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Comment by tharne | Hacker News Reader

What most academics and others like them tend to miss about the American suburbs, is that most Americans like their suburbs.

The American suburbs are the Toyota Camry of housing. Kind of boring and somewhat ugly, but affordable, functional, and ultimately well-liked by the end-user.

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Do they like them because of inherent qualities of US-style suburbs, or do they like them because that's all they know?

Also, suburbs are only affordable because we continue to defer infrastructure maintenance. At some point, we will have to pay to maintain all the bridges, roads, etc.

I'm not anti-suburb necessarily. But, I do loathe the car-based culture we've created. And the rage that any mention of alternative transport seems to elicit among many suburb dwellers (who also love to bitch about traffic problems, but only want more tarmac as a solution).

I think a lot of the rage against alternative transit is the apparent bias among many such proponents to "First, we make car travel much, much less appealing; only after that's accomplished, then we'll hope to make alternative modes competitive with the nerfed version of private automobiles."

I had encountered unexpected hostility against cyclist on the road. No making car travel unappealing was involved, just someone existed on bike and someone else somehow took it as provocation.

That hasn't been my experience at all (living in the DC suburbs).

Local example: I live in Reston VA. We've slowly been adding bike lanes to existing roads as other improvements are made. In some cases, this required cutting from 2 lanes to 1 lane. However, in all cases, traffic timings and accident analysis was undertaken and in all cases that I've seen, traffic flow either improved or if there was a decrease, it was on the order of 1-2 seconds per mile traveled. Additionally, in most cases, traffic accidents of all kinds were reduced.

But, you wouldn't know it from listening to the anti-bike crowd. They see the reduction in lane count and immediately jump to "nobody rides bikes!", "run them over" or worse. Seriously, it's that bad.

I'll also add that in some places, the bike lanes are rarely used, but that's as as direct result of poor designs created to silence the noisy motorists. Another local example - the main thoroughfare along my neighborhood has bike lanes. However, the lanes stop just prior to the two places you would want to ride your bike - the high school and the shopping center. So, of course fewer people use the lanes - they don't actually GO anywhere! It's infuriating.

Edit - the sidewalks along this same thoroughfare also start/stop or switch sides. This makes it less tenable to walk to the school or shopping (the road is about 2 miles end-to-end; shopping center at one end, high school near mid-point). Lots of people are within 1 mile of either destination, but running back and forth across a 45mph busy road is simply unsafe. A pedestrian was killed a year ago running from the sidewalk on one side to his home on the other. How the heck is this even to code? Argh.

Humans are emotional more than rational. Positive numbers won't outweigh the anecdote of being stuck in a traffic jam while the bike lanes sit there, effectively empty.

City planners and bicycle activists need to work with human nature, not against it.

The only traffic jam on the road outside my house is caused by the hundreds of high school kids driving themselves to school instead of riding a bike (which they can't do, because the bike lane doesn't go that far, because their parents demanded the road be left untouched to make room for more cars).

If over half of the high schoolers driving by your place would really chose to ride a bike instead of driving... Well, the high schoolers you know appear to be quite different than the high schoolers I know.

Even myself - I couldn't wait to be able to drive to high school, nevermind the bus, my bicycle, carpooling with neighbors, etc.

Getting a car at 16 is only a thing because it means freedom from having mom/dad drive you everywhere. If alternate transit existed, this would resolve itself.

Would be nice if Tyson's was bikeable and 7 as well. Lots of improvements are being made to the W&OD trail which is nice as well.

Oh man, don't get me started on Tyson's Corner.

The urban planner who decided to drop a major employment center inside the triangle made by 3 massive highways (with little/no housing, no transit access, and ridiculous street layout) needs a kick in the crotch.

> That hasn't been my experience at all (living in the DC suburbs).

In my experience what "first we make car transport less and less appealing" translates to is "we should allocate some of this land dedicated to free parking for other uses."

Unfortunately you just can't have a walkable urban neighborhood and also a glut of free parking. But suburbanites insist that city-dwellers should shoulder the opportunity cost of making their wasteful transportation choices more convenient for them.

Often it’s the businesses nearby that want that parking to remain. If you don’t give people a convenient means to come from where they live to where your business is, you can’t get their shopping dollar. I don’t care if it’s hard to get there; I’ll just shop someplace else that is convenient.

I live on the edge of a city. Most of my shopping is out in the suburbs as they crush the city core on convenience of time and transport (and often on price due to overhead).

> Unfortunately you just can't have a walkable urban neighborhood and also a glut of free parking

With proper ventilation, subterranean roads and parking areas could enable this where geology is favorable, but it wouldn't be cheap.

This could maybe be viable for malls, stadiums, or huge residential buildings. But I don't see it working for rowhome/townhome heavy areas. Just not enough scale to be worth it.

I agree, I completely rely on transit and don’t own a car, but it’s clear a lot of activists want to penalize owning a car. Transit can out compete car ownership on its own merits (see NYC, DC & Boston) but it requires significant investment which most are unwilling to accept. Imo the fundamental problem is that most activists are fundamentally fairly left leaning and public/private partnerships would be the best way to build out subway/light rail systems in up and coming cities. Due to ideological commitments they’re unwilling to consider this option.

in LA, almost every train stop has nothing over it, like no retail, no commercial, and no residential at all. it's such an easy win to have a commercial developer build a 6-story mixed use complex right on top of the station. but no, we need to make sure everyone has to walk at least 1/3 of a mile to their final destination.

That's one place northern VA is doing ok, finally. With the Metro extension to Dulles Airport (and beyond), they did revise the zoning and development plans in the blocks surrounding the stations. Millions of sqft of mixed-use developments are going in where previously it was low-rise office and massive spans of asphalt parking.

Part of it is economics - proximity to the metro made the land more valuable. But part was the county BOD and planning commissions putting their foot down and making changes to zoning (changes to min parking requirements, changes to housing density, etc).

As somebody who lives across the street from the edge of one of these zones, it's a mixed bag. I get to walk to work. Next year, there will be a new grocer on my way. Pretty good. The downside is more traffic, especially on bridges across the airport access road (we really need 4-5 instead of the 3 that exist today). And, as land values have gone up, developers are trying their hardest to buy up parkland and convert it to condos/offices.

The more competent proponents of alternative transport start by making the alternative transport better than cars.

San Francisco is almost a credible example. Pre-Covid, it was quite common to want to go from point A near Market Street to point B, 1-2 miles away, also near Market street. This could easily take 45 minutes by car or 5-10 min by bike. If the BART or Muni went to the right place, you had a Clipper card so you didn’t need to navigate the atrocious payment system, and you didn’t need to use the elevator, it was reasonably fast. If the Market street improvements had gone quickly to every-five-minute bus service with a dedicated lane, the bus would have been a huge win over car/rideshare.

A lot of transit planners seem to fail to understand that good transit will be widely used even by affluent people as long as they trust that the transit is frequent (or runs on a real schedule and the schedule is accessible), has appropriate hours, and is clean and safe. Instead there are pilot programs with 1/4 the service, and they fail to attract 1/4 of the riders, because 1/4 of the service is simply not a good alternative to a car.

It’s like the Caltrain wondering why the tech employee ridership isn’t great when the express service stops before all the programmers go to work. Or Sonic.net deciding to put fiber in the neighborhoods that already have a lot of customers of their DSL service.

Here are some reasons...

1. You have a yard for you and your kids to play in. I know a number of people who love this. You can send the kids out to the yard without having to be there with them. When the weather is nice you can do this most days. And, the kids can have a blast doing it.

2. You can grow a garden. Flower garden or vegetable garden... I know a number of people who do this. This brings them pleasure in multiple forms.

3. It's a place that's yours rather than someone else's. When you rent there is someone else that owns it and you live there. Some people like to own and have more control over their space. It's about agency.

All three of those can be true in a city.

Like I said, I'm not anti-suburb. I am anti-car-dependent development planning.

Technically true; we own* such a place in Cambridge, MA. It's not something that's affordable for the median household income though. Structurally, I suspect it could never be, because the inherent low density required for that means that places nearest the city with that density will be bid up beyond what the median household can afford.

Which in turn means someone of median (or even 75th percentile) income who wants to buy a house with a yard big enough for kids to meaningfully play in isn't going to do so in Cambridge, but can readily do it in a number of suburbs within an hour's commuting distance of Cambridge/Boston.

* - or rather the bank owns more of it than we do and we’re slowly buying it from them...

> I suspect it could never be, because the inherent low density required for that means that places nearest the city with that density will be bid up beyond what the median household can afford.

I see no reason why. Cambridge was, once upon a time, a streetcar suburb of Boston. There's no reason you can't just build more dense suburbs and outlying cities. You just don't need them to be car-dependent. There are tons of suburbs outside of major European cities that are just less dense and more family oriented while still being well served by transit and being walkable for all peoples' daily needs.

Having a private yard for your kids and their friends to play in (as listed #1 upthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26556317) is the thing that necessarily constrains maximum density. We have about 1/4 acre in the city. That’s somewhat more than the minimum, but you’ll be hard pressed to get 10 units per acre and have everyone have a meaningful yard.

Why does everyone need a meaningful yard? The point of mixed use development is that you mix housing aimed at people at various phases of their lives. There's no reason why everything has to be one or another. You can have a 10 unit multi-family building amidst a block of rowhomes.

There's also no reason all the land has to be personal and private. Condo buildings can have yards and gardens. Kids also do fine playing in public parks, rec centers, and playgrounds. There's a variety of built environments that serve families' needs that we simply do not build because of zoning restrictions. Singapore manages to build extremely densely, keep housing costs accessible to median income families, and still have their kids grow up happy and well adjusted. It's a policy choice America makes to be this wasteful and it's mostly done by making it illegal to build any other way.

Not everyone needs it, obviously. Many people want it, also fairly obviously. This subthread is discussing the preferences of families who do and those units will, by geometric necessity, have a lower maximum density.

Some of the benefits: During COVID, we put up a trampoline for the kids to play on and get some exercise. Private yard meant we didn’t have to ask or fight anyone about it and there’s no additional COVID risk because everyone already lives together.

We put up a vegetable garden as well; no one is bothered by it.

Plenty of people want to (or are okay with) live in high-density housing in an urban environment. Not everyone does; as you say, there’s no reason everything has to be one or the other.

> It's not something that's affordable for the median household income though.

Unless you have building codes that encourages the same type of domiciles as 'the city'. The Roncesvalles neighbourhood of Toronto used to be a suburb of "the city", but now it is in the city, and the houses have big lots, lanes/garages, and plenty of square footage:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/200+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

They're expensive now because urban living is cool again, but up until the late-1990s/early-2000s, land was not that expensive "in the city": urban living was generally considered only for immigrants, and the WASPs lived out in the 'burbs.

For some stuff that's a little less palatial, just go up the street for some good examples:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/50+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+O...

There's no technical reason why areas/neighbourhoods couldn't be built like that again.

> All three of those can be true in a city.

At what multiple of price?

>Do they like them because of inherent qualities of US-style suburbs, or do they like them because that's all they know?

Many Americans do have real-life experience of living in dense cities but still prefer suburbs because of their stage in life. A copy & paste of another comment outlining common multi-decade life timeline:

- early 20s (single no kids) : going to college in a city or working at a downtown firm so they enjoy the dense city living like Manhattan, Chicago, etc... walking to restaurants and bars, museums, cultural things

- mid-life with kids: they enjoyed cities in their younger years but they want to raise a family so they move out to the suburbs. They want the better schools, yard, garage to putz around in etc. Yes this means the proverbial "soccer mom" with a SUV to drive the kids to sports practice, ballet lessons, etc

- retired and kids are grown and gone leaving an "empty nest": some senior citizens might sell the suburb house and move back to a city condo and enjoy walking to museums again

So the suburbs are attracting the knowledgeable former city dwellers. Yes, lower land cost (and hence cheaper sq ft) is definitely part of it but not the only advantage. Some do like the quieter streets, a garage to pursue hobbies, a yard for barbeques, less crime, etc.

What is not to like about affordable housing and good schools? I think there is too much emphasis in these discussions on 99%-invisible style urban design and not enough on the simple socio-economic calculus the average homeowner does when deciding where to live.

It doesn't matter how walkable your neighborhood is, how broad the restaurant selection, how ethnically diverse the community, or how many different forms of public transportation there are, if the perception is that housing is expensive and schools are bad, many people are not going to move in, even if they would otherwise enjoy those amenities.

Until urban areas can meaningfully compete on those two metrics for the average person in the U.S., the suburbs are here to stay.

And you see this broadly in where people choose to live.

It's a stereotype, which is no less true for that, that young college-educated people have been tending to move into cities especially over the last 25 years and then move out to a suburb when they get married and have kids. And really it's been going on longer than that. A bunch of people I went to grad school with went to work in Manhattan in finance and lived there. Maybe one or two of them still do.

I completely agree, most people like their suburbs. However, I do wonder if there's a connection between American suburbanization and our mental health crisis. Modern suburbs are kind of anti-community and anti-human compared to most historical cities and towns.

You're surrounded by people, but miss out on a lot of the small interactions that come from being close together. You're dependent on a car, so regularly stuck in traffic and can't go anywhere on your own. The boring/ugly aspects might be uninspiring. All fo this is "normal" so you don't notice it in your day to day life, but it adds up.

I'm probably completely wrong here, but when I see the massive mental health and drug issues from otherwise rich, stable, suburban families I wonder if there's a connection.

Mental health and drug issues pervade society.

I have lived in suburbs, dense city and rural countryside. The density has no say on the quality of your neighbors or the extent to which you will interact with them.

In fact, if my anecdotal experience were made a rule, it would be "the more densely you pack people together the less they function as a community". Of course it isnt true as a rule, but it has been my personal experience.

I think this has more to do with you and the local culture (like, block-by-block) than urban vs. suburban. in the suburbs, you can drive back and forth between your home garage and office and never speak to anyone. but you can do the same thing on foot in a city. in my city, people don't usually strike up conversations with random strangers on the street. or if they do, it's just a one-off; you'll probably never see that person again. in the suburbs, if you spend a lot of time on your porch, you'll probably get to know the neighbors that hang out on their porches. there's a pretty similar dynamic on the stoops of residential blocks in a city.

if I had to make a general rule, I'd say there are more people who could potentially be your friend in a city, but the barrier to becoming friends with each one is higher. you bump in to more people, but less frequently.

If you are a kid, or if you have kids, you will shortly know a lot of people in your suburb, or such has been my experience.

> most Americans like their suburbs.

Nothing wrong with saying that, but it's a loose characterization based strictly on opinion.

There's real and tangible problems with urban/sub-urban planning in the USA that go far deeper than whether someone "likes" something. It deserves exploration and critique. It's not merely a consumer choice.

Or maybe most of them don't know better?

Anecdotally, I met thousands of Americans in my life, and I'd say the vast majority of them never cease to praise the life and balance of small European cities.

Partly I'd say it's about real estate ownership. In the US, living in a city means either spending enormous sums on real estate (suffocatingly so) or renting. But in the US, real estate ownership is incentivized as a primary way to build wealth and stability for old age and retirement. Thus, rent is viewed as a short term living situation. But, affordable real estate that acts to build wealth, especially for people who needed to spend their early career paying off student loans or don't have parents that can buy them a down payment, can only be found in the suburbs.

So it seems to be more structural due to government. That's not necessarily a bad thing. I like having a big yard with dogs and a cul-de-sac for my kids to play in.

As an actual American, I've never heard anyone talk about small European cities. Are you from Europe? If you're only talking to American tourists in Europe, there's going to be some strong selection bias favoring people who like Europe and want to visit.

Well, and with respect to cities generally, there are many cities I like to visit quite a bit that I really wouldn't care that much to live in--especially if it meant giving up my ex-urban/rural home.

Let me add my own anecdote about the bubble I live in. I currently live in a Asian city where nearly everyone lives in apartments and takes very good transit (although cars are very popular despite the massive import taxes). Coming from the US, I’ve been told many times how envious they are that one can buy a single family home in the US, not share walls with neighbors and have a home over 1,000 at ft (rare to find one over 900 here, most are 600-700 2 beds). That type of single family housing is purely for the ultra rich here. Not within reach of the even the upper middle class.

This is a Canadian take on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYYdQB0mkEU

The suburbs are hell if you are young and don't have a car, don't have friends, etc. If you are a bit older you might like the square footage and relative quiet of the suburbs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas

are

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...

are good reflections on American Vernacular architecture; that first book in particular has a collection of comments from clients such as "if I wanted this I wouldn't have hired an architect".

Jane Jacobs liked the idea of cities developing organically according to what people want and the suburbs provide that in the form of a market, but the market is set very much by government standards for what kind of house is mortagable, zoning laws, etc.

In the US "suburb" can mean different things. On one hand I think of the area in Santa Monica around the Mormon temple which is all beautiful small single family homes on spectacularly landscaped tiny lots. On the other I think of the diabolical geometry of Southern New Hampshire (where I grew up) where low-density subdivisions were organized around the highways like the way your lungs are organized but when your car reaches the highway it is like a demolition derby without a clear hierarchy because those subdivisions put induced demand on the highway (simply because it is efficient for motorists to live close to the highway;) no wonder people in NH just legalized flying cars!

>Jane Jacobs liked the idea of cities developing organically according to what people want

I like a lot of Jacobs' ideas. I'm also somewhat amused when a lot of people (not saying you) praise her because she fought back against NYC highway plans. But the fact that she liked cities to develop along the lines of what the community wants sounds a lot like NIMBYism which many of the same people oppose as well.

> What most academics and others like them tend to miss about the American suburbs, is that most Americans like their suburbs.

Is income taken into account?

> Like published happiness research, the State of the City survey shows that reported satisfaction is highly correlated with income. Some 88 percent of those with incomes over $75,000 said their community was excellent or good; only 66 percent of those with incomes of less than $30,000 said the same. It’s worth noting here that the impact of income is larger than the impact of location in influencing satisfaction (a 9 percent difference between city and suburb as opposed to a 22 percent difference between high and low-income groups. These data suggest that the real headline finding of this survey should be “higher income people are more satisfied with the places they live.”

* https://cityobservatory.org/are-suburbs-really-happier/

Survey in question:

* http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/08/overall-americans-in...

You describe suburbs likes it's the Microsoft Word of places to live.

I hate suburbs. I’m American. Anyway First of all, most people simply like what they know and think is expected and do not bother thinking about the unknown or trying different lifestyles, I.e. suburbs. People settle into their lifestyle no matter how bad or good it is and do not question it, whether it’s their suburban environment or food habits or child easing or whatever. Pointing to something that is the current standard and saying people like it, that’s why it’s the standard is naive.

Is there evidence for your claim? How many were (made) aware of alternatives? It's easy to accept local customs, so much so that you think you like them, but that doesn't really prove anything more than that habituation is a thing.

Its not Stockholm syndrome. I have lived in urban cities as well as rural settings. I like my suburban lifestyle. You like the city or rural living? Great. You do you.

Don’t assume because other people choose something different than you that they must be ignorant to the other options. It just different. Not wrong.

Stockholm is a great city!

You did nothing to disprove its not Stockholm syndrome. Also you assumed things about me while asking me to not assume things about you. Make sense!

Though unlike the Camry, the “affordability” is a mirage derived from being heavily subsidized by state and federal tax codes, decisions about how to prioritize infrastructure spending to promote sprawl, and zoning and housing policies that discourage any other form of development.

You couldn't be more spot-on.

The affordability aspect is also subsidized by green house gas emissions, and cheap oil.

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