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Comment by dashundchen | Hacker News Reader

That's the problem. How does a small Midwestern city take 40 minutes to drive halfway across, except for utterly horrible planning and land use? Why is a single city 40 miles wide?

It got this way through 60 years of low density sprawl. Sprawling further and asking people to drive longer and longer distances is not a viable solution - socially, environmentally or fiscally.

We need to remove the barriers and even encourage mid-scale density on all levels of government. We need to be thinking of creative transit, design and tech solutions to retrofit our cities for something besides single passenger cars because our cities are choking on them.

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In forty minutes you can cross Berlin. It boggles my mind that people want to live in places where you have to ride a car for twenty minutes just to get groceries.

You'd be surprised. I bet my socks that half of the people who make these arguments simply haven't lived in a world where they can exist without a car. They just can't imagine how it is possible because they are so embedded in a reality where cars are vital to life and it's hard to imagine outside of it.

not every one can afford or want to live in central London or NYC

Rents in Berlin, even after a decade of increases that everyone is concerned about, are roughly equivalent to rents in Buffalo, not Manhattan.

It's very odd to think that high rents is some inherent fact of city life.

Why is that though? I just googled it and this article seems to think it's a result of bad economic times. Here's the last paragraph

>It goes more or less without saying, then, that with an economy stuck in such a unique rut for so long, the housing prices remained similarly uniquely low as well. There was little incentive to build and invest in a city that wasn’t growing economically. Which is precisely what has helped make it so attractive to many, and such fertile ground for investors now that the economy is finally beginning to recover.

https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/the-history-behind-berlins-...

The problem in my city is that in the city there is no middle, there's expensive apartments/townhouses and there's section 8. What I'm most interested in is how do we get mid-priced living introduced into urban areas?

I am very interested in this problem as well and have been doing some digging. The surface level answer from some real estate people in NY is that the ROI from condos is just better than any mid-priced living.

1. I don't know if that's actually true 2. Even if it is, it might be possible to change architectural and design constraints to achieve desired unit economics 3. If it's straight up not possible to build mid-priced units with the same return, then existing condo prices don't sufficiently take into account externalities and we should use local legislation to bump their costs up and take them into account.

Rents are heavily regulated in Germany's largest cities. They would be high but for the government's involvement.

Doesn't price fixing just result in new rentals being impossible to find, because demand at the fixed price exceeds supply?

If your population is growing, sure.

This is a good example of the mindset that the parent poster opposes. Why do you take it for granted that, unless you live in a mind-bogglingly dense and expensive city, a car is the only way to get around? There are plenty of examples of small towns with adequate density to get by with using a car infrequently, at most--there are even some in North America, although it's depressingly rare. Why can't we demand better from our local governments?

Having a car (I don't btw) allows you a lot off flexibility both in terms of work and in your social life.

Not in New York it don't.

NYC and places like it eg London at our outliers most smaller towns and cities don't have good public transport that runs 24/7

You can live in a 2000-5000 inhabitants town and not need a car.

so that's a flipping village and most villages / hamlets wont have any local jobs

I live in a town of 3000 in Iowa, and I need a car. Sure, I can walk to work (and often do in the summer) because it's only a mile away, but we get some pretty nasty winters here and I'm certainly not going to walk when it's -10f and there's two feet of snow with ice on the roads and sidewalks.

On top of that, we still need to drive to another town 17 miles away to get groceries every couple of weeks. We need to drive to another town if we want to eat somewhere that isn't Subway or Pizza Hut. We need to drive to another town if we want to see a movie. We need to drive to another town if we want to see family.

Despite living in a very small town, I still need a car and won't be giving mine up any time soon.

Edit: (All of those things suck, but I still love where I live. Moving to a city isn't something I'm interested in.)

The GP says you can, not that municipalities are inherently designed that way.

I'm thinking of rural towns and hamlets outside of larger cities in Germany and other European countries that have their own bakeries, grocers, local schools etc with housing congregated nearby. The centralization also provides easier public transit to cities, towns and employment centers nearby. Many people still live in relatively large houses with gardens and yards.

A lot of this is a historical development pattern from the intersection of transportation routes. In fact, much of rural American used to develop the same way - many pre-interstate rural towns are likely to have a semblance of downtown at a crossroads or former rail depot, even if it's vestigal or abandoned today.

Even this centralized low-density development is more accessible to the carless, preserves more agricultural and natural space, makes it cheaper and more efficient for municipalities to provide services than 50 different isolated subdivisions spread in a 25 sq mi area.

Or like Annapolis, MD. Or New Rochelle, NY. You can get a lovely house in those cities within walking distance of downtown for less than what houses cost in the mega-sprawl Bay Area suburbs.

You can have a house in Annapolis that is a 3 mile round trip walk from the nearest grocery store. I invite you to do that walk with asthma in -5C weather with a strong wind while carrying a weeks worth of groceries.

You can, but you don't have to. The zoning codes are such that you can choose to live a less car dependent lifestyle even if you're not able to afford a place like Central London or NYC. But insane zoning laws take away that option in many parts of the country.

I grew up in Vienna, VA, where you needed a car even if you lived around the Metro station, because the town decided to surround it with low-density residential instead of high-density mixed residential/retail: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Vienna%2FFairfax-GMU+Stati.... In contrast, I lived in a relatively affordable New York suburb,[1] where the Metro North station was surrounded by a mix of retail and residential: https://www.google.com/maps/place/New+Rochelle,+NY/@40.90929.... My wife and I had a car, and a baby, and we used the car only once a month because even the Costco was right next to a nearby Metro North stop.

People used to post-WWII suburbs really fail to realize how much government policy distorts peoples' choices. My house in Annapolis (which is at the edge of rural Anne Arundel county) is in a neighborhood where you can walk to a park, a bar, and two quickie marts. The subdivision was built about the same time as Vienna (in the car era), but back then the county had much smaller minimum lot sizes, less than a third the current minimum lot size in the county. The streets are barely wide enough for one car to drive through. That's how people choose to live when you don't force development into a sprawling wasteland model.

[1] It wasn't substantially more expensive than Vienna, despite being within a 30 minute train ride of Midtown Manhattan.

Even if you can technically walk to something, a person can have a disability such that it is impossible for them to do that. Encouraging them to ditch their car is stupid without giving them an alternative. A grocery delivery service really isn't an alternative because they suck: do you want squished and spoiled vegetables and broken eggs? It's basically only good for dry and pre-packaged frozen foods. So now instead of driving once a week to go to the store and eat healthy foods, we microwave the TV dinners that the Amazon drone flys to us every day. Hooray?

Who is saying we force disabled people to give up their cars? We are talking about getting rid of stupid zoning laws that preclude everyone else from choosing less car-dependent cities.

The key thing is to consider transportation costs in addition to housing costs. When you do this the balance shifts, and walkable neighbourhoods with high housing prices suddenly become a lot more affordable.

They studied this in Metro Vancouver and found that the "expensive" downtown core was actually more affordable than the outer suburbs where you had to use a car for all transportation needs.

That idea never even occured to me. In most of europe, there are small supermarkets everywhere. For all but the smallest villages, there is a supermarket within walking distance.

Here, "walking distance" goes about to the end of the subdivision. Which is nothing but houses. The closest tiny convenience store is something like 2 miles further. The closest proper grocery store is almost twice that.

Not everyone lives in a city (or even town).

For example my parents live in a mini-subdivision of a dozen or so houses about 5 miles outside the nearest city limits. The walmart is on the way out of the other side of town.

I don't think the majority of all American car miles stem from the "not everyones".

Poor city planning that makes cars all but essential is the problem, not the dozen houses way out in the sticks. In Germany even towns with a population of like 30k have at least basic necessities within cycling distance, and Germany is way worse than, say, the Netherlands. I'm pretty sure that the majority of the population lives in towns that are larger than that.

In exchange for this car ride, you can have a bedroom that's larger than an entire New York City apartment. You can have a garden, grow your own food, grow your own flowers - heck, if there aren't too many NIMBY ordinances you can have your own chickens. You can have an apiary. You can get a grill, install a picnic table and dine outside. You can have kids - and let your kids outside in the back yard to run around like maniacs as Nature intended, climb trees, play Frisbee or baseball right there in the yard, play with the dog... or they can ride their bikes around on the quiet side streets.

I favor medium-density inner Brooklyn myself, but I grew up in the suburbs, with a few dozen acres of woods behind the houses, and I'm glad I did. Suburbs are demonstrably awesome too.

This is a really bad exchange though. You cannot walk in your neighbourhood and your kids get run down by traffic.

Back yard? That does not exist in the US. You get a tiny garden which is not enough.

In Europe we have the various sport fields you can reach on foot or via light rail, not even going into a car. Therefore your kids do not have to drive at age 12.

You can reach work via train, I know people who ride in excess of 200 km daily.

Heck, schools and universities are reachable via such transit.

We have big parks in the cities.

I am not talking cities the density of Hong Kong either. NY is not quite walkable either, it lacks walkability due to grid street design with no accommodations for crossing them easily and safely.

I'm not sure what you are saying. Are you saying there are no backyards in American or that the suburban neighborhoods are not safe to walk?

Parks in big cities are completely different from large yards. Parks are nice, but large yards mean you can have gardens, grow food, or have lots of friends and family visit.

Large back yards that you can play ball or throw a frisbee in are only for the upper middle class and semi-rural areas. The more typical cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood has houses that are almost as wide as the lot they sit on and back yards that are only about 20' deep with no privacy from the neighbors. You basically have to choose between having the grill and picnic table, or the garden and swing set. And you can only let your young kids play in the street if you live at the end of a cul-de-sac. I'd much rather put my kids in a neighborhood where there will be more than two or three other families with kids in close walking distance, and a neighborhood park for them to play in.

I strongly disagree. You describe one kind of neighborhood.

You are only correct if "semi-rural" to you means "suburban".

Granted that new neighborhoods seem to be built with less care for yards, but growing up in suburban Texas in a subdivision from the '60s, we all had decent yards to play in, with room for trees, gardens, and sometimes even large swimming pools.

I live in an urban area now, and love it. But people need to open their minds and stop crapping on other peoples' lifestyles.

People saying "I just can't /imagine/ living 30 minutes from the citycenter" are as close minded as those who can't /imagine/ living in a walkable area with shops and food nearby.

Every single one of your items about Europe applies to New York.

You should go to Berlin, the UK or many other european cities.

You see kids playing around in city parks pretty safely, and people who want the suburbs live in villages on commuter rail about 30+ minutes away. They actually have apartments in the city core that are 2000sqft and can have 3 large bedrooms with a big living room and hallway with plenty of sunlight. The interior of the apartment buildings create a court yard with a little playground and you often see kids there, playing together. They are very pleasant, and all of these people don't need to have a car.

> You can have kids - and let your kids outside in the back yard to run around

Interestingly, many studies suggest that urban children are significantly more free range than suburban these days. (does not isolate for race/social class)

You can have a bedroom that's larger than an entire NYC apartment and an ample garden in the walkable inner neighborhoods of small midwestern cities, too.

My parents live in an inner streetcar suburb of Milwaukee, have plenty of living and gardening space, and are a shorter walk to a movie theater than I am in Brooklyn.

And in all the places I lived in Canada, you'll have zoning laws that disallow grocery stores in housing developments. Even crazier: zoning laws that disallow bars in housing developments which means that you must drink and drive if you want to go to the bar and drink.

Here in Japan, 25 km gets me to the middle of the nearest big city (of about 700K people) from where I live. I have to go through 4 towns on the way. I live in a town of about 20K people and I can walk to 3 different grocery stores and any number of drinking establishments. North America seems so incredibly inconvenient to me these days.

> which means that you must drink and drive if you want to go to the bar and drink

Taxis? Transit?

The state of Texas is twice as big as Germany.

Or, you know, people like to live in houses with a yard, where there might be wild animals living around or a forest somewhere within an hour's drive, and prefer that over cramped hovels.

Ironically if everyone lives in low density sprawl for nature, it destroys the same habitat where those wild animals once lived, or where that forest was, and it makes actual nature harder to access for anyone who can't afford or travel to the latest round of exurbia.

Whereas if our cities were denser, there'd be more open space left, that is easier to access, by potentially more people. Density != cramped hovel. And density doesn't mean everyone lives in a highrise. There's points between single family homes on quarter acres and 60 story skyscrapers.

Edit: I highly encourage you to checkout some examples of cities that saw most of their growth pre-auto:

Here's my personal favorite - Leipzig Germany, metro population around 1 million: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Leipzig,+Germany/

A wide range of uses, densities, housing prices and modes of transportation (dedicated bike infrastructure, transit, and yes even cars). But the compact development area can leave so much more room for green space, nature preserves, public parks, agriculture, watershed protection. There's even many buildings that have yards - it's just everyone doesn't get their own acre.

Leipzig was heavily bombed in the war so I guess that helped with rebuilding the infrastructure to make room for alternative transportation.

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

The way forward for the midwest is clear, then.

Leipzig was rebuilt with essentially the same layout as before the war. If anything, additional space was used for larger roads.

Here is a video comparing a tram ride through Leipzig in 1992 with one in 1931:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX4wGWzWqBk

I can't say a lot about Leipzig but many german cities were rebuild far more car-centric then they were before. Public transportation, small streets and biking seemed outdated back then. A lot of medieval building were destroyed after 1945 to make room for cars. There's a good german (not subtitled) documentation about this topic [1].

The Nazis had the same attitude before. Cities had to be car-centric, that's why they moved on with the Autobahn and created Volkswagen. The obligation to use bike lanes (Radwegebenutzungspflicht) was issued under the Nazi regime. It was part of the fascist mindset that cities are made of concrete (instead of children playing in parks).

[1] http://www.ardmediathek.de/tv/Reportage-Dokumentation/Unsere...

Leipzig is a small city, especially metro area wise compared to the US's large cities.

As far as density, people per square kilometer.

10,831 NYC

5,344 Boston

4,447 Chicago

3,198 LA

1,985 Detroit

1,900 Leipzig

1,414 Houston

I'm on mobile so unfortunately I have no easy way to provide comparisons. But living in a rust belt city and being familiar with the difference in development patterns, I suspect those numbers are an artifact of the extent of city limits. I'd be happy to look later.

Ie Leipzigs boundary for that number includes the city and undeveloped/agricultural/rural areas in the surrounding metro, where Detroit's number is the developed city limits, excluding the suburbs, exurbs and agricultural places in the metro.

I don't mean to get too bogged down in this point too much. I wanted to point out there are plenty of lessons we can learn from pre-auto cities to make our future more livable.

Yes, I provided you the numbers for city's proper in all cases.

No, Leipzig's boundary for that number does not include their larger Urban Area. Looking at the metropolitan area population of those cities Leipzig is 843,619 while Detroit, the rust belt city you mention, is over 4 million according to OECD.

http://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/all.pdf

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Leipzig,+Germany/@51.32782...

If you compare the official city limits with the satellite view you will see the developed area containing most of the population is much smaller than the city limits, and you might understand what I am getting at. I think the appropriate measure here would be the weighted density, closer to representing the average density a person there would be surrounded by.

Then why is it easy to live without a car in Leipzig, but (as I learned somewhere else in this thread), impossible in Houston? Density is about the same.

Because even in mid-low density European towns and cities the diversity of land use is greater. Shops, pubs, and parks are permitted to be near housing, as opposed to the US which makes it illegal to have a shop near your house in much of the country.

If you live in Berlin, or most other large cities in Europe, there is wildlife and forest within 1 hours drive.

Try visiting A nordic city for vacation. You will realize dense city and forests can literally be within walking distance - not one hour drive away.

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