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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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