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I feel like if all work was suddenly remote, city residency would drop at least 50% in a week. I hope remote eventually becomes the norm. There are probably a lot more like me out there who even in their 20s only work in a metro area solely out of necessity. I have a hard time imagining that all these people I see on HN pining for city living and making suburbs out to be worse than prison are more than a vocal minority.

> I feel like if all work was suddenly remote, city residency would drop at least 50% in a week. I hope remote eventually becomes the norm.

Could not disagree more. (Young) people move to cities for vibrancy, culture, and to be around each other.

Most people aren't young. Raising children in a city is a nightmare.

Speak for yourself. Raising children in the burbs is a nightmare.

Speak for yourself. Raising children is a nightmare.

(Tho worth it)

I'm not sure I can envision a scenario where raising children in a suburb is worse than trying to do so in a city. Mind explaining?

They feel entitled to roam around in the woods without adult supervision, they come home muddy, they don't learn that you have to pay for everything, and their self-learned knowledge of manipulating the physical/natural world is scary and disempowering to tech weenie parents.

Children are humans and are social creatures just as much as adult humans are... if not even more so. It is helpful to be around things that humans enjoy culturally, whether that is museums, sports stadiums, restaurants, parks and playgrounds, or just people in general. Population centers allow for critical mass of a lot of things that children enjoy that don’t exist elsewhere (one example in my case is a boys gymnastics competitive team, which is nearly impossible to find outside of cities).

Perhaps most importantly my children spend almost zero time in cars, and will be afforded a freedom that I never had as a suburbanite child...the freedom to go where they want without the explicit accommodation of an adult with a drivers license. It’s also helpful for kids to be afraid of things that can likely hurt them, like cars, and not afraid of things that aren’t likely to hurt them, like black people, gay people, foreign languages, or atheists.

This is why I moved back to the Netherlands after years in California. My children and I can bicycle most everywhere (schools, supermarkets, sports) and there is an excellent public transportation grid.

The freedom afforded to teenagers by being able to safely bicycle on dedicated bike paths is hard to beat.

I realize this will probably go unseen, but as someone who was raised in the middle of nowhere by parents who refused to drive me anywhere to socialize with other kids my age... know that you're doing your children a massive favor. I wish my parents had a tenth your good sense.

What do you mean by vibrancy? Are grids of apartment buildings, high rises, and pigeons supposed to be more vibrant than apple orchards, nice houses, and cardinals? Yeah, cities section off squares to be parks sometimes, but it's not the same.

And what's culture? Saying somewhere doesn't have culture makes as much sense as saying you don't have an accent. Where I grew up there's locally made apple cider and other apple products, good farmer's markets, locally butchered meat, the colleges have all the "arts" stuff going on that you'd want if you're into that, and there are great authentic Mexican restaurants everywhere.

Being around people as a mandatory part of the living space isn't really for me.

Maybe I'm just out of touch with the other "young people" my age but I've been to a few cities and I can't say I was exactly "captivated."

I don't agree. Super dense cities like New York might fall out of favor, but smaller cities will still be attractive. Being able to walk to wherever you want to go is very nice. In the suburbs you have to drive 10 minutes to get anywhere, which is quite annoying. Maybe that will change once self driving cars become the norm though.

Whenever I've been to baltimore, it took around 10 minutes just walking this distance, adding in waiting at road crossings: https://i.imgur.com/Vxnt9cq.png

If you want to go to an actual grocery store and you live in a city you're going to spend more than 10 minutes walking. Plus you won't even have access to Walmart, Costco, etc.

In the 6 apartments I’ve lived in in the 5 years I’ve lived in Seattle, I’ve never had fewer than 3 grocery stores within a 10 minute walk.

Well I lived in SF and in NYC presently. Unless you count corner stores (and I don't, because they are exorbinantly expensive) 10 minutes is better than average for those two cities.

I live in a city and have 2 full-fledged grocery stores + approx 70 bodegas and restaurants within a 10 minute walk. Also have a Target + Best Buy.

Im pretty sure it's the opposite direction. The economies of scale make it so cities have above and beyond more amenities than the suburbs ever could. Be it food, culture, access to jobs/networks, or even just the dating pool working remotely in a huge house in the middle of nowhere really can't provide a substitution.

Living isolated far away from civilization might be appealing to some, but I'd put money on the idea you're the minority. Growing up in the suburbs was a black mark on a generation and I think most of us aren't looking to subject our children to that. Aside from the space (which I'll never understand; who wants to have more shit to clean and maintain) I can't see any benefit to leaving the city.

>I can't see any benefit to leaving the city.

There's less crime, driving is viable (what do you do if you want to bring home a large item from a store in a city?), your surroundings are actually nice to look at, it's quieter, establishments aren't crowded, some people don't like walking all day, you can play loud music or whatever in your home without a noise complaint if you don't live right next to anyone, and privacy in your yard, for a few examples.

What's special about city food? That it's more expensive? Calling small towns "away from civilization" is so disingenuous that it seems intentional. I've gone over this in another response, but do you really believe there isn't nice food and events out there?

As a base line, this is my mental model for suburban living: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence,_South_Carolina

Less crime in absolute maybe, but it's a toss up as to crime per-captia. Driving being viable is just a twisted way of saying driving is required; a strong con for many people including myself (and eats away at all of those real estate savings when you've got car payments and insurance). You just buy online and ship for most large items; rent a van for everything else. Lack of walking is another con; there's a reason the south sports 40% obesity rates.

The special thing about "city food" is the diversity. Small populations can't support a plurality of niche restaurants and vendors.

Being "away from civilization" I'll admit is subjective, but I don't think at all disingenuous. In the city we have touring bands, brand new stage productions, top of the line art museums, screenings of foreign films, a thriving music scene, and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to meet and learn from people from all over the world. Giving that up for an HOA and yard work seems like a raw deal.

I disagree entirely. Every minute wasted in transit is wasted. I was lucky to make the most of a private school scholarship (Baltimore) and received overlapping theater, voice, writing, instrumental and athletic training alongside academic training and "gifted" early science training provided by state government. From city centers like Boston and DC I was exposed to the world many Americans only know through pictures or books.

Nothing is more damaging to adults or children than lives in remote isolation with delusions of Swiss Family Robinson self-sufficiency on government road, school and mortgage subsidies. We must stop claiming any normalcy to that post-Eisenhower makeshift accounting fiction. Lives in remote isolation are one of the reasons business formation is so low in the United States. Shyness is never any value. Shy people are takers.

Wow, quite the extreme take there, and a strawman argument at that. I don't know why you think that the alternative to not living in a city is a life "in remote isolation with delusions of Swiss Family Robinson self-sufficiency". The original comment even specifically referred to suburbs.

Transit may be wasted time, but for the vast majority of people, that transit consists almost entirely of going to and from work. Living in smaller cities or suburbs means that your transit time for everything outside of work will be roughly the same as someone living in a big city. So, if remote work were to be the norm, the wasted transit time is eliminated. I for one agree. The idea that you and others seem to believe in where anything outside a major city is an apocalyptic hellscape that is "more damaging to adults or children" than anything else is not just melodramatic, its pure fiction, and like the OP, is a viewpoint I imagine is only held by a (very) vocal minority.

That was poetically agressive. I recommend checking out Strong Towns. Across our shifting political and geographic spectrum folks are looking at 2 phenomena that landed Americans in peculiar distributions. First, Eisenhower era highway building. Even early suburbanization was under panic defense logistics influence. Second was supersizing suburbia with white flight overlapping deindustrialization. We need not moralize to calculate the engineering of that with calculable overlapping downstream costs and grim actuarial funding pictures. Those narratives overlap generations kicked off farms into those cities not long ago.

North Americans who buy homes move every 7 years on average. We have troubles building value in places where people stay over generations to enjoy it. Even educators are learning that "tickets out" is too abstract a target to motivate remote kids to study in schools. We inherited our little patches of planet and histories, but we should not normalize our current widespread displacements. Folks are migrating to specific places for different reasons we can examine on maps. Other folks in tons of places have troubles making a go of where they are for reasons we understand and cannot fix. [Edit: grammar]

Or we could remove housing supply restrictions

A place that has high-paying jobs will have residents out-bidding each other, driving up the prices of the housing market

Not necessarily; some cities simply build enough to keep a lid on housing prices: https://www.vox.com/cards/affordable-housing-explained/. Many Texas cities do this and even Chicago does to some extent. Tokyo also does this: https://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-....

We have the technology to build a lot of housing units on a given parcel of land, if doing so is legal.

Yes especially in the BA. We could build twice as much housing and it wouldn't be enough.

I don’t want to come across as too skeptical since increased supply will certainly apply downward price pressure. But, I’ve been seeing this argument so often recently that I need to question it. Can you provide contrasting examples of places of similar high population growth where the deregulated ones’ home prices stayed substantially lower than the regulated ones?

I ask this because I believe that demand is the primary influencer of home prices, not supply. I’m open-minded though. So, to challenge my assumptions, I even briefly looked at several of the fastest growing cities of the past couple years (with several in Texas). However, even areas that I assumed had lower regulation and less zoning still had substantial annual price increases.

To me, the only way that you can reduce housing costs is to decrease demand.

That's why I'm trying to get to work remotely. Right now I live in Milan, but I'm planning to move to Palermo where housing costs a fifth, more or less