The people the suburbs were built for are gone
vice.com
vice.com
To me the architect in the article is too quick to dismiss the premise of Bell Labs — giving researchers privacy and pastoral views. Sounds a lot like early Silicon Valley to me. They claim that it’s actually just the chance encounters that were important. There’s some truth to that — Steve Jobs famously designed the Pixar campus to maximize chance encounters. But I wouldn’t be so quick to discount a degree of space and privacy.
That’s kind of central to the whole discussion: the human balance between a need for privacy and a need for community. People want space, and they also want to be able to visit areas of density, and walk around. This used to be the mall, the big box bookstores.
I actually think this article was very interesting, and the architect was very articulate about a lot of things. But I’m not sure we’ve actually solved the core question: why did the malls decay? What changed? Was it e commerce? The shrinking middle class? Traffic just getting too snarled with no real solution?
That's a very cool office structure. I'm glad they repurposed it for a more cooperative use suited to the times.
To me the architect in the article is too quick to dismiss the premise of Bell Labs — giving researchers privacy and pastoral views.
A great discussion point re: Bell Labs that I read in an HN thread long, long ago was that research labs of this type (Bell Labs, Google X, Xerox PARC, etc.) only arise in monopoly conditions. Basic research only becomes supportable from an organizational overhead and ROI standpoint when there is no meaningful competition to the parent organization.
It implies another large and very interesting question: are the net benefits of places like Bell Labs worth the costs that come with tolerating monopolies?
More to the point of the topic at hand: is the monolithic structure of Bell Labs, the building, worth the costs it has imposed on the shape of its surrounding community?
Society has another mechanism for people to do research without a profit motive - the university - but for various reasons that's been working poorly. (One is that they've sort of developed a profit motive, and at the individual level, researchers need to chase grants.)
I don't think the answer is to tolerate monopolies; I think there are ways society can better support people doing open-ended research without just telling a company "Here, have all the money you want and no accountability." I don't think De Beers, for instance, produced much valuable research for the world with their monopoly.
Not that fundamental research is a bad thing but there's often a happy medium between near-term product development and totally blue sky research.
Now none of those assumptions hold. Even universities, which historically didn't care to be located in big cities or near other universities, are now facing the "two-body problem" - so many candidates are now part of a couple who both want academic jobs.
Not disagreeing here, just spitballing. Back then you were likely to live in a small apartment or a Levittown-type house that was about 850 ft sq, was poorly insulated and had no air conditioning. The family shared a single (comparative deathtrap of a) car, there were no cable bills, phone service was inexpensive, you dried your laundry by hanging it up outside, and there was just one TV. I bet one could still afford that lifestyle on today's average salary, no? It seems to me that we just want more stuff now.
Maybe in your very local calling area--not actually sure what local phone bills were like--but long distance, even to a few towns away in the same state were very expensive. Today, I could probably call London from the US (just using my regular domestic plan) for less than I could have called Boston 40 miles to the east in inflation-adjusted dollars in 1970.
That's a part of why I love 90's cars so much. Reliability was paramount (especially in the Japanese brands) and luxury was just for the luxury cars. I will be upset when these cars start to die out.
I really hope that US/Canada's regulations change to allow microcars. We are still allowed motorcycles, so we are left with a fairly large gap between complete death machine and car-sized SUVs. Why not introduce the quadricycles legislation? Japan has KEI cars, Europe has microcars, yet the US and Canada have nothing of the sort. It is unfortunate.
Proper incentives would make that a perfect vertical farm facility IMO.
Real estate values in the area makes farming a weird choice economically.
From the cell wall to the terminals of a battery to the crossing of the bridge from cow hollow to the Marin Headlands ... energy and potential are found in distinct things that are held apart from one another.
Interestingly, around here the Totem Lake mall was written off for dead for the last 30 years. Big boxes, big parking lot bereft of cars. It was a lonely place for a llooong time.
But the whole thing was redeveloped into another mall, pretty much all upscale stores, and the parking lot is jammed.
I can't explain it, but the developers knew what they were doing.
> I can't explain it, but the developers knew what they were doing.
Asians, especially Chinese, tend to go for malls with upscale stores (if my experience living in Beijing is any indicator). I bet that’s what the developers were going after.
Good times ... buying white box PCs for my small business on a regular basis in the 90s.
I think what’s dead is the typical 80s mall with massive parking lots and exclusively retail stores. BellSquare will be fine. But Northgate is a dead mall. Out in Cary, NC a dead mall was just bought by Epic Games for their new office. The old theater in Bellevue got turned into offices for Bungie.
Downtown Redmond is full of boxes. So is downtown Kirkland. I think most of the office space is Google? I’m not sure if Totem Lake boxes have much office space.
There’s boxes up in Kenmore. Capitol Hill has lots of boxes. Central District has several new boxes around Jackson and 23rd. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a mixed use box!
Northgate was doing fine but the writing was already on the wall as recently as 2017. The owners have demolished the middle (Nordstrom store #2 is almost completely gone) to make way for the hockey practice facility and several new office buildings, a couple of hotels, and apartments.
With, as you might imagine, retail on the bottom and a lot of walking space in the middle.
> You can’t throw a stone without hitting a mixed use box!
Sure, because developers and individuals have figured out that mixed use, if done OK, means stuff is more accessible. The problem is that we've only a handful of places where we zone to build mixed use so the spaces are super expensive because developers like to maximize profit.
We gotta catch up on housing, though. The close-in 'burbs are zoning for offices offices offices and not for people to live there.
What I'm sick of is all of the suburbs doing their level best to try to convince businesses to not locate in the city while also complaining about the "housing crisis" and "traffic crunch" that their own policies caused.
Everybody griped that Seattle wasn't zoning for housing at the rate it zoned for offices, so the city has started upzoning and now the 'burbs are doing the exact opposite of what they lobbied the city to do for a decade.
Then one day I found out that the city was planning on building new student housing on the park where my daughter and I went to play every day. All of a sudden I found my unbridled YIMBYism becoming a lot more circumspect and nuanced and it turns out I was actually just a massive hypocrite. Urban densification is Great! and I still believe it is the right solution (just not in _my_ back yard).
PS: Now that I've moved 2 miles down the road and no longer go to that particular park I'm far more open to the long term benefits of it being used for student housing.
For the most part I don't think that the law should limit what buildings can be put up - factories/stores/housing can all share a neighborhood. However even if chemical factories don't release anything, there is still enough fire danger that they should be separated from anything else. Worse some chemicals are safe on their own but if they leak to a neighbor the combination is dangerous so such things need to be kept apart.
I don't really feel like trying to come up with a proposal of what the rules should be, but what we have isn't right.
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/11/22/malls-are...
[2]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/19/how-amazon-changed-americas-...
[3]https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/23/economy/luxury-malls-holiday-...
I am in the process of buying a few acres of land further south of this area, in Buckley, WA.
I hope to build a garage/shop on the property, have space for my amateur radio hobby, and a few years from now, build a modest home. I would then sell my current home here in Kirkland.
Yet no one knows what tomorrow will bring. So I have no idea of how any of this will actually unfold.
I’m thinking that I will slowly transition away from writing software and build up a small meditation / retreat center on my property.
So from the start article never was about suburbs. It was about people and social dynamics.
The actual interview spends most of its time focusing on how malls aren’t that useful anymore, and now that they’re changing to be useful people are moving back out to the suburbs. But the core idea of the suburbs: large SFU homes on large plots of land is never questioned.
I haven't looked into it, but I heard about it via the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes whose creator makes videos based on his experience and on his reading of Strong Towns. Starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg
Disclaimer: I'm a dirty European with a natural bias against American suburbia and I haven't read the strong towns book. Also strong town's presentation looks a bit like a cult but that might just be my impression.
the defining story of human geography in the last year is a movement from cities to suburbs
despite that, "people want dense cities" is an evergreen meme on HN
Pretty much the answer to any question about why a headline's hook doesn't land in the meat of the article. They got what they wanted from you.
They're all pretty much the same kind of two-story wooden house, people built them in bulk when they got home from the war. It was an event like an Amish barn raising, the same guys built a ton of the exact same house one after the other.
Now they've got maybe the second or third owner and the designs have diverged quite a bit, but you can still find the central house if you know how to look.
Where you find a distinct lack of this sort of organic variation is in suburban tract single family home developments where changes are micromanaged by neighborhood HOAs.
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same…
The first few citations are circular, they link to articles about the book being discussed or the authors of that book.
Where are they getting the “80% of new households ... will be these one to two person households” stat from? No citation, of course, because it’s not true. I won’t be surprised to see that used in future articles and linked back to this interview, however.
The anti-homeownership propaganda seems to be growing with articles trying to tell us “you don’t want to own a home!”. If an ounce of research was conducted it would be clear how many people want out of cities and into homes.
My wife and I are going into the third season of trying to buy a house (SoCal). Every half decent home sells in its first weekend and, in our experience (6 offers), for all cash and over ask. This is the norm in many other areas from what I’ve read.
To me, the real story is “Millennials want to buy homes and start families but the older generations aren’t moving out of the suburbs fast enough”.
I don't read this like that at all. It seems much more a reflection of exactly the difficulty you're describing: lots and lots of people like you want to find big suburban family homes but are priced out, and the suburbs are (awkwardly and somewhat unfairly) infilling to accomodate more modest and denser neighborhoods to house them.
The unfortunate truth is that "The Suburbs", as you and many people imagine, simply don't scale. So the actual neighborhoods we're building in the urban periphery are having to change. Recognizing that fact isn't "propaganda".
It is not just a commentary on what's happening, as you describe in your first sentence. There's also a distinct assertion on what must happen going forward, to the opinion of the speakers.
Suburbs don't scale. Yet, cities don't scale either. This is why people get priced out or want to move out and most cities have been low growth modes for years.
I find it interesting that recognizing that the path of least resistance (suburbs) may be slowly and haphazardly changing (true), is ccheered by all academics.
Yet I don't see any expert opinion about about having cities be more receptive to change to accommodate growth....
Sure sounds like a NIMBY from academics about their cities, no?
You can see this in how cities tend to go full blight very quickly after the jig is up (e.g. Detroit, probably the largest example, but many midwest rust belt towns too).
I live in a "semi-rural" part of a European country between two major cities and I'm surprised at how immaculate the arterial road is that I live on, between the cities (kind of a "country road" that parallels the highway). Where I lived in the US before, similar roads were full of wheel-eating potholes. But then again, property prices here are through the roof because the government heavily regulates growth, so that's where they get the revenue.
I just went back and re-read the article. And... no, I don't see that at all. The tenor of the thing is almost 100% empirical, describing change without advocating for it. (To be fair this is largely a "book review" kind of thing and I haven't read the book itself.)
Politics really has infused everything now. Is it really not possible for you to read a straightforward description of urban growth patterns without seeing a... I dunno, I guess agenda-driven plot against your way of life? You do realize you can't vote your way back to unrestricted suburban growth, right? There just isn't the space for it.
Is it possible that there's a possibility that in fact, your assumptions could be wrong ? For an article that is 100% empirical as you say, i hardly see any citations, like user theNJR OP said.
Take for example my "way of life". How would you react if i told you that I am a resident of a major urban center of +2M people ? And I have lived in such a city all my life ,including my formative years ?
Would you still hold on to your truth ?
It literally is not.
> For an article that is 100% empirical as you say, i hardly see any citations
... it's an INTERVIEW. With the AUTHORS. Literally almost the whole thing, beyond the 3-4 paragraph introduction, is a "citation" of expert evidence.
[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/wef2.pn...
Anti-homeownership propaganda appeals to them. Why wouldn't they look for upsides in their situation?
In more modern terms, also the lack of a home office for each working adult; because society still hasn't digested the possibility of remote-mostly working and how that can be a good thing, rather than the hell many are facing during this pandemic.
What are the profit margins on large rental properties vs. single family neighborhoods?
People who want higher density in their neighborhoods because they believe that it will lower their costs, and apply that to everyone, everywhere?
* Stability is poor. You can lock in a 30-year fixed rate mortgage with a predictable payment (effectively hedging against inflation), but there's little to no recourse against landlords doubling your rent next year or refusing to renew your lease.
* Fully pedestrianized, live-work development is still a scattershot novelty, often requiring heroic efforts to get zoning and incentives set up, but the 1000-hectare, 900 houses and 4 golf courses, 700 km of roads that curley-Q and cul-de-sac, master-planned community, has been raised to an art form.
* Attempts to support public transit are not just forgotten, but aggressively fought, in part because buses/light rail/subways are considered services for undesirable groups.
* The whole urban-renter situation tends to be treated either as a "well, it's just poor/minority/etc." as a subconscious motivation to allow stagnation, or handwaved as a transient situation for the "successful professionals" -- they'll eventually move out to a McMansion so it doesn't matter that their experience is lousy for a few years while they save a down payment.
Unless the wealthy/successful/influential embrace this lifestyle, there will be limited momentum to improve it for anyone else.
There you have it folks.
Is it "anti-homeownership propaganda" if we build co-ops and condos for people to own, like I have? Come on.
Do you have a source to cite for your claim that it's not true?
This source supports the claim that "something like 80%" of newly formed households will consist of only one or two persons, at least for the period 2018 through 2028.
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/number-of-u-s-households-p...
(Also, it seems odd to suggest that the reason a person didn't provide a citation for a statistic mentioned in the context of an interview is because the statistic isn't true.)
It projects 12.1M new households, 8.4M of them either one-person households or married couples with no children (which presumably means a two-person household, although I suppose it's possible some of those might have a third person living with them, e.g., an elderly parent). Only 1.6M of new households (married with children) are obviously more than two persons. The remaining households are 0.6M unmarried with children, which could be two or more persons, and 1.5M unmarried living with other adults, which could also mean two or more persons. It's not impossible to get somewhere close to 80% from that.
At any rate, the comment I responded to asserted that the expert in this field said something obviously untrue, yet offered no evidence except his own personal experience shopping for a suburban home in one particular American city, as if that proves anything at all.
It kinda makes sense that newly formed households will consist of one or two people. Does it mention how long they are expected to stay that way?
I see this a lot in UK articles too, berating people for wanting a boring detached house and a garden somewhere quiet, when they could live in a shoebox in the city. It seems to be a bit of anti-middle-classism, mixed with environmental concerns and a love of central planning. Some of the same thinking that lead to brutalism here, IMHO.
I think a major driver of anti-single-family-home advocacy is simply that the kind of people who become urban planners are the kind of people who personally love the crush of the city and the close proximity of their fellow man. It is also fueled by the interests of developers and, to a lesser extent, social justice advocates.
I think the environmental concerns that feed into it are often quite valid, spreading endless suburbs across places like the UK is not a great idea. But I don't think criticising those who aspire to have more space is a good outcome.
What I'm drawing attention to is that the bien pensant class in the UK seem to have started to tell us it's wrong to want the life that people have aspired to before. And that this is something we saw some decades before with brutalism, pushing people into spaces that designers and architects wanted them, not places they wanted to be themselves. There seems to be a desire amongst some architects and planners to push people towards their ideals of higher density housing, in particular, trading out much in the way of private space to much more social living.
Not everyone wants that. It's not wrong to want to live in smaller urban spaces with that trade-off, but it's not wrong not to buy into it either.
When I was in high-school, I spent 2 weeks in the USA, on Long Island. I could walk for an hour and not walk across a pedestrian. There were often no sidewalk (when there were, I wasn't sure I could use them, as to my foreign eyes, being detached from the road, they where running though properties :-D ), but what's the problem with that? There was almost zero traffic, since the areas are low-density residential; much less than on my country roads. I could reach the ocean, I could reach playgrounds/playfields, I could reach one street with shops, I could reach... the high-school. No transit was needed. But I was alone in the streets/on the roads. I didn't understand why the older kid (16?) of the house was already driving a big car to go to high-school...
When I look at Google Maps, a huge proportion of those suburbs areas seem to be within a mile of a either a shop street or a supermarket, and often some playfield too (we don't have that many over here). The grid pattern makes access easier. So I am puzzled. It seems very 'walkable' to me. Of course accessing those supermarkets by foot or cycle ranges from unpleasant to maddening because access was generally only planned for cars. But that's much more easily fixable than redesigning the whole zones.
Now if you work 15 miles away, that's something else, but does this come into 'walkability' concept? No density is going to fix that: even in a big dense city, your job, or your next job (and even more your partner's!) is almost always going to end up on the other end of the city after some time. Walkability cannot help there, so I reckon jobs location shouldn't weight on the concept much.
I lived abroad in a pretty US-sprawl-like place. A huge majority of detached houses, a few rowhouses, a handful of short flats buildings, with supermarkets in place of the town centre. Basically no small shops, but a few bars between the supermarkets. I was living on one side of the town, and I was walking (winter) or cycling (summer) everyday to my workplace on the other side of the town, 2 rivers and 1.5 miles away. I would shop on the way back home. Easy, simple, practical. No transit is needed. For me it is walkable. But it seems it isn't, for many people I read here, because they would declare similar areas in the US as non-walkable.
I now live in a municipality, where density is 8 inhabitants / km² (20-25 inhabitants / sq mile). But most people live within half-a-mile of the village centre. It has enough small shops for your daily or weekly needs; if you wish, there's a bigger shop/small supermarket in the next village, 2 miles away. There's a guy who is over 80 years old and who lives at the farthest point in the municipality, 1 mile away. He comes shopping almost everyday, by foot, on the road that passes in front of my house. So for him I guess it is walkable. But what if we ask all the 40-something who live 4 times closer, but who prefer to take their car, and drive 2 times 10 miles to go a big supermarket. They'll swear they need their car, for those countrysides are not walkable! Heck, my neighbour works in the centre, that is one quarter miles away (5 mn walk, 1 mn bicycle) and takes her car to go to work.
Sometimes it is true. Imagine you wish something like the Spanish town model: a very dense centre, and nothing else than the centre, so wherever you are in the town, you just walk/cycle/drive less than a mile and you are in the fields, the hills, or other forms of 'nature'. Density located in a single point would also enable easy and efficient point-to-point public transit between similar towns, by the way.
Anyway, you can't have this if you take the French route and allow suburban sprawl. It will spread 5 miles around in all (free) directions. Then it doesn't matter if you densify the centre (following the mantra "density is good and efficient" which we hear all the time here), people living in the centre (and most of the suburb) will not have access to 'nature' unless they use a car.
(What actually happens in terms of densification in France is generally worse, because densification of the sprawl is not made in the US style with huge buildings in a very dense, punctual, centre, but it is made along some axes or in some areas here and there. You end up with some average density everywhere, while the infrastructure hasn't followed. And cannot follow, because the density itself is spread, instead of being in a single point easily served. The elected from those areas say they want to combat sprawl, but they make it worse for everyone this way.)
On the other hand, I agree that cities, or urbanism in general, shouldn't be designed for what I call the 14-28, like it is often asked on this site. Or at least it should be the only goal and it shouldn't be the goal everywhere. What I mean by 14-28 is people who are in a great demand of interactions, who want to meet people, a lot of people (of course it depends on individuals, I just arbitrarily peeked those figures). It has always been like that, teens and young adults have always wanted to leave and discover the world, to multiply experiences, good and bad ones, and are attracted by the city lights. That's something we must acknowledge, and we'd better provide an environment for that.
BUT that must not be the end of all things. When people get a bit older and become parents, most of them tone down and wish to be in less hectic areas, that's just a fact we can observe, even if it doesn't match our own ideal. And that's like it until their death, you can find a few people who will move to a city for their retirement but most who move will move the other way. Same for kids: until a certain age, they are satisfied with the presence of their parents, schools, and a handful of neighbouring kids, they have no need or desire of a large and dense city.
So most of their life, people don't care for having a big concentration of people where they live, and on the contrary favour a bit more space and a bit more quietness. Urbanism shouldn't blindly optimise for the former (density).
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/16/when-apartment...
I sincerely hope remote work takes off so the geographic network effects of all the jobs being in the same place are less important. It would make low density much more viable for those of us who want to see the sky and maybe a tree every once in a while.
It is literally illegal to build apartments in many areas of the United States. That's because of local zoning laws limiting how many residential units are allowed per acre, minimum parking requirements, height restrictions, setback requirements, etc. The US government intervened in the mortgage market to make low interest 30 year loans broadly available (if a homeowner defaults and the foreclosure sale is not enough to cover the loan balance Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac are the investors holding the bag). Toll-free highways make commutes from suburbs to downtown possible.
Exactly. If someone wishes to own a detached single-unit residence, fine. I'd prefer they didn't but that's not my decision to make for an individual.
The problem comes when people want to control what's built within a quarter or half or full mile of the residence they own. (And, no, before someone comes at me with this specious reasoning, there's a huge difference between "build a nuclear power plant next to a daycare" and "different types of housing near each other.")
As a matter of public policy, I will always advocate that we do the environmental and financially efficient thing of building closer-in and closer-together. (We gotta add in some standards for noise transmission, too.) But preserving a specific type of housing in a specific location in amber forever is not reasonable and should not be continued.
Even when the olds do die out, you’re not going to get some discount. Newport Beach is never going to be Detroit.
The urban core the suburb is tethered to matters more to buyers than they're willing to admit directly.
If everyone tries to enjoy what you are, that drive won't be 5 minutes an average.
Neither suburbs nor detached houses nor private houses are specific to the US.
In France, primary housing is 57% individual house, 43% collective (apartments). But that's not all: if you consider families (with children), which is what matters when is "where did you grow up?", individual houses rise to 70%!
In UK, flats are a tiny minority, the form that rules there is of course the semi-detached house. But even there, there are still more detached houses than flats.
In the whole EU, the ratio is similar to France: flats are a minority with 46% of housing, and amongst the remaining 54%, 2 third are fully detached houses.
Another angle. If we take ze city, where almost everything is apartments: Paris. There were 25% *less* inhabitants in 1990 (when a present 30-year old was born) than there were in 1920! People have fled to the suburbs there as well (which doesn't mean 100% individual house, admittedly, but anyway a much much greater proportion than inside Paris).
> I grew up in an apartment.
It doesn't make a statistic :-)
I don't think it came up this time but indeed it is common each time there is this kind of thread here. Same thing for the fuzzy 'walkability' concept.
> I think I know one person in the UK who doesn't drive
I don't drive, I never did (despite having a licence), whatever place I lived in (tiny village, small town, small town in the middle of nothing, small city, big city; detached house, semi-detached-house, flat) but I know I am the odd one. I am definitely not representative, the only thing cases like mine can prove is that it is doable (under some circumstances).
> European car ownership is lower than the US in general but it's a very very far way from zero.
Indeed. Let me pull a few more French statistics for a minute :-)
84% of households own at least 1 car (same ratio for the 25-39 years old, roughly the Gen-Y).
36% own at least 2 cars (40% of the 25-39 years old).
In 1990, when society and activity was already organised the same way as now, every home who needed a car already had one, yet owning rate raised by almost 10% since then, and the share of households who own 2 cars raised almost as much (for 3 cars it raised too).
In just the last 5 years, the number of vehicles raised by 4.5% for cars, 6% for vans, 3% for lorries. Meanwhile, the population only raised by 1%.
The number of vehicles has doubled since I was a kid (1980). Again, I was in the deep country and everyone who needed a car already had one.
1990, 1980, ... We had the largest superstore in Europe (or was it in the World?) a couple dozen miles away, that was already built in the 70s. France was a precursor in large supermarkets. So much for the image of the small village grocery (which exists too, but a large part (70-75%) of the consumption is made in supermarkets and superstores; even though now the largest of the latter decline, the former thrive).
Still somehow beats the places where I lived in Finland where the supermarkets and their car parks are in the centre of towns. In a small town, they actually are the town centre.
I went back to the Cleveland suburbs for a grandparent's funeral several years back and I could definitely see how in the 1950s the structure of the suburb would've been great for the large Catholic families that lived there.
It was centred around the VFW, several parks, and a school. Children could play in the streets. Parents could socialize at the VFW and walk home. Each corner had a shopping complex with a grocery, gas station, barber etc. It was never more than 1/2 mile to all your commercial needs -- and a safe sidewalk walk if you sent kids to go get milk or eggs. If you were working downtown there was public transit to take you from the suburb to the city center and back again. I could see how this would be a very nice set up for where my parents grew up.
Today this doesn't exist. The corner shopping complexes are entirely vacant. Grocery is now only available at bigger box-stores requiring an hour of commuting in traffic on roads that don't have sidewalks. The school closed. The VFW is no longer culturally relevant.
The suburb was built within a decade of the end of WWII and during the Korean war. So it was a safe bet that most households had a member who was a Veteran or related to a Veteran who could wave them in.
As time progressed, less and less households in the neighborhood would probably qualify. So its no longer a community centerpiece.
Actually I wonder if a rise in restaurants has crowded out other forms of retail.
And then in new developments, it may be that housing is more profitable than small retail shops.
I admit that there are 3 supermarkets within walking distance of my house in a pedestrian friendly neighborhood. I can reach them on foot or bike in a few minutes. But they are expensive and have limited selection so we drive a few miles to a huge discount supermarket at the edge of town, every 2 or 3 weeks, and only get perishables at the nearby stores.
The walk to your mailbox is shorter than the walk from your parking spot into your store (and back).
It will be interesting to see what shopping patterns stay in place post-pandemic. On the one hand, even I who already shopped a lot online, have switched even more to Amazon rather than taking a run to the store for something I don't actually need right now. On the other hand, I was picking something up at an Apple Store a few days ago (for reasons) and it was a little bit surprising to me that the shopping mall was actually pretty busy.
Regardless of whether a streetcar serves the neighborhood, it is characterized by a town center (or "main street"). Retail, commerce, schools, and 3rd-places are nucleated near the main street. Distances are short, like you describe. It is in many ways an urban center and functions like a city. They're often just outside bigger cities and have multiple transportation options to get to the bigger city. These were the first suburbs but these days they're very much considered a part of the city at least symbolically or by name.
In the early naughts the "New Urbanist" movement among urban planners and architects sought to transplant this form of urbanism back to American suburbs. It was marginally successful but seemed to lose steam. The most relevant thing that remains from that effort was what is now called "complete streets" initiatives and measurements like "walkability score".
Many of the old streetcar suburbs still exist, and so do many new urbanist efforts. You can find these places if you look for them. I live in South Philly, but there are places outside Philly that are still streetcar suburbs. Walkability scores are almost as high as the big city, you can get to work in the city with a reasonably fast commuter train (septa for PA, patco for NJ). There's also office parks that are relatively short distances from these burbs-- Tech folks are vastly more likely to work in those than in the big city (which, sadly, is dominated by lawyers, hospitals, class-A corporate, retail).
Overall there is no reason for them to exist unless people pay a massive premium.
If you have a county or municipality in mind, their road budget is probably public, you can probably get their actual numbers for last year and see this for yourself.
Plus it’s not accounting the full cost of roads given that you need a vehicle to access them. On average, something like 15% of a households income is tied to transportation (car maintenance, loans, gas, registration, etc), which is insanely expensive just to be economically productive.
And after the people who built the buildings have taken whatever money they did make and "left the building" too, then rezoning and repurposing can change the range of available lifestyles in unplanned ways.
>Overall there is no reason for them to exist unless people pay a massive premium.
One of the primary reasons for exclusive neighborhoods to exist is so they can exclude those who have average or lower ability to pay a premium.
Including the necessary car(s) as originally intended which are still insanely expensive & time consuming to operate even after they have long been paid for.
But after that sometimes no longer allowed to be parked in some neighborhoods depending on the ugliness consensus of the rulemaking body at the time.
Not even to be economically productive, rather to subtract from productivity during otherwise more fruitful survival efforts.
The US economy is so unsustainable on so many levels it's really hard to argue about anything like the status quo. It's an extremely convoluted and leveraged systems which cannot be fixed in a way that ends up with something similar.
Roads are pretty expensive:
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-...
> So, for example, a representative cost in 2014 for reconstructing an existing lane of a major urban freeway was $7.7 million per mile; doing the same on a collector street in a small urban area would have set you back $1.5 million per mile.
So at $20/person, you need a density of 4000 people per mile (assuming 18 year life for the road).
$1.5mil, assuming a 10 year life, would need 7500 people at $20/yr each, or 3000 households at 2.5 ppl/household. Assuming each household is a quarter acre, that's 750 acres, or about 1.2 sq mi. That's a depth of .6 mile on either side of the mile of road. (Which is a depths of 15 lots. I think.)
Edit: $10-$20 per month. Well, there's a lot of other roads needed, too.
You don't perform a reconstruction after 10 years.
You need a reconstruction when you have done zero maintenance for 30 years. Or else if there are 1000 loaded lorries roaming on your street everyday :-)
Otherwise you can do with some (partial or full) resurfacing after 5/10 years. That's much much cheaper.
If I take my local prices, resurfacing 1 mile of a 6 yards wide road, is less than $250.000. And that's with full refurbishing for a pretty damaged road + a new asphalt concrete surface! If you just do preventive maintenance with single-layer or bi-layer that can be 5 or even 10 times less...
(Sorry about the probably imperfect technical terms translations).
Everything you wanted to do, it took driving by your parents to get you there. Or relying on spotty public transit.
I grew apart from my school-friends, as they could share their evenings on fun and play, while I had to go back earlier (commute did take quite a long time) to be able to do my homework etc.
My sleep quality also plummeted as I had to wake up 1-1.5h earlier than my friends to be on time for morning classes.
In general, if you live in a suburb, you go to school either in the same suburb or a neighboring one. Indeed, one of the classic reasons to prefer one suburb over another is which school district it's in.
What your describing sounds a lot more like a remote rural town. And a small one at that!
It's entirely possible—though quite unusual—that the specific suburbs you moved to had no schools to call their own, but it's absolutely untrue that "there's no schools in the suburbs".
My friends and I would just ride our bikes. It was great, actually.
Imo what kids need (in terms od environment) is locality with other kids to socialize with that is safe enough that they can navigate and play in independently from parents. By navigate I mean public transport or walkable distances.
Whether it is house or not matters less.
To you it may be "noise and chaos", to many others it's life and excitement.
No matter if you live in a dense inner city or a small village, open public spaces where they can meet other children are vital to children's growth and development.
My kids do lots of stuff they couldn't do in a public space and I likely wouldn't let them do inside. They have outdoor baths in summer, grow sunflowers and herbs, collect eggs from the chickens, have 'outdoor movie nights', run around naked for hours etc. There's also social things, being in a playground or park means my kids often go and find things to do by themselves, which is great (they're great at independence). Being in our backyard forces them, most of the time, to work together to solve whatever problem they have. Those problems are often far different from what happens _inside_ the house and are just as critical to their development. Last week I saw my 2.5yo up our apricot tree throwing apricots into a bucket being held by our ~5yo because they wanted to make dessert. Could probably do that in a park, but yeah.
The problem is in the communities. I remember a sunny day back in 2015 - I was living in a suburb near Redwood City with lovely, expansive parks. Naively I decided to take my shirt off while I was lying in the grass and get some sun. It took less than 5 minutes for a group of concerned mothers (whose group was yards away from me) to come berate me for "exposing myself to children". What sort of education is this?
Obviously there is an element that will connect with some, and definitely not with others, here. If you have it, you know. It can't be explained.
For me, that's the best part of your writing. Thank you
The problems is that as children develop, their focus and needs change. A toddler needs little more than a small space and a parent's attention (this is obviously oversimplified, bear with me). Older kids enjoy running around and playing outdoors and can play just with rudimentary objects.
At some point, rocks and sticks stop being enough and the kids begin to form more specific hobbies and demand more autonomy. Group activities outside of school can be essential in developing those hobbies and now having a nice house isn't enough, you need a dense enough community to support these groups without long commutes. Safe walkable streets or public transport also help with the development of autonomy, which is at odds with the previous ideal of a large, secluded house.
High schoolers might go want to go to a school tailored to their interests, which will most likely require going to a boarding school for kids who don't live near/in a city, separating them from the family probably sooner than they'd like and separating them from friends on the weekends.
What's best for kids isn't easy to define and is also individualised. A kid who grows up to wanting to be a forester might appreciate living in the countryside, while a budding programmer might wish for more opportunities to meet likeminded peers. Thankfully parents' interests and the environment they live in reflect on their kids, so it's not all random, but there's probably no ideal environment for every kid, there's just pros and cons. That said, thinking about the requirements and maximising the pros isn't a bad idea, we just need to be careful to examine the problem from all perspectives.
Why. Maybe you're comforted by the thought that your experience was not abnormally privileged, but it was.
To be fair this is evidence of bias, not evidence of superiority
> With more people and shops etc in your neighborhood comes noise and chaos.
This isn't necessarily true. Not all urban spaces are built like manhattan. If you live on main street next to the shops, sure, but a very easy and pleasant urban form is one with a main street with shops and quiet side streets with apartments and houses. For example, a lot of the neighborhoods in Brookline, MA[0]. The bigger issue is that because there's so few neighborhoods built like this, the few that exist are incredibly expensive and desirable, atleast in greater Boston.
[0] consider the map view here. Residential, tree filled streets all close to a shop-lined (and rail-lined) main street https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3396099,-71.1361021,426m/dat... . I lived 1 building away from the main street (just across from the school) and the only "urban noise" was the school. It was a peaceful and an amazing neighborhood. I would have moved there permanently if it wasn't like 700k for a 2 bedroom in an old building (or $3MM for a brand new 4 bedroom townhouse).
2020 was the revenge of the suburb. Downtowns are depressing wastelands with increasing violence and homelessness. And the suburbs are... not too far from normal.
This is what created the malaise to begin with. People flee the city because of some temporary problem and create structural problems for generations. It's also a weirdly American experience in that you find practically nobody in Berlin or Tokyo or whatever whose going to move into a suburb and abandon urban life because of something that is an issue for a year or two.
Having lived in SF and San Jose, as well as having spent time in Chicago and New York... Give me a decent sized house in suburbia, a car, and a decent spot in town that doesn't look like it is just trying to die but people are keeping the husk of it alive for it's "charm". Surround me with food and entertainment that doesn't cost city prices to enjoy, passersby who greet you warmly instead of burying themselves in their phones or music, and feel free to let most of that experience be pretty generic - I don't need some to be sold on some place's history or background or mission statement when all I want is a burger.
Cities are many things to many people. I respect that people enjoy them and wouldn't want to take them away from anyone. But it's not for me, never has been, and likely never will be. I'm glad to have found a company that respects that.
It is happening in Japan too.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/japan-tokyo-cities-ci...
There was a net outflow of, wait for it, 3000 people out of Tokyo in September... the city has 14 million inhabitants. That is during a pandemic with a government that's actively trying to curb the inflow into the capital. The population right now actually appears to be up compared to one year ago crossing 14 million first time mid 2020.
Point to be made :
".....The expectation going forward is that something like 80 percent of new households that will form over the next 15 years will be these one to two person households. A lot of them would prefer an apartment or a condo—smaller units...."
This to me is at the core the problem. This statement is borderline revolting, with a holier-than-thou attitude. Why do we have an academic from an urban core opine on what everyone else wants ? Who said this person is an authority on how people that he does not know, want to live ?
The proof is in the details. People left cities to move to the suburbs because they hated what they had in cities. That was their solution. If people no longer want to live in the suburbs, they can do the reverse, or strive to change the suburb themselves.
Instead of advocating for "solutions" to impose on others, how about instead let people decide on their own ? Simply put, for people that want to change their lifestyle, they should be able to do so on their own.
Yet I never hear 1 expert - "let's open every metro city zone regulation to unlimited mixed use, and let's see what gets built". These experts are probably afraid they may be dead wrong about what people actually want.
But more generally I don't understand your complaint. You're saying that people should not advocate for changing how the suburbs work, because if people wanted to change how the suburbs work, they would advocate for it?
Like, I'm sorry you feel that a claim of fact comes with an attitude, but it's a testable, refutable claim. Do you think the claim is wrong? Or do you just not like it?
Not some outsider having an opinion on it with no stake in the outcome.
For example, if the academic was calling certain things he has an opinion on, about how to make things better, and to be done in the city of New York (presumably where he lives) then he would be a lot more credible.
I live in New York because it's where I can get a one-person home in a walkable neighborhood with good transit. If I could get that in a suburb, I'd be happy to live somewhere cheaper! What is so offensive about saying that people like me exist in large numbers?
Also... the point of academics is to study and report on things they're not personally involved with?
The article specifically talks about how these changes are already happening, driven by actual residents of the suburbs, and the academics found that there was little awareness of them and wanted to make more people aware of it.
>>> the point of academics is to study and report on things they're not personally involved with? This is right if we make distinctions on scientists vs academics. Academics opine on things with no risk to themselves and usually what they report is a test that cannot be reproduced scientifically. Scientists present facts on which they personally have a stake on (for example, a microbiologist studying a dangerous bacteria; a chemist trying not to accidentally blow up, etc) .
To your point, you are correct RE: academic reporting. My argument is that maybe we should listen with a high degree of skepticism when such people talk. It doesn't completely invalidate any report (although in this example, there's no data to back assertions) , but as with most things from academics go, they are usually not testable, so.
(What people say and people do are different things)
Meanwhile in France, it dropped from 2.75 to 2.2, so I thought it was the same in the USA, hence my hypothesis. But it appears it isn't.
I lived most of my life in dense, walkable, rental neighborhoods. It took years to get out and I don’t regret it one bit.
It is impossible to have downtime when you’re surrounded above, below, and all around you with neighbors.
It’s also impossible to state how different an owner-maintained building is from a landlord-maintained one.
A better approach would be how to create walkable suburbs, with all of the benefits but none of the downsides.
Instead, the articles are taking the lazy approach; and takes a lazy approach to reasoning on why homeowners are becoming more scarce.
Edit: The timing of the article couldn’t also be worse. Covid has suddenly shown that density has significant downsides.
But this comment of yours struck me in particular:
> It is impossible to have downtime when you’re surrounded above, below, and all around you with neighbors.
Where were you living? We lived in busy Paris and Berlin and were able to consider our homes quiet refuges. We had a kid and all the other reasons why people transition from city to suburb. It felt more accommodating than the German suburb my brother in law lived in with his kids, full of bike lanes and the like.
Now we’re in Palo Alto, a walkable suburb, which doesn’t seem much quieter. I still can’t see the stars, and getting to concerts, art exhibits and the like is inconvenient and doesn’t really happen. At least I can still walk to the grocery store or restaurants through of course the selection is limited.
New building or old, all it takes is one noisy neighbor to keep up half of the residents within a block.
Loud noise is a notoriously difficult problem, and especially difficult to manage in a true mixing pot like NYC.
Many years back: I was very annoyed to wake up at midnight on Christmas; some religious immigrants were going around door to door singing with their instruments (apartment building). They meant well, but that sound carries.
Yes, I told them to quiet down.
Cite? "Owner-occupied housing units made up 60.6 percent of total housing units, while renter-occupied units made up 29.3 percent of the inventory in the third quarter 2020" (https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf)
The neighbourhood I live in was originally for dock workers around the Thames. Then the docks containerized and electrified.
Then the neighborhood was for employees of the local Ford plant. Then they downsized and replaced most people with robots.
Now the neighbourhood is for a mix of people being housed by the state (the unemployed, single mums etc) and people working service jobs in Central London who take the train up every morning.
That's all in the last 90 years. Less really as my house is one of the older ones.
With covid meaning everyone works from home, us service workers might all move out over the next decade.
My point is, people (including governments, companies and other groups) find uses for the infrastructure (including houses) that they have. Not the other way around.
And this is all cyclical: I remember when the inner cities were "crime ridden hell holes". They depopulated. Then suddenly people (often gay men apparently?) moved in and suddenly you can't turn around with seeing million dollar appartments, 8 dollar coffee places and high fashion outlets...
Then, they assert that most people don't live in houses, also wrong. 60% of Americans (and similar elsewhere) live in houses. Not apartments etc.
Then, the predictions. Why are 1-2 person households the trend? Is it because people don't want to live in a house and own a car? Are the so-called Millennials at the core of this? No. If they have the income, they buy houses and cars, exactly as people before them did.
So what is the supposed trend about? I imagine it's because of a lack of suburb development. Zoning, land use, distance to city centers. People don't live in suburbs, because for whatever reason they're not being built fast enough at a cost that is affordable.
Is it possible that it’s due to people feeling like they do not have the economic security to purchase homes and start families?
There are cheap suburbs all over the US. The question is can people afford them, including factoring in the volatility of income over the next few decades of your life.
All of these types of articles are just laughably wrong about the state of the world. They say 80% of new households will be 1-2 people as though this is a lasting trend towards smaller households. That's just people moving out of their parents house. The majority of those will eventually become 3+ households.
The people that the suburbs were built for still exist. People that aren't rich and want to have a family. They're just doing that in their early 30s now instead of in their early 20s.
I assumed they were just continuing a trend. But I looked at the US 1980 census and was surprised to find that the number of persons per household almost didn't change. 2.67 then vs 2.62 now.
Meanwhile in France, it dropped from 2.75 to 2.2, so I thought it was the same in the USA, hence my hypothesis. But it appears it isn't.
I don’t get their conclusion, because I think there are many other benefits to home ownership outside of size typically being bigger than an apartment or condo. Having outdoor space, no HOA that can impose restrictions, added privacy, etc...
See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22908734
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Sea-Cliff-Mansion-Tumble...
https://www.sfexaminer.com/the-city/new-central-subway-direc...
That Central subway is probably going to be roughly 10 years late.
I read the roads are better now after 650M dollars.
Whether the local government is acually fixing stuff is somewhat different issue. This one is about it being overall more expensive when they finally have no choice but to fix it.
Much of the additional costs are actually borne locally: water, sewage, roads, garbage. With increased installation of solar panels, even electricity is increasingly borne locally.
Also, given the inefficiency of large bureaucracies and the costs of scale in the US, it is somewhat unclear to me if urban areas are really lower cost per capital compared to suburban areas. Look at the Central tunnel project in SF.
Second, your claims about price are purely theoretical. As of now, suburbs require more money and dont have all that many solar panels.
I just claimed that perhaps people should be free to do as they wish as far as living in suburbs vs cities.
You then claim that many places do not allow mixed use. I assume that this is part of your freedom argument. Guess what. Many of the smaller towns in the Bay Area have already changed zoning to allow this. My city did this.
The real conflict, at least in the Bay Area, is between the part of tech trying to limit salary cost by limiting housing prices and the part of tech (and non tech) who have already bought and want their housing prices to rise. It is mostly a zero sum game.
It isn't about equity and environment. If it were, then the part of tech trying to limit salary cost would actually lower their consumption and would actually contribute towards those less fortunate.
In reality, a very small percentage actually cared about the less fortunate. You should see how often volunteering was cancelled due to lack of participation. Happened multiple times in multiple large companies.
Also, very few people in tech even think about limiting their consumption. How big are the houses of the C levels? How many people bought Teslas, new houses, etc upon IPO?
Both sides are mostly act out of their self interest. Inequity, environment, character of neighborhood, quality of life, etc are mostly false warriors in this battle.
Housing owners want ever increasing housing value and all the associated amenities: quality of life, cultural events, fine foods, trips, etc...
Tech owners want to basically drive housing to as low as possible. Think Singapore or Japan.
Well, COVID-19 resolved this conflict of tech vs tech. Welcome to remote work which means that companies can hire anywhere.
This is the kind of thing people parrot because it sounds nice. But unfortunatly, this isn't actually true. Suburban maintenance is usually cheaper per capita than urban ones, in the real world.
Cities tend to need higher-quality infrastructure, which drives up costs. (Cities bury power lines in conduit underground which is expensive, suburbs string them from sticks in the air, which is cheap. Cities bury storm water drainage which is expensive, in suburbs a ditch in your yard is all the stormwater infrastructure needed which costs almost nothing, etc). So even though suburbs have less people-per-foot, the infrastructure costs are drastically cheaper despite the per-foot distances being higher.
The electric company can string up a neighborhood of 50 single-family homes (trunk and individual line replacement) without much fuss or trouble, just two guys and a truck. But the logistics to run a brand new power line for a brand-new apartment building with 50 units in it in Midtown Manhattan is way more complicated, time and labour intensive. (They might have to close down a sidewalk or entire street, they have to dig up chunks of the road, check for a dozen other things buried underground, the buildings are so close together they need to know the foundational stability of every other thing nearby, etc)
The long game is a modified form of pod hotels.
BTW, you can well partition American ideology as:
- let's go back to post war golden age, fuck disadvantaged people
- let's go back to revised post war golden age, but made good for disadvantaged people
- the post war boom was only possible because WWII destroyed so much of the rest of world and cars were becoming popular for the first time. We cannot go back.
The third camp is right, but very small and very different.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/business/economy/single-f...
I find it interesting how many posts here bemoan the lack of community in their lives when so many people live in isolated areas. For some reason the solution that comes to mind is more church instead of rethinking our housing priorities.
1) I don't know how young people meet each other in real life when both men and women self-isolate with earbuds now.
Unless taking your earbuds out is a signal you're interested?
Maybe somebody can fill me in.
2) I knew a young IT graduate who wore earbuds at work. He had the chance to listen and discuss many topics with world-class software and IT engineers, except he couldn't hear them.
Your IT graduate made their own choices - maybe they wanted to do their job and go home rather than discuss with world-class people. Or maybe they had problems with concentration or noise.
Some people are introverts, or have busy life you're not a part of and never see, or just have different priorities. It's ok.
Companies often pay for their employees to attend professional and technical development workshops or go to conferences, because part of your job is to improve your skills. Casual water cooler talks do the same thing; they improve your skills, and help initiate creative ideas that ultimately help build better things.
In my own PhD, I saw supervisors demand their students attend department get together, bar hangouts at conferences, and even casually talk to other people in the dept. If I was a manager of creative types, I would absolutely rate someone who didn't "waste their time" at work lower, because if your job description is to create, you need to do reasonable things to improve your creative skills and outputs.
Several of my employers issue staff with noise cancelling headphones on day one on the job. The employee is supposed to make the suitable judgement call on when they're suitable (needing a few hours of uninterrupted concentration) and when they're not.
The alternative is giving people offices so they can actually isolate, or understanding that people who operate on 'maker time' will not be productive with regular interruptions.
I mean this 100% seriously: when you have community outside of work you spend less time chatting at work.
AirPods Pro are often used as hearing aids in “transparency” mode. Do not make the (lazy) assumption that someone wearing them cannot hear every word you say.
Furthermore, I think if I had to listen to self-proclaimed “world-class” engineers all day, I’d wear earphones too. And not on “transparency” mode.
Whether you're in a city or a suburb, there's plenty of community to be found or made if you put the effort in. The problem is our culture is being eroded away with each minute spent using the internet.
I struggle with this problem daily - as a web developer, my job is to fight for people's attention. I strive to build as good of a UX as possible and serve interesting content to users in the name of getting more clicks, more ad impressions, and more revenue. This is happening at a global scale, with ever more companies fighting over the individual's attention span to make a buck. Attention is a finite resource. If we capture 2 hours of your day, then you lose 2 hours you could have spent making friends at a local volunteer group while improving your community. I feel like we're cannibalizing society.
All that being said, I think online communities are a wonderful thing, but psychologically, they lack something important. People feel lonelier than ever while having more access to new communities of like-minded people than ever before.
I'm hoping VR/AR helps bridge this gap, but this in-between phase we're in is just kind of depressing.
It's not that I don't think that religion provides community or a decent ethical foundation. I just don't believe in the supernatural or any belief system that requires the breaking of the Second Law of Thermodynamics without any explanation of how.
Still the social aspects of religion are interesting. What does "more church" look like if you're an atheist? More participatory sports clubs maybe? Or, more things you can walk to and do regularly with the same people in general?
EDIT: I see the confusion now, it is actually ambiguous, maybe you read it right
Even the unorganized religions rely on this trichotomy without any explanation or coherence
I would be open to any outcome, just quantify the rules and mechanisms
Otherwise as you mentioned, some hobbies are my church. Local coworking is my church too.
Church is foremost for worship and social second, third, etc...
Some people are not particularly social at church and thats ok. What makes them happy is fulfilling a spiritual need.
It wasn't a total failure, but humanism never reached the mainstream.
Growing up in Manchester, I found it was football that fulfilled the emotional and tribal needs of many of my peers.
Many people assume Britain and USA are the same. In many respects, that is true. But as to church and religion, they are poles apart. At least that was true in the nineties when I lived in USA.
There are the Unitarian Universalists where many -- including atheists -- are not only welcome but also find worship.
unitarians simply take the parts they like from every religion to form another.
WFM. YMMV.
Like the spontaneous generation of life that continuously grows more and more complex?
“Here’s a cosmological model that might be true given our current data”
Vs
“Here’s a magical anthropocentric religious explanation for anything I can’t immediately explain”
Sports, craft, games, etc... it hosted scheduled activities like workouts, helped organize event like trips, there was a room with a piano where lessons were held but was otherwise freely accessible, a small library, a bunch of chessboards from the chess club, again, freely accessible, etc... A lot of activities were aimed at kids but it spanned all age groups, including elderly.
Of course, it created a strong, unreligious community. Unfortunately, as it is often the case with these organizations, the few key players lost interest and no one took over, so while it still exists, not much remains.
Plenty of secular NGOs. User groups (Linux, BSD). If you're into photography: photo walks.
Those are all just commerce that you commute to, though. As someone who worked in the service industry for years, 99% of the people I met at work (the "regulars", the overly chatty parents who haven't seen an adult this month, etc) I would never consider part of my community.
How many conversations do you have with members of your community that you're not buying something from?
That said, most relationships in a community of people are going to be at least somewhat superficial, because nobody can maintain deep personal relationships with hundreds of people.
The idea that the whole thing is just a cynical commercial racket is silly though. Building a real relationship with your community is the whole point of small local business. A lot of those relationships are genuine friendships. The owner of my local coffee shop invites my wife and I over for dinner every so often, and vice versa. I had my local butcher over a couple of weeks ago because he wanted me to teach him how to make beef rendang.
Even if commerce underlies the relationship, it can still be entirely community based.
What I am saying is that you should have connections with the other people in your community at the shop, not the person hired to interact with you. The relationship with the store owner has nothing to do with whether you drive a car or not.
The relationship you have with others, the other folks at the store shopping, etc are much harder in a suburban geography literally because of the lack of interactions. Drivethu's are the extreme of this.
It's my hypothesis that having a relationship with your local butcher or coffee maker has little to nothing to do with your car, but the relationships you have with others merely due to their proximity to you is the beauty of community. Digital or physical.
I don’t think this is an essential element of community at all, but as I said “ a majority of [the other community members I interact with] would be other people who go to the same places I go”
> It's my hypothesis that having a relationship with your local butcher or coffee maker has little to nothing to do with your car
I’d say you’re right. But I’d also say that the comment “cities are made for cars not people” is equally as insightful as the comment “footpaths are made for shoes not people”, “cycle lanes are made for bicycles not people” or “rail lines are made for trains not people”. Because at the end of the day, shoes, bicycles, cars, buses, trains... are all made for people. I would suggest that a persons perception of their local community has much more to do with how they interact with it than it does the form of transport they use. I’m also certain that there would be a large number of people who live in the same community as I do, which I find to be particularly vibrant, who spend their time not socializing with anybody, and then go home at the end of the day to take out their phone and complain about lack of community.
Only one of those literally puts a glass and metal wall between every single person, and I think it's a significant difference in how social you can realistically be, as all time spent traveling is no longer occurring within a social context, but a private one.
There is literally no city in the world where people are interested in the social experience of public transport.
What connections do you find in your grocery store?
But it's just a reply about the car making your interaction with your community almost exclusively commercial. I've met far more friends at the park, usually when I'm walking through with my dog.
Just because I wouldn't call him if I needed a kidney doesn't mean he's not a part of my (the) community.
This feels like a commercial transaction to me.
Any human behaviour examined from the correct perspective can be attributed to an egoist motive.
I just don't consider it a real friendship, and I think this is potentially dangerous thinking. Your counterpart is being paid to form that connection with you, and you are in a specific position of power over them in that situation.
It's nice, in the moment, to be given service - by someone working in a service industry (this is certainly not unique to the suburbs) - but I find it odd that you seem to describe this as a satisfying personal relationship. You will likely never see that person again, whenever they stop doing that job. Your connection and their connection is to the transaction, which includes a personal element at your behest.
If you had said: and I often see them outside of work, then I would consider that slightly differently.
That said, I do have “real friendships” with a number of people that I’ve meet in these settings. Because, perhaps unsurprisingly, a nice local community can be a good place to find new friends.
Everything has to be "Real friendship" What does that even mean? You're just talking to others to be a decent human being. Not everyone has to be your wife/husband/BFF for ever.
I've seen plenty of people after commercial transactions. In fact, many times I remember people and they remember me for pleasant interactions - they aren't my best man but it's still really satisfying to me.
This is not a benefit of living in the suburbs. You can have a pleasant commercial transaction anywhere in the world - you pay for that.
It just goes back to the common theme these days - everything is something or someone else's fault. No one ever just says " man I'm feeling lonely, maybe I should join this club, or start going to this coffee shop and just strike up conversation."
No we have to "blame the suburbs" and "blame cars." No one wants to just take responsibility for themselves, they just want to complain about everything else causing their problems online.
Obviously there are many other benefits of regular friendly small interactions with people, but this one has stood out in my mind over the last couple polarizing years.
Along with social skills I think it's the lack of other hobbies or interests. I have friends from local bars but I also have ones from various sports clubs and other activities. Whether it's churches, the local chess club or sports a city will provide a lot more of these niches for community.
Community doesn't just happen, you have to go out and get involved in them, then you have to talk to people instead of sitting on your phone.
I would rather like to see more enjoyable activities such hackathons, festivals, contests etc. Church/religions are outdated and most of them(i.e the major ones) just exploit your fears.
If “God” is the label we place on the force/spirit of creation/life in this world, then “fearing God” means to respect and subject yourself to the truth about this creation rather than considering yourself above it. The most concrete example is understanding that attempting to break the laws of physics by “flying” off a cliff is unwise. Among Christians it’s also common to interpret it as recognising that going against the “will” of this force that created us (concretely natural selection as well as however the universe and life of earth came to be) will bite you in the arse, such as rejecting family (life) for vanity for example.
If one instead fears judgement from fellow men in church, you should disregard the fear and forgive those who judge you - because standing above a fellow man is the sin of thinking you’re of a higher intrinsic value which also is not fearing God.
It’s not expressed in precise scientific language but rather colourful, poetic, narrative, and philosophical language, because it is ideas older than Newton, but it does not require supernatural claims, not is it about fearing other people.
Not trying to change your mind or person - but encourage you to continue discovering philosophy and religion
Science calls for the use of data, and constantly modifying and updating knowledge based on data.
Religion, or at least all the implementations of it that I know, are not about throwing out the old if new, conflicting data is discovered.
As far as I can tell, religion is a relic from tribal days, and still serves much of the same purpose today. It can assist in societies without formed legal systems and can help foster higher trust within its members.
Humans have insufficient time to evaluate all of the motivations and priorities of others, and religion provides a nice framework with all the various social events and traditions for the tribe to coalesce around.
Growing up, I learned that plausible deniability is very important for humans. For the same reasons that flirting is a thing, it’s not beneficial for someone to walk around with an explicit list of people/tribes they value over others, in push comes to shove scenarios. But it is beneficial to signal it implicitly, and going along this line of thought gets into politics.
But it's full of supernatural mumbo-jumbo. Of course that would not be an issue if it wouldn't claim to be the undisputable truth. Science calls for verification. Religion does the opposite.
This is just one of the possible interpretations. If you are a Christian then you believe the New Testament has a priority over the Old one, and you know that someone already asked Jesus the question what is most important, and the reply was, briefly, "love". So, logically, if you follow love (not fear!) in your life, trying to be kind to others and helping them within your means, this should be understood as living perfectly within the spirit of the teaching of Christ, even if you have nothing to do with any Church.
The character/person Christ is described as “logos” made flesh. That means the ideal man embodies in this world the ideas of universal ethics and as you say love for their fellow brother and sisters the children of creation.
I like you interpret it as a personal philosophical/spiritual thing, and the church being a physical place to remind yourself of and celebrate this. Thank you for your insightful comment :)
It means to believe and do absurd things due fear such Abraham offering his son as a sacrifice/killing him. Most important it means to fear questioning "god's will" or the authenticity of religion.
>> The most concrete example is understanding that attempting to break the laws of physics by “flying” off a cliff is unwise.
Religions like very much to enact "laws"/opinions on things they don't understand or don't fit their model. The history is full of this. Usually people get hurt. Just look at what poor Isaac was about to get. The old book is full of such crap. Hate, war, and discrimination seem to get a respectable place as well. To make your example more religious you should put a punishment on that: i.e if you try to fly you will rot in hell and even if you escape the fall the good people of the church will burn you at the stake.
>> Not trying to change your mind or person
You can't. I went full circle on it. Once you get rid of the fear you see the religions for what they truly are: a mix of old politics and some cheap philosophy.
>> but encourage you to continue discovering philosophy and religion
Philisophy: maybe
Religion: my stomach can't handle it anymore.
Hehe this was me younger discovering pre Christian philosophy and r/atheism. I especially considered myself Epicurean. Good times :-). Take care and keep on reasoning!
I was raised without religion but as Bangladeshis we have a pretty rigid culture apart from religion. This is the “what do you teach your kids about stuff.” Here in the United States it seems like most of that is just whatever is transmitted through the Disney Channel and movies. And frankly a lot of that is pretty garbage culture. It teaches people to be self-centered assholes.
Obviously there are many moral people who aren’t religious (and many religious people who aren’t moral). But you can take away religion but you still need some moral framework in its place. And in the US that seems really hard. We don’t have ready-made frameworks for “here’s what you should teach your kids.” Many parents do a fine job improvising, but it’s a lot of work to do it on your own from scratch.
The abandonment of religion and culture more generally has been a giant exercise in ignoring Chersterton's fence.
Culture is a basically "here is how we act so we don't die." People grow up in it, and they realize that some of it is perhaps outdated or inaccurate. That isn't by itself much of an issue.
The trouble comes when those people have children and grandchildren who were never immersed in the culture and so didn't have the backing of "here are our mutual stories" to know what to keep and what the get rid of.
It's basically burning down a library because, "Well I only read three or four of those books anyway"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton's_fence
While many tout the Judeo-Christian foundations of the US, most of that is just a thin veneer. Kind of like the Horatio Alger myth that you can simply pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you really really just try hard enough.
Scripture definitely teaches a traditional view of marriage and gender roles. You might consider that “repulsive” but I think there’s a lot of room for debate on that. Less than half of Americans believe that “changing gender roles have made it easier for women to live more satisfying lives.” https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/10/18/wide-partisan-gap.... That includes less than 60% of Democrats.
Scripture also teaches the centrality of procreation to marriage and society. I happen to agree with the Obergefell approach, which relied on relatively recent research (based on the 2010 census) showing the astounding number of same-sex couples raising children together. I think it’s no surprise that views on same-sex relationships have shifted quickly as people came to understand that it’s compatible with traditional understandings of marriage’s societal function. (That research, by the way, was not available 5 decades ago. The scientific research on homosexuality being an immutable characteristic really got going in the 1990s, and became widely acknowledge among the public only around 2010.)
I will point out that the western world is almost entirely dependent on immigrants from societies that have traditional religious views on these issues for their population stability. Western social liberalism has many positive attributes, but it hasn’t proven to be self-perpetuating. Maybe it’s adherents should be a little circumspect before calling other attitudes “repulsive.”
"the cultural values transmitted are often not only at odds with scripture, but just repulsive in general."
>Maybe it’s adherents should be a little circumspect before calling other attitudes “repulsive.”
Which of the values I criticized as repulsive do you think I should be more circumspect about? Racism? Homophobia? Misogyny?
>I will point out that the western world is almost entirely dependent on immigrants from societies that have traditional religious views on these issues for their population stability. Western social liberalism has many positive attributes, but it hasn’t proven to be self-perpetuating.
I think the Western world will do just fine without embracing the repulsive values I've listed.
I lived in Singapore for a while and there was a very strong demand for cars. This is despite a world class public transport system and very high fees/taxes on owning a car. The point is, having a car is a luxury that many people desire. Even with public transport alternatives.
There are nice string of parks along the lake, but the loop area as a whole constantly sacrifices nice outdoor space in exchange for a bit more driving room. That’s starting to change but we’re still a long way away from a European style city center.
I’ve been to Europe and seen the mass of cars in the down town core and shit parking situation.
I’d say chicago doing is pretty good compared to Europe.
My overall point is despite good mass transit and dense housing, when people can afford it it, many people prefer cars.
You're likely being downvoted for the ignorance.
(NB: I didn't downvote you because you are right that too often this fairy-tale European style appears here. But still...)
That said I loved Singapore and I love it's awesome public transportation and its abundant taxies that were easily reservable long before Uber existed.
Agreed. It's a meaningless lazy insult. Like saying, "hospitals are built for diseases, not people".
When it comes to relationships, cities just work on a pull model, where small towns worked on a push model.
BTW, I was just about to agree with you. But I just realized that we’ve been social distancing for almost a year. It felt like centuries ago since I had more than a 5 minute conversation with my neighbors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_Protestant
These days, they're losing members to a growing irreligion, people who can find everything they need without joining any religious faith and, perhaps more importantly, can remain irreligious without suffering a serious social disability. (There are still places where the first icebreaker question is "What church do you go to?" and not having a good answer is not really an option if you wish to get along.) Therefore, expecting the old standbys to pick up the slack isn't going to work.
https://religionunplugged.com/news/2019/8/30/as-nones-increa...
The above has some great quotes:
> "People are either being intentionally and intensely religious – like really active evangelicals, or conservative Catholics, or yada yada – or they're leaving the more moderate churches that we've always seen as holding down the middle of religious life in this country," he said. "We've ended up with two trends that appear to be related. We're losing moderation in the political space in American life and we're losing moderation in the religious space, as well."
> The political implications of these trends are complex, he said. But there does seem to be a Big Idea at the heart of it all: Millions of Americans, especially young adults, have decided that "religious" equals "Republican."
> Burge put it this way on Twitter, describing how doctrines can affect public life: "There is no religious group in the U.S. that places itself halfway between the political parties. Instead, every religious tradition has a 'baked-in' political preference now. Nones favor Democrats. Christians (by and large) favor the GOP."
No idea how much it holds but it fits my experience.
The stereotype is meant as something positive, but I associate something negative with it. I grew up suburban and I just can't imagine ever moving back. It's so boring, dull and while there's more proximity, you are so bound to you environment. If you don't fit in the you have a problem. I didn't fit in later in school, I didn't get bullied or anything, but I just lacked people with the same interest. I found them in the city in the 10th grade, so I started to commute by train into the city every wednesday after school and on the weekends. They were weird, looked weird and interested in music, art and protecting the environment. I regularly feel asleep saturday night on the central station because I missed my train and had to wait hours. I understand the positive association but the only thing I associate with it is being locked in in an environment you have no control over because it is not by choice but by geographic proximity. I don't want parties with people on my block, I want parties with my friends. Preferably every weekend until the sun starts to rise again and I am exhausted but happy.
Writing this was very interesting for me, I never really tried to reflect why I so strongly despise the idea of moving again into something suburban.
Isolated areas, or at least small towns, tend to have much stronger communities than I've found in cities. Anytime I've lived in a city most "communities" that evolve tend to revolve around work.
Live in a small town for a few years and you'll likely be part of multiple small communities interested in different things. I used to live in a pretty isolated smallish city and knew almost all of the owners of every restaurant I ate at and store I visited. I was active in a range of different communities with many different interests.
If you live in some extremely isolated area, like out in rural Maine, you'll likely be at least acquaintances with literally every person in town. The grocery store clerk and the owner of the town lumber yard will know something about you, at see you as part of their community. When you go grocery shopping it's rare to see only strangers.
Every apartment I've lived in in cities I've only vaguely known my neighbors, but in my first move to the suburbs I was instantly greeted by everyone around me, we exchanged numbers and had a small party.
My experience is that, generally speaking, community increases with the distance from the city center. One particular exception would be a dead zone in certain mass produced suburbs (the ring of death around Denver CO. being a good example).
My experience has been the opposite. Moreover, in a large city, I get to choose my community as opposed to being forced into being in one due to mere proximity.
This is a key, in a city you need to be proactive about it, or if not interested you can fully avoid any interaction and no one cares. In small places, you have to interact at least a little with people around you, or you'll be labeled as a weirdo. And also you're more often in need of someone helping you with something, as not everything is around the corner and readily available like in big cities.
In general, American suburbs infrastructure-wise were built more for cars than people or other transit mechanisms.
Austin seems to care about this a bit less, but I think it might be due to terrain. In general a fence increases home value usually in most Texas cities.
“Here's the man with teeth like God's shoeshine
He sparkles shimmers shines
Let's all have another Orange Julius
Thick syrup standing in lines
The malls are the soon to be ghost towns
So long, farewell, good-bye..”
It was a nice weird space-age childhood, but now that built environment needs to go.
Granted, my city is huge and so living in the city feels more suburban than living downtown would.
My wife, kids, and I all have our own rooms and home offices. We have a nice backyard with screened in porch, deck, and patio. 2 car garage and can charge the electric car at home and never have to deal with bringing the groceries in during the rain.
I would never go back to living in a downtown area.
I have a couple of friends that moved downtown. One bought a house for 2X the cost of the suburbs. The other got divorced and moved to an apartment downtown. After a year of trendy restaurants and lack of space he got tired of it and is looking to move back to the suburbs.
It is sunday morning, 5am, and this kid of a boomer, with a good white-collar job, is about to drive to work.
Commies are long gone, that goal no longer applies, move on.
The Daily Evening Rush Of Suburbanites And Travelers For The Cortlandt Street Ferry, Pennsylvania Railroad. (1899)
This seems historically illiterate, because suburbs came before the Cold War.
Ok but that's not when it was invented, which is what you said.
On the contrary, they are running the asylum
Examples: soda tax, alcohol tax, tobacco tax, gasoline tax, candy tax, decreased state funding for school districts in higher income areas, state requirements for higher density housing lest the city lose state funding, ban on gas cars, ban on gas stoves, tiered electricity and water costs, elimination of magnet schools.
I would expect far more social manipulation through laws in the next few years.
Here are a few that I can dream up:
- decreased state funding for schools if your housing is below a certain density, or below a job/housing ratio
- make water and electricity far more progressively expensive
- additional property tax based on land area
- additional road tax based on number of miles in an area
- higher sales tax on cars
It makes sense for rural and suburban services to cost more in taxes because they cost more for the government to deliver (simple example being a more extensive road network). The status quo is actually that rural and suburban living is being subsidised by government.
I agree with you about the soda tax though!
Edit: I see you updated your comment but I will leave mine as is.
What is that money actually going to? In California, over half goes to school funding and suburban schools get less since the state gives more to poorer (mostly urban) school districts.
The typical complaint is that suburban areas use more water, energy, and their roads cost more. However, they often have to pay for all that. Local roads are paid by local government (read the suburbs). Water districts are often also local.
The only areas where suburbs may use more (but not pay more) is in building and maintaining infrastructure: highways, electrical, gas. The power infrastructure is long paid for and is actually a regulated utility so you are limited to highways. I wonder what taxes are going to be created as people switch to electric cars. There are already cries that the punitive gas tax against driving will become ineffective.
No this is the reverse: the money you use to pay your taxes comes from the state (the currency issuer). Taxes are useful to achieve policy goals or control the money supply to avoid too much inflation, but the government doesn't need to collect money from taxes before it can spend it.
Only the Federal Reserve can print money. The way the rest of the federal government besides the Fed gets money is through taxes and by selling treasury bills and bonds where they promise to pay back the money with interest. Other parts of government can also sell bonds.
If entities believe that a government is running the printing presses there is a currency run and inflation. Ever wonder why assets inflated tremendously the last 8 months relative to the dollar? Ever wonder why the dollar has lost 10% versus other currencies? Things that are fixed in price just got cheaper (like fixed rate mortgages). Things that aren’t, have gone up in price (restaurants, produce, lumber).
Also the running of the presses may add money to the Federal government but may hurt some local governments in the same manner. For example, a city in California dependent on property taxes may have trouble paying its bills when there is a lot of inflation. That is because Prop 13 mandates no more than a 2% increase in property taxes per year. Those private companies that it gets services from will bid at higher prices.
The built environment of the United States was a choice. "Forced" through top down "market" incentives.
Not to mention oil subsidies etc
From American Conservative: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/we-have-always-...
https://marketurbanism.com/2017/09/05/subsidizing-suburbia-a...