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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

This is a big deal, unfortunately. I am super onboard with the urbanization movement, but cost of a 3-4 bedroom living space is not cheap in an urban area. I really don't want to raise my kids in a suburb - my wife and I grew up in that environment and it was unpleasant. But we may be forced that direction just to afford to have enough space for 1-2 children. :-(

edit to add some color commentary: I would mostly like to sell my car and not buy another one; I would like to use public transit everywhere; I would like to live in a high-density area with 6+ story residences. Many benefits accrue in these situations; I don't understand the pleasure or enjoyment of living outside of that kind of environment - having done so myself, the more urban the area, the better living it is.

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What about suburban family life was unpleasant? I'm curious what you think the upsides are for raising kids in a city, which I personally think is a bad idea. Kids need an environment where they can go outside and be kids without all the difficulties a city adds.

I'm not pnathan, but I grew up in the suburbs and am never going back; my spouse and I have raised our kid in the city for several years now. Why didn't I like it?

- The sameness. Every house on the streets where I grew up looked virtually identical, as did the neighborhood where I bought my first house. It took owning a house in the 'burbs to remember how much I didn't like the cookie-cutter aspect. Doubly so for the fact that virtually every suburban neighborhood built in the past 20 years has an HOA, which I detest.

- The distance. Going to anything, even just a Wal-Mart to get groceries, meant a minimum of 10 minutes just to get out of the "residential area" and make it to the "commercial area." The one corner store we had was usually under pressure from the city government and nearby residents to close down because of, allegedly, too much traffic.

- Minimal cultural differences. Yes, my hometown had a Western Days Weekend and an Old Town District but that was it. The town where I bought my first house (this was a bad idea, in retrospect) didn't even bother with that. Everything else in both places was strip shopping centers or Wal-Mart or paved six-lane roadways to get people out of town to the big city for work and then back into town to get to sleep at night. Going to do anything, like a zoo or museum or a baseball game, meant a half-hour minimum drive. There are lots of suburbs in north Texas, let's say, that exist solely for zoning authority.

You mentioned being outside and being kids. The city where I live now, Seattle, has a massive parks system. My tiny house on a tiny lot in the city still has about 1,600sqft of outdoor area to play in and a huge tree. Even the apartments we've rented have a courtyard and are near to parks and sidewalks and places to play. It's great for people whose kids are outdoor types; mine prefers to be inside with books and puzzles and computers.

What I like about raising our kid in the city: Exposure to new and different ideas; most cities aren't self-selected to be the same as each other. A varying cityscape that isn't just the same houses feeding to the same street and to the same businesses. More cultural and entertainment options are close at hand. Being able to live in a more environmentally sensitive way (my kid doesn't want to learn how to drive and prefers to take transit and has made compost and recycle separating into a game).

The distance I will totally back up. As a kid in a suburban area, I couldn't do anything without parents to drive me - meet friends, head to a decent park, go out to a movie.

Of course, this can be fixed when you're old enough to get a car, but that adds a) expense for the parents, and b) a lot of danger. Having 16- and 17-year-olds driving everywhere might not be the best idea.

I remember riding a bike pretty much everywhere within about a 20 mile radius of home (including a couple nearby small cities). (To be honest though I don't think any of our parents realized just how far we travelled or they might have objected -- on the other hand, I don't think they were that likely to start driving us everywhere back then either.)

In West LA in the 90s? No way any sane parent would let their kids bike on city streets.

One of the things that's actually made me optimistic about suburban California is the proliferation of bike lanes. Definitely makes the whole environment more livable, for kids especially, and makes public transit a lot more practical for everyone.

I grew up in an older suburb that still had sidewalks, so I could walk to friends houses, the park, and even a movie (the local theater is actually closer to my parents' house than my local theater is now in Brooklyn).

OT: waves - hi there fellow Seattleite!

Hello to you, too. Hopefully you can find something inside the city that makes you happy. There are still deals to be had, even on small 3BRs.

Suburbs are highly segregated economically and racially. I grew up in the Northern VA suburbs and didn't meet a black person until middle school. Suburbs also make kids totally dependent on their parents to get to activities, friends, etc. Finally, suburbs are incredibly dangerous. The #1 cause of death for teenagers is car accidents. Your 15-19 year old is a lot safer in the city than driving around the suburbs.

Not all suburbs are created equal? I grew up in a suburb and only had to be driven to school (took the bus). My friends mostly lived in the same neighborhood and roughly 1/2 were black. The burb also gave me a lot of freedom. The only rules were not to cross the highway on one side or the rather large river on the other. There was a closed down school nearby along with a lot of parks so we had ample space for sports.

Maybe you just don't like affluent, segregated suburbs?

New vs. old might also be a factor. I live in Atlanta and detest virtually all Sun Belt development in the last few decades because it's so spread out.

The suburbs in the Rust Belt, in places like South Bend, IN (where I spent my elementary school years), or Buffalo, NY, are a lot more dense and palatable in this regard. I'd still dislike living there, but it's a far cry from living truly, honest-to-god in the middle of nowhere in places like ATL, DFW, PHX...

None of ATL, DFW, or PHX can honestly be described as the middle of nowhere. Perhaps "middle of nowhere" is just your strongest verbal condemnation of a location, but using it as such dilutes the quality of discussion by robbing it of precision.

On a separate note, ATL, DFW, and PHX are all awful to me as well, but that's because of the life-draining sprawl, not because they're sparse. I fear for the future of housing every time I have a window seat in or out of ATL looking at those developments.

Er, sprawl is sparse. Sprawl is practically by definition 'low-density.'

Suburbs also make kids totally dependent on their parents to get to activities, friends, etc.

Yes! And the deleterious effect of this is underappreciated and understated. It's not just a convenience and logistical issue; it materially alters the nature and quality of the connection one has with surrounding society, and leads to _different kind_ of social relations over time.

Kids cannot "be kids" when their life lacks social spontaneity (and in fact, there is some question about adults being adults as well), when their life is a directed graph and a collection of automobile vectors, subordinated to the rhythms and whims of their parents to drive them.

As a child, I did not immediately understand this paradigm shift as I underwent it, which led me for years to struggle with this great, nonarticulated malaise for which I had no name. It's only with the benefit of hindsight that I understand that I was unable to cope with living "nowhere in particular", which suitably describes 90% of inhabited areas in the US, including places that are notionally urban. Much of DFW should be reclassified as a rural area.

Kids who go to schools in the suburbs tend to be a hell of a lot more integrated than their urban counterparts.

Maybe it's different over there in the US, but as someone who lived in a lot of surburban places in the UK and other parts of Europe... well, they're not all that different from the standard town or city here. Perfectly possible to get around without a car, with a decent high street, various transport connections and a bunch of nearby activities for kids and families. You could (theoretically) live and work in these areas while relying solely on public transport.

Yet despite this, I'd say that the decline in the number of kids and young people driving is a fair bit less than it seemingly is in the states.

It is very different in the US. US suburbs were designed around the automobile, and their original raison dêtre is to be accessible only via car: they were sited just far enough by from the nearest urban area (or adjacent suburb) to allow predominate free-standing houses with yards.

"Suburb" has shades of meaning here in the U.S. too, but I think most people think of the sprawling new city suburbs when they use the term. When I lived in New York, I lived in a small suburb, but we had a cute little downtown and regional rail access to New York City. We rarely drove there. But most U.S. suburbs are not like that. They're like my parents' suburb in Virginia: where you can't really even leave the cul-de-sac on foot because you quickly hit a major road with no sidewalks.

I'd argue the opposite to be honest. Kids need the difficulties they face in cities. I grew up in a half/half environment due to divorced parents and I can easily say that kids coming out of city schools have more 'life' skills. In this environment kids are forced to deal with many different cultures/backgrounds at a young age and learn the importance of getting to know other types of people.

In suburban environments (I don't have a direct source right now, but it's sorta of widely accepted) kids often are among peers exactly like themselves. This really does nothing for development, especially if 90% of the school is of a certain race/culture...which typically happens in divided suburban environments.

In addition to this, they are also exposed to the realities of life. Seeing homeless panhandling, the speed of the city, the ever changing environment, it's a good representation of what someone might face in life. Being exposed to these elements builds a stronger person.

Sure they might have an overall different outcome of life, for example kids certainly aren't dirtbiking/atving in the city, but that all comes down to exposure, parenting, and self interest.

I'd just let to echo this. I personally grew up in one of these homogeneous, suburban environments and I feel like I acquired the meaningful life experiences that I truly needed much later than others who grew up in more urban environments. IMO, the "danger" of city life is incredibly overblown. I actually know far more people struggling with drug addiction in the suburbs where I grew up than in the city where I now live.

Not to mention the fact that the reason urban areas have a reputation for crime, drug abuse, and other "social ills" is in large part due to "white fight" as it were.

Even setting aside the racial component for a second, it stands to reason that if cities are "tough" because everyone with the means toward a more stable and comfortable life moved to the suburbs, then many of those same issues with poverty and resulting crime and drug abuse would be lessened by un-segregating things.

If cities are rough because it's accepted that anyone with the means will leave, then they become less so when the urban/suburban split doesn't mirror the poor/rich (or white/minority) split.

Agreed one hundred percent, being formatively from an urban background and then transported into suburbia in childhood. Much of my useful life experience and skills in that stage of life came from exposure to the reputed "grit" of cities.

Suburbia offered nothing in this regard. It was a contentless, vapid expanse of nothingness, where I couldn't go anywhere or do anything without being deliberately driven there by my parents.

As someone who grew up in a small city where pretty much everyone was white I would have to disagree.

Large cities are no place to rise children they are cramped, expensive and highly polluted the kids may get exposed to a higher diversity of people but that is not necessary at a young age. As long as you raise your children with your own values and teach them to have and open and accepting mind it doesn't matter where they are.

I have no problem interacting with different kinds of people even though i only got exposed to such diversity after i graduated university and I could never imagine growing up in a large city it would have been awful.

Hell personally I'm trying to move to a smaller city close by to London and take up more remote work so i can actually have more breathing room.

I absolutely have the expensive, small and badly maintained spaces that tend to be the norm in large cities.

US cities are a bit different you could probably live comfortably if you are ok with needing to drive everywhere but that's ridiculous to. I don't have a driver's license I never needed one since everything I ever wanted was a walk away and if it was further I could just take public transportation even in the small city I grew up in.

Spending so much money maintaining and fuelling a car is a waste of resources.

Not every city is London or Manhattan.

And I'm not sure even those would be "highly polluted" these days (big Asian cities definitely are though - and I wouldn't want to raise my kids in New Delhi or Beijing).

My wife grew up in Vienna and my son will grow up in Berlin, I think both provide for a much more interesting childhood than the suburb I grew up in, and are not really polluted or dangerous (maybe some parts are, but we don't have to live downtown to get the benefits of the city).

London is quite bad - http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/08/london-ta...

Or - http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/15/nearly-95...

Fair enough! It never really felt bad to me in Vienna or Berlin, but I have a Canadian friend who always complains about the air quality compared to Vancouver so I guess it's always relative to what you're used to.

Berlin in particular has a lot of late 1800s "railway suburbs" which have been politically integrated into the city-proper in the 20th century & are now just outer districts of the city.

These are plenty green and still well served by the city's rail and subway network, so you sort of get the best of both worlds (commute times are still longer compared to living in a more central district, but that highly depends on where in the city you work).

I only really notice it when I've been out of London for a few days. Although I rarely venture into the centre where it's worst.

I used to think London or New York could get polluted when it was a little hazy to see the Gherkin or Empire State Building. Then I moved to Sarajevo in December. It makes my lungs feel like I sucked down two packs of cigarettes every time I walk out of my front door.

I will never complain about pollution again (I'm not saying any amount is good, but there are children all over the world living in much worse conditions than London at 17:30).

>Kids need an environment where they can go outside and be kids without all the difficulties a city adds.

This is a completely subjective opinion being passed around as fact. My parents divorced when I was very young so I grew up going back and forth between houses. My mom lived in suburban areas and my dad lived in a more condensed area(not as condensed as Chicago/Baltimore but still not a suburb). I greatly preferred being with my dad just because of the area. Just because my friends and I didn't play basketball in the front yard doesn't mean we didn't have space to be a kid. We would walk to all the stores or just explore the city. If we wanted to run around and play then parks were abundant.

I've answered the starting question elsewhere in this thread.

> Kids need an environment where they can go outside and be kids

This is completely specifically isolated to your perception of what it means to be a kid. After doing minor reading on family history, what kids do, what it means to be a kid, and the environment they need are extremely culturally isolated to time and space. It's become obvious to me that practically anywhere can be a wholesome place to raise a child. For instance, what about a child in Mumbai today? Or the middle of Mexico City? Or Cairo? Are they so stunted? It simply doesn't compute that every child has to be raised in a suburban house to be a full adult with a happy childhood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf8jvSPA3XQ

That given, in hindsight I'm very grateful for my upbringing in a white, Mormon, newly-being-built-out-in-the-90s, right-on-the-foothills suburb in Utah. I made the decision to leave that culture, but after living and visiting around various places in the Seattle area and seeing all the "diversity", I'm unconvinced anything out here is really "better", just a different set of tradeoffs. (Lack of Depth being one of them.)

Cities make it easier for kids to go outside and be kids. The need for car transport that RcouF1uZ4gsC brings up applies to kids as much as adults. It limits who they can interact with down to a few kids from the local street and their activities to those parents are willing to drive them to which harms socialisation even more.

Basic things like seeing a film with friends, playing a sport, or going on a date become way bigger deals than they otherwise need to be. Being the kid that always needed exact locations and times for things to be able to participate was always a huge PITA for me.

I'd say at the very least that parents choosing the suburban life should do so understanding that they're signing themselves up for extreme taxi duty and that their child doesn't really have much power in deciding when things start/end. Actually, nowadays maybe Uber on your kids phone would do the job.

"Cities make it easier for kids to go outside and be kids."

The other way round. I grew up in the countryside and we could literally play on the streets without risk. Visiting friends was actually easier. We simply took the bike, the rollerskates or - later - a motor scooter. No need for any parent to drive anybody anywhere. No need to use public transportation. All my schoolmates lived in bike distance (that is 25 km in my definition).

Of course it counts how safe your country or city is. It is our business to make them safe, not to hide in cars, because otherwise we may be harmed.

Again, it depends...

I live out in the country. My 15 y-o son has one friend who lives within walking distance and his parents keep him pretty busy with extracurricular activities, so he's never home. When you're an adult, being close to nature sounds cool. When you're 15, it's boring beyond belief.

In rural environments, you go outside and interact with nature; in urban environments, you go outside and interact with people. In the suburbs, you go outside, interact with nothing, wonder why you bothered, and go back inside. Suburbs are supposed to be safe, not interesting. Real estate investments from beginning to end, they focus entirely on private property, wasting space on public amenities only to whatever minimum is necessary to avoid alienating potential buyers. Suburbs are empty, tedious places unless you have a car you can escape in: raise a kid there and you're either committing them to the boob tube or taking up a second career as a taxi driver.

My parents moved to a suburb of Sacramento when I was 8. I didn't mind at first, but it was a real letdown when I realized, after a few years, that we weren't going to be moving on this time. I couldn't understand why, when we'd been to so many interesting places, they chose THAT one to settle in! I grew to loathe the place and could not get far enough away when I was finally able to leave. To this day, I don't even like to visit suburban areas. I live a mile and a half from the center of Seattle and it still feels too suburban sometimes. I'd be a lot closer in if I could have afforded it when I was shopping for a house. I would not ever want to put a child of my own through a suburban upbringing.

Not everyone feels this way though. I had a fairly rural upbringing in the northeast and I long for a less dense, no traffic, laid back way of life. Unfortunately, our culture has chosen to forget that way of life. However, one aspect of living a rural lifestyle is that life without a car is almost impossible in this day in age.

I personally think urbanization brings with it more problems that it solves. While they are more social perhaps, cities are anything but sustainable and aren't a natural way for humans to live with nature. Cities are a breeding ground for man made disaster and are IMHO one of the reason the fear of terrorism is winning out over personal freedom.

I'm not sure why you'd say that cities are unsustainable. All the folks who research this stuff seem to agree that urban living is more sustainable; urbanites tend to use less resources every way you cut it. They drive less, their houses are smaller, their houses leak less energy because they typically have fewer surfaces exposed to the outside environment, they can rely more on common infrastructure for moving resources around instead of having to have everything moved around by truck, etc etc.

I'm also not convinced you can really blame urbanites for the fear of terrorism. Cities might be the preferred target for terrorist attacks, but at least in the USA people it's rural folks who tend to be more worried about terrorism while urbanites tend to take a more balanced view of the subject.

Suburbs also make kids totally dependent on their parents to get to activities, friends, etc.

[Highly urban-oriented personality here, decidedly with you in general ...]

Here, a purely rationalistic and quantitative analysis might not back this up. It's not necessarily clear that there are fewer vehicle-miles travelled and fossil fuels expended in stocking every corner grocery in a dense urban metropolis vs. one 3000-mile salad backhauled to a Walmart SuperCenter to which everyone within a 10 mi radius has to drive. Pound for pound, the latter approach might actually be more cost and resource-efficient in a lot of cases.

But of course, there's more to life than robotic efficiency.

They made much smaller 3/4 bedroom homes before Ww2 and the ascent of the car. Many of them lacked driveways. You can pack a lot of homes like that into a small space and then get good LRT service to a nearby corner. Cities were built for that before - look at old industrial towns like Pittsburgh and Flint. If we can salvage those old industrial cities, there's great opportunity there for transit-oriented living without giving up single-family homes.

I live in Hamilton, which is the Pittsburgh of Canada, and there is great promise here for the "have it all" urban lifestyle.

You don't even have to give up driveways and garages; it's entirely possible to build townhouses (row houses) with a 1-car garage on the ground floor. I lived in one of those years ago: the "main floor" (as seen from the front) was really the 2nd floor, and the basement floor had a 1-car garage which opened out to the back. It's entirely possible to build lots of these in cities and get a good amount of living space plus room for a car. Just look at the "brownstones" in Manhattan NYC; those things had tons of room in them, but were narrow so you could pack a lot in a given space. They had so much room that these days most of them are split up into 2-4 separate units and rented out.

Just curious, what did you and your wife find unpleasant about growing up in the suburbs? I grew up in a suburb and loved it very much.

We were dependant on our parents to do anything or go anywhere that was more than a few blocks away. No infrastructure for biking existed worth talking about. Sidewalks were sketchy; no one expected pedestrians. Visiting friends was hard, and depended on parental coordination.

Any sort of outing was a Big Deal; kids had to be wrapped up and put in the car, then we all had to trundle off somewhere, then the reverse had to be put into motion.

A transit system in a dense urban area makes these issues go away.

Slightly location dependant - there were no museums of quality[0] within hundreds of miles; same for zoos, libraries[1], symphonies, operas, plays, etc. Density drives tax base and demand; any reasonable urban area has all of the above.

Suburbs, as a common rule of thumb, strive for conformity and blandness. This has held true since the white flight era in the US[2]. So you wind up with really crappy aesthetics, and uninteresting options for engagement. A very common result is the alienated suburban teenager bored out of their skull. We were, to greater and lesser degrees.

Now, as adults, we both recognize several serious problems with the suburb/exurb system in the US.

1. It's not sustainable economically. You have a huge infrastructure system on a low density population; hard choices start coming out to play because of the cost of maintenance, which generally was capitalized by developers, but the opex is borne by the government; local politics in the US has evidently generally shifted to anti-tax Republican demographics; with fewer people supporting the burden, issues come out to play. So the net result is life is getting worse there.

2. It's not environmentally sustainable. Efficiency rises significantly as you start densifying the region; new services become possible at critical masses - one of the big ones is transit. This drives pollution down, decreases oil use, etc, etc.

3. It promotes closed-mindedness; without having to deal with the breadth of humanity, you don't have to cope with all of the reality involved, leading to really terrible policy decisions. Forcing contact with The Other and humanizing them tends to work out better in the long run. Referencing current politics: https://twitter.com/nycjim/status/687997269258407937 . NYC's great strength is having to deal with other people.

Anyway, if you take some time to look carefully at the "new urbanist" movement, these themes are repeated over and over again. It's not democrat, republican, libertarian, or green; but it recognizes many of the issues those viewpoints present. I'm not ashamed to say that I'd rather live in Manhattan, NYC than in any arbitrary suburb I know of (Now, if I could afford that in a residence I could raise kids in... :( ).

[0] Local History Museum is what was available.

[1] Less of a problem as a young child, much more of a problem as a teen.

[2] Note that "urban" is often an appellation on something meaning "black people". I wouldn't actually call suburbs racist by design, but I would invite quiet contemplation of race and environment in the US.

Not American (aus), and not op, but I grew up and moved between semi-rural, suburban, and now am in a city.

Now, the human being is a pretty adaptable creature that normalises what they experience every day, so a lot of these are things I only noticed after moving from environment to environment.

I think I got just as much additional activity time in the rural setting as I did growing up in suburbia, because trips to playground or ovals or swimming pools or tennis courts all involved car trips. Ditto shopping, movies, etc. Of course, now I'm an adult, I know commute times need to be added as a downside.

Where the suburbs turned into "hell on earth" was during the teen years, when you're struggling for independence/stimulation, but you're stuck in the teenage equivalent of solitary confinement. The internet came just in time for me. As I've said before, it all just seemed normal then, but as I moved around, I learnt that there were places in the world you could walk to the supermarket/movies/library. Where buses came more than once every 2 hours and didn't involve a half hour wait to get what was notionally a few km's down the road. Where your friends actually lived close enough for you to visit. And those facilities where you had to get into the car? Well now they are just down the road too and you can walk, or catch the sub-15 minute public transport straight there.

We're definitely going to give the urban child thing a go if we have children. Though part of that will necessarily mean a change of attitude. We no longer want a 4 bedroom house with a backyard for kids, primarily because large parts of what we would of tried to have gained by having such space can instead be outsourced to community facilities instead.

After reading many replies it sounds like many people lived in horrible places, not just that they were suburbs. I live in what would be considered suburb now and would have loved to be here as a kid. A river with docks is only a block or so away. There are multiple fields and parks. There are tennis courts and a pool. Sidewalks also blanket the whole neighborhood which you can follow up to the closest grocery store.

If I wanted to go to the city I have to drive, that is a downside. But, when I was working from home full time I was debating on getting a golf cart and seeing how long I would go without driving my car.

America has been building suburbs for 100 years so there's a lot of variation— I grew up in a walkable streetcar suburb of Milwaukee that was right next to the city and looked like many urban neighborhoods, with narrow streets and sidewalks and a decent mix of multifamily housing.

Most people still drove for transportation, but it wasn't nearly as mandatory as in many post-1970 suburbs.

As the other poster said, there's a lot of variation in "suburbs" in America. I recently lived a township in northern NJ, which effectively was a "suburb" in the NYC metro area. There was a convenience store just down the street (a 1-minute walk away), a high school right next door, a small river and a park a few minutes away, a "downtown" area less than 10 minutes' walk away, etc. A bug stop at the end of my little street took me to Manhattan in less than 60 minutes. If I wanted to go to other nearby towns, however, I needed a car because the buses were too slow, though a fair number of (poorer) people did use them for that. The houses were really close together and typically quite old; mine was built in 1930. Heating costs were high though because those old houses aren't well-insulated (and that house had been renovated with new windows so it wasn't too horrible, unlike some others). There were lots of sidewalks everywhere, though they tended to be in rough shape in places because of all the salt in the winter; they had to replace them a lot.

I also lived in the Phoenix metro area for quite a while. That was totally different. No shopping within walking distance at all, if you were lucky there might be some kind of park near your development, but older neighborhoods usually didn't have that. HOAs were commonplace and horribly run. There were sidewalks everywhere, but they were only good for walking around the neighborhood to get some exercise, not for actually going anywhere. Any place you might want to go required a car, and public transit was really awful. There were buses, but they tended to go to major destinations, and suburban housing developments weren't among them.

Honestly, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we had much higher-density housing with mixed commercial/residential areas so it was easy to walk to nearby eateries and convenience stores. The problem is the rent prices are always much too high, and I'd like to see some kind of political action to deal with that. I suspect the culprit is a combination of real estate speculation and insufficient supply caused by zoning laws.

As a native Eastern European (who has been in the US most of his life), I'm still occasionally flabbergasted at the paucity of 3+ bedroom apartment options in US cities, as well as how crappy the <= 2 BR options are. It seems there's a cultural expectation that once there's more than two of you, you move out to the suburbs and buy a freestanding house. Like you, I have absolutely zero intention of following that script.

Central/Eastern European apartments often had a small foyer, a narrow hall way, and doors along the perimeter into ~2-3 rooms--sometimes more. The hallway usually had closet space. One room was generally somewhat bigger than the others and understood to be a "living room". Kitchens were separate rooms and often had a door of their own, which effectively meant they were an additional room, since one could work, study and socialise at the kitchen table. Overall, there was much more compartmentalisation and walls, which I think is essential if you have children, but even if you don't. Interestingly, I wouldn't say their area was much bigger than 1-2 BR apartments typically found in America--the floor plan was just configured much more rationally. Such apartments were fairly close to table stakes in former socialist bloc countries, as well as elsewhere in central Europe.

For instance, my wife and I live with our three young children in a 2 BR ~1200 sq ft. unit in downtown Atlanta--definitely against the grain. It's the typical American apartment layout, a poor and awkward imitation of a house; front door that opens into an "open plan" consolidated living room and kitchen environment, and two bedrooms where "private life" is said to take place.

What would make far more sense to me would be to take that same 1200 sq ft. and dump the second bathroom and the unnecessarily large walk-in closet in the master bedroom. That would certainly provide for a third--if small--room that could be used as a study, which would literally make all the difference for allowing me to get at least some work done at home. And we don't need a giant "TV room"; what we need are walls, noooks and crannies. It's wasteful and pointless; it leaves us with two bedrooms that are really only good for sleeping, and one common area in which all five of us have to coexist much of the time. Might as well just get a large studio at that point.

As I see it, much of the problem with "open plan" offices carries over into "open plan" floor plans. I don't understand Americans' obsession with and preference for this design. It's perfectly possible for families to live comfortably in a central urban place with relatively little square footage--if it were designed more sensibly and with some of the virtues that otherwise can be found only in a freestanding house.

I couldn't agree more. I think a large part of the problem is the application of trends which make sense in large houses (and houses tend to be pretty big in much of the US) to smaller spaces. I grew up in a big house in flyover country and it had a "open concept" with a huge combined living room/kitchen/dining room. But that house also had a study and a "family room" on the first floor, and 5 bedrooms on the second, so everyone had plenty of private space. My current much smaller house in California is basically a shrunken version of the open concept. But it lacks the family room and study, and only has 3 bedrooms. Despite having ~ 1400 square feet, it feels cramped with only 2 adults and 1 child living in it.

I think that explains some of the charm of the old Victorian/Edwardian era flats in many U.S. cities. If unmolested by "renovation," they'll have the original floor plans, which are much like you describe. They're great for sharing with roommates, especially if they have the split bathroom (toilet in one room, bathtub in another).

In Germany and Austria a lot of the housing stock is old and resembles what you describe, but many built in the last decades of the 20th century or later follow american-like floor plans.

The problem with your idea is the part about eliminating the bathroom. For a household with that many people, having a single bathroom is really a big PITA. As soon as one person is taking a shower, that means everyone else has to wait 15-30 minutes for them to finish before they can use the toilet. It's even worse for guests. Bathrooms don't have to take up that much room; you can stick them in a space about the size of two old-style telephone booths, for a simple half-bath meant for guest and emergency usage only. These days, no one wants to buy a house with a single bathroom for these reasons, and in older houses people will even turn a closet into a second bathroom.

The idea behind "open plan" spaces is to make it seem more roomy by combining rooms and not having so many walls. People are both larger and taller than they used to be, so tiny houses can seem claustrophobic. Combining your living areas (living room, dining room, kitchen) into a single space actually makes sense here. Americans don't even use formal dining rooms any more, so it's a waste of space to have them, so now they're either eliminated altogether or made part of the living room or kitchen (the so-called "eat-in kitchen").

Now, as for Americans' "obsession" with open plan, this does not apply to offices; the dynamics behind house design and office design are completely unrelated. For houses, it's because people want a more spacious feeling, like I said above. For offices, it's because corporations are cheap bastards who want to save money on office space for their office drones, so they've made up a bunch of nice-sounding BS about "collaboration", when the real motivation is to greatly shrink the amount of square footage per desk because the open-plan concept lets you shove more desks together more closely, and commercial real estate is expensive. There's also a certain amount of managers liking to be able to see what their employees are doing. In reality, open-plan offices absolutely kill productivity for workers who need to concentrate on their work, such as software developers.

Deriving that the suburbs (or anywhere) are "unpleasant" from such little information is illogical and presumptuous.

Although it's just as anecdotally short-sighted as your conclusion, I have found that it is not where you are, but who you are with that majoritively affects your emotional perspective.

Edit: I have lived in the "woods" my entire life, so I have no dog in this fight. Do we seriously support shitty logic like the OP mentions? Anecdatae is not data.

> : I have lived in the "woods" my entire life, so I have no dog in this fight. Do we seriously support shitty logic like the OP mentions? Anecdatae is not data.

If you've lived in the woods, you have no anecdata to support your conclusion either. However, there have been a raft of papers and other material related to governance in the past 15 years that describe the benefits of urban living and how to make it better. Further, the historical reality is that seeing Nature as better in the West is a strictly post-1800 phenomenon, being based out of the Romantic philosophical movement ( http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness... ). Historically, nature was untamed; the proper place for man was in the cities.

Look: we have n billion people on this planet. Do you want them all up in the woods, paving it over, adding gas stations, walmarts, and so forth - polluting it with french fries, used condoms, and the detrius of modern society? Or would it be better for us to build a sustainable world only in the cities, and leave the woods to go walking in for refreshment and experience? I choose the second.

> I choose the second.

Bully for you. But not everyone wants to live in cities. If you want to, fine. Personally, I'm no fan of suburbs and prefer either a Tier 1 city or the country (or at least exurbs).

I can certainly appreciate that. It seems to me that American suburbia as such has none of the virtues of either a first-rate city or of can-see-the-stars roll-in-the-hay countryside, but the downsides of both. It's a worst-practical antipattern.

Did you miss the part where I acknowledged that relying on my anecdatae was as fallacious as your conclusion that "the suburbs are unpleasant"?

Our limited data set is not enough to make any useful conclusions. My only gripe is making decisions with obviously shitty data.

Blanket statements are ignorant. Stop being so absolutist.

I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house with a four person family. My downtown Baltimore apartment is larger.

OT: /waves from Patterson Park

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