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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

You can get all three, you just have to live somewhere outside the two coasts I think. I’ve got all three in a small town in the middle. I walk on the sidewalk in front of my house to the library that is a few doors down from my incredibly affordable house. It feels like a Norman Rockwell painting.

I’m hoping remote work can allow more people to experience this.

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Edit: modified the list of cities based on comments

Is your neighborhood truly walkable though? Do you walk to the grocery store? What about the hospital? dentist? Physical therapist? Pet store? Restaurants? Is there transit nearby?

Afaik, there are only a few cities in the US (all costal) which are truly walkable in the traditional sense, SF, NYC, Boston, DC and maybe Philadelphia and only limited parts of the cities are actually walkable. These are the only cities with limited single family zoning and didn't boldoze their city centers to build parking lots and freeways in the 50s like the rest of NA cities (see https://www.vox.com/2014/12/29/7460557/urban-freeway-slider-...)

Many cities and small towns in the US and Canada may have walkable elements in limited areas, but they are still very car dependent in most cases

The core of Boston is more walkable than SF is. Especially if by "walkable," you really mean walkable and with easy access to expansive public transit to easily get to all the other things you won't have in a small town center or otherwise within a 30 minute or so walk.

To the sibling comment, walkable means different things to different people.

Walk to a hospital or a grocery store that isn't a small market/convenience store? You're already talking a city at that point. And, in the hospital case, probably not all the medical professionals you might conceivably want to see are likely to be within a one mile or so radius.

A ton of places are walkable in the sense that you can buy a house/condo and walk to a restaurant or two and pick up a few groceries. But, as you say, very few cities in the US are walkable in the sense that you really don't need a car without a lot of compromises/depending on others/using personal transportation services a lot.

Added an edit to the comment based on your info, thanks

Boston is /very/ walkable, the whole city can be walked end to end in a few hours and Somerville is one of the densest neighborhoods in the U.S.

I'll also say D.C. (and to some extent Northern Virginia and select parts of Maryland) makes car ownership optional, the transit system does a good job of covering a lot of neighborhoods.

I've been to a few college towns that also, by necessity, are dense and are walkable or at least bikeable oasis in otherwise rural areas.

Thanks for the info, I added an edit to my comment

BTW, Boston did pretty much bulldoze the center of the city (the West End) for a freeway but spent some $10 billion (much of it federal money) to rectify the problem with the Big Dig. It was walkable before the freeway was dismantled but less so in Boston proper. (As with other US cities, it was also less safe in general a few decades ago.)

The thing with college towns is that you tend to have the campus and, if it's in a rural area, generally a few streets of associated town. Technically walkable but, once you're not a student any longer, the campus is less interesting/useful and there probably isn't a whole lot in the ten or so blocks of the town that you can walk to. You can doubtless survive but the options are probably limited without a car (and most of your non-student friends in the area probably have one).

Just providing a non-coastal example - Pittsburgh is pretty decent for walkability and transit. It is a dense, small (in area) city. Trips by bus are often comparable to the same trip by car. I would say that most neighborhoods in Pittsburgh are walkable, but getting between neighborhoods is best done by bus, due to the big hills.

Some figures:

- 10 percent of Pittsburgh residents commute by walking [0]. 17 percent commute by public transit [1].

- "According to the U.S. Census Bureau, public transportation commuters in Pittsburgh spend an average of 32 minutes traveling to work, the 11th-fastest transit commute time of the 136 cities in our analysis. That is also just nine minutes slower that the average commute time for drivers, the fifth-smallest difference." [2]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_... [2]: https://smartasset.com/mortgage/best-cities-for-public-trans...

edit: formatting

FWIW you can have all of these on the coasts as well. For example, if you can afford a suburban Boston house, you can find any number of small towns in New England where you can afford to live and have a small walkable community (that is to say, in absolute terms these communities are expensive but in relative terms for New England they are not).

The problem this is missing is that "walkable" doesn't actually include everything you need to live. Jobs are the most obvious one, for those who don't have remote work or their own business, which is to say for most Americans. You'll also probably end up driving when you need to do serious shopping because your town center's general store isn't a Wal-Mart. Similarly for any number of specialized purchases or services.

In any case, small-town living and city living are very different. What's impressive about Japan is bringing a walkable, livable urban form to a mega city of 30 million people. When American towns start growing into cities (or when they are informally annexed into a larger cities' urban region) they usually do so by converting farmland into car-accessible suburbs, which is the problem.

What are you job options if you get laid off? How often do you and your spouse spend time with friends? I would hate moving to a small town and being cut off from seeing friends whenever I want to. Not to mention people tend to congregate towards larger cities, so moving to a small town probably means giving up quality food and my favorite events like sports and the symphony.

I’m self-employed, so I can’t be laid off!

My gf and I don’t really like to socialize that much and prefer to stay in and play video games and watch tv, so we love it. The ubiquity of the internet has made it possible to live almost anywhere in my opinion. For $25 a month we can see and do pretty much the same thing everyone else is doing every night on the internet. We cook our own meals also. You can always make new friends in a small town.

There are trade-offs to be sure, but if you knew how low my mortgage payment is you might choose like we did. :) All the money I save has allowed me to invest heavily, which will allow me to travel and see the world instead of see a city go by every day on a commute to work until I’m old.

I see, so your "you can have all three, you just have to..." is actually unrealistic/bad advice to those who are not self-employed, not to mention those who actually enjoy doing things in the city.

How many places is being able to walk to a wide choice of professional jobs a realistic option? (Obviously if you expand the definition to reasonably accessible by public transit, the list gets longer but is still relatively limited given transit options and the fact that many offices are in industrial parks, not cities.) And sports/symphony limit you to a relatively large city or at least a college.

You don't really need to choose.

In many places, you can live in a smaller town and be within an hour or so of a city. It doesn't need to be a choice between living in Manhattan or the middle of nowhere in Wyoming.

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