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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

A major problem I see in the US, compared to basically anywhere else in the world I've lived, is sprawl. Seemingly every other developed country has done a much better job of having the vast majority of people live in at least medium-density areas, which has all sorts of benefits, especially a lower cost of infrastructure/public transportation, and encouraging mixed-use development with small owner-operated businesses and markets within walking distance serving day-to-day needs.

All of this helps encourage a more communal, broad-based and functioning working/middle class economy. Whereas the US tends to have a huge divide between high-density "downtown" area and then low density suburbs to exurbs, mixed with island apartment complexes and served almost solely by massive chain stores.

I remember moving back to the US from France and landed in one of those terrible cookie-cutter apartment complexes, and one day walking to the central mail box I thought to myself: "I am walking farther to get my mail in the US than I did in France to get to a grocery store, bakery, meat shop or tram line."

The nearest place I could buy any food was a gas station with processed crap and soda, 3/4 of a mile away. In France I could walk a block to a mini-market with tons of fresh vegetables, cheese and fresh-baked still-warm bread.

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I kinda agree with you. One thing that was striking to me when I started to travel throughout bits of the rest of the world is how abruptly cities just...stop. Outside of that there's farmland, forests and small villages.

In the U.S. it seems there's a slow decrease in density from a city core out dozens of miles; from tall density out to suburbs, then individual developments and maybe around then you'll get the kind of farm environment you'd find in Europe.

It's not to say that all of Europe/Asia, or all of the U.S. is the same in this way. But it seems to be a pattern. In the U.S. people try to move away from cities once they can, in Europe people seem to gravitate towards historic centers.

I think lots of it has to do with livability. In France it might be convenient to take a daily trip to the local market to get some groceries for dinner -- not much more work than going through the pantry. Density might not be too high, and the environments are pleasant, relaxing and convenient.

In the U.S. cities built before the car are better, but can still be a grind. Big swaths of NYC are hard to do daily shopping in for example. Cities built after the car are a mess wholesale and people live far from each other and spread very far out, and the things they need to live are similarly spread everywhere.

In Korea, my parents-in-law live in a proper house (not an apartment flat), but a grocery store is a 2 minute walk, and a large commercial center with pretty much every other service you might want is about 5 more. I easily triple my walking-time in Korea even on lazy do-nothing days compared to life in the U.S.

> One thing that was striking to me when I started to travel throughout bits of the rest of the world is how abruptly cities just...stop.

Seoul is a perfect example. If you take a train going out of the city you feel like you jump back in time 100 years in a matter of a few minutes.

Yeah, it's really weird, huge apartment buildings and then just greenery and farms. If you look back at the final row of buildings it looks like a realization of some sort of "the inevitable wave of progress" metaphor.

S Korea implemented whats called Green Belt decades ago. Basically large swaths of land where you basically cannot build anything. They were not designated such because of some specific species or such. They just wanted to ensure there is some unpaved land. Great planning looking back.

Some U.S. cities and counties do this, it's called open space. Thing is that it restricts the future growth of the tax base. Cities want more tax base, even to the degree they'll approve building permits when city doesn't have the funds for years or decades for things like flood management in those newly zoned areas. And then cities are also beholden to the existing voters who, by and large, are intractable in the U.S. when it comes to building high density housing, especially when it needs to go vertical.

It has a lot to do with zoning, building restrictions and the price of land.

Of course, but it's interesting that the pattern in different countries seems to be the way that it is. This is ultimately an effect of the local land governance practices and the U.S. seems fairly strange.

I don't see how your comment has any relationship to the actual article. That said, as someone who lived in central Kiev (Ukraine), Chicago, LA, San Diego, and now middle of nowhere off the grid next to Joshua Tree, I would have to say, living away from other people is the best. Maybe it's just me, but I am glad that in US I can still do this. I guess it's also possible in Europe, though there you are looked down upon for doing so and judged to be "part of the problem" by people like you.

It's definitely a good thing that one can do that if they so choose in this country, e.g. living far away from "civilization" and totally off-the-grid. But the real problem, in my opinion, is how the US made it not just possible, but actually easier, to live outside of the city after World War II. The combination of the GI Bill, developments in prefabricated housing construction, and the automobile allowed for the development of the sprawling suburbs that dominate the American residential market. But none of this would have been possible without the intimate cooperation of politicians, who used this as a means of benefiting their own careers. These politicians allowed almost every white person to own a brand new house and brand new car, with tax subsidies and kickbacks all the way down. A lot of people took this opportunity to give themselves and their families a better life, and moved out to the suburbs.

It continues today in my hometown of Philadelphia, where I still live. My friends and co-workers who are older all consistently move outside of the city, like my parents and their parents did before them, when they have children. This movement to the suburbs today is no longer caused by political intervention, but rather by the terrible school system that continues to be underfunded, which is primarily the effect of the richest Philadelphians moving outside of the city to raise their families (and pay taxes to the surrounding communities). It's no wonder there's such a major divide between people who "have" and people who "have not", or why the schools are so terrible and the transportation infrastructure is outdated by over 50 years. Perhaps if my generation chooses to stay in the city limits when we settle down and raise families, our kids won't have to deal with such dangerous and depressing environments.

On the other hand, I genuinely enjoy getting away from people and being out in the wilderness. Being off-grid sounds really interesting, and something I've always wanted to try in my life, just to see if it was feasible and comfortable. I'm not coming down on you for living your life the way you want to live it in any way. I think you would agree with me that if land around you suddenly became very valuable and apartment towers started going up, you'd feel a little unnerved right? Living off-grid, in my opinion, is not the problem. The problem is people who want to take a beautiful place and build it into a haven for human environmental destruction.

I'm a bit confused when you say "these politicians allowed almost every white person to own a brand new house and brand new car". What business is it of politicians to prohibit people from owning a new home or car? What right does anyone have to tell me what neighborhood I can live in? If you want to blame someone for sprawl, blame the politicians that subsidize the infrastructure that make it possible.

I believe the parent is referring to the fact that the GI Bill and home loans for returning WW II veterans were written in such a way to systematically discriminate against blacks in this country. The explicit prohibitions you mention obviously existed at that time in the form of segregation, but whites were also given extra advantages by the racist way these programs were implemented. The extension of these benefits overlaps precisely with growth of sprawl, as whites used the increased purchasing power afforded to them by these programs to buy homes in the emerging suburbs (essentially following the incentive). Ira Katznelson of Columbia University wrote a good history of this in his book,"When Affirmative Action was White"

It might be more accurate to say "these politicians subsidized home ownership and cars at the expense of those who don't choose or can't afford to partake".

It's hard to express in the space of a HN comment, but American society is built to encourage suburban sprawl and car dependence in almost every way imaginable.

* The mortgage interest tax deduction taxes renters to give that money to buyers

* Roads, once supposedly funded by fuel taxes, are now mostly funded by general revenue, meaning that they're an all you can buffet (so why not use all you can? Somebody else is going to, after all)

* Drivers who kill cyclists and pedestrians virtually never face any serious consequences for their actions

* Cities force amenities, jobs, and homes to be ridiculously - comically - far apart from each other through zoning. How the hell does central Dublin have tens of thousands of people, hundreds of pubs, and thousands upon thousands upon thousands of jobs all within a couple miles of each other, while people in Mountain View are pissed off their neighbors might want to put a duplex on land that they own because hey, that's too many people!

* We make it ILLEGAL to build homes and businesses without ridiculous excesses of parking, meaning you have to pay for parking whether you like it or not

* The cost of parking is rolled in to the cost of goods and services. A grocery store's land is easily 70% parking. That land costs a lot of money. Why do I have to pay for everyone else's parking when I walk to the store?

* Auto companies normalized the idea that streets are only for cars with campaigns to popularize terms like Jaywalking. I mean, think about it - for all of human civilization streets were where kids played, vendors sold, people chatted, and horses, carts, and people moved. Then the car showed up, quite literally started killing everyone in its way, and we decided everyone else can just deal with it

* Safety standards in the US tend to worry about the safety of the vehicle's occupants without regard to those struck by the vehicles. That's almost as dumb as imposing safety standards on guns based on the threat to the firearm operator.

Edit:I should have said "based solely on the threat". Obviously it's important that guns don't blow up in their user's face. And I conflate safety standards with licensing, though the comparison to cars there is fairly apt.

* Carbon emissions are likely to cause trillions of dollars in economic damage and kill millions of people through increased disease, decreased food security, and increased drought, among numerous other things. The people who will bear most of this cost are not the ones who are causing it. Gasoline should be taxed at the rate necessary to remove its carbon from the air via proven means. This would probably make it around $15 a gallon, which much to the surprise of most in the US, isn't THAT much. Very healthy societies function fine with $10/gallon fuel. In those places it is not wasted so profligately.

* There's more, but I need to get back to other stuff.

tl;dr - if you live in the US, you're going to pay the huge, tragic cost of auto dependency whether you like it or not, so you better get with it and just buy one already.

It's hard for me to argue with you, because I do agree that living in the suburbs and traveling to work every day, more then an hour each way, is simply insane. If you add the average commute of say 45min one way each day, and multiply it by the number of days you commute, it comes out to 16 days per year. That's 16 days of 24 hour per day driving. If you put it in working terms, then we must actually multiply it by 3 times since people usually work around 8 hours a day. So that's 48 working days. Basically you spend roughly 1/10th of your working time simply driving to and from work.

That said, I would much rather drive 45 min than spend 45 min on public transportation. I grew up in Kiev, a place with by all accounts very good public transport system, at least during the Soviet days when they still took care of the system. And guess what, it was awful! I also visited Boston, lived in Lake View in Chicago for 6 years without a car, and traveled through Europe and lived for 4 years in the center of downtown San Diego. And I can honestly tell you, based on my experiences, I would NEVER want to go back to using public transport. Maybe I am selfish, or maybe I just hate people, who knows, but being in the mass of humanity, at the whim of some government agency running the system, just doesn't sit with me. I know the freedom the car provides is in some ways an illusion. We still rely on public roads (most of the time) and gas stations are still a prerequisite, but I can't help breathing easier knowing that my car can take me any place I want to go and I can fix everything about it my self. It's a freedom thing, even if it's an illusion, a feeling that perhaps is hard to understand for someone from Europe (I am assuming).

I am not saying it is right or wrong, but it's inline with the mythology of America, and I like it. I do understand that diversity is important though, and there is no clear reason why there couldn't be more mixed use places like you describe. Perhaps if there were more places like Dublin (as you described, I'v never been) in US, more people could move there and be happy. All I am saying is I am happy with my car in South California, a place that's in general in love with their cars, and I am quite happy here. What can I say, different strokes for different folks.

It's interesting to compare experiences with you, actually. I actually am from northern California, and have lived in Berkeley, Sacramento, San Luis Obispo, Santa Monica, Dublin (IE), and most recently San Diego (South Park). My favourite commutes were either long bike rides or short walks, with a long BART commute somewhere in the middle. My worst commutes, by far, have been inching along car-choked freeways.

I think it's great that you have the ability to choose your lifestyle, but the whole point is that your lifestyle is being very heavily subsidized by taxpayers. I consider this unfair, and I'm sick to death of paying for it all while being told cyclists like me are the ones freeloading.

I'm aiming to return to Dublin now after a year spent very much disliking San Diego. I hated the hostility and threats I got as a cyclist. I hated how over 100 of us spoke to the two-faced Todd Gloria and the rest of SANDAG to fight for one. damn. bike lane on University ave, and he shot it down because the Hillcrest Business Association insists on taxpayer-provided parking welfare, dead cyclists be damned. I hate how people just took it for granted that they should put alcohol-heavy events in places with no access to transit (though admittedly Lyft/Uber are options, albeit expensive). I routinely witnessed drunk, or at least not sober, people hopping in their cars and driving off. I hated that I went to the Greater Golden Hill planning meetings where homeowners baldly stated that the reason NO new housing should EVER be constructed ANYWHERE in their neighborhood is because it could mean that their already $800k+ homes might not rise in value quite as fast. I hated conversations that consisted of people bitching about how horrible cyclists are because you know that some of them run lights? Nevermind the drivers who blast down 30th St. at 40+, ignore stop signs, and often are likely drunk. I hated the fact that the only halfway-livable neighborhoods in SD (South Park, Little Italy, etc.) would be ILLEGAL to build now because of parking minimums - San Diego's distinctive residential design where several cottages are clustered around a man courtyard doesn't work when every damn home is forced to have two parking spots by law. I hated the fact that if you ever suggested SD was anything less than sheer fucking heaven people took HUGE offence, as though you'd insulted them personally.

Also, I like SD beer (especially Lost Abbey), but c'mon people just saying "omg let's make a 16% ABV quintuple IPA which is basically just hop tea" isn't actually that innovative.

First, I absolutely love San Diego, so their we will not be in agreement, in guess. On the other hand, it looks like we would be buddies when it comes to beer :) But let me just address a few points.

1. It's not nice to shit on the city you live in, unless it's constructive, of course. I hate it when people come to whatever place I happen to live in and proceed to tell me that it's crap. My reaction is always: "Why the fuck are you here than?" On the other hand if someone says, hey, I have this idea that worked in other places, maybe it could work here, I usually tend to listen. Not sure how you pitched your critique.

2. Bicycle riders are hated in San Diego for a good reason. For full disclosure, for the years I live in Downtown San Diego, I used a bicycle to get around a most of the time, though I also had a car and a motorcycle. Yes, I used to run lights, split lanes, and ride on side walks. But I can honestly say that in all that time I have never been beeped at, cussed at, or hated, and I went out of my way to not inconvenience people.

Many bicycle riders in San Diego are just like me. However, there is also a group in San Diego called Critical Mass. I am sorry if you belong to that group, I hope not, but I literally want to punch every member of that group in the face, and I have at least one of them on one occasion. They organize these rides where they get 500+ people and they ride on University or down Market street for 10 min straight, running every light and blocking traffic. And I am not even talking about car traffic. This one time I was WALKING home from Hillcrest, and I was trying to cross University. These fuckers decided to stage their protest and were riding through the red light on University and 4th. I needed to cross the damn street, the pedestrian crossing light was on, and I had the audacity to try to cross while they were having their little protest. This guy ran up to me and tried to stop me. It didn't work out well for him.

On another occasion I was driving my car and I noticed a guy on a bicycle (fixy, of course) riding behind me, weaving side to side, with both hands in the air, flipping off people behind him, screaming at the top of his lungs "bikes rule, fuck you all." I stopped of a red light. The guy was too busy flipping off people behind him to notice such trivial things as red lights, and crashed straight into me. Cause me no damage, but it was hilarious :)

So, in short, I love bicycles, I ride bicycles all the time, I used to defend people who ride bicycles and get in trouble for stupid shit with the police in court, and yet I also consider the San Diego Critical Mass to be a bunch of entitled douchebags who hurt the reputation of San Diego bicycle community.

3. As for the tax payers subsidizing my love for cars, they are also subsidizing other peoples choice to procreate, and I am not bitching about that. And before you say that there is value in education, I am strong believer that school is nothing more than 12 year long obedience training for kids. It's a place where smart and intelligent little kids become obedient little consumer whores with no ability to think for them selves. Oh, hold on, I am bitching about that ;) Ok, in that case most people in SD have cars, most pay taxes, so if it is an injustice, it's a small one by comparison to the above mentioned public school situation. To be honest, I am not against public schools as a concept, just against the fact that out public schools are little factories for cogs.

In any case, I love San Diego because it's close to Mexico (where one can still by antibiotics for your dog without a fucking prescription), it has amazing weather, generally nice people, amazing beach especially the one by UCSD :), and a good mix of people. Yeah, you have to have a car or a motorcycle to enjoy the city fully, but that's SoCal for you. Different strokes for different folks, like I said. I promise not to come to Dublin and demand that they have more parking, as long as you stop trying to take my precious parking away :) After all, isn't the best kind of voting is voting with your feet? It's too bad it's so difficult legally to do that.

PS: Currently I am living off the grid (relatively speaking, still have satellite internet, obviously) near JT, and love it here too. So I am not defending SD just because I live there, it's a good city. My favorite parts are OB, MB, and Bay Park. By least favorite, PB.

I have never been to Philadelphia, so I have to wonder, is it the case that people are moving out of city into the suburbs to raise kids strictly because of the school system, or is it simply that Philadelphia isn't really all that safe and nice for the kids. I grew up in Kiev, and with all of it's flaws, I never felt unsafe playing in the streets, and my parents (extremely over protective) never felt uncomfortable sending me out to play on the streets for hours at a time completely unsupervised, even as early as age 7. We lived in what would be considered the second ring of Kiev. Not the very center, but just outside the center. I would compare it to midtown areas like Lake View in Chicago. Having lived in a few places around US, I would only be comfortable sending out my kids (future) out to play like that in areas outside the city. Well, for one, having lived in places like Chicago, there really isn't that many places in the city to really send your kids to play in the first place. There are parks, but they are spread out enough where you have to walk for blocks to get to them, unless you are lucky enough to live next to one.

Again, never been to Philadelphia, so I am picturing it to be similar to Chicago. And if that's the case, perhaps it makes a bit of sense to move out when you are ready to raise your kids. Is it so wrong to start out in the city, have your fun, and move out to the suburbs in your middle years. Of course, I do agree that the problem is the School systems being paid for by the property taxes instead of by the state. The state should collect property taxes uniformly and then combine it with other taxes and distribute it to schools based on child population in each school district.

I am also not a really huge fan of the Suburbs in general to be honest. I like the idea of small towns rather then suburbs. The difference is, a small town would, and should, have it's own economic engine, local services, and everything else to cater to your life. That way you can actually live and work in the same place, and raise your kids. The problem is consolidation of industry. So many companies, especially tech companies, concentrate around one location, forcing high density living to be the ONLY answer. What about medium density living? What about spreading the employment centers a little more evenly, allowing for lower density, but without the need necessarily to always drive to work, and if you have to drive for some (medical perhaps) reasons, it could be 5 min commute at most. That would be the type of society I would strive to build, but I am not in in the business of building societies, and I am guessing plenty of people would disagree with me.

Zoning rules in the US are one thing I will never understand. Especially since it is very anti market and the US seems to believe on a free market more than most countries. I wonder if it has to do with suburbs of American cities being much more planned than most other city areas. Planned residential areas in Europe suffer from the same problems. Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas?

The main reasons for zoning are cultural. For some reason or another, US households and governments have a greater preference for income segregation (keeping apartments away from wealthy neighborhoods) and "quiet" residential areas.

The fears are/were that the natural beauty of certain types of development would be spoiled by low-income housing, factories, and commerce. Of course, as you say, it's very any I - market. People already tend to naturally cluster based on income, level of education, desire for public goods, etc, so it shouldn't be necessary to have such restrictions.

It inevitably comes down to money, too, where minimum lot size restrictions shut out potential tenants/owners who can afford the per square foot cost in low quantities but not a large property. These restrictions are supposed to ensure a high enough tax yield per dwelling, but it's in the name of beautification.

You could say it all goes back to the car. When it suddenly became much cheaper for low income people to move out of the city center and commute from traditionally rich suburban areas, the rich got scared. Some moved further away, but governments also used zoning laws to make sure to poor stayed in the city, where they belonged.

A lot of zoning restrictions were an attempt to circumvent anti-segretation laws for schools and housing through policies such as redlining.

Bingo. A lot of the configuration is rooted in our racial history. Even sans zoning, black people have chased white people to the suburbs, back downtown again, and basically all over the map.

You can't understand American city structure without the context of race relations here.

"chased" is a strange choice of words here.

Not to be taken literally. A word chosen to parody the ridiculousness of the overall dynamic.

Hoping to evoke a Keystone Cops-on-a-map style mental image.

That's an "interesting" phrasing, but I find it less convincing than the usual "white flight" interpretation.

Flip sides of the same coin.

Didn't mean the phrasing literally, as much as in parody. That said, there is an element of upwardly mobile African Americans seeking opportunities for their children. While they are not explicitly "chasing white people", this search frequently lands them in the same suburban locales.

You also can't say its all about race either because that would be trying to deliberately mislead.

Hence the phrase "a lot" vs. "all about".

You're ignoring the lions share of zoning which is really about safety and conforming to standards. People like the money they spend to mean stability. And that means nice neighborhoods of houses don't want certain businesses because of trucks, unfamiliar traffic which equal danger to pedestrians. Some don't care about lawns or flags or color as much but it turns out the most insufferable people end up being drawn to the hoa boards.

What's interesting is that the word "safe" doesn't show up once in the "Zoning" Wikipedia article. However, words like "business interests", "income segregation", and "racial segregation" seem to show up quite a bit.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Functional_zoning_-_cat...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning#Criticism_of_zoning_law...

the word "safe" doesn't show up once in the "Zoning" Wikipedia article

Then that Wikipedia article needs to be amended.

Look at an example from the real world. This is happening right now, in Portland Oregon. http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/two-portland-glass-c...

The problem is that glass factories are "adjacent to a 100-child daycare facility, two public schools (Cleveland High School and Winterhaven K-8), and a city park."

These factories have been emitting metals such as cadmium and arsenic into the air. As you can imagine, this being Portland, everyone is quite upset. And rightly so.

You can argue about the quantities of emission that any given plant should be allowed. But you can't argue that, for any given emission level, society as a whole is much better off if these factories aren't adjacent to daycare facilities and schools.

Keeping schools and factories separated is a very legitimate "safety" goal of zoning.

A while ago someone posted a great article about Japanese zoning laws. Those make so much more sense: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

People are constantly having issues with Japan building freeways over their populated areas, going right through their rice fields. The only difference is nobody can claim racism because Japanese are homogeneous.

Zoning and building codes are usually totally separated. For example plenum cabling adherence is required in many localities for industrial, commercial and residential zones regardless of income level. As for safety you of course don't want a chemical plant next to say an elementary school, but generally that kind of zoning is not what leads to what urban planners refer to as "exclusionary zoning."

In addition to zoning, parking minimums mean that US landscape is mostly asphalt with some buildings sprinkled here and there, instead of actual city.

Really, look at satellite photos of a modern American city and it's primarily car infrastructure.

http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par...

http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/04/10/parking-craters-arent-...

Reminds me of the Treansformers comics where the Autobot computer thought vehicles were the dominant lifeform on the planet...

Planning is an American tradition since before the Constitution. Territories West of Pennsylvania were organized by surveying, the "township" was a square plot of land of fixed size (6mi square). This is reflected also in the square shaped of counties in many Western states, the squares of Chicago's layout, and the presence of many streets called "base line"

The US is in almost all things far less free market than the rhetoric would have you believe, and this is a bipartisan thing. The American right throws free markets under the bus as much as the left, but often for different reasons.

You know how Klingons are always talking about honor? But they're the ones that do all the crazy things that are decidedly less than honorable?

That's what Americans do with the free market.

> Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas?

You don't know the half of it.

Suburban sprawl was national policy during the Cold War. The idea was to spread out the population to reduce the damage a nuclear weapon could do.

They did it on purpose.

source? i was under the impression it had more to do with a convergence of car culture and white flight

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerab...

the argument i've heard is that the highway expansion made it possible to live farther away from cities, and the connection with the nuclear scare is that the highways were constructed with transporting nuclear weapons in mind

This is silly. USA is sprawled (and has been since before WW II) because the USA has far more territory (and far more territory per person) than any other temperate-region nation.

This happened because the native populations of the USA were far less technologically developed and highly-reproductive until ~18th Century when they got displaced.

I live an American city which has many of the benefits of high density living. But I am also envious of ppl who live in the burbs who don't have to put up with noisy neighbors, const traffic outside your home, high crime rate, not having to walk to train stop on below freezing days, a yard for the dog, place for kids to play ect

This is the main reason for sprawl. It's not racism, politics, or any other bs agenda. People like having a yard, a garage, quiet neighbors, small schools, etc...

As someone who grew up on 5 acres of land, knew every neighbor I had personally, and never heard a single siren wizz by, I can attest to there being some benefit to that lifestyle.

> This is the main reason for sprawl. It's not racism, politics, or any other bs agenda. People like having a yard, a garage, quiet neighbors, small schools, etc...

West Berekely has (last time I checked) a 45 ft limit on building heights. They also have deliberate dead ends to discourage driving on side streets. Piedmont forbids multi tenant buildings and has a time limit of two or three days before a citation can be issued for a resident's parked car staying in the same spot. My buddy was openly criticized by his neighbor in Piedmont for the way he managed his lawn, which was not neglected. These are absolutely issues of politics and discouraging undesirables to live elsewhere.

This is in East Bay, where we tend to consider ourselves progressive, and it's called NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). The Berkeley tactics are a blatant example of, "It's ok when we do it because we're special."

I'm unclear why you include Berkeley's traffic calming (blocking off side streets) in your litany of NIMBY issues. Discouraging people from driving on side streets is a pedestrian-and-density friendly strategy.

There absolutely are hordes of NIMBY tactics used in Berkeley politics, with nearly zero coherency, attempting to stop dense development especially downtown.

assume for the sake of argument there is a constant amount of traffic. You can spread it evenly or lump it together. So... Berkeley has a large number of extra-busy boulevards carrying traffic farther than it would ordinarily have to go?

otherwise, what is happening is traffic is being discouraged/encouraged overall which has economic consequences.

TANSTAAFL

Those "deliberate dead ends" often include throughways for bikes and pedestrians, which means Berkeley is one of the most pleasant places in the bay to get around.

you're describing a rural area, not a suburban one.

Depends.

Where I grew up (northwestern PA), there are suburbs where you can get a few acres and city water hookup. We don't consider it truly rural until you have double digit acreage and a water well.

Yes its not racism. I don't know why so many people on here assume so. They prefer to believe what a Michael Moore tells them instead of viewing cities, groups as complex as they actually are.

You don't think it's racist that white people were given the loans that let them move to the suburbs and black people were denied those same loans and thus kept in projects?

Because redlining was often an explicitly racist choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

> In the United States, redlining is the practice of denying services, either directly or through selectively raising prices, to residents of certain areas based on the racial or ethnic makeups of those areas. While some of the most famous examples of redlining regard denying financial services such as banking or insurance,[2] other services such as health care [3] or even supermarkets,[4] can be denied to residents to carry out redlining.

> During the heyday of redlining, the areas most frequently discriminated against were black inner city neighborhoods. For example, in Atlanta in the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles by investigative-reporter Bill Dedman showed that banks would often lend to lower-income whites but not to middle- or upper-income blacks.

Everything you said would make total sense to if I hadn't had black neighbors, was poor, and lived in a double wide trailer growing up.

That still doesn't change the fact that redlining is a historical fact and was institutionalized in many ways.

I just went back to Britain and was shocked by how quiet everywhere was. The only real exception being central London. Most of the places I visited have fairly similar density to the non-downtown part of SF where I now live.

I wonder what the reasons might be? Some ideas:

* Wood frame construction instead of brick - more noise let in

* More cars on the road as public transport is less viable

* Larger, louder cars and trucks

* Grid layout means more cars on residential streets

>* Wood frame construction instead of brick - more noise let in

No. With proper insulation and good windows, wood-frame houses are extremely quiet inside. And they don't collapse in earthquakes.

>* More cars on the road as public transport is less viable >* Larger, louder cars and trucks >* Grid layout means more cars on residential streets

Ding! Ding! Ding!

The cars are probably the biggest factor, plus the fact that "cars" here are frequently giant noisy pickup trucks and SUVs.

Another factor is dogs. I've lived in several places where people have big noisy dogs they leave outside to bark for hours on end. I imagine that's not a big problem in Britain. Everyone in America just loves huge, smelly, noisy dogs that bark all the time.

Higher quality road surfaces have a lot to do with it.

You don't have any access at all to any public parks where the kids can play?

In my neighborhood (which wasn't nice) the public parks offered much more than a single yard ever could.

You can have whatever you want in most places in the US. You can live in a high-density urban areas with good public transit and markets withing walking distance, you can live in suburban settings with supermarkets and strip malls, you can live in rural areas where your nearest neighbor is miles away.

Note that most experiments here with forced high-density living (the high-rise public housing most big cities built in the "urban renewal" era), were unmitigated disasters.

The US has very little truly mid-density mixed use space. We are not talking about housing projects. Here's Valparaiso Chile[1]. There are very few places in the US with that medium level of density (parts of Boston and SF definitely qualify), and they are almost universally very expensive.

https://pixabay.com/static/uploads/photo/2014/03/26/22/21/va...

That looks like a place that has all the negatives of the city (small, cramped apartment living spaces) combined with the negatives of the suburbs (too far away from things)

Not at all. Standard living arrangement was e.g. some friends who rented a 3 bedroom, maybe 1000 sq ft house for $500/month (total, plus maybe $40/m for utilities). It was under a minute walk from two little markets with fresh produce, meat, cheese and beer. A few minutes walk to multiple bars, take-out food, larger markets and restaurants. Health care is also far cheaper / fewer barriers to access.

So suddenly someone making $8/hr, 30hr a week can live a quite good quality, car-free middle-class life. That is simply impossible basically anywhere in the United States.

> So suddenly someone making $8/hr, 30hr a week can live a quite good quality, car-free middle-class life.

That's about 1.4 times the median household income in Chile. You can have a pretty good middle class life in the US at 1.4 times the median household income too.

>So suddenly someone making $8/hr, 30hr a week can live a quite good quality, car-free middle-class life. That is simply impossible basically anywhere in the United States.

I want to live in this magical under-employed paradise

Comments like those really reinforce to me the notion that Americans really do have it easy.

A Chilean from a subpar city like Valparaiso could make maybe like 4$/hr, with similar hollidays as in the US. Would never be able to pay 500$ a month for rent.

Also Valparaiso is a "touristic" city, or more accurately used to be one, so not many lucrative carreers to be had -I imagine that the second something pops out there all prices would go up, too. The reason it's medium denisty it's more likely because of the sismic activity in the area.

What?? You can't possibly believe that the us has little mid mix density. Its all over cities. You're just trying to claim that some scheme would work awesome if only we allowed it. Come off it.

Maybe it wasn't the wisest idea for the state to fund an Interstate Highways System and all it's associated infrastructure 50+ years ago. I've always wondered what the U.S. would look like had we not taken that route. I suspect the sprawl would have been massively curtailed and our lives would be much more harmonious. Who knows, maybe we'd be taking cross-country trips in hyperloops instead of automobiles?

No, having an Interstate Highway system is a good thing. I don't know if not having one would have led to a communal hippy utopia or not but if it I certainly wouldn't want to live there. :)

    I suspect the sprawl would have been massively curtailed and our lives would be much more harmonious.

Harmonious? Do you not have neighbors?

It's impossible to have a moment's peace in even a suburban environment. Between cars driving around with absurdly powerful subwoofers making their presence literally felt for a quarter-mile everywhere they go, loud truck engines and mufflers made purposefully loud, incessant backup beepers even in the middle of the night, neighbors with no respect for other people, cheaply built apartments, dogs barking...the list goes on and on. Surely ancient Rome was noisy, but they didn't have machines, and they didn't have people roaming around operating devices whose sole purpose is to make enough noise to be heard inside people's homes for hundreds of meters in every direction.

It only takes a small percentage of the population doing things like this to make everyone else miserable. And good luck legislating against it when powerful lobbies operate on behalf of companies whose existence depends on the legality of operating said equipment without restriction.

People weren't meant to be crammed together and stacked on top of each other. People need room. And if people want room, who are you to say they shouldn't be able to have it?

  People need room. And if people want room, who are you to say they shouldn't be able to have it?

I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to have room. I just don't want to subsidize it.

Highways are good for fighting wars.

And that is why its named the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

This. There's a very good reason the system looks and acts like it does.

Exhibit one: The autobahn.

> Seemingly every other developed country has done a much better job of having the vast majority of people live in at least medium-density areas

That's because the US has the most habitable land of any country. Russia, Canada and China are all technically larger but most of their population lives in their small habitable areas. The other European countries are not much larger than most US states.

This is a dubious claim - similar to the falsehood trotted out about how America can't do public transport because it's bigger than European countries.

The size of the country isn't playing in to people's commute distances. The scale of infrastructure within cities and towns does, though. If your zoning laws mean that the nearest place to buy a box of cereal is 2 miles from your house, and for that matter if density restrictions, height maximums, and parking minimums mean you have relatively few houses per acre, your city (to use the term generously) is not going to achieve anything resembling medium density.

> This is a dubious claim

There were other factors as well like car culture and white flight. Until the last decade living in cities was something anyone wealthy enough avoided because of the high crime rates.

It's starting to head that way again.

Where did you move in the US?

Try moving to the northeast; you'll find things a bit more similar to France. I used to live in New Jersey and I lived just down the street from a convenience store with a pretty decent selection of stuff, and about a half-mile from a real full-size grocery store (though it closed while I lived there; not enough business). Northern NJ is full of small "townships" that have a downtown section not far away from housing. But remember, these places were mostly built almost a century ago; the house I lived in there was built in 1930. They did things really differently back then.

I'll bet you didn't have your own yard in France.

Suburban life isn't a "major problem" for the US, it's how we want to live.

He said he moved into an apartment complex, so he probably didnt have his own yard here, either.

Also, which of these has the better yard?

Houses in Nevada: http://www.newhomeselko.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Homes...

Apartments in France: http://cdn-1.aparisguide.com/montmartre/Paris-montmarte12.jp...

* Density doesnt have to be expensive

* Density doesnt mean it cant be green and beautiful

* Conversely, a lot of suburban yards are ugly and people dont spend much time in them, they just stay in the big box in the middle and enter and leave thru the garage.

That's the front yard which is most likely substantially smaller than the back.

Also those look like cheaply made houses for people who want maximum square footage per dollar. It's easy to find smaller houses with larger yards.

I can fall in the yard in Nevada and only end up with grass stains. I can play catch with my child. Each "yard" has their merits, but a real yard to me is much more than either of those.

Of course people have their own yards. They might be smaller, and the houses might be smaller, and the roads smaller. But houses have yards literally everywhere in the UK, even London. Of course, in London the number of people who can afford a house is shrinking every day, so many have to settle for an apartment, and many of these do not have yards. But apartments with yards are available, and outside of London a house is the norm, and houses all have yards.

And yet the parent comment's experience holds, typically, for somebody living in a house with a yard in a majority of the UK.

The extraordinarily high prices commanded by homes in cities suggest the market disagrees with you.

That's more a function of a very limited amount of desirable inner city housing (because this doesn't apply "those" areas, which are very cheap) and the abundance of suburban housing.

Canada and Mexico are the same and it's the fault of urban planners and real estate developers.

well, yeah. all of that is true.

but consider this: america was built by people trying to leave europe and to a lesser extent asia, not rebuild it elsewhere. and it worked great, until it stopped working (recently). i think we'll figure it out eventually, it just won't be for a while.

see the resurgence of city centers and farmer's markets, for example. also, for what it's worth, american cities that are forced into small areas because of water or economics (sf, ny, isolated parts of LA and chicago) result in a euro-like end result.

I hate sprawl, too, but I'm missing how this relates to the article. Why would less sprawl somehow solve the problems cited?

I don't really agree with this but consider your examples are tiny countries compared to the US.

Sprawl is everywhere. Even in Japan

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