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Comment by Chiba-City | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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]

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