Hacker News Reader

Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

He argues as if living on the outskirts is mostly about affording a yard that you don't really need, but there's so much more benefit than that for kids living in a rural area.

When I was a preteen in the late 60s and early 70s I got to explore and be independent in a way that is rare today, though I lived in a vast densely populated suburb. At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction. Today that would be an invitation to have your children seized by child protective services.

It's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the night sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city.

Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans.

View on HN

Growing up in NYC I walked home alone, took the subway to meet friends, walked around all of manhattan a million times, etc. Most of that started around age 13-14, and as a preteen I would have my slightly older sister along with me.

At 15 I started to bike everywhere. I took my bike to the Hudson river path and I could get anywhere I wanted in 10-20 minutes - visiting a friend who lived downtown, or head up to Central Park to meet up and bike around with others, try out some diners uptown, etc.

At 16 my friends and I would walk around the east side, walking for miles in the middle of the night.

I don't think it was negligent at all, but I felt extremely independent because I could get anywhere as a kid without needing a car. I've always found that growing up in a city that felt safe and had great public transportation made me extremely independent at an early age.

For even more context to this: when you're a child in NYC, the public school system gives you a free MetroCard as soon as you start elementary school. They're meant to be for commuting, but they have a small enough eligibility radius and extra rides to make them generally useful. Once I got one (I was maybe 8 or 9) I was more or less independent, as were all of my childhood friends.

This is in stark contrast to people I befriended in college, who were (1) largely reliant on their parents for socialization and exploration until they were old enough to drive, and (2) incapable of handling the general mishegass that happens in urban environments without me as their tour guide. This doesn't make them bad people or dependent in some profoundly handicapping way; it just goes to show that a frontiersman's notion of "independence" is perhaps not the most interesting one in 2020.

Oh hell yeah. Those cards were like little slices of plastic magic. Every once in a while someone would lose one, or claim to lose it, and you could snag the extra and get yourself anywhere from an extra 3 to 6 rides, and with free transfers that basically meant you could be anywhere any time for free.

I went to school upstate and it was impossible to get around without a car. Everyone was totally reliant on them, and I guess as kids you were always beholden to whoever was licensed/ had a car. To me that's insane, we could get anywhere for free, whenever.

Yep! I seem to recall the MetroCards claiming to only have three daily rides on them, but actually working at least four or five times (presumably as a margin of error/safety for lost kids). I used mine more than once to ditch school and take the D out to Coney Island :-)

Two of my kids got to see the before/after of this sort of thing when we took them to Berlin for a semester (I was guest lecturing at the TU). Since they had to take the S/U-Bahn to get to school, we got them monthly passes that let them go anywhere, anytime "for free". For a 14 and 17 year old, I think it seemed like heaven. The older one would go to nightclubs and come home at 03:00 and we weren't worried about drunk driving etc. The younger one could explore the whole city (hello, Dolores Burritos!) with her friends, or go to Idea to get art supplies, without us.

Getting back to Philadelphia where everything collapsed back to "Dad, can you drive me to ..." was depressing for everyone I think.

A curious word I'd never heard before:

meshugaas - noun (slang): Crazy or senseless activity and behavior

Same. I bicycled around my neighborhood with friends when I was I think 10 without any real oversight. I'm guessing some adults kept watch either outside or from windows when we played on our block but we could roam further out on our own.

Yeah, but you had to grow up in a constant cloud of pee smell .

It amazes me how much this doesn't seem to bother people. New York smells like pee. Everywhere. I've only been a few times, but it has always smelled like pee. I don't feel like "all three times I went, everywhere smelled like pee" really deserves anymore chances when no other place I have ever visited or lived has ever smelled like pee, with the exception of a dirty horse barn. Is all of New York a dirty horse barn?

Maybe New Yorkers just like it? I mean, it has to be that. Because nothing in New York is all that great, such that you'd put up with the constant smell of pee.

Certainly not the pizza.

I'll have you know that Central Park smells like manure, not pee. The rest of the city smells like hot trash, but only in the summer ;)

Joking aside: NYC has a lot of smells, but human urine isn't actually one I pick up all that often (except for sometimes in the subway). As for why anybody would live here: it's one (maybe the most important) of the world's cultural nexuses, as well as the most thoroughly developed urban environment in the United States. Those are sufficient draws for many people.

I mean there are a billion reasons to live there, and I don't even live there anymore. Amazing museums, public transportations, entertainment, restaurants, and parks are some of the universal ones. If you're lucky enough to be well off you then gain access to some other amazing things, such as some top tier private schools.

Last time I hung out in Chelsea I was surprised at how tolerant the residents were of the trash stacked on the street in the heat of the summer. I was staying at a small “normal” place that I’m sure was a least 2 million dollars, and it was, just odd how this amount of trash everywhere was normal.

Still love to visit NYC though.

It's absurd how they tolerate that and pay the highest rent in the country for the privilege of having a swarm of rats scatter when they walk past the trash heap at night. No other city in the country just leaves waste in a pile unprotected on the side of the road like NYC. I don't understand why they don't at least have a god damn huge bin like any other first world city if it's going to be a pile of trash anyway on the sidewalk day in day out. It's downright medieval and I don't understand how it isn't a public health crisis having so many rats so close to eating and living.

Part of the problem is that Manhattan at least basically doesn't have alleys. BTW, if you think things are bad now, don't do any time traveling back to the 1970s/80s.

I don't have an alley where I live in LA, but we have bins at least

> it's one (maybe the most important) of the world's cultural nexuses

How does that translate into everyday living for people who don't have a job in culture creation (media, fashion etc.)?

For me: it means access to museums, performing arts, and just about any food I could ever want to try.

I don't know what to tell you lol it doesn't actually smell like pee. I lived there for over 20 years. Also NYC has amazing pizza, it sounds like you might just have really bad opinions.

See, I think this is just what New Yorkers tell the rest of the world to trick us into thinking New York is so great.

Like, Broadway. That's a big, inside joke, right?

Depending on how much energy you’re willing to invest in exploring and what your preferences are, it might take you a while to find the slice of NYC that’s appealing to you. Everyone’s different, but NYC definitely has something for everyone.

I’ve lived in NYC for almost seven years, and I’m just starting to feel comfortable. Not because I’ve changed too much, but because I now know what I like, what I don’t like, and how to seek out the former and avoid the latter.

It helps if you have friends who have already lived there for a long time, and who have similar interests, they’ll be able to short circuit you. Otherwise I’d recommend knowing yourself and researching, in that order.

The places that are most well known are the places with the biggest marketing budgets. (you mentioned Broadway). Most New Yorkers avoid those like the plague, fwiw. They’re built for people for whom money is not limiting factor to hedonism.

It didn't take my 7 years to feel comfortable in DC and DC doesn't constantly smell like pee.

That's valid, but of course everyone is different. It took me a while. Others get lucky and feel comfortable right away.

I wasn't meaning to imply that most people take as long as I do.

DC and NYC are geared towards different people, and that's OK. pg has written nice food for thought on this topic. http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

Good pizza, but if there is a bar in walking distance you will be smelling pee. All my visits come with that ripe smell. I get that in DTLA too. It's just what happens when you have people drinking and no public restroom infrastructure to speak of. Maybe you are noseblind, or it's been a few since you've been on the bar scene in manhattan, but the piss smell is very real especially during hot summer nights.

I mean, if you walk around you will maybe smell pee sometimes? But saying the city "smells like pee" kind of implies that it's pervasive, contrasted with "outside of bars, at night, you might spell pee" (something I've never experience by the way).

NYC smells bad and the trash situation in Manhattan is straight out of the middle ages. That being said, I found New Orleans to have far worse smells. Something about how they do their trash there is even more degenerate than Manhattan. Imagine a little 5x5 alcove cut into the wall with a dumpster full of fried fish grease that hasn't been hosed out since Katrina. It was brutal. The entire city is a health code violation in any state but Louisiana. It straight up made me lightheaded sometimes in the french quarter, just putrid rank smells permeating the humid air with no breeze pushing it anywhere.

What advice do you have for raising a kid in a city in this day and age? My biggest concern is all the addicts in my city. Some 60k live on the street, certainly many are working and are invisible, but the most visible of the unhoused are certainly concerning and have put myself on edge a few times riding pubic transportation, being personally accosted, watching fights break out over nothing due to someone being mentally unstable making eye contact with another person, seeing knives pulled on the train and being trapped in the car until the next station. I worry that if I let my child out and about unsupervised like this that they would be targeted as an easy mark for what little they happen to carry on them by desperate people looking to feed their addiction, because I know adults who've experienced this simply due to appearing vulnerable and alone. The kids I do see on public transit and on the sidewalk are typically shuttled around by their grandparents, or in a pack with a half dozen other kids. Maybe I'll teach them to use my skateboard so they'd at least have a blunt object like I do when I am out and about by myself on transit.

I don't know if I trust SF or LA if those are the cities you're talking about. NYC has been a much safer city in comparison since the start.

I don't know about your city, so it depends. I wouldn't feel the same way I did in SF, for example.

In NYC you learn quickly what's safe and what's not. I was taught that, at a very early age. You learn how to spot the difference between someone who's homeless and someone who's dangerous. You learn to be aware of your surroundings, you learn to duck into places like shops if you think someone is following you, etc.

It sounds awful listing it out like that, but those were just what we learned growing up. It was just how we took care of ourselves.

> But it's still like that in rural areas. A kid can explore the wilderness with her dog on a Saturday and not be expected until dinner. Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people. The air is cleaner, the sky is darker, wildlife is all around. If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap. This breeds more independent people with hard earned self confidence. She can watch and help her parents do a bazillion things around the house that they'd dial up a contractor for in the city.

In my experience this is very common in cities too. It's the suburbs that prevent it. I don't have kids yet, but in my (very urban) neighborhood it's extremely common to have kids out and about on their own. It's generally seen as being very safe.

When I talk to coworkers with kids in the suburbs they're much more worried about letting their kids run around without adults. To be fair, it makes some sense: cars are one of the biggest killers of kids, and they're a much bigger risk in the suburbs (where most streets are wide and fast) than the city.

I live in an urbanized suburb (SFH, but 5 miles from a city core) and kids are out all the time. We have a few helicopter parents that feel the need to monitor their kids constantly, but for the most part, the parks, buses, restaurants, convenience stores, etc are all full of kids/teens. They don't even really cause trouble either. You'd think a group of teenage boys would be assholes, but nope, they just kind of mind their own business.

Once you get to the cookie-cutter subdivisions in the far suburbs, that's when the kids all disappear. Part of it might be helicopter parenting, but I think it's caused mostly by a lack of any outdoor activities. Riding your bike means going to the next subdivision over. Repeat that a half-dozen times and you get to a heavily trafficked road that can be followed for a few miles to a strip mall with a Target. Even all of the nice parks in these places are only accessible via car -- surrounded on all sized by 4-6 lane traffic going 45+MPH.

Where is this, I want to move there!

It happens in my single-family home and duplex filled neighboorhood in urban Austin TX.

Can you say which neighborhood it is? If you’d rather not, can you recommend some neighborhoods?

I’m considering moving the family to Austin but have mostly been only looking at the new suburb developments in the south- and northwest.

Lovely, if you don't mind can you share the name of the neighborhood, looking at Austin as a potential place to move to.

Not sure why I was downvoted, this was a legitimate question.

Cincinnati. The city is old enough that the inner suburbs were established largely before cars became common, so a lot of them are more pedestrian friendly. Granted, the city loses that midwestern economy when you get closer to the center. You either pay out the nose ($1MM+ is not unheard of) for a home close to the city, or you buy a dirt cheap house ($60k- is not unheard of) in a "rough" neighborhood.

Thank you.

>Today that would be an invitation to have your children seized by child protective services.

This is a common refrain, but I've never seen more than one-or-two anecdotal accounts of this happening. Do you have citations or articles that support common CPS intervention in cases like this? In my experience CPS is primarily focused on abuse and malnutrition, and tries everything possible to keep families together.

Parents act like the world outside is scary and dangerous, despite declining crime rates. I think that many younger kids are in dual-income families, and are at after-school care from 3-6 every day. Those that aren't are often in after-school activities, and aren't home, bored with time to burn outside. If the kids are home, they'd rather play Fortnite or Call of Duty with their online friends than build a fort in the riverbed.

You don't see it in the news that much, but you get phone calls because nosy neighbour reports an unattended kid outside. Law in some places say that children have to be supervised until 12, etc.

The phone calls create a chilling effect as parents tell other parents. So if you even want to avoid the helicopter parent trend, society forces you to be their chauffeur.

So no, kids don't get taken away immediately, but the singular phone call is enough to stop it in %99 of cases.

But here are some links (go through the links that the articles give too):

* Started by some new stories: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/03/27/fr...

* The linked article author went through an entire lawsuit about this with BC's CPS: https://5kids1condo.com/we-won-common-sense-prevails-in-bus-...

I bet if you did 10 minutes of google research yourself you could find plenty more.

It's funny you ask; the person who runs the linked submission actually got told in 2017 that they had to keep their kids under constant supervision until they were 10, after an anonymous tip that they were letting their kids ride the bus unsupervised.

They recently lost a legal battle but are continuing to appeal. http://5kids1condo.com/i-took-the-government-to-court-for-ki...

Update on the above case: upon appeal, they won their case, according to http://5kids1condo.com/we-won-common-sense-prevails-in-bus-d...

Extremely common in cities, that's how I grew up in the 90s.

However, the kids I met in college who grew up in rural areas had to be driven everywhere. Looking at their faces when I'd mention taking the bus to a concert as a teen, you'd think I was talking about performing wizardry.

As a city kid I could literally go anywhere I wanted at any time, just walk, hop on my bike, or the bus. My parents left dollar bills in a designated spot for bus fare if we wanted to go somewhere.

There was even "wilderness" in the city I grew up in. I grew up building tree forts of dubious structural integrity and swimming in streams. Without adults being involved, just the neighborhood kids. I loved that there were always neighborhood kids, there was always a playmate around - just walk outside and see who was out and about. This was all elementary school age.

The good part about "neighborhood kids" is you don't get to choose them, they were just whoever lived in your area - so you learn to get along with people you'd otherwise not hang out with.

> To be fair, it makes some sense: cars are one of the biggest killers of kids, and they're a much bigger risk in the suburbs (where most streets are wide and fast) than the city.

On the flip side, I see far more reckless driving in the city than in the burbs. Blowing lights or stop signs or excessive speeding are all more common in the city often directly in front of police. That wouldn't fly in the suburbs, and moreover people sort of expect traffic laws to be followed within reason (people still speed, but it's not normal to go 70 in a 45). Further, I have a strong suspicion that there are more hit-and-runs in the city than the suburbs. In the burbs, streets are wider and the speed limits are higher, but they have push-to-walk buttons and almost everyone stops well before the light turns red.

Nope, data says suburban automobile traffic is more dangerous than urban automobile traffic.

https://injurylawyer.com/pedestrian-accidents/high-rate-of-p...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-15-mn-58713-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448007/

https://www.collinslaw.com/blog/shocking-report-reveals-subu...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/019443609029503...

None of these links actually contradict his statement "I see far more reckless driving in the city than in the burbs".

It does, however, support the quoted statement that (actual level of recklessness notwithstanding) cities are safer than suburbs in regards to getting hit by cars.

Depends on the city. I live in LA and we have probably the most dangerous streets in the country for pedestrians. We were the only city to see our car on soft body deaths rise after implementing vision zero.

My theory is this is a result of the traffic, ironically. You spend 2 hours out of your day commuting at 12mph at best, so the minute you have 100 yards of asphault ahead of you, many people opt to just whip to 50-60mph on 35mph roads and 25mph residential streets to savor the speed. If you hit someone at that speed, death is practically guaranteed.

The streets in LA are also ridiculously wide with few barriers and obstacles unless you get into the hills. This is a recipe for drivers speeding up, and never bodes well for bicyclists or pedestrians who don't benefit from the wider spacing when they're crossing streets or navigating intersections. In my limited experience, NYC has many narrower streets but is still problematic especially outside of Manhattan, and SF is similar in some parts.

I grew up in Africa.

One of my favorite games was to catch African chameleons, and run around with them on my finger, pointing them at flies.

That's a game that you won't find too easily in the US.

But it was really dangerous. We had some very nasty snakes, thereabout, half the bugs could give you bites that would take a month to heal, and violent crime was quite prevalent. I learned to be quite careful.

I survived. Not sure I'd want to put my kids through the same risks, but my parents didn't seem to have a problem with it (good or bad? I dunno. They were quite fascinating people, in their own right).

It did give me a unique perspective, though. In my mind, I'm glad to have had it.

A finger mounted tonguegun? Kid me would've loved it! (Adult me too!) Best thing I could manage was a two handed digger (holding a Guinea pig just above the ground).

But it was really dangerous

My wife & I talk occasionally about an interview we read of some tribal group, I believe in Africa. A kid is exploring a machete. The westerner asks a woman why she isn't stopping the kid. She explains machetes are quite sharp, so the kid will either quickly learn to be careful- or be removed from the gene pool (paraphrasing).

It answered a lot of questions we hadn't been able to answer previously. (Mainly revolving around how difficult parenting still is, even with all our modern miracles)

> Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people.

Crime in rural areas today is rampant due to the opioid crisis. I don't know of a small town that hasn't been absolutely torn apart. Ironically while small town crime is way up due to opioids & heroin, it's down in large cities, about as low as rural towns in the 70s.

> If she skins her knee or gets lost, she gets to deal with it herself rather than having an adult on tap.

Tell me which kids don't have cellphones these days? All my friend's kids in rural (very rural) areas have them for "safety", and 2g-3g reaches pretty much every hollow.

Your description does not match the experiences I've had in the last 10 years, and as someone who grew up in a very rural area (~1k people/sq mi) and now lives in a very urban area (~18k people/sq mi).

Where I live in New Mexico it's closer to 10 people/sq mi. There is poor cell phone reception on some high points and none elsewhere. So I hike with a PLB. This area does have a serious drug problem but there are so few people that the threat is low. Where I typically hike I've seen maybe a half dozen people, at a distance, in a dozen years.

~1k people/sq mi is not "very rural"

Just went with wikipedia's number for my hometown.

The city pop is 3k, but the county is only 16k, for an area of 450 square miles. I did not grow up in city limits, and the area was less than half the population back then.

Just was trying to give some very conservative numbers. More than happy to meet more yokels like me :)

Echoing kgermino's statement, I also live in a (small but dense) city on the East Coast, in a very walkable neighborhood where the train station is a ten minute walk away from my house. There are kids bicycling and playing outside, lots of families with dogs, all enabled because the roads are smaller and we're still a walking distance from food, hardware store, etc.

Do not confuse the singe-zoned, panopticon-esque tracts of land with nothing around but houses with small yards and not a single shred of grocery stores, points of interest or wildlife-allocated land for dozens of square miles (necessitating car travel) [1] with "living in cities." Additionally, crime goes down not just with a fewer number of people, but also with people taking ownership over their community – as you'll see in loved neighborhoods of bigger cities like New York – rather than barricading themselves inside their house and watching with suspicion any person that walks past their shuttered blinds, because in places so hostile to travel on foot, no one in their right mind walks.

In an era of continuously increasing human footprint on the planet, we should not be talking about the (environmentally and fiscally) expensive expansion of humans to the corners of the planet that remain "rural" and a respite for our Earth's natural resources. We should consider how to use properly the space we have already colonized, and we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land.

1 - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/7/7/abolish-single-...

> we should begin with elimination of single-zoned tracts of land

Not everyone's needs and preferences are the same. It's great that your city meets your needs and preferences. That doesn't give you the right to impose your preferred solution on everybody else.

Hilarious.

What do you think zoning is, if not "imposing <someone's> preferred solution on everyone else [ who might develop it ]" ?

Zoning is explicitly how communities act to stop people from doing things in with property there that a sufficiently powerful subset (hopefully a majority, but only hopefully) of the people already there don't like.

> What do you think zoning is

A way for individual communities to be the way the owners of those communities would like them to be. That's why different communities can be zoned different ways, i.e., one community does not get to impose its preferred way of being on everyone else.

The post I was responding to advocated abolishing single-zoned tracts of land altogether, which is a way for some people to impose their preferred solution on everyone else.

Zoning allows people that do not own land to decide what can be done with it.

That has some positive purposes ... it may indeed be a good idea not to put a toxic manufacturing facility next door to residential lots or a school. It might possibly make sense to focus retail development in a certain area within a community rather than haphazardly throughout it.

But single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing. It is, quite simply, rich people telling poor people "we don't want you here".

> Zoning allows people that do not own land to decide what can be done with it.

Land ownership, at least in every US jurisdiction I have experience in, is not that simple. Yes, technically my wife and I "own" our house and the plot of land it sits on. We have a title deed filed with the county clerk. (I'm leaving out the fact that we have a mortgage because the lien holder on the mortgage doesn't really have any rights that are relevant to this discussion; for our purposes here it would be the same if we owned the house and land free and clear.) That gives us a whole bundle of rights connected with the house and land, but it is not absolute "ownership" in the sense you appear to be using the term. The city, the county, and the state all have rights that don't go away just because someone buys the house and land; after all, they were all there long before we got there, and they all played a role in building the house and improving the land, not to mention all the infrastructure--roads, sewers, electricity, water, telephone, Internet. Our house and land aren't just sitting there in a vacuum; they are part of a community that is bigger than us and that has some ownership rights over the whole community that have to be balanced against the rights of individuals within the community.

Someone who really, really doesn't want to put up with any of that can go out to a highly rural jurisdiction and buy a plot of land that's far enough from all neighbors that they can basically do whatever they want.

> single-dwelling has almost nothing to do with such high minded purposes, and exists almost entirely to keep higher income home owners away from lower income renters or mixed-income housing.

Sorry, not buying it. You're welcome to build your own community that works the way you want it to if you don't like any existing communities. But you don't get to just declare by fiat that communities that don't work the way you prefer are evil.

I'm glad that you've outlined why property/ownership is much more complex than libertarians and conservatives typically acknowledge. I entirely agree with everything in your first paragraph, and it's all extremely important stuff.

However, I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing, and this led me to do a bunch of reading about the way this zoning classification is used across the US. That reading left me with only one conclusion: it is almost entirely a classist tool, used by the wealthy to exclude everyone else. Of course, the communities that do this have lots of nice sounding justifications for it which do not sound remotely problematic. But dig a little deeper (I did, really), and I am fairly confident that it becomes completely clear what is actually going on.

> I've lived in a wealthy suburban community that used single-dwelling zoning to exclude apartments, townhomes and low income housing

I agree that such communities exist. However, that does not mean all communities that have some parts of them zoned for single-family dwellings are like that. Every community I have lived in that had portions of it zoned for single family dwellings also had townhomes and apartments, all in the same community and all within similar reach of whatever amenities were provided. (I have also been on both sides of the divide you draw, living in townhomes and living in single family homes.)

It doesn't need to be the case that every community with even one single-family dwelling zoned neighborhood has the same motivation.

As I said, it wasn't until I started reading around about this issue that I came to see how pervasive this use of the law was, and how in so many cases the motivation was reasonably easy to ascertain.

I'm not denying that conceptually speaking, such zoning could be done with purely good intent. I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.

> I'm claiming that within the US, and specifically within largely white wealthy communities, it is rarely used with good intent.

And your basis for this claim is your personal anecdotal experience, plus "a bunch of reading" you have done. IMO that's a pretty flimsy basis for such a sweeping claim.

This is attacking a straw man; the elimination of single-family zoning does not imply replacing that zoning with some other equally onerous requirement. Allowing students to attend school without requiring a dress code is hardly "imposing your preferred solution on everybody else".

Also, the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues, like the lack of housing in California causing sky-high home and rental prices. See e.g. a review of the book Golden Gates, which touches on NIMBY-ism in California: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/business/economy/housing-...

> the elimination of single-family zoning does not imply replacing that zoning with some other equally onerous requirement

Sure, it does: it explicitly says (not implies) that nobody who wants to live in a single-zoned community is allowed to any more, anywhere. That's an onerous requirement for anyone who does want to live in such a community.

> the idea that local interests should have the power to block community changes is directly responsible for many prescient issues

I think you mean "present" issues.

The problem I see is the idea that local interests should have no power to block the grandiose plans of politicians and bureaucrats who won't have to live with the results. At least in the case described in the article you linked to, the city manager, as far as I can tell, was also a resident, so he had skin in the game.

I note, btw, that the project mentioned in the article was allowed by zoning rules.

I agree with you - I think that rural life is quite empowering, but can be quite isolating as well. I also think that cities can inspire a sense of independence and self-reliance - in NYC, many middle schoolers ride the subway alone. In my apartment, we fix things ourselves, and my 6 year old already has a working understanding of plumbing and electrical. She's also been exposed to a diversity of cultures and ideas, not all of them pleasant, but all educational.

Overall, I find the suburbs to be the worst of both worlds - overprotective parents shuffling their kids in cars from scheduled activity to activity with other kids of a similar ethnic and socioeconomic background

When people talk about raising kids right, it always pans back to growing up in a rural area away from most people. Besides the dark skies/wilderness why is growing up in a rural area better than in a city for children?

Given that the majority of people live in a city/metropolitan area, I'll assert that my subjective opinion that growing up in a city would be better for a child than your subjective opinion that rural areas are better.

also: kids are not always staying kids. I was happy when I was a teenager that I could explore the city on my own and independent and with friends and not stuck in a (for teenager boring) rural area.

>Yeah, it's harder to get a ride share, and you can't work in an office in the city without a very long commute. But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans

Pretty ridiculous statement here.

So, the kids I knew in college who grew up in rural areas all said a lot of their peers (and sometime them) got (sometimes heavily) involved in drugs/alcohol because "there was nothing else to do."

>Crime is much less of a concern where there are far fewer people.

Disagree completely, I believe there is safety in numbers and the community mostly watches out for kids. (Personal experience here)

> But there are higher priorities than those, like growing better humans.

I grew up in a suburban bordering on semi-rural area, and while I do think living in a rural region certainly has it's benefits (like the ones you describe), implying it by default "grows better humans" than those living in an urban area is ridiculous.

i grew up in a rural area and appreciated the freedoms that entailed, but in no way is that the only, or best, way to develop independence in children.

what you're describing is more an indictment of poor risk assessment, that parents are paranoid and over-protective for no good reason, than some inherent difference of rural vs urban living. crime is not a serious concern anywhere, just like getting eaten by a bear is not a serious concern anywhere.

> just like getting eaten by a bear is not a serious concern anywhere.

You must not live in Grizzly country. It's a serious concern.

no, that's exactly the point, it's not. the risk is overblown, even considering bear country. the worldwide risk is on the order a few dozen attacks (not deaths) per year, primarily to defend their cubs, with extreme hunger being a secondary cause (bears understandably don't risk fights without good reason).

I grew up in grizzly country in Northwest Montana, spent loads of time out in the wilderness on my own or with my younger brothers, and even saw a mamma grizzly with two cubs in the wild once. They are absolutely not a serious concern.[1] We used to make fun of outsiders who feared just getting out of the car without their guns and pepper spray. :-)

[1] That being said, please don't be stupid: keep your distance and show them all due respect.

Yeah, I'd laugh at those outsiders, too. Campsites are different. Idiots leave food around, which grizzlies find, and come to expect. Then the next idiot comes around, wipes salmon grease on his pants, goes to sleep wearing those same pants, and gets eaten.

I agree with your [1] -- where you're taking the concern seriously.

You also are dependent on parents to go see most friends, and the amount of kids nearby will be fewer. That independence doesn’t really start until 16 when you get a car. All this to say is everything comes with trade offs.

This is the guy that lets his kids free-range in the city. I don't think you can accuse him of mollycoddling his kids.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skaoQy04EjU

I grew up in the city and explored the city freely. The issue here is not the landscape, it is that definition of "acceptable parenting" moved on absurdly.

And frankly, rural kids are not more independent. Also, the "skins her knee" thing is strawman. Kids who are small enough to need that adult on tap are not exploring forest alone (say 5 years old). And at the age where rural kids explore forest with dog alone and it is fine for them to get lost, they don't get taps in city either.

I mean the independence thing very seriously, even you see the same age kid going in city alone as unfanthomable, but even now, they actually do.

This is the kind of subtle change in society that I can't describe.

As a kid, at my uncle place in the country side, we used to take bikes with my cousin and go whatever. Far away, unattended, no phone (hell, I don't think that house had a landline at the time).

Nowadays it feels a fantasy novel about another galaxy.

> At age ten I would hop on my little stingray bike and explore for a dozen miles in any direction.

My experience was very different, my subdivision was hemmed in by freeways and expressways on most sides. Going anywhere required a ride from an adult.

Even you encourage everyone to move to the countryside (as you do for example by subsidizing car use), you destroy the very things you like about the country: cleaner air, dark skies, wilderness all around.

sounds to me like thats a reason for CPS to be shut down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com