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Comment by cjf4 | Hacker News Reader

As it relates to the US, this post had interesting ideas regarding urban development, and no grasp at all of suburban development.

While urban lifestyles are becoming more fashionable in the US, growth is higher in the suburbs[1]. Whether this is because suburbs are the only option for people moving to new cities (as urban cores become "full"), or because Americans (including millennials) are much more comfortable with suburban lifestyles than they are given credit for is up for debate. But to speak as if a sharp turn towards public transit based cityscapes is America's fait accompli betrays a serious lack of understanding of the country and it's people as they currently are.

[1]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/05/24/big-cit...

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Indeed.

There is also this statement:

> It’s not even an imposition. It’s opportunity. People can live in high-quality housing with access to extensive social as well as job networks

Here's the author is saying that "high-quality" housing and social network is supposedly stronger in urban areas. With regards to housing quality, I think the urban/suburban quality is highly debatable. In terms of social network as well, I think this is probably most true in the context of "professional network". Many people move to more suburban or rural areas precisely because of feelings of alienation and lack of personal connection traditionally associated with large urban areas. This has been remarked on by social observers for well over a century.

The most ironic thing about this whole post though is that it gives no credence to how the "future" predicted by the '90s kind of won: The Internet has made many professional and communication opportunities available to people wherever they may live. While we might not live in that IBM commercial version of an anonymized future where "The Internet does not care if you are X", we do live in a world where the internet has disseminated many of the traditional benefits of cities (and "civilization") to wherever a person may live. Knowledge, education, communication, art, work: all of these are much easier to obtain outside of cities now, and that has massively factored into why our current "future" has allowed that demographic shift into the suburbs to continue.

Agreed.

The idea that a social network is better or of a higher quality simply because there are more bodies around you is a false premise. This sweeps aside the idea that people may prefer a lower density social network where each party mutually seeks another out as opposed to forced through proximity.

People in dense cities don't have social networks based on proximity, where did you get that idea? On the contrary, the big city is where you can disappear, and live almost anonymously. The alienation comes exactly from that: the lack of forced interactions with the same people pushing you into forming social connections.

>Knowledge, education, communication, art, work: all of these are much easier to obtain outside of cities now, and that has massively factored into why our current "future" has allowed that demographic shift into the suburbs to continue.

This is really underselling the simple fact that our federal dollars still heavily subsidize suburban development at the expense of urban amenities and development patterns. Most of the rapidly growing cities haven't actually built any expansions of transit capacity or coverage since they hit their growth spurts over the past few decades, and the housing supply hasn't kept up either. If it's functionally illegal to build urban capacity you're not going to get urban development. It's a much simpler story than grandiose tales about how the internet obviates the need for human interaction.

> This is really underselling the simple fact that our federal dollars still heavily subsidize suburban development at the expense of urban amenities and development patterns.

This is simply not true. Secondly, the restrictions around urban development are self-imposed at either the State or Local level. SF, NYC, Chicago, etc. have zoning and development restrictions that Houston, Atlanta, Austin do not.

Astute observers may determine for themselves why that is, but this is not a federal or subsidy issue. (Just how much has the CA never-to-be-completed train cost again?...)

> This is simply not true. Secondly, the restrictions around urban development are self-imposed at either the State or Local level.

Made possible by the unending spigot of funding for laying down asphalt. These decisions become less and less tenable when the underlying substructure goes away.

What’s more is that it’s not even accurate. There is no equivalent federal impetus behind building walkable neighborhoods and transit the way there is to subsidize the maintenance of road expansions and interchanges. 4 out of 5 federal transit dollars go to highways.

And it even goes into what we do through industrial policy. We didn’t bail out people who make trains or buses, we made the auto industry the national manufacturing priority. For God’s sake the government doesn’t even build railroads. They’re all private and leased.

> Just how much has the CA never-to-be-completed train cost again?

A fraction of DoT funding to serve way less dense population clusters. What’s more, transit projects get decided in ways that are lousy with veto points while highway funding just gets put through with little resistance.

Honest question: Have you lived in Austin?

Because there's no way it's going to survive the influx of people it's seeing, in part because it faces the exact same urban development crisis that other cities are facing and making the exact same mistakes. For every person that points to Houston or Austin as being exemplary examples, I wonder if they have actually tried living there. This is before we even start talking about the dire nature of trying to walk anywhere in these cities.

Honest answer:

I have lived in Austin for 10 years off-and-on (I had a startup where I had to drive 6 hours to a different State every 2 weeks for 3 years). I have lived there permanently for 7 years.

I have also lived in Houston, 2 other cities in Texas (including Midland), 6 other states in the U.S., and was not born or raised in the United States.

For the last 7 years, I have also worked for companies where the tech headquarters were either in NY or SF.

Where do you get the idea that Atlanta does not have zoning and development restrictions?

Certain groups/bubbles look at their friends who, like themselves, tend to be college-educated, relatively well paid, young, childless, etc. and conclude that everyone is (or at least wants to) move into urban cores. In fact, there is a general migration out of areas like the rust belt and many very rural towns to places where there are more jobs. But the migration into urban cores is mostly fairly specific demographic groups into a relatively small number of elite cities. Which is a notable change from the net outflow as recently as 20 years ago. But it's still a relatively modest shift in the scheme of things.

Mostly because we've made it such that they're the only people who can afford to move into city cores any more.

There are still a lot of people who could afford to live in an urban core but choose not to.

Wonder if Starlink and other LEO internet services will make rural living accessible to high salary remote workers. While the rural lifestyle isn't for everyone, it's the extreme that would also open the door to exurban and small town living. Add in online shopping and ever evolving streaming entertainment options, it wouldn't be surprising if many small towns and rural areas saw new migration into them.

I've known people who have remote worked in tech with just satellite. It's not ideal/cheap and there are definitely compromises especially as video becomes more and more part of everything. So it can be done today, albeit with compromises.

5G could potentially improve the situation as well.

A few years ago I saw a video on YouTube of a developer at Microsoft who lived in a yurt in rural Montana or Idaho. Seemed to work pretty well for him and his girlfriend. Though they never said it, I got the feeling that they did sometimes go into town for a bandwidth run now and then, probably for large uploads.

If I'm not mistaken 5G is line of sight. If so, might be more useful in flat areas than up in the mountains though repeaters could make that work.

Certainly none of today's alternatives to broadband are great. And I don't really know to what degree and under what circumstances 5G will help.

But, yeah, it can be done even in the context of a lot of tech jobs. It does require making compromises though. Probably little or no streaming video, for example.

I couldn't even imagine. My family upgraded from dialup to satellite around 2006 as a luxury, and the latency was basically unworkable for anything remotely realtime.

Even for a reasonably decent plan, the caps were also ridiculous as well. I could realistically watch maybe 45 minutes of YouTube per month.

I have a rural house with satellite internet. I work from there several weeks a year to stretch my time away from the hell that is the Bay Area. It works fine as long as all I need is access to the git server, despite the fact that I usually blow through the bandwidth soft cap within a few days at most. I usually take at least two trips into town (7 miles each way, pop. 700) to get cell service for conference calls over the course of a week.

There's rural and super rural. I live in the UK, 15km from the nearest big town, 90km from london, surrounded by fields and woods, but 2km from a rail station and with 300mbps fttp. I can work just as effectively as colleagues in London with folks in India, China and the USA... My point is that extreme changes to infrastructure aren't needed for cities to become much more distributed and for urban movement to become much reduced and changed in pattern.

Yeah, as someone who grew up on 12 acres off a dirt road -- in the comparitively populated SE corner of Michigan and still within the suburban area of a small city as well -- I think a lot of the more Eurasian crowd have a hard time understanding the true scope of situations like North American rural communities.

Cable didn't even come up to our street, and this is ~4mi from the local town -- pretty far from 'super rural' in local terms.

My dad has a property in Maine, likewise just a few miles from the nearest small (~10,000 population) city. He's the last house on a dirt road that can still get ~1Mbit DSL and cell reception is really marginal too. And that's barely rural by Maine standards.

The economics of DSL are driven by the physics and physics is harsh. Basically the signal to noise for high frequencies drops through the floor after 2km and for low frequencies after 10km... with good copper and lots of clever DSP (that's long range adsl btw) The good news is that I think MIMO will make a lot of properties more economic to serve with radio in the next few years.

I'm about the same distance from Boston in a fairly rural town in the middle of about 3 houses on 100 acres. And that's not especially unusual for this area. So I'm just a little over an hour from the city and am even near a commuter rail line.

I think a lot of people imagine larger cities and their immediate suburbs on one hand and rural Wyoming on the other. There are plenty of places--many with pretty affordable housing--that are comfortably within the radius of major cities (in terms of jobs, culture, amenities, etc.) but which are not urban living.

Not sure why this is being down voted. In all the discussions about cars and congestion I always think in the future so many more people will just work remotely. That seems like the best fix. I'd love to live rural and have access to high speed internet and consumer goods. Only issue I have with rural life is access to good schools and doctors for my kids.

>I always think in the future so many more people will just work remotely

People have been saying this for over a decade now (probably much longer, but that's when I started paying attention) and I've yet to see any evidence at all that it's true. As the owner of a rural house where my only internet option is satellite, I'd love for it to be true, but I still rent and apartment in the Bay Area where I live most of the time because that's where my employer wants me to be.

It varies a lot by company and other factors but both numbers I've seen and anecdotally the numbers are up in the software industry. More and more people I know who switch companies end up just remotely if they weren't already--including at companies that weren't historically remote-friendly.

Of course, lots of employers aren't really remote friendly and others are probably better described as being OK with some WFH but not as much 100% remote. (I'm pretty much all-remote at this point but I'm technically attached to an office even if I don't have a desk there any longer.)

Interesting. My last two jobs (including my current) working from home is very common. We have several 100% remotes and others work from home 2-3 days a week. My friend's company is nothing but remotes (no home office). People have been saying this for a decade but just recently the infrastructure is there. Today's it's so easy to jump on Skype or Google Chat and video conference with people. 10 years ago we weren't quit there.

>While urban lifestyles are becoming more fashionable in the US, growth is higher in the suburbs

You would really need to conduct surveys questioning where people want to live versus where they do live before it's possible to understand current state and likely future trends. I have a suspicion that most people would rather live in a different place, but have had to compromise because the place they have in mind doesn't exist. Not that it couldn't exist, just that today it doesn't because <circumstances>.

From just observing people's personal anecdotes about where they'd like to live, I've noticed a few common situations:

- Folks trying to find a way to host a growing family in a dense urban setting (examples in this thread). They often end up in suburbia, and endure soul-sucking commutes.

- Young single high-earning professionals that want to live in a remote/rural/setting. They often just stay in the city while pining for the fjords as a kind of long-term early retirement plan.

- Retirees that want to live in dense urban places with great public transport and medical facilities. They're simply priced out of this for the most part.

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