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Comment by Bedon292 | Hacker News Reader

Its interesting. I don't have experience with a large variety of cities, but Seattle and DC I am quite familiar with. They do not feel the same to me at all. Lots of history and monuments, and there are still pretty strict height restrictions in DC. Just don't have any of that feel in Seattle. The primary commonality is the horrible traffic. But, if you go to Bellevue and Tyson's Corner they feel the same. Perhaps DC is unique? Perhaps I am biased to the region I grew up in? How do other feel DC and Seattle compare?

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Both DC and Seattle are old cities where growth has happened recently. So the new build is shaped or at least influenced by the surroundings.

It's easiest to look at new places, or rapid growth places since 1960. You need to look regional vs. "the city". The areas around Atlanta are a great example. The area around the Atlanta Braves stadium exemplifies modern development -- a shopping mall posing as a city, with Comcast, a theatre and the baseball stadium as anchor tenants. The assembly square area just north of Boston is a similar thing.

Philosophically, on one extreme you have a real "organic" city like NYC, Chicago, Seattle, etc. On the other you have a corporate campus or malls that started popping up in the 1950s and 1960s. Modern development requires much more capital, so you end up with bland campus/mall environments controlled by one big entity. Once developers scale out, you end up with more vacancies, etc as it makes business sense to leave storefronts vacant due to tax law and other factors.

Even outside of big developments, modern buildings turn out to be a hybrid. End users don't own the buildings, so the REIT/leaseholder/developer wants it to look as prestigious as the market demand as cheap as possible. So lots of cheap glass and stucco to quack like a nice building. Usually the fittings, doors, etc are garbage. Best example of this is a medical arts building. The nicer ones will have a weird sculpture, but everything else in public areas are the cheapest available materials from the carpet tile to the elevators. CFOs managing a portfolio of 2,000 buildings see value in saving $0.08/square foot on carpet tile.

I recently did a cross country drive and there are some cities that stand out, but a whole lot that blend in. There were moments where I was looking around unsure if I was in Nashville, Denver, Dallas, Phoenix, Kansas City, or Des Moines. Anywhere that has a renovated or new "hip downtown" area with wood framed 1+4 (1 floor for retail and 4 of "luxury" apartments) painted in bright Ikea colors.

The Geography of Nowhere https://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-Man-Made-L...

The industry jargon for that building style is:

“5 over 1” or “one-plus-five”: wood-framed construction, which contain apartments and is known as Type 5 in the International Building Code, over a concrete base, which usually contains retail or commercial space, or parking structures, known as Type 1.

https://www.curbed.com/2018/12/4/18125536/real-estate-modern...

Thanks for the correct terminology. It's these buildings exactly.

I also hate them because of the construction quality. No matter which city I visited, they all seemed to have the same cheap countertops, ovens, microwaves, carpet, and doors that never quite shut right.

Can't speak of DC but I feel that even culturally, large cities have more in common with each other than they do with the sparesly populated regions in their own countries.

London, Paris, NYC, Tokyo, Seoul, KL, Singapore, Cape Town, Shanghai, Buenos Aires... Same same but different.

I've visited/lived in 7/10 of those cities, and really appreciated the fact that retail and public infra look the same between cities. In that sense, there's a certain "interoperability" (much like how most airports around the world work the same). It only takes a day or so to get used to how the public transit works and how to buy things. I could drop into a new city and learn how to get around in no time.

(NY's subway was the least intuitive and took the longest to get used to -- it's complicated by inconsistencies like express trains, lack of electronic signage on multiuse platforms, doors not opening in certain cars for certain stops in lower Manhattan, etc. -- but even so there was a method behind the madness.)

However, once you venture outside the central business districts/downtowns and into the neighborhoods, things start looking very different. It's in the neighborhoods that one finds unique cultures.

Chicago for instance: the Loop is nice and all, but the character of Chicago is really in the 77 neighborhoods around the city. NYC's cultural hotspots are in boroughs like Queens.

I would say most cities retain their culture in their neighborhoods, not in their CBDs/downtowns.

Rome is an exception to the others. The centre is low-rise and packed with stunning ancient Roman buildings. Compared with, say, Milan. The suburbs are much more similar, though.

Pretty sure that's legislated in Rome. Similar in Jerusalem.

Also DC - nothing can be higher than the Washington Monument in the district.

It's funny, I was about to include Rome and went like.. Naah, maybe not.

I'm from Buenos Aires and now live in the US and travelled most of the country on wheels, and there is some truth to what you say. I feel more comfortable moving around in NYC and Boston than I do in any other medium city of the us (Miami or Jacksonville for exapmle).

What feels right is that things are not manicured down to fakeness. Everything is dirty because it gets used, some kind of yucky thing covering the whole city, noise, things that are compromise because "well you know, it's an old big city", and most importantly, people WALKING.

The people walking component is to be what changes everything. Sidewalks, store locations, transportation, the vibe of the city seems to be related to how many people are actually walking around you to go somewhere, and not because they drove there to do something.

Yeah... I just can't agree with the premise of this article

I've spent sizable chunks of my life in DC, NYC, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Barcelona, and Bangkok. These cities all feel wildly different to me.

But a few decades ago, cities like DC and Philly were much more diverse and interesting than they are now, at the cost of diminished safety and tidiness, of course.

Back in the 1980s, DC especially used to sport a warren of one-off ma and pa hole-in-the-wall shops packed into low rent enclaves found all round the city. But a couple decades back those neighborhoods were bought up by ambitious well-heeled developers and turned into chic malls of boutique shoppes that attract only yuppies. Now only homogeneous gentrification survives.

I'm from the same places. Definitely some overlaps, but IMO the big difference is the weather and the culture. All them security clearance types right next to one of the worst ghettos in the US vs. Seattle's Portlandia-light + Amazon/Boeing/Sbux/MS money all over the place. SLU is sooo much nicer than a lot of DC, save for maybe parts of Georgetown.

I think DC is the exception here. Most cities are cookie cutter buildings downtown, with the same restaurants. Out towards the suburbs its cookie cutter strip malls and the same restaurants. Oklahoma and Texas feel a little more unique since they tend to have a local set of franchises.

DC is a fairly unique american city, in part due to the height restriction and weird layout of the major arteries.

I often don't feel like I'm in an actual city when I walk around in DC. when I'm not right next to a monument or government building, it feels more like a particularly dense suburb. if someone else is driving, I might not notice that we've left silver spring and entered the city proper.

I agree that DC seems more unique to me than other cities. It's done a good job of retaining it's historical architecture almost everywhere. The Navy Yard is the only area I can think of that's switched over to the modern glass style, but even there the height restrictions result in buildings that look a bit different from the glass skyscrapers of other cities.

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