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Comment by village-idiot | Hacker News Reader

You are far too certain. 70 years ago a prognosticator wouldn't be considered insane to say "the ship sailed on cities 50 years ago, Americans live in downtown and that's not changing". These things do change, often quite quickly.

Personally, I think the Boomers are in for a big shock when they try to sell their homes for a "fair" price, and discover that Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes. Once that happens the market (and politics probably) are going to do some really freaky things.

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> Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes

I see this often. Very few people want large homes when they are either single or don't have kids.

As soon as you do have kids and they start to grow to an age where they want to play outside, having space to run, play sports, be away from traffic, have their own room, etc gets a lot higher on your priority list.

You can also get a suburban home without it being "large" and still get a lot of space to go with it. People used to get "starter homes" and then periodically trade up if/when their incomes increased or they had some equity in the home.

It seems like the biggest barrier to this today is that people want to go straight to the HGTV home. I can't tell you how many people I've known who, straight out of school, overextend to the most expensive house they can afford.

If you want more house, for your money...that usually means buying farther away from density.

You act like Millenials don't already have children, when the oldest members of that cohort are 37.

That's because it's a known trend:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/josephcoughlin/2018/06/11/mille...

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/singletons/201804/sh...

https://www.parents.com/parents-magazine/parents-perspective...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-havi...

Yeah, so that reinforces my point. Millenials aren't going to buy up those suburban homes.

Anecdote of one. 36, wife and two kids. Have a quarter acre of land, a pool, and a 2600 sq ft house in a Tier 2 city for ~$200k. Why would I ever choose higher density and city living? I would not pay more for a lower quality of life (and distance means little to me, as I work from home and my kids don't go to school).

I happily bought my suburban home instead of living close to others in a condo or a townhouse.

Buying suburban for me would replace my 30m walking commute for a 1.5h driving commute, all for a yard I wouldn't have time to use with my commute. Not a good trade for me.

I also don't have any kids and won't be having them.

Fair points. My commute is 20 minutes (long enough for one NPR podcast and a Dunkin Dounts coffee on the way), and I only go into the office a few days each month. My employer even installed an EV charger for me!

That sounds about perfect for a driving commute.

How old are you? I was quite sure that I wouldn't have kids, either, but I randomly met a nice girl who lived in the (urban) apartment upstairs from me and next thing I knew, I was 38, married, and watching my son being born. It comes at you fast and unexpected and it wasn't at all the life-ruining thing that I was sure it was when I was 28. Here in my early 40s, my only regret is not doing it earlier.

Old enough and married long enough to make me changing my mind unlikely.

FWIW, what works for you as a childless person is not super relevant to what works, in general. In the long term, earth will be filled mostly with people who have children.

Make that an anecdote of 4 - you, I, and 2 neighbors. Also, better school quality compared to the urban core.

Yep! This is the "smart for the individual, dumb for the group" type of a dilemma. It absolutely makes sense for you to do this, individually. As a society, it's rather undesirable for people to live this way. Your lifestyle is being subsidized by (mostly poorer) people living in dense areas [1], and by the externalities we all deal with: pollution from extra driving, lawn care (leaf blowers, gas powered lawn mowers, weed wackers, etc), otherwise unnecessary infrastructure (bridges, plumbing, electric lines, roads, sewage, etc.)

It doesn't make you a bad person to be taking advantage of bad policies. But cities do need to incentivize sustainable living over unsustainable suburban sprawl.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/9/5/but-rich-people...

I don't disagree. Simply price what it'll cost me to live in low density housing away from other people and I'm happy to pay. I will pay whatever it costs to not live in a dense urban core (to your points about environmental impact, we own two Teslas, have solar panels on the roof, have an electric lawnmower, and consume most of our power on site).

Sprawl is not unsustainable if you internalize the external costs, and I'll argue it'll get cheaper as mobility moves to electric vehicles and trucks, new infrastructure (with higher longevity) is built in new subdivisions instead of trying to replace 100+ year old gas, water, and sewer mains, etc.

@village-idiot: To your deleted comment, yes, my Teslas have a carbon impact during their manufacturing, but it is less than the SUV and pickup truck we used to own. It is very difficult to have no impact whatsoever on the Earth; optimize the best you can.

Yes, but fewer people are having children, which reduces the demand for suburban living.

The suburbs also have less attraction for me as a parent. In the old days you could let your kids roam a suburb freely - now you can't. So why not live in a city? You have the same restrictions, but also a lot more distractions such as free museums.

Why can't you let your kids roam in a suburb?

I suppose my kids could technically "roam" but they won't have anywhere to go that's interesting. Most kids can't even walk or bike to school in the suburbs.

Interesting is also very different for a kid. Kids get interested in bugs, the woods, forts, climbing on trees.

In the suburbs I've lived in, there are no forts, woods, or trees that you can climb, without being told off by whomever owns the property the tree is on.

Ahh. I'm lucky enough that my kids have some trails, two parks, a lake, a water park etc. within walking/biking distance to roam to. Not to mention friends' yards. And roam they do.

There’s an increasing social pressure since the 1980s to supervise children at all times because of “stranger danger”. Parents have had the cops called on them for letting their kids play in the yard.

Nothing structural has changed about letting kids roam, but the social side has.

Busybodies who call the cops when they see children without a nearby supervising adult?

Statistically, it is much safer to let your kids roam today than it was 30 years ago. Violent crimes are down quite a lot across the board.

My kids roam freely every day in our suburb. They are 6 and 3 years old. Suburbs like mine are awesome: most residential streets here have no outlets and don't have a lot of car traffic as a result. My boys have friends up and down the block and we know everybody in every house on the street. It's a fantastic way for kids to grow up.

Somehow Americans managed to have large families 100 years ago without the palatial McMansions. You don't need a large home unless you're running on the real estate investment treadmill.

The suburbs have less air and noise pollution, which is good for the children but overall it's a dull and isolated environment. Playing alone in the backyard just because that is the only place where a child can go out of the house is quite sad.

In Europe the children can go to a shared park or a playground. Strolling along a street is also safe and quite pleasant when there is little traffic. There is more space and things to do than you can have in your backyard. And more importantly, they get to play with other children.

We live in the suburbs. Our kids play with other kids at the local park all the time. But you're insane if you can't see the huge advantage to being able to just let the kids out into the backyard.

This sounds exactly like the US suburbs I've been in!

I'm a Millennial (by some definitions) with kids. I don't want "more house"; instead I want my kids to have access to things to foster their independence and growth.

I have a lot of friends, with kids, who have had to look farther out into the suburbs because of home prices and inventory. And nothing in this price range is HGTV material, believe me.

There's some more nuance here than "urban-jungle" vs "suburbia".

It is totally possible to live in a walkable area with urban amenities without being inside a dense mega-city. These used to be called "street-car" suburbs-- urban nucleations that exist just outside of the central business districts of medium-to-large cities. They're sort of like cities unto themselves. They're sometimes referred to as "main-street" communities.

Lots of people live in such places and don't realize it or they've managed to give too much away for automobile infrastructure to notice that, YES, it is possible to live such that not every trip necessarily begins and ends with an automobile in a parking space. This can be done in many places _without_ moving to NYC/SF/Chicago.

How much house one needs (if any) is a lifestyle decision that can fluctuate over time. People can adapt. It starts with demanding things like "complete streets" (https://smartgrowthamerica.org/program/national-complete-str...), walkability as a target in new developments and intelligent requirements for parking so that we don't end up with "ocean-of-asphalt" parking lots.

> Personally, I think the Boomers are in for a big shock when they try to sell their homes for a "fair" price, and discover that Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes

There are plenty of foreigner investors who'd be happy to buy their property.

I get what you’re saying but just from a legal and complexity point of view, you’re unlikely to find radical change in suburbia.

It’s just like the issues with rail — because you have so many landowners, the capital costs of transforming a single family block or subdivision to higher density is really expensive or requires eminent domain, which would be politically difficult.

You can have scenarios (especially now that it’s ok to walk away from mortgages) where prices drop. Single family isn’t going away.

> Millennials neither want nor can afford large suburban homes

Due to the economics of supply and demand, if the former clause is true then the latter clause cannot also be true.

There's a lag in between those things where both clauses can definitely be true.

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