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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
Why. Maybe you're comforted by the thought that your experience was not abnormally privileged, but it was.