a closed system (which is the bit that everyone conveniently forgets). Earth is not a closed system, receiving a significant daily energy input from a near-by star.
Sad to see the truth in this conversation buried so low.
Whether you're in a city or a suburb, there's plenty of community to be found or made if you put the effort in. The problem is our culture is being eroded away with each minute spent using the internet.
I struggle with this problem daily - as a web developer, my job is to fight for people's attention. I strive to build as good of a UX as possible and serve interesting content to users in the name of getting more clicks, more ad impressions, and more revenue. This is happening at a global scale, with ever more companies fighting over the individual's attention span to make a buck. Attention is a finite resource. If we capture 2 hours of your day, then you lose 2 hours you could have spent making friends at a local volunteer group while improving your community. I feel like we're cannibalizing society.
All that being said, I think online communities are a wonderful thing, but psychologically, they lack something important. People feel lonelier than ever while having more access to new communities of like-minded people than ever before.
I'm hoping VR/AR helps bridge this gap, but this in-between phase we're in is just kind of depressing.
1) I don't know how young people meet each other in real life when both men and women self-isolate with earbuds now.
Unless taking your earbuds out is a signal you're interested?
Maybe somebody can fill me in.
2) I knew a young IT graduate who wore earbuds at work. He had the chance to listen and discuss many topics with world-class software and IT engineers, except he couldn't hear them.
The earbuds in are a suggestion you're not interested in conversation. Many people also are not interested in random conversation... ever. As much as I'm happy to meet people in social environments, I don't want anyone to randomly start talking to me on a street. And I'm not even "young people" anymore.
Your IT graduate made their own choices - maybe they wanted to do their job and go home rather than discuss with world-class people. Or maybe they had problems with concentration or noise.
Some people are introverts, or have busy life you're not a part of and never see, or just have different priorities. It's ok.
I understand that you don't want to talk to random people on the street, but I disagree strongly with "just doing your job" mentality. If you have any sort of creative output job where you work within a team (engineering, academia, some artistic endeavors), things are different.
Companies often pay for their employees to attend professional and technical development workshops or go to conferences, because part of your job is to improve your skills. Casual water cooler talks do the same thing; they improve your skills, and help initiate creative ideas that ultimately help build better things.
In my own PhD, I saw supervisors demand their students attend department get together, bar hangouts at conferences, and even casually talk to other people in the dept. If I was a manager of creative types, I would absolutely rate someone who didn't "waste their time" at work lower, because if your job description is to create, you need to do reasonable things to improve your creative skills and outputs.
As with all things, there's a time, place, and situation where it can be more suitable or less suitable.
Several of my employers issue staff with noise cancelling headphones on day one on the job. The employee is supposed to make the suitable judgement call on when they're suitable (needing a few hours of uninterrupted concentration) and when they're not.
The alternative is giving people offices so they can actually isolate, or understanding that people who operate on 'maker time' will not be productive with regular interruptions.
I think we are in complete agreement. Creative employees must have the right to direct their own work day (especially their uninterrupted deep work hours), and the responsibility that they fulfill all their formal and informal job requirements. One aspect of the latter is casually exchanging ideas with coworkers they don't usually work with.
People don't always have to be improving themselves at work. At a certain level of skill (say average), just doing your job is enough. Now sure, if you want to get ahead at work, then it's a good idea to go the extra mile, but not everyone cares about that or needs to care about that. They have other aspects of their life that they want to focus on at the expense of their work life.
AirPods Pro are often used as hearing aids in “transparency” mode. Do not make the (lazy) assumption that someone wearing them cannot hear every word you say.
Furthermore, I think if I had to listen to self-proclaimed “world-class” engineers all day, I’d wear earphones too. And not on “transparency” mode.
Maybe the dude have enough social contact as is, so he does nor have to rely on watercooler chat. Work is not the only place to be with people. Since people change jobs fairly often, it is less of place to form long term community.
I mean this 100% seriously: when you have community outside of work you spend less time chatting at work.
The stereotype is you live in the suburbs and know all your neighbors. Maybe even have block parties 2 or 3 times a year. Where as the stereotype for cities is you live in an apartment building closer to way more people than in the suburbs but know none of them.
No idea how much it holds but it fits my experience.
I live in a smaller german city and I know my neighbours. Before I lived more suburban (though 10 minutes with the train into the city) and I knew none because most were old I was a student sharing a home with other students. Some complained about us being loud after 10pm.
The stereotype is meant as something positive, but I associate something negative with it. I grew up suburban and I just can't imagine ever moving back. It's so boring, dull and while there's more proximity, you are so bound to you environment. If you don't fit in the you have a problem. I didn't fit in later in school, I didn't get bullied or anything, but I just lacked people with the same interest. I found them in the city in the 10th grade, so I started to commute by train into the city every wednesday after school and on the weekends. They were weird, looked weird and interested in music, art and protecting the environment. I regularly feel asleep saturday night on the central station because I missed my train and had to wait hours. I understand the positive association but the only thing I associate with it is being locked in in an environment you have no control over because it is not by choice but by geographic proximity. I don't want parties with people on my block, I want parties with my friends. Preferably every weekend until the sun starts to rise again and I am exhausted but happy.
Writing this was very interesting for me, I never really tried to reflect why I so strongly despise the idea of moving again into something suburban.
My experience is that neither of those two "groups" have parties with their neighbours. I think it might be too hard to generalize about things, the most sociable place I've lived in was Sopocachi in La Paz a high density walkable area, but I've never experienced anything like that anywhere else so it might be an outlier.
I would rather like to see more enjoyable activities such hackathons, festivals, contests etc. Church/religions are outdated and most of them(i.e the major ones) just exploit your fears.
Fearing God is important in Christianity, but let’s think about what that means?
If “God” is the label we place on the force/spirit of creation/life in this world, then “fearing God” means to respect and subject yourself to the truth about this creation rather than considering yourself above it. The most concrete example is understanding that attempting to break the laws of physics by “flying” off a cliff is unwise. Among Christians it’s also common to interpret it as recognising that going against the “will” of this force that created us (concretely natural selection as well as however the universe and life of earth came to be) will bite you in the arse, such as rejecting family (life) for vanity for example.
If one instead fears judgement from fellow men in church, you should disregard the fear and forgive those who judge you - because standing above a fellow man is the sin of thinking you’re of a higher intrinsic value which also is not fearing God.
It’s not expressed in precise scientific language but rather colourful, poetic, narrative, and philosophical language, because it is ideas older than Newton, but it does not require supernatural claims, not is it about fearing other people.
Not trying to change your mind or person - but encourage you to continue discovering philosophy and religion
You have an excellent point of view on religion. Recently I’ve come to the same conclusion that religion isn’t supposed to be supernatural mumbo-jumbo, but rather ancient science — previously known as “natural philosophy“.
> Recently I’ve come to the same conclusion that religion isn’t supposed to be supernatural mumbo-jumbo, but rather ancient science
Science calls for the use of data, and constantly modifying and updating knowledge based on data.
Religion, or at least all the implementations of it that I know, are not about throwing out the old if new, conflicting data is discovered.
As far as I can tell, religion is a relic from tribal days, and still serves much of the same purpose today. It can assist in societies without formed legal systems and can help foster higher trust within its members.
Humans have insufficient time to evaluate all of the motivations and priorities of others, and religion provides a nice framework with all the various social events and traditions for the tribe to coalesce around.
Growing up, I learned that plausible deniability is very important for humans. For the same reasons that flirting is a thing, it’s not beneficial for someone to walk around with an explicit list of people/tribes they value over others, in push comes to shove scenarios. But it is beneficial to signal it implicitly, and going along this line of thought gets into politics.
>> religion isn’t supposed to be supernatural mumbo-jumbo, but rather ancient science — previously known as “natural philosophy“.
But it's full of supernatural mumbo-jumbo. Of course that would not be an issue if it wouldn't claim to be the undisputable truth. Science calls for verification. Religion does the opposite.
>> Fearing God is important in Christianity, but let’s think about what that means?
It means to believe and do absurd things due fear such Abraham offering his son as a sacrifice/killing him. Most important it means to fear questioning "god's will" or the authenticity of religion.
>> The most concrete example is understanding that attempting to break the laws of physics by “flying” off a cliff is unwise.
Religions like very much to enact "laws"/opinions on things they don't understand or don't fit their model. The history is full of this. Usually people get hurt. Just look at what poor Isaac was about to get. The old book is full of such crap. Hate, war, and discrimination seem to get a respectable place as well. To make your example more religious you should put a punishment on that: i.e if you try to fly you will rot in hell and even if you escape the fall the good people of the church will burn you at the stake.
>> Not trying to change your mind or person
You can't. I went full circle on it. Once you get rid of the fear you see the religions for what they truly are: a mix of old politics and some cheap philosophy.
>> but encourage you to continue discovering philosophy and religion
>> You can't. I went full circle on it. Once you get rid of the fear you see the religions for what they truly are: a mix of old politics and some cheap philosophy.
Hehe this was me younger discovering pre Christian philosophy and r/atheism. I especially considered myself Epicurean. Good times :-). Take care and keep on reasoning!
> Among Christians it’s also common to interpret it as recognising that going against the “will” of this force that created us (concretely natural selection as well as however the universe and life of earth came to be) will bite you in the arse, such as rejecting family (life) for vanity for example.
This is just one of the possible interpretations. If you are a Christian then you believe the New Testament has a priority over the Old one, and you know that someone already asked Jesus the question what is most important, and the reply was, briefly, "love". So, logically, if you follow love (not fear!) in your life, trying to be kind to others and helping them within your means, this should be understood as living perfectly within the spirit of the teaching of Christ, even if you have nothing to do with any Church.
The church building made of stone or wood is made by man, and the priest too is just a man.
The character/person Christ is described as “logos” made flesh. That means the ideal man embodies in this world the ideas of universal ethics and as you say love for their fellow brother and sisters the children of creation.
I like you interpret it as a personal philosophical/spiritual thing, and the church being a physical place to remind yourself of and celebrate this. Thank you for your insightful comment :)
As a former agnostic now churchgoer (who converted when I got married) one of the things I observed is that, perhaps by happenstance of history, organized religion is a key part of how Americans transmit their cultural values.
I was raised without religion but as Bangladeshis we have a pretty rigid culture apart from religion. This is the “what do you teach your kids about stuff.” Here in the United States it seems like most of that is just whatever is transmitted through the Disney Channel and movies. And frankly a lot of that is pretty garbage culture. It teaches people to be self-centered assholes.
Obviously there are many moral people who aren’t religious (and many religious people who aren’t moral). But you can take away religion but you still need some moral framework in its place. And in the US that seems really hard. We don’t have ready-made frameworks for “here’s what you should teach your kids.” Many parents do a fine job improvising, but it’s a lot of work to do it on your own from scratch.
While you may be accurate, the cultural values transmitted are often not only at odds with scripture, but just repulsive in general. Homophobia, racism, intolerance, misogyny and hypocrisy are just some of the "values" I've personally witnessed in both Episcopalian and Lutheran settings over 5 decades.
While many tout the Judeo-Christian foundations of the US, most of that is just a thin veneer. Kind of like the Horatio Alger myth that you can simply pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you really really just try hard enough.
Scripture definitely teaches a traditional view of marriage and gender roles. You might consider that “repulsive” but I think there’s a lot of room for debate on that. Less than half of Americans believe that “changing gender roles have made it easier for women to live more satisfying lives.” https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gap.... That includes less than 60% of Democrats.
Scripture also teaches the centrality of procreation to marriage and society. I happen to agree with the Obergefell approach, which relied on relatively recent research (based on the 2010 census) showing the astounding number of same-sex couples raising children together. I think it’s no surprise that views on same-sex relationships have shifted quickly as people came to understand that it’s compatible with traditional understandings of marriage’s societal function. (That research, by the way, was not available 5 decades ago. The scientific research on homosexuality being an immutable characteristic really got going in the 1990s, and became widely acknowledge among the public only around 2010.)
I will point out that the western world is almost entirely dependent on immigrants from societies that have traditional religious views on these issues for their population stability. Western social liberalism has many positive attributes, but it hasn’t proven to be self-perpetuating. Maybe it’s adherents should be a little circumspect before calling other attitudes “repulsive.”
I didn't say that there was a scriptural basis for racism:
"the cultural values transmitted are often not only at odds with scripture, but just repulsive in general."
>Maybe it’s adherents should be a little circumspect before calling other attitudes “repulsive.”
Which of the values I criticized as repulsive do you think I should be more circumspect about? Racism? Homophobia? Misogyny?
>I will point out that the western world is almost entirely dependent on immigrants from societies that have traditional religious views on these issues for their population stability. Western social liberalism has many positive attributes, but it hasn’t proven to be self-perpetuating.
I think the Western world will do just fine without embracing the repulsive values I've listed.
> organized religion is a key part of how Americans transmit their cultural values
The abandonment of religion and culture more generally has been a giant exercise in ignoring Chersterton's fence.
Culture is a basically "here is how we act so we don't die." People grow up in it, and they realize that some of it is perhaps outdated or inaccurate. That isn't by itself much of an issue.
The trouble comes when those people have children and grandchildren who were never immersed in the culture and so didn't have the backing of "here are our mutual stories" to know what to keep and what the get rid of.
It's basically burning down a library because, "Well I only read three or four of those books anyway"
That's a foregone conclusion. The problem has been discussed ad nauseam. This article/book is more valuable than yet another rehash: it covers extant solutions to the problem.
Yet many people here don't believe the problem actually exists, so it's far from forgone. The idea that a third place should be a central part of one's life is not a very common perspective, and such a place is rarely planned for. Take any thread on HN about housing and you only see housing being considered for (1) square footage or (2) how it advances one's career.
As a car owning suburbanite, I can’t shake the suspicion that people who complain about lack of community, in actuality just have a lack of social skills. I know all my neighbors, and talk to them on a daily basis. I know all the people who own or work in the local businesses that I frequently go to. I know many of the people who frequently go to the same coffee shops and bars that I frequently go to. I know all the people who work at the butcher, and at the fish market, and at the grocery store that I frequently go to, and always have a conversation about something with them when I go in. All of that feels a lot like community to me. Yet I have the very strong suspicion that if somebody who likes to bemoan a lack of community moved in down the road from me, they’d probably just keep on bemoaning it.
I agree. I live in the suburbs. Have lived in urban and rural in the past. I like the suburbs. Plenty of green space. Plenty of privacy. Lots of interaction with neighbors and lots of families with similar aged kids to play with.
All amenities are close by (but beyond where I would walk). Sure i have to drive, but its 3 minutes and its easy.
To each their own on what they choose as a lifestyle. Stop hating on mine.
I suppose suburbs are not the most efficient way to live. My priority is quality of MY life, which I find is higher in the suburbs. So i am willing to not be optimized because thats not what provides value to me.
> the butcher, and at the fish market, and at the grocery store
Those are all just commerce that you commute to, though. As someone who worked in the service industry for years, 99% of the people I met at work (the "regulars", the overly chatty parents who haven't seen an adult this month, etc) I would never consider part of my community.
How many conversations do you have with members of your community that you're not buying something from?
I mean, I worked retail too and I get what you're saying. However, just because you don't have a deep, meaningful relationship with someone doesn't mean they aren't a part of your community. Hell, I've probably chatted with my mailman 3 times in the past 3 years, but we recognize each other and say hi and ask how each other are doing.
Just because I wouldn't call him if I needed a kidney doesn't mean he's not a part of my (the) community.
Most of them... a majority of them would be other people who go to the same places I go.
That said, most relationships in a community of people are going to be at least somewhat superficial, because nobody can maintain deep personal relationships with hundreds of people.
The idea that the whole thing is just a cynical commercial racket is silly though. Building a real relationship with your community is the whole point of small local business. A lot of those relationships are genuine friendships. The owner of my local coffee shop invites my wife and I over for dinner every so often, and vice versa. I had my local butcher over a couple of weeks ago because he wanted me to teach him how to make beef rendang.
Even if commerce underlies the relationship, it can still be entirely community based.
I'm not saying it's a cynical commercial racket, that would be silly.
What I am saying is that you should have connections with the other people in your community at the shop, not the person hired to interact with you. The relationship with the store owner has nothing to do with whether you drive a car or not.
The relationship you have with others, the other folks at the store shopping, etc are much harder in a suburban geography literally because of the lack of interactions. Drivethu's are the extreme of this.
It's my hypothesis that having a relationship with your local butcher or coffee maker has little to nothing to do with your car, but the relationships you have with others merely due to their proximity to you is the beauty of community. Digital or physical.
> What I am saying is that you should have connections with the other people in your community at the shop
I don’t think this is an essential element of community at all, but as I said “ a majority of [the other community members I interact with] would be other people who go to the same places I go”
> It's my hypothesis that having a relationship with your local butcher or coffee maker has little to nothing to do with your car
I’d say you’re right. But I’d also say that the comment “cities are made for cars not people” is equally as insightful as the comment “footpaths are made for shoes not people”, “cycle lanes are made for bicycles not people” or “rail lines are made for trains not people”. Because at the end of the day, shoes, bicycles, cars, buses, trains... are all made for people. I would suggest that a persons perception of their local community has much more to do with how they interact with it than it does the form of transport they use. I’m also certain that there would be a large number of people who live in the same community as I do, which I find to be particularly vibrant, who spend their time not socializing with anybody, and then go home at the end of the day to take out their phone and complain about lack of community.
> “footpaths are made for shoes not people”, “cycle lanes are made for bicycles not people” or “rail lines are made for trains not people”.
Only one of those literally puts a glass and metal wall between every single person, and I think it's a significant difference in how social you can realistically be, as all time spent traveling is no longer occurring within a social context, but a private one.
Having travelled to many different cities that have many different styles of public transport, I can very confidently say the cities of the world are firmly divided into two camps on this topic. One where you don’t talk to other people on the bus/train because you never know who’s going to turn out to be a violent drug addled lunatic, and another where you don’t talk to people on the bus/train because it’s impolite.
There is literally no city in the world where people are interested in the social experience of public transport.
Well, this year I've met two friends at the store because we were buying similarly weird produce.
But it's just a reply about the car making your interaction with your community almost exclusively commercial. I've met far more friends at the park, usually when I'm walking through with my dog.
> I know all the people who work at the butcher, and at the fish market, and at the grocery store that I frequently go to, and always have a conversation about something with them when I go in.
I guess it could be if you wanted it to be. But if you just wanted a coffee with no social interaction or sense of local community, you’d be better off going to a Starbucks over a local shop.
Any human behaviour examined from the correct perspective can be attributed to an egoist motive.
I like and enjoy a good and friendly commercial transaction.
I just don't consider it a real friendship, and I think this is potentially dangerous thinking. Your counterpart is being paid to form that connection with you, and you are in a specific position of power over them in that situation.
It's nice, in the moment, to be given service - by someone working in a service industry (this is certainly not unique to the suburbs) - but I find it odd that you seem to describe this as a satisfying personal relationship. You will likely never see that person again, whenever they stop doing that job. Your connection and their connection is to the transaction, which includes a personal element at your behest.
If you had said: and I often see them outside of work, then I would consider that slightly differently.
But I’m not talking about having “real friendships”, I’m talking about community. A community is just a type of social unit, and people who deride a lack of community tend to be talking about the lack of that social dynamic. There is not much socialization involved with placing an order at Starbucks and waiting for my name to be called out. There is a much greater level of socialization involved when I go to my local coffee shop, where I know the staff, and we talk for a few minutes about how our lives are going before I head off again. That’s even more true when I stop and talk with some of the other regulars that I’ve gotten to know. That’s just typical community social interaction.
That said, I do have “real friendships” with a number of people that I’ve meet in these settings. Because, perhaps unsurprisingly, a nice local community can be a good place to find new friends.
See this is exactly it - everyone overthinks everything.
Everything has to be "Real friendship" What does that even mean? You're just talking to others to be a decent human being. Not everyone has to be your wife/husband/BFF for ever.
I've seen plenty of people after commercial transactions. In fact, many times I remember people and they remember me for pleasant interactions - they aren't my best man but it's still really satisfying to me.
The point the OP way back when is making is you can be social in suburban circumstances.
It just goes back to the common theme these days - everything is something or someone else's fault. No one ever just says " man I'm feeling lonely, maybe I should join this club, or start going to this coffee shop and just strike up conversation."
No we have to "blame the suburbs" and "blame cars." No one wants to just take responsibility for themselves, they just want to complain about everything else causing their problems online.
When you talk to the butcher once every couple weeks, and enjoy the interaction every time and think “that person is all right”, you have a solid foundation for empathy and understanding. One week you pull up to the butcher shop and see them get out of their car and it has a political bumper sticker different than yours. Instead of thinking “that person is other, an abstract concept that I am supposed to fight against” you might say to yourself “huh didn’t expect joe to be a ___”. But you most likely don’t start disliking joe.
Obviously there are many other benefits of regular friendly small interactions with people, but this one has stood out in my mind over the last couple polarizing years.
> I can’t shake the suspicion that people who complain about lack of community, in actuality just have a lack of social skills.
Along with social skills I think it's the lack of other hobbies or interests. I have friends from local bars but I also have ones from various sports clubs and other activities. Whether it's churches, the local chess club or sports a city will provide a lot more of these niches for community.
Community doesn't just happen, you have to go out and get involved in them, then you have to talk to people instead of sitting on your phone.
"Built for cars, not people" is a bit of silly premise. It's "built for people who want cars, not people who don't want cars".
I lived in Singapore for a while and there was a very strong demand for cars. This is despite a world class public transport system and very high fees/taxes on owning a car. The point is, having a car is a luxury that many people desire. Even with public transport alternatives.
I have spent my life in Europe and when I visited Chicago a few years back I thought the extent to which the city was built around car-use was grotesque. There's little outdoor, organic urban life, and it's horribly difficult to just walk the city.
There are nice string of parks along the lake, but the loop area as a whole constantly sacrifices nice outdoor space in exchange for a bit more driving room. That’s starting to change but we’re still a long way away from a European style city center.
You're talking about Europe as if it's one city, like Chicago is. There are upwards of 30 countries on the European continent, a subset of which are in the European Union. They certainly have more than one city between themselves; some even have many cities!
Singapore is hot and humid all year long. Locals might be used to it but in my time there, a short 10 minute walk to the station means I'm covered in sweat by the time I get there. So I can certainly see why people would prefer cars.
That said I loved Singapore and I love it's awesome public transportation and its abundant taxies that were easily reservable long before Uber existed.
I think not. The cognitive scientists are eager to point out that that people who are members of religious/spiritual groups are doing actually better in many indicators of a “good life”.
Someone was once quoted as having said that mankind will not truly be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest; while I don't generally condone violence, I am of the opinion that they might indeed have been on to something.
There's a difference between religion and church as an organisation with structure. As much as I grew up with catholic church all around and hope it goes down at some point, I don't mind people having the related religion. You don't need any priest to tell you what beliefs are correct or not.
Kings and priests are machinations of man, they exist not as external adversaries, blights unto who would otherwise be naturally enlightened, but a salve to our deep, innate need for surety, protection, charms against the fear of the unknown.
If it's true that mankind won't be truly free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest, mankind won't truly ever be so, because it'll invariably be the last one to die who is the king, and the one before, the priest. We might as well make peace with it.
The "god of the gaps" is because people can't handle the uncertainty that comes from the answer "We don't know yet", which is what science offers.
"Why do we (humanity) exist?" "Because our species evolved to this state."
"Yes, but why are we capable of asking why do we exist?" "Because our species evolved the intelligence necessary to understand our existence."
"Yes, but why did our species evolve with the intelligence we have?" "Because it was an adaption to our environment that made our offspring more likely to survive."
"Yes, but existentially, why does all this exist to the point where we evolved to that state?" "Life evolved on Earth, we don't know how that process began. We have some theories, but nothing proven."
"That's not good enough!" "Sorry, that's all we've got so far."
I believe this philosophy go even further back into the various Vedas of ancient times too, which also discussed multi-dimensionality and everything consisting of frequencies / vibration. The Gods are really encoded symbols and personifications for various aspects of Cosmos (creation, maintenance, destruction, etc).
Some people seek into the mystical. Other people seek into science. Some people don't seek, and for them there's less logic. Logic though, can also be something that binds you to falsehoods. Revisiting first principles again and again is healthy, but really tough work.
Science and meditation should go hand in hand. Being brilliant is no safeguard against personal angst and delusions.
We don't know yet, is the perfectly fine answer. It's OK to seek too, which is how people find new solutions.
"More church" is not what's happening, unless you focus on the Evangelicals, which are actively repellent to many people. Mainline Protestantism, for example, is in decline: Mainline Protestant churches represented the "default" Christianity for generations of moderates, and by moderates I mean both moderate in religion and moderate in politics.
These days, they're losing members to a growing irreligion, people who can find everything they need without joining any religious faith and, perhaps more importantly, can remain irreligious without suffering a serious social disability. (There are still places where the first icebreaker question is "What church do you go to?" and not having a good answer is not really an option if you wish to get along.) Therefore, expecting the old standbys to pick up the slack isn't going to work.
> "People are either being intentionally and intensely religious – like really active evangelicals, or conservative Catholics, or yada yada – or they're leaving the more moderate churches that we've always seen as holding down the middle of religious life in this country," he said. "We've ended up with two trends that appear to be related. We're losing moderation in the political space in American life and we're losing moderation in the religious space, as well."
> The political implications of these trends are complex, he said. But there does seem to be a Big Idea at the heart of it all: Millions of Americans, especially young adults, have decided that "religious" equals "Republican."
> Burge put it this way on Twitter, describing how doctrines can affect public life: "There is no religious group in the U.S. that places itself halfway between the political parties. Instead, every religious tradition has a 'baked-in' political preference now. Nones favor Democrats. Christians (by and large) favor the GOP."
I read through the article and was disappointed that it did not give a good treatment to the suburbs' new role as immigrant destinations. Historically inner city ethnic neighborhoods were where immigrants first landed, but now they move straight to the suburbs. And they do so for the same reason white people in the 60s and 70s did so: immigrants have larger families and want space and good schools at a good price. The narrative that suburbs are obsolete because (mostly white) baby boomers and their children have less of a need for them overlooks the suburbs' desirability to non-whites and immigrants climbing the ladder.
I grew up in the suburbs of 2 cities. I went to college and lived in dorms and apartments in the city. Literally 3 weeks after graduation I moved 3 miles away to a suburban apartment complex. 5 years later I bought a house in the suburbs and absolutely love it. The grocery store and shopping centers are 1 and 4 miles away. I can load up my car with tons of stuff.
My wife, kids, and I all have our own rooms and home offices. We have a nice backyard with screened in porch, deck, and patio. 2 car garage and can charge the electric car at home and never have to deal with bringing the groceries in during the rain.
I would never go back to living in a downtown area.
I have a couple of friends that moved downtown. One bought a house for 2X the cost of the suburbs. The other got divorced and moved to an apartment downtown. After a year of trendy restaurants and lack of space he got tired of it and is looking to move back to the suburbs.
I like visiting cities and every now and then I've idly thought it would be nice to have a small city place. But 1.) Housing prices in said city are pretty eye-watering, not SF or NYC levels, but enough and 2.) You know what? If I actually wanted to periodically get my taste of city life, nothing is keeping me from getting a hotel room or AirBnB for a week. But I don't actually care enough to do that.
American cities are not that great, crime is way up in my area (Minneapolis). I want to live in Tokyo. Can afford a house, don't need to own a car, can walk everywhere, kids can take public transit and no one bats an eye, low crime. I guess I should move and stop dreaming.
It's hard to say. Surveying people is not useful as what people actually buy is often different from their stated preferences. Right now there's so much government intervention against dense cities that there is no choice in many areas (e.g. non single family homes are banned).
They arent gone. They just got old. The suburbs were biult for the kids of the boomer generation. They are now old. The kids of the kids of the boomers have different needs, mostly to do with money and work. Thats where i disagree with the article. It isnt about cars and work-life third places. It is about not being able to buy a house, or not wanting to because we shift jobs/cities every few yeara. It is about higher bills. It is about working multiple jobs, or working that one job 24/7. Those are the needs the suburb doesnt address. Wanting to ditch the car is way way down the list.
It is sunday morning, 5am, and this kid of a boomer, with a good white-collar job, is about to drive to work.
Suburbs were invented with one goal: survive and win an all-out nuclear war, getting an edge over Commies which they could neither economically nor ideologically afford to replicate.
Commies are long gone, that goal no longer applies, move on.
But suburbanisation properly became a thing with policies of destroying public transport, and redlining that while invented in 1934, started to get massively applied around 1947. Destruction of public transport made living in inner cities more difficult and in suburbs, relatively easier - and redlining made people feel compelled to move out out inner cities.
The institutions are seeding a narrative. This is one such seedling. It doesn’t matter if it is true or not. In the near future, this narrative will be advanced, and governments will begin forcing people to move to cities.
There are a lot of laws and taxes designed to promote progressive behaviors already. They aren’t meant to raise money or because of scarcity. They are designed to coerce behavior. The assumption is that you are stupid and need to be coerced. But first comes the narrative fed through the media.
Examples: soda tax, alcohol tax, tobacco tax, gasoline tax, candy tax, decreased state funding for school districts in higher income areas, state requirements for higher density housing lest the city lose state funding, ban on gas cars, ban on gas stoves, tiered electricity and water costs, elimination of magnet schools.
I would expect far more social manipulation through laws in the next few years.
Here are a few that I can dream up:
- decreased state funding for schools if your housing is below a certain density, or below a job/housing ratio
- make water and electricity far more progressively expensive
- additional property tax based on land area
- additional road tax based on number of miles in an area
Some of the examples you gave are simply capturing negative externalities (e.g. carbon emissions). Often a precise externality tax is too difficult for a government to implement so a ban is done instead. The UK banned free plastic bags at large supermarkets and it was incredibly effective.
It makes sense for rural and suburban services to cost more in taxes because they cost more for the government to deliver (simple example being a more extensive road network). The status quo is actually that rural and suburban living is being subsidised by government.
I agree with you about the soda tax though!
Edit: I see you updated your comment but I will leave mine as is.
Government gets its money comes from taxes. What percentage comes from suburban versus urban areas?
What is that money actually going to? In California, over half goes to school funding and suburban schools get less since the state gives more to poorer (mostly urban) school districts.
The typical complaint is that suburban areas use more water, energy, and their roads cost more. However, they often have to pay for all that. Local roads are paid by local government (read the suburbs). Water districts are often also local.
The only areas where suburbs may use more (but not pay more) is in building and maintaining infrastructure: highways, electrical, gas. The power infrastructure is long paid for and is actually a regulated utility so you are limited to highways. I wonder what taxes are going to be created as people switch to electric cars. There are already cries that the punitive gas tax against driving will become ineffective.
No this is the reverse: the money you use to pay your taxes comes from the state (the currency issuer). Taxes are useful to achieve policy goals or control the money supply to avoid too much inflation, but the government doesn't need to collect money from taxes before it can spend it.
You have no idea how state, county, and city governments work in the US do you? None of those entities can print money. Those parts of government raise money through taxes.
Only the Federal Reserve can print money. The way the rest of the federal government besides the Fed gets money is through taxes and by selling treasury bills and bonds where they promise to pay back the money with interest. Other parts of government can also sell bonds.
If entities believe that a government is running the printing presses there is a currency run and inflation. Ever wonder why assets inflated tremendously the last 8 months relative to the dollar? Ever wonder why the dollar has lost 10% versus other currencies? Things that are fixed in price just got cheaper (like fixed rate mortgages). Things that aren’t, have gone up in price (restaurants, produce, lumber).
Also the running of the presses may add money to the Federal government but may hurt some local governments in the same manner. For example, a city in California dependent on property taxes may have trouble paying its bills when there is a lot of inflation. That is because Prop 13 mandates no more than a 2% increase in property taxes per year. Those private companies that it gets services from will bid at higher prices.
It will be interesting to actually determine infrastructure costs in urban vs suburban areas. I think it is a complicated answer. Is it more expensive to build Are there other alternatives beyond these two choices?
Federal Highway subsidies.
Federal Mortgage & insurance rules.
Tax structures.
Federal building guidelines for FHA / HUD programs.
Destroying dense mixed use black neighborhoods to build highway interchanges.
Federally funded highways and interstates that enable suburban living to be convenient.
The built environment of the United States was a choice. "Forced" through top down "market" incentives.
To me the architect in the article is too quick to dismiss the premise of Bell Labs — giving researchers privacy and pastoral views. Sounds a lot like early Silicon Valley to me. They claim that it’s actually just the chance encounters that were important. There’s some truth to that — Steve Jobs famously designed the Pixar campus to maximize chance encounters. But I wouldn’t be so quick to discount a degree of space and privacy.
That’s kind of central to the whole discussion: the human balance between a need for privacy and a need for community. People want space, and they also want to be able to visit areas of density, and walk around. This used to be the mall, the big box bookstores.
I actually think this article was very interesting, and the architect was very articulate about a lot of things. But I’m not sure we’ve actually solved the core question: why did the malls decay? What changed? Was it e commerce? The shrinking middle class? Traffic just getting too snarled with no real solution?