I'm in a suburb. Not an expensive one. Downtown is a 20 minute drive in light traffic. Within a 10 minute walk there are office buildings, grocery stores, shopping mall, gyms, parks, hiking and biking trails, etc. There are many cities to choose from; some are better planned than others. Based on your comment I would guess that you've opted to live in one of the "cool" cities in America.
Price is relative. That could be Los Altos, California. Which is very nice, walkable with garages, great parks and outdoors, but not what most people would call affordable. :)
I would argue that it's objectively cheaper to live in the suburbs.
And I can assert with confidence that $100/mo in HOA fees provides walkable parks, trails, pools, gyms, tennis courts, basketball courts, etc. I vote on the financial management of all these things so I can be sure they are provided by that amount of money, objectively. Major builders do suburbs like this one across the country. And they make a killing managing them too.
Where are you? SF? SD? NY? Miami? You're paying a premium for the right to brag about it. Not for the amenities.
I won't. But I'm basically describing the entire USA except the coasts, and a few major cities in between.
For perspective, houses in SF sell for 10x the value per square foot compared with my neighborhood. And I'm not remotely in the cheapest place in the country.
America is big. Look around. There is a LOT of space in the middle.
Right, I'm calling bullshit. Suburbs in America don't have anything 10 minutes walk away. You're just confused what a suburb is. I'm honestly concerned that people like you are allowed to vote.
The comment got a lot of upvotes, so clearly many people are living in suburbs like mine. If it's unbelievable for you, you've failed yourself. Sorry to hear that. I'm concerned that people like you are allowed to perpetuate price gouging on real estate because of your incompetence. Cheers.
This is it. My garage is full of kid's stuff. I don't have a backyard for a shed, plus my landlords installed shelving on all three sides, some not above car roof level.
If we want to park a car in there, it's about an hour of moving stuff out of the way. I stand at the back as a spotter while my wife drives at me. Once she hit me, she turns the car off and climbs out through the back seat. I then climb over the roof of the car.
I wish I was making this up. Glad it's 12 years old with no sun roof. I don't have to feel bad about sliding over it.
Breaking the site guidelines like this will get you banned here. Please don't post like this, no matter how right you are or feel you are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Given whatever size of garage I have, being somewhere I can live without a car gives me more garage space, regardless of whether it's a suburb. If I want to maximize garage space given my choice of a car-free lifestyle, I would probably move to a suburb with a good train station, not one where "only 20 minutes' drive to downtown" is seen as the selling point. Those are subtly different kinds of places, in my experience, where most people are going to fill their garage space with cars.
Nah, I'm joking, hopefully not antagonizing.
My point was that since you're not downtown, you can park in the street.
Minutes to downtown isn't a selling point I'm making. I don't typically go downtown. I've put 10k miles on my car in 3 years. This was in response to someone saying they can't get exercise in a suburb, which I find absurd.
The antagonism is from effectively calling them immature (and thus implying that their opinion is coming from a place of naivety) and placing yourself above them. This is a pretty standard insult that people use to try to be persuasive.
I suppose you could say that posting that insult itself is so immature that readers should recognize it as a joke, but I suggest that you should try to stay away from sarcasm when posting in online forums. It can be quite difficult to detect the sarcasm of a bunch of people you don't know.
I could end my post by sarcastically saying "don't worry, you'll learn what a joke is when you grow up", but hopefully you can imagine how some people would take that as a genuine insult rather than a joke. Though it would be punchier ending.
Are you young? Because this comment shouldn't be offensive unless you're harboring doubt about immature decisions you've made. For everyone else, it's a tongue in cheek poke at the bad decisions I made when I was younger. Statistically, people tend to leave the city when they get older. If you're insulted by that, you probably still belong in the city.
Maybe you should look inward instead of downvoting, or offering explanations that presume a lesser understanding in your audience.
Looking up to experience isn't a bad thing. It shows maturity. How's that for a punchy finish?
>”I think the key is to have everything delivered to you.“
This is why we can’t have nice things. We simply can’t rely on a class of workers to dote on us simply because we fancy living in the burbs. The amount of waste just so you can get your instacart. The reality is near 8% mortgages have put suburbs with garages out of reach for almost everyone without a trust fund or selling their startup.
> We simply can’t rely on a class of workers to dote on us simply because we fancy living in the burbs
You make zero sense. Going to the grocery store involves the same workers helping you pay for gas and selling you groceries, or cooking your meals. Are you a recluse that interacts with zero workers? Who in their right mind calls someone else out for using a regular service? You'd prefer those people to not have jobs surely.
There's no end to that game of efficiency. You end up with either ascetic monk life people or asking for population reduction measures.
If you're annoyed about low efficiency of ordering food, what do you think of vacation traveling, hobbies, any sort of vehicles etc. Most efficiency would be to have no humans with our superfluous wants and needs. Otherwise you're just shaming others for doing things you happen not to like, while forgetting all the useless things you do. Surely you have done consumist purchases that weren't required for your immediate survival or health preservation before.
Possibly if that last mile delivery was carried out by people who were also practiced in logistics. This is never the case. It’s better for you to find a means of transportation to get your staples of living than to pay someone else to use any means of transportation to provide you your bananas.
The planet can’t take any more “conveniences” on our behalf. We need to find a more efficient way of delivering goods and getting our goods. Throwing your hands up and saying “I’ll just get everything delivered” is about the worst option you can do from a logistics perspective to reduce carbon.
If we had pick and pack robots and delivery drones that were powered by solar fields and alternative energy, I would say that’s about as close to carbon neutral logistics as we can get. Trucking and freight are still exorbitantly polluting but the heavy “last mile” pollution problem would be traded with increased overhead air traffic. The reality is: a self driving car with a delivery robot is probably going to be our answer in 2040.
They're amazing if you love sitting in traffic.