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Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

It's nice that more companies are building dorm rooms. But it would be great if someone would build dense urban living for families too.

A lot of the growth of suburbs isn't necessarily due to people wanting to live there, but because it's the largest (and sometimes only) option for folks with children.

They don't need to match suburban house sizes. Most people don't need 1800+sqft. But if we could start getting modest 3 and 4 bed urban condos with 1000-1300sqft, it would do a lot to improve things.

Incentivizing a huge chunk of the population out into far flung suburbs doesn't seem smart from a efficiency, infrastructure, land use, or pollution standpoint.

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> A lot of the growth of suburbs isn't necessarily due to people wanting to live there, but because it's literally the only option for folks with children.

How do you figure? Last I checked there are children in cities.

To add a datapoint:

I used to live in a very nice neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN with my GF and a child. House was just under 1,000 sq ft with unfinished basement and attic (not included in the sq footage). We loved it there. Great neighborhood: I could walk to the grocery store, or bus and restaurants etc. It was within walking distance of Lake Harriet (beautiful lake/park with free music performances, etc) and close to many other lakes and parks. We were outside a lot.

But we moved to a 2X larger house in the suburbs on a half-acre lot behind a nature preserve. Why?

Pretty much the only reason was that our son was going to be old enough to start kindergarten soon and the local schools sucked.

Private school was an option, but we soon figured out that it was cheaper to move to a bigger house in the suburbs in a better school district than to keep living in the city and pay for private schools.

This is a common reason for parents to move out of very liveable cities. It's often much cheaper to move to the suburbs than pay for private schools, especially if you have 2 or 3 children. And with more and more businesses moving from city to suburban locations, it may even make your commute shorter (it did for both of us).

tl;dr: Improve public schools in cities and more parents will stay.

At least in Toronto and Vancouver they didn't plan on children in the city so now there are no schools for the children that are here. There are also very few 2 and 3 bedroom places so having a child is very impractical.

On the other hand I changed my commute from a 15minute walk to a 1h20m ride on transit and my living space when from 500sqft to 1500sqft

Yeah but Americans are taught to think cities are scary and suburban sprawl is safe, even though you're several times more likely to die in a car accident than being murdered in a city, not to mention health problems in kids whose primary exercise is walking to and from their parents' minivan.

In all fairness, that wasn't a completely inaccurate generalization in the 1970s or so. That's changed a lot for the most part, but a number of effects linger such as the quality of most urban public schools. Therefore, for a variety of reasons--including having more space--many (though of course not all) middle class+ families still are inclined to move to the suburbs when they have children.

With respect to exercise, you'd have to convince me that kids living in a city condo/apartment routinely get more exercise than ones in the suburbs.

Something like that might rent for 2400 to 3000 a month, if the pricing trends that I've observed hold. Even if such a thing existed, the average person couldn't afford it in their wildest dreams.

Yes, exactly. And I think that's a huge problem.

We're overvaluing SQFT, and way undervaluing land. A 1100sqft condo with no land in a city, should be much cheaper than a 2200sqft stand alone McMansion on a quarter acre of private land. But today, the opposite is true.

That's going to end up being a long term mistake. And because of the housing cost distortion, we're incentivizing people to continue that mistake.

>We're overvaluing SQFT, and way undervaluing land

This is exactly it!

We are seeing a ton of individuals who are not wealthy, even if they have a strong income. They are buying into the idea of paying these crazy rent prices to stay "connected" or in the "heart" of the urban areas. Access to these things is not granted by housing, you can attend every fancy nightclub, restaurant and bar while living 15min away in a drastically larger/cheaper living arrangement.

Why should it be? That's like saying that the $2.15 bottle of Coke you find at the counter should be significantly cheaper than the $1.99 two-liter in aisle 15. It's not, and there's a good reason for that. A two-liter and a 20 oz bottle are completely different products, different people are buying them for very different reasons. They don't compete against each other, they compete against other products in that segment.

On the surface, a 1000 sqft condo in the city and a 2000 sqft house are comparable products. But they're not, they are marketed to completely different kinds of people whose selection criteria are not comparable in the least.

There's an article in today's NYtimes about tiny apartments (250-350 sq ft) starting at $2500/month in the Kips Bay part of Manhattan (i.e. a nice area but not the nicest or trendiest).

The usual rule in NYC is that you must make 40x the monthly rent to rent an apartment. So those shoeboxes are being aimed at people making six figures.

On the upside you get a virtual butler.

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