Why can't we build nice neighborhoods anymore? | Hacker News Reader

Why can't we build nice neighborhoods anymore?

bloomberg.com

121 pointscyunker302 comments

As the article hinted at the simple answer is Car Dependency. Suburbs are regulated and built to accommodate cars now and not people.

The topic is explored thouroughly on the 'Not Just Bikes' youtube channel. https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes which uses information from urban planning group 'Strong Towns' https://www.strongtowns.org/.

Nope, the article specifically addresses your point:

> consider college campuses and their central quads, which typically do not have automobiles even today. The ones people admire are the older ones, not the newer campuses, which tend to be functional but aesthetically mediocre

Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present.

> Not just with campuses, but cities too. We generally need to import good aesthetics from the past, which should be a sign that the current system is broken. Good things should be possible to create in the present.

I suspect that there is considerable survivor bias going into that. There were plenty of bad aesthetic choices in the past, too; we just recognise and remember the good ones.

Similarly, there surely are good aesthetic choices being made today—it's just that, as in any age, there are many more bad ones, and those are the ones that are easier to call to mind. A lot of good modern aesthetic choices borrow from the past, but that, too, is true of any age; the choices of the past we admire were not born ab novo, but were themselves inspired by still older design.

This is not to make the ridiculous claim that nothing is changing, only that "we look to the past for cues to good design" is not in and of itself an indictment of some fallen modern age.

> we look to the past for cues to good design

But by your very logic, we also look to the past for cues to bad design. There are plenty of ugly old towns and cities in the US. Regardless, the most beautiful cities in the US: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Charleston, New Orleans, Boston, Seattle are also some of the oldest.

> there surely are good aesthetic choices being made today

With how restrictive the building and city planning codes are, the amount of creativity is extremely limited.

Might be related to the way modern art is ugly by design. Since it became easy to create beautiful things at scale, the "art" appreciation scene moved into ugly stuff, because only sophisticated art experts can appreciate the stuff, thus separating themselves from the common rubble.

I definitely think the ugliness of modern art is related to the economics. Why invest a lot of time or thought into something, when you can convince someone to believe that those don't matter?

NotJustBikes and StrongTowns have addressed all of this. For just one of zillions of examples: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/6/3/cognitive-comfo...

Neither source just simplistically says "it's the fault of cars", both are deeply thought-out perspectives on what is really going on. It's not just cars, it's certain engineering and bureaucratic decisions that were made around cars. It's also the scale of development, i.e. governments that are set up to work with large-scale developers and are too hard for small-scale developers to deal with, and the general trend toward all-at-once top-down development, and I could go on and on. StrongTowns has successfully diagnosed the entire systemic pattern. It's not just blame-the-cars.

Check out the actual resources, don't just assume they are only the simple thing the poster had to say to make any point at all.

> Check out the actual resources

If anyone is interested in what's being discussed here and in Strong Towns, I'd highly recommend reading it[0]. I had been a fan of Strong Towns for a long time, but just finally read the book recently.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/strong-towns-book

These are most likely two separate problems. Car based urban planning which requires large wide roads, giant carparks and 'boxey houses' due to garages can overwhelm any other aesthetically pleasing design (notably green space).

Admiring the old brick styles of the ivy leagues is simple confirmation bias due to their academic prestige. There are plenty of beautiful Modernist buildings, it comes down to if the college is willingly to pay for it.

I would like to see some pictures of beautiful Modernist buildings.

I live in an apartment, but the house I grow up in had more lawn space than was used by the car.

I like some suburbs. However, not far from downtown San Jose, within the city limits, there is some interesting tract housing developments: they have soundwall like structures surrounding these neighborhoods that are built like a maze. Once in it can be hard to find your way out without GPS to one of the few entrances/exits.

So that’s in a city, not even the maligned suburbs!

Are those single family zoned?

Because if so they're also responsible for housing prices being insane in the area

Pretty sure they are. Look at a map of San Jose and check out the areas around Quimby or Tully Roads in east(ern) San Jose.

I just see standard developments - anything more specific?

Heh found a trailer park.

To me a place like hidden glen north is odd. It's a tract surrounded by soundwalls and has few exits from the development, whereas in normal developments you have intersections with all streets. This kind of development follows the thoroughfare model where smaller streets feed larger streets which feed boulevards/expressways which feed freeways. They are built in such a way the actual city neighborhood is disconnected from its surroundings and makes transit by anything other than car difficult -buses don't go in, and biking is fraught -all relatively close to the downtown area. Suburbs are better designed than that.

I’ve seen some of those in Arizona - but even though there was one way in and out for cars there were multiple walking paths.

> It's a tract surrounded by soundwalls and has few exits from the development, whereas in normal developments you have intersections with all streets.

I'm not sure any development built after about 1975 in my midwestern metro area isn't like this, including the sound walls if they're next to an interstate or major highway.

My neighborhood, with... oh, I dunno 150houses? At least a dozen named-and-numbered streets present in it? It has two exits. Get this: one of those can only be entered if you're going a particular direction on the road it intersects, because there's an unbroken median curb there. So it's more like 1.5 entrances.

Our neighborhood before this one? Two exits (it's bigger than this neighborhood and still developing, so I expect it'll get a third pretty soon).

Our neighborhood before that? One exit. One. technically two, but the second was marked "dead end" (it wasn't, really, but that was probably still the right thing to label it) and took you on a weird barely-developed road with no other intersecting roads, which looped you back up to the same highway the the neighborhood's other route would have put you on, so even for people who lived right by the connection to that road, leaving the normal way was faster.

The general rule seems to be: no more than one exit on any major road bounding the neighborhood. This means neighborhoods that are right next to each other can be slow to travel between on foot or by bike, without cutting through yards.

> They are built in such a way the actual city neighborhood is disconnected from its surroundings and makes transit by anything other than car difficult -buses don't go in, and biking is fraught -all relatively close to the downtown area.

Some folks for whom keeping a working car around isn't a big deal, consider it a feature that their neighborhoods are hard to reach by a combination of public transit and foot. Crime rates go up and the homeless population shoots up, they say, when they add a bus stop next to your neighborhood. Time to sell before the market drops if you see them working on a new bus stop in walking distance of your house, they say. (seriously, this is straight from several people I know, not something I'm inventing or guessing at)

You made me recall a time when I was broke while in school. I had classmates in neighborhoods like these. I'd take a bus and then hike to their place. But walking there was weird. People that saw you (most buried in their TVs or whatnot) looked at you like something was wrong. Like, what is someone doing _walking_ here (I usually walked fast, so it was clear I was coming and going), since I didn't visit often, they didn't "recognize" me apparently and walking really threw them off or marked me as "stranger" or slight "intruder" as I had not driven in -which was the normal mode.

"Crime rates go up and the homeless population shoots up, they say, when they add a bus stop next to your neighborhood."

Setting aside questions of morality, what part of that is factually incorrect?

In places where driving a car is more convenient than taking mass transit (almost everywhere in the US), mass transit is primarily used by persons who cannot afford to own a car. If a mass transit stop is added to a neighborhood which did not previously have one, that means poorer individuals and families can now live there (or visit there). There are known correlations between poverty (including homelessness) and crime, so it is logical that adding a mass transit stop will increase crime over time.

Why is that incorrect?

Because it's a tragedy of the commons.

You're all focusing on the low level details while you're destroying the urban fabric of your cities and towns and housing is becoming super expensive that you end up with those masses of homeless people you then try to avoid by tearing down bus stops (or not building them in the first place).

I think some of the walls like that might even be for "traffic dampening" ie- so people don't cut through the neighborhoods to get somewhere else.

This is correct. Where this often goes wrong is that the planners don’t allow pedestrians and cyclists to take shortcuts, making driving the faster option for even short trips.

There are some very nice older suburbs, with much higher densities than would be thought of as suburban today, that provision parking for every home. The venerable alley is basically an accommodation for cars, but a much more humane one.

The sweet spot seems to be about 1920-1940.

Yep, you're absolutely right. The parent's youtube suggestion has a video on this too, called streetcar suburbs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

The Lake Vista neighborhood [0] in New Orleans nailed this as well, but sort of flipped the alley concept. Still has street access and parking for every home, but the "front" of most houses faces an alley-width, pedestrian walkway. It was always one of my favorite areas to hang out as a kid, never really understood why until now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakeshore/Lake_Vista,_New_Orle...

I often see urbanists and young people fantasize about life in car free mega cities. Having lived that life for years I can’t imagine why. A lot of cities that are beautiful and attractive also have room for cars. I would even argue it is a big part of what makes those cities attractive. There’s no substitute for the point to point on demand fast transportation that cars offer. In cities that aren’t overbuilt, it makes it so much easier to get things done, see people, and access the outdoors. All that time saved is time to live a richer life.

A good example of a car centric city that is very attractive is Seattle from ten years ago. The city had a strong sense of community because it was composed of intimate neighborhoods mostly with single family zoning rather than mid rise boxy apartment blocks everywhere, ample green space for its population, and roads with little traffic. It is because Seattle was so attractive that people and businesses flocked to it. Now those aspects are going away as density, anti car policies, and other issues are making the overall quality of life worse.

Even famously “mass transit unfriendly” cities can be fit for a car-free lifestyle if you work at it.

But I suspect a huge part of it is visiting Europe or Asia as a tourist and enjoying being without a car.

But they didn’t actually live there.

Even my relatives in Germany who live in a very public transport friendly city still own two cars.

> I suspect a huge part of it is visiting Europe or Asia as a tourist and enjoying being without a car.

Agreed.

As a tourist you also tend to visit the historic center of capital cities, which have by far the best public transport and fanciest architecture.

Plus you're on vacation and having fun.

When you live there and walk to your commuter train a gray november morning, it's a very different experience.

> When you live there and walk to your commuter train a gray november morning, it's a very different experience.

Still preferable, to me at least! Getting in to work and shucking off your mist-covered coat and making a nice cup of tea made it just fine.

Having taken commuter trains on gray November Euro-mornings, I still prefer them to cars for commuting. Sitting in a traffic jam on a gray November Euro-morning is more depressing to me. But you’re right, I live in the center of a city. I can get by without a car just fine. On the country side this is not really an option. Whether the suburbs are well connected depends on where you are. In the end, plenty of people still commute by car, it’s just that there’s a sizeable proportion that doesn’t and it changes the feel of public space (and your own sense of options).

> Even famously “mass transit unfriendly” cities can be fit for a car-free lifestyle if you work at it.

I think it's such a pervasive meme that the US is bad for transit that people don't even try. I don't ever use cars (like twice in 450 days) AND I live beside one of the major transport hubs in my city (65/Folsom in Sacramento), yet I don't know where or when buses could bring me.

There is a dearth in communication.

I was in Orlando last week and the buses were great, and empty.

For one data point: I lived in London without a car for several years, and enjoyed it. A lot of people do. One big thing you give up in car-dependent areas is interesting walks. Everything is super-sized to accommodate vehicles, and at a human scale, it's boring. In an older city designed for people, every 10 feet there's something new to catch your eye.

There are tradeoffs, but I much preferred being able to take the train or bus and relax and zone out rather than have spend the entire trip in the vigilant state you need while driving. And while cycling, yes, you have to be vigilant, but you're getting exercise too.

I'm at a point in my life where, I probably don't want to live in the big city as much. (Funnily enough, when I was much younger I never thought I would want to.) But anyway, I'd still much prefer to live in a denser, more walkable suburb, which tend to be unfortunately hard to find and expensive in the US for reasons that are probably already all discussed in comments in this thread.

> But I suspect a huge part of it is visiting Europe or Asia as a tourist and enjoying being without a car.

I live in Dublin. I'd rank it as pretty middling in transport by European standards. We have a decent bus network, commuter rail to the suburbs, trams that are frequent but overcrowded at rush hour, and intercity trains to the other cities in the country.

I've been here nearly a decade and have no great rush to buy a car. And there's still obvious improvement to be made. The red line needs a relief line unless work from home makes the expanse of new offices at the end of the line mostly empty, cycling lane coverage is spotty and often conflicting with buses or parking, and bike parking is lacking.

> "There’s no substitute for the point to point on demand fast transportation that cars offer."

Very few American cities actually offers FAST point to point transit via automobiles. 50 years ago, it was probably realistic, but now automobile traffic in most American cities makes quick transportation anywhere unrealistic.

Average speed in central london is 7mph.

To be fair, cars are on demand, unlike tube where waiting times can reach an outrageous 5 minutes.

But central London is a tiny portion of London, and the slow speeds are very common for busy downtown areas of large cities. Despite excellent public transportation, 54% of London households own at least one car - not too much different from the number for Newark, NJ (60%).

https://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-12-how-many-cars-a...

The London orbital motorway the M25, definately not central London, with its majestic 12 lane sections boasts an average speed of 25mph.

> I often see urbanists and young people fantasize about life in car free mega cities. Having lived that life for years I can’t imagine why.

I for one simply don't want to pay the to own and maintain a car, preferring instead to rent one or purchase a ride (via taxi or rideshare etc) as needed.

Same here. I would only put maybe 2000 miles on a car per year. Insurance + maintenance alone would be more than I'd pay for a rental/rideshare every now and then.

"Car free" is a straw man that's easy to argue against, and misses the point. Rather, most urbanists call for cities that are fair to all who inhabit it, regardless of whether they are currently inside of a car. A bus that carries 50 ought to have priority over several cars that carry 1 apiece. Neighbourhoods should not be artificially embalmed in time by excessive zoning rules to only allow car-dependent architecture. People who live in a city should have an actual choice in terms of what density and transportation mode is best for them. (That definitely includes single family homes and cars). That'll obviously be different from person to person, and even more obviously that'll change over one's lifetime. So make a city liveable and navigable and interesting for those who are 8, 80 and everything in between. Make that the goal, and you'll be heading in the right direction.

> There’s no substitute for the point to point on demand fast transportation that cars offer.

If you design cities to not have alternatives to cars then of course there's no substitute. All my day-to-day trips are currently faster using a bike+train, significantly less stressful, cheaper and also much healthier. People don't generally prefer specific modes of transportation, they just want to travel quickly and conveniently. That can be achieved with any mode of transportation, yet cars are the most expensive, most polluting, loudest, lowest density and most stressful.

I just took a look at a picture of Seattle from 2011 and it looks like half the area is dedicated to car parking with huge stroads everywhere. Having to take a car to go to the shops 300m away sounds like a total nightmare. And it's not even the suburbs! If those roads had little traffic on them then that was clearly just due to the population not having caught up. Once it did of course those roads weren't going to be enough. At that point you can either bulldoze more of the city for the car and still get awful traffic or provide better alternatives...

For reference this is the photo I found: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Downtown...

Most of the complaints against density are really against medium-density cities. Those combine the worst of both worlds. They don't have enough room for cars if most people drive, but far too many people have to drive because there are not enough people to support decent public transport on most routes. Once population density starts approaching something like 10k / square km (25k / square mile) over large enough areas, urban life becomes much more attractive.

I've never been to Seattle, but it looks like a medium-density city on the map.

I often see urbanists and young people fantasize about life in car free mega cities.

Yes.

Now go look at Peter Cooper Village in NYC.[1]

"The complex is designed as two large "superblocks", independent of the grid system that characterizes the majority of Manhattan below 155th Street.It consists of two large parks, one for each part of the complex, juxtaposed with modern red brick apartment towers."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_Town%E2%80%93Peter_...

There is not faster to way to discredit oneself than to offer a pat, single variable explanation.

As others point out, Americans like and want to transport themselves by car. Let's accept this, work with it, and build around it instead of lusting after a minority defined Utopia.

This may or may not be true, and it doesn't matter because single use zoning in most American cities makes it illegal to build walkable cities. It's pretty hard to establish what Americans prefer when the alternative what they have isn't allowed.

Single family zoning isn't simply a car thing. I live in a small, walkable, transit-friendly neighborhood full of crunch eco-liberals, and it is entirely hostile to upzoning for reasons having nothing at all to do with cars; it's a central tool of NIMBYism.

Oh my yes: whatever height is currently built is perfect, every currently vacant lot is a prize, etc. etc.

But the GP spoke of single-use zoning, a slightly different cudgel. I understand the abstract appeal of dividing up a map into neatly-separated areas, a la SimCity, but that just doesn't accomodate real life.

Why should a neighbourhood consisting of single family homes not be walkable?

This is such a neighbourhood from the early 1920s not too far from where I grew up. Take a stroll through it with Street View. It is perfectly walkable.

https://goo.gl/maps/kKqhtNbKDy6oycSi9

The lots are smallish compared to the American standard, though. This is a crowded continent.

It's not a single use zone if stores are allowed in it. The OP means that you need a car to get anything you need because the nearest store is 2 hours of walking away.

Ah, this is something I did not know. A residential area that allows no stores is really a weird, weird concept.

Small stores draw criminals, you see?

So does big business :)

Oh, I'm also in Eastern Europe and it's similarly foreign to me. Even the new suburbs they're building here now with all identical houses, Edward Scissorhands style, have corner stores(tm) within walking distance everywhere.

Well said. Another angle is the race angle. Most people advocating for lesser cars are young, healthy, rich and white. Healthy enough to not use cars and rich enough to live near work.

https://theconversation.com/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-cycl...

The group that talks about systemic racism is perpetuating it.

"Healthy enough not to use cars" - man, that's a good one. I'll remember it next time my half-senile father in law has no other choice but to drive somewhere because there's no way around his car dependent neighbourhood - oh wait, that's every day.

If he is senile he should not be driving anywhere

That's exactly what kspacewalk2 is saying. He _should_ not.

The city around him is only built for driving, doubly so his completely car-dependent neighbourhood. He'll be doing this until he either cannot possibly pull it off, or gets in a serious accident. This is a fact of life for millions of seniors in North America, and saying "oh no they shouldn't" won't change squat.

That's your job to take the keys away and get rid of the car. It's a sad situation but hardly unique

It's a sad situation made worse by stupid urban planning that prioritizes cars.

No it's not "my job". It'll be his kids' job when he's fully senile, but until then he's an adult human being with rights, and he wants to be independent and "age in place". At some point he'll cross the threshold into having his decision-making powers taken away. Let's hope no one gets hurt in the meantime.

Take a hypothetical scenario (not dissimilar to war breaking out in WW2, and not dissimilar to the 2020 global pandemic upending our lives) – where the private motor vehicle is gone.

Society (cities) would quickly re-orientate themselves so work wasn't so far away from home. So shops weren't on the outskirts of town.

Your argument is predicated on cars existing. On cars causing the problem you suggest they solve.

That article is about cycling as a sport. I'd bet if you look at cycling as a method of regular transportation, it would skew heavily non-white and lower income. Owning a car is expensive.

That is an incredibly poor take on top of a serious allegation, and sorry-not-sorry, it's clear you don't really care about poverty, racial disparities or ill health.

It takes very little empathy to realise that driving a car is a huge technical barrier compared to a wheelchair/scooter/just walking slower. There is no reason you need to be healthy to avoid car use... except one. That motorists will kill you if you don't quickly get of out their way. I've seen large parts of my local area become completely inaccessible to the less-abled because of fast roads, so can it with the "I'm thinking or the sick!". You're not.

Or to just go look at which cities are not color-coded into mansions and slums, and notice those cities are ones where the poor do not need to maintain their own expensive machinery for basic tasks. Because ... again, I don't believe I need to explain that. It's a deliberate choice you're making to not understand it.

You do know that poor countries overwhelmingly don't use cars, right?

The standard social hierarchy is: walk everywhere -> bike everywhere -> go by motorbike everywhere -> drive a car everywhere.

Cars are expensive. The old, the unhealthy, the poor -- all of these people can benefit from infrastructure that allows people to get around without using a car. Because cars are expensive.

Wrong.

I tried to find the tweet, but it was succinctly put ~"it's said people in Los Angeles love their cars, but people in LA have no choice but to own a car, it's not love, it is necessity".

In every city that has made a concerted effort to accommodate all modes of transport, driving as a percentage has gone down. "build it and they will come" is better suited to transport than it ever was to SaaS.

It is easy to conclude that people don't "want" to drive.

“It’s said that” is not the same as “polls show” and then linking to a source

LA is also cherry picked to be one of the worst places for cars. It’s legendary for its traffic.

Writing in from the PNW where I wouldn’t trade my car, and the freedom it gives me and my friends and my dogs to travel, for anything.

I lived in the PNW and loved that I could take a bus just about anywhere. It was a big draw for me.

If it was a hellscape dominated by 26 lane highways and hours of traffic to get anywhere like many parts of the US, I never would've bothered moving there.

The whole of the PNW is not a city or specially designated hiking trail, and 99% of where you could go in the region was not accessible by bus routes.

I gotta hand it to you, in response I searched DuckDuckGo for:

"people in los angeles love their cars"

and the top result was

"People in Los Angeles Are Getting Rid Of Their Cars"

Hypothetically, if one person had to die every time you used your car (for your dogs to travel or whatever) would you stop using your car? How about if it were one person for every 1000 journeys. What if every single journey you made in your car had a very small and undeniable contribution to the deaths of people you live around, would you stop then?

"People in Los Angeles Are Getting Rid Of Their Cars" is a headline meant to generate clicks, posted with no context, statistics, or discussion.

Are you a vegan? Hypothetically, how many people have to die due to the greenhouse gasses emitted due to your meat consumption? Have you ever served somebody an egg that didn't have a fully cooked yolk? Do you consume any single-use plastics? Do you use a compost toilet?

We could go on and on.

> it's said people in Los Angeles love their cars

doesn't need a survey or study. Are you disputing the perception that Los Angeles is a car-centric city?

> Are you a vegan?

Yes.

> I tried to find the tweet, but it was succinctly put ~"it's said people in Los Angeles love their cars, but people in LA have no choice but to own a car, it's not love, it is necessity".

This is the part that needs a study or survey to back it up.

If we're just throwing around anecdotes, I've both driven a car and taken the bus in a city that was known for its mass transit, and the mass transit sucked compared to being in a car.

> Yes.

And how about the rest? I'm just making sure we're being consistent, and that you optimize all your life choices to avoid any possibility of harming someone, no matter how remote or indirect.

You're being a contrarian.

Los Angeles is famed for its motordom.

Tell me, where are you from that that needs explaining? It's fascinating to meet someone from such a remote tribe.

Please don't insult me simply because I don't agree with you :)

I've lived in Sacramento, San Diego and Seattle. I've taken mass transit and driven a car in all of those cities.

In my experience, in every city, the mass transit sucked. Access to anything not on a bus line is effectively inaccessible without a car. The busses smell like urine. They don't show up on time. Mentally ill people harass me and my dog on a regular enough basis where it's more trouble than it's worth.

I love my car. I don't see it as a thing I'm forced to use, it's something I chose when given the option between it and a bus. It's a safe, climate controlled vehicle which is available at any minute of the day that I want it to be.

I live in Sacramento. I've been in a car twice in the past 480 days, and not a whole lot before then (living since 2017 in Carmichael, Arden, downtown and East Sac., Fair Oaks for a few weeks).

I think what you're trying to say is "people will always choose a private air-conditioned car", but I'm saying car use is artificially high because other options are not feasible. Where it is safe and comfortable (i.e. away from cars) to make most of one's journeys (under 5 or 10 miles) by other means, people choose non-car options at a higher rate than people in LA (or Sac etc) are choosing.

You are being obtuse by asking for journal references where they're not needed (this isn't a conference, it's a conversation in the comment section on a website).

Look, I get we're coming at this from different viewpoints, but you can't tell me that I'm the one being obtuse after you interrogate me with some inane hypothetical about how many people I'd be comfortable with killing through my car use.

I'm asking for you to back up the claim that people in LA hate their cars, not that cars aren't the most popular form of transport there. People hate _traffic_, not their cars. I live somewhere with low traffic. Best of both worlds.

Sure, it would be great to have better public transit options in LA. But I'd wager (because we're going off of our theory of mind intuition, and not polls) that people would prefer their cars to bus transport, even in LA.

1 minute of Googling:

"81% of Americans agree with the sentiment that their car reflects who they are...59% consider themselves as someone who is passionate about cars, trucks, motorcycles, or other vehicles" [1]

78% of Americans personally enjoy driving moderately to greatly [2]

> Wrong.

> In every city that has made a concerted effort to accommodate all modes of transport

These are strong claims without citation. Your subsequent comments in this thread reveal a fairly extreme and inflexible viewpoint on cars which you advance through many logical fallacies (straw men, false dilemma, and hasty generalizations). In other words, I don't think you're evaluating this issue in good faith or rationally. So, I'm not going to engage beyond this comment.

The main point of my initial comment was to point out that this "walk-able utopia" goal is not shared by a great number of people and contravening both the will of the majority and the current state is an exercise in futility and thus a waste of a society's time and resources.

[1] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/american-attitudes-on...

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/234416/driverless-cars-tough-se...

I am not sure if we can tell whether Americans like cars or not considering they don’t really have a choice.

San Francisco and New York, the most walkable and densely built urban areas in America, are famous for their extremely high rents. This is a function of extremely high demand for housing there.

Apparently a whole lot of Americans _don't_ want to transport themselves by car.

You need a car in SF depending on the area you live in. On the west side, SF has very poor public transit

Right. It's not just car dependency, and ... it's Not Just Bikes either.

It's almost a tautology to say that if you want to have a particular kind of nice neighborhood you'll have to include those uses in your planning.

I think that most people want to be able to get from A to B in comfort, and are not necessarily married to one particular mode of transport.

If the only way to get anywhere is by car, then of course people want to transport themselves by car. If you offer other competitive options, people will sometimes take those options instead.

It’s worth remembering that for a lot of “A to B” trips the change in location is kind of incidental to the actual goal of shopping, socializing, dining out, etc. In other words you if locate a lot of “B”s close to your “A” (or vice versa) people will tend to be satisfied with slower modes like walking and biking (that also reduce the energy needed by a couple of orders of magnitude).

The U.S already did this, starting in the 40s-50s up till now, and it's horrific. The idea of building infrastructure around everyone having a massively expensive and wasteful machine to get anywhere they want as fast as possible all the time (and without any energy expenditure) makes for a hellscape. It's fine to like and own cars, but cars should be de-prioritized in planning and infrastructure considerations because it makes everything worse for everyone, including car owners. Might as well design cities around providing everyone with personal planes at this point.

> Americans like and want to transport themselves by car.

I think the minority are questioning the strangeness of this supposition. Least of all because the government has a hand in it.

Neighbourhoods are where people live, yet built for and around cars?

It may be single variable but I think a reasonable person might want to question that at least on some way.

It's interesting to note that Hacker News really loves Strong Towns.

I chatted with Chuck Marohn (founder and face of Strong Towns) once at an event a couple years ago, and they're quite aware that they get a lot of traffic from HN.

The strong town movement and its affiliated planning companies ruined my community. A lot of the mixed use re zoning is a pretext for opening up rural areas for heavy industry.

That's just ridiculous, though. Does anyone sane zone heavy industry together with residential?

I don’t think that’s what article says. Article just keeps blathering that new neighborhoods are not “beautiful” or “nice” without describing any objective measures for what author really meant.

I do understand however what it is trying to say. My opinion is that housing development is vastly commoditized and builders wants tried and trusted designs at lowest prices and fastest speed. There is not much room for creativity and experimentation. I went to see houses build by Toll Brothers which are premium expensive builders and even their designs were regular with few bells and whistles only to show off. Lower end market basically just follows the template. This is extremely disappointing because house construction is something that lasts for so long.

I may be romanticizing it as a mere occasional visitor, but my impression of Tokyo is as a place which has managed to manage a balance of (incredible) density with livable neighborhoods. Lots of public transit, commercial districts, residential zones with small shops and groceries. Very walkable, bikeable, and even driveable if that's what you need. But within the city you seldom need to drive.

I grew up in LA suburbs. We had to drive to do anything: shop, go to the movies, visit friends. When I finally moved out of the home I grew up in, I moved to Hollywood, the neighborhood, which is very walkable and has lots of good public transit. Later I moved to San Francisco, and at this juncture I'm in a neighborhood in Oakland built up mostly in the 1910s-1930s. Not nearly as walk friendly as my old SF and LA neighborhoods, but there are still good groceries, restaurants, and bars within a 5-15 minute walk. And it's an aesthetically beautiful mix of victorian, craftsman, and spanish-style architecture for the most part, in gently rolling hills surrounding a beautiful tidal estuary which reflects the downtown high-rises.

When I visit my family in the suburbs, it feels really weird and isolating.

The thing with Tokyo is that the cops do their jobs. A homeless person asking for money on a Tokyo subway is unheard of. I'd love something like Tokyo in the USA but it will never work because crime on American public transport is rampant. Hell just last week a women was raped on a Philly subway and no one did a thing.

Adult hood in America is coming to terms with the fact that I'll never live to see this cleaned up version of the USA everyone is dreaming about so instead I'm scooping my single family home and getting the hell out of dodge.

I am not an expert on the subject, but I do not think that the explanation for most of what you see in Japan is explained by “good policing”. There was an excellent article on policing in Japan a few years back that I sadly can not remember the outlet of, but I very much remember a sentence that resonated with my experience in Japan which was along the lines of: “It is not because of the quality of its policing, but rather despite its quality of policing that Japan’s low level of crime is notable”.

Do not get me wrong here, I do think the many police boxes and the fact that you can greet and recognise the face of your local officers on your way home after work at night helps to form a sense of community. But my suspicion is that the truth lies more in the fact that Japan has a culture where people “police” themselves to an almost ridiculous degree in terms of all forms of behaviour. There are of course massive downsides to this kind of social pressure (especially on the level of individuals), but that would be a subject deserving an article in its own right.

It's a combination of cleanliness, social responsibility, and police presence true but I've also heard what happens when there is a disturbance and it's dealt with quickly either by police or conductors. Someone begging on the train is not tolerated at all. Japanese culture views that as an unacceptable imposition by that individual on the other riders. Western culture tends to shame you in the other direction which is its own whole set of insanity.

Maybe we are talking past each other, but I am not so sure you “see” the causation the way it probably is (I am reluctant to call myself an authority even after nearly a decade living in Japan, so take my perspectives with a grain of salt). “Western” societies apply corrections the way you seem to ascribe them to Japan: A strong arm and stern reminder. In Japan, it is instead “soft” and more akin to the stern look your mother gave you back in the day. Begging is not something that happens, not because it is immediately clamped down upon, but because it does not happen in the first place because of “collective social restraint”.

In another comment you wrote: “I don't even want to know my neighbors exist”. Since Japan is a more collectivist society, you will be acutely aware that your neighbours exist at all times. Heck, not only your neighbours, but every individual around you at work, in public, etc. and constantly be reminded by your fellow Japanese that you better “behave” and conform according to the perceived norms or get glared at disapprovingly or – worse – even ostracised. At least to my eyes, this is where you find the source of the societal phenomena you seek – not the police or another central authority.

I spent a month in Japan. Most Japanese people live closer to how Americans live. Low density suburbs and very low density cities. Even in Tokyo you can purchase a small single family home in the suburbs with a driveway for what would be considered a very cheap price by American standards. You would take a 30-45 minute train into Tokyo. They also sound proof the nice condos in downtown really well and you can afford a fairly large two bedroom for around $1500 USD per month. They are also more creative with the dense city space and parking and allow parking on the sidewalk in designated spaces.

One thing that struck me walking around Osaka was a 7-11 that had parking like an American style one would with parking in front.

Driving into Kagoshima (bullet train was out due to landslide so we drove down) you're gonna see basically single family style dwellings all the way down hill into the city where it gets instantly dense but for only about 15 city blocks. Was dead AF at night. In a city like that you can own a car no problem and commute in. And that's how most Japanese live. Don't get it twisted. Japanese folks enjoy privacy as much as anyone else. Tokyo is the exception, not the rule. And even in Tokyo they will go to retreats out in the mountains regularly.

Tokyo is a great model for proper zoning in high density urban areas to prevent high costs but it's not how you live everywhere

From what I can tell, this discussion is drifting beyond what I originally disagreed with in terms of what you wrote: That there is a strong correlation between the effectiveness of policing and what you consider to be desirable properties of Japanese society. Your latest response instead seems to focus on Japanese zoning, population density, etc. Which, while I certainly understand enough to discuss, is not something I introduced into our discussion and I also do not see in your response above how you relate it to our original discussion point either.

I usually only monitor posts for a few hours after I make them, but before I “move on”, you wrote: “And that's how most Japanese live. Don't get it twisted”. That is not a particularly friendly way to respond to a person, especially as I can not see how I anywhere have even hinted towards a suggestion that all Japanese live “on top” of each other. Perhaps you thought my point about “knowing your neighbours” was about privacy? I can assure you that it was not the case (which hopefully becomes apparent if you reread it in that light) and that what I wrote about Japanese society (in my experience) is equally applicable to the large cities and out “in the country”. If you want to dig further into this on your own with me “gone”, there is plenty of reading about “wa” which is pretty much what I describe. Although I fully admit that seeing the implications and complexity of the concept took me many years.

Did you ever hear of the term [卐] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockleiter ?

> it will never work because crime on American public transport is rampant.

Are you sure? I’ve never had that impression across years of transit, bus and rail, in Pittsburgh and Boston.

I think the biggest barrier is a chicken and egg problem: it’s hard to motivate transit expansion without dense housing and it’s hard to motivate denser housing except along existing transit corridors

Lol the amount of times I've seen a tweaker snoozing on my septa ride to work or some idiot going "hey I'm sorry to bother you folks but [insert fake sob story]". No thanks. Plus have you noticed there's a pandemic? The last thing I need is to be in a tube with strangers. Do you realize how miserable subway stations in east coast cities can get when the AC is broken? If they even have AC?

The whole system would need to be rebuilt for me to even consider going back to that.

Most riders before covid were office commuters. Now with remote work what reason is there for it to be there? Oh right for the guy asking for hand outs to ride it all the way up and down the line all day while no one does anything about it.

Trust me it's not an issue of denser housing. I do not want denser housing. I don't even want to know my neighbors exist. Seriously.

I lived in a dense city for a long time. It sucked.

> Most riders before covid were office commuters

Admittedly, I'm one of those office workers, so I haven't used transit much since the pandemic began, but I'll be back to using it daily early next year or so (subject to change, as always...)

It's always going to depend on your line and your time of day for how pleasant transit is, but as a general rule the more families use a transit line, the nicer it is. When I lived in Brookline, MA and took the Green Line trolley, it was extremely pleasant, even during non-work hours (when you would see parents with small children and such on your ride). However, the line goes through an upper middle class semi-dense[0] suburban neighborhood, so of course it was nice.

The same logic applies to Tokyo. The entire city is dense and almost every person takes transit sometimes. Even if there are unpleasant people (I'm sure there are), the overwhelming number of ordinary families, office workers, and so on, taking transit makes the less savory riders nearly invisible, at least to tourists.

This is why I say it's a chicken and egg problem: you won't ever have nice transit unless you have a system where middle class people want to ride transit, and you won't have that system unless it's more convenient than driving the car, and you won't have THAT system unless housing is dense.

> I do not want denser housing.

That's perfectly fair, and I agree that many people feel this way. Personally, I want to live in a city and I like having a lot of neighbors. When I walked through Japanese suburbs (where houses fill up an entire tiny lot with almost no space between them), it felt very at-home to me. But that's personal preference.

> Do you realize how miserable subway stations in east coast cities can get when the AC is broken? If they even have AC?

Yes of course, one of the advantages of taking a car is that you have your own personal climate controlled box with your music and nobody else's noises or smells. I don't dispute this, but that's not really a USA-centric problem (aside from the occasional broken AC in summer or broken heating in winter). Having your own personal climate box will always be more pleasant.

[0] My definition: semi-dense because it felt urban near the main street/transit but in a few pockets of Brookline, you could be a 10 minute walk from transit but surrounded by expensive single family homes on large lots.

Did you tell the bother brother to fuck off?

Not worth it. They can be violent and it happens daily. It's not my job.

Thought so...

>last week a women was raped on a Philly subway and no one did a thing

Technically, according to what I've read, they did do something. They recorded it.

Gotta keep those crime stats high to increase the police budget!

> That is why the increasing cost of craftsmanship, while real, cannot account for the decline of neighborhood beauty.

It's not the cost, it's the availability. I'm currently in the process of a home renovation. If you want a master craftsman to build you say, kitchen cabinets, you may have to wait years for them to be available.

Or you can go to the store and buy custom built cabinets from a factory and have them in a few weeks.

It's the same with the outside of the house. You can build a generic outside with supplies from Home Depot, or if you're really fancy the contractor's supply depot, or wait years for a master to do a custom job for you.

If demand so significantly exceeds supply, why aren't folks with these skills raising prices?

They already charge a significant amount. But that doesn't increase the supply of master craftsmen. You can't just make more masters. :)

Also, there is still a price ceiling. If they charge too much, people will choose the cheaper alternatives even if they aren't as good.

> You can't just make more masters.

You can given enough time. Your second point is more likely the real reason. These jobs might seem to pay lots from the outside but if you dedicated the same time to a more boring job like management you very quickly make a lot more money with almost unlimited room to bump your prices.

> These jobs might seem to pay lots from the outside but if you dedicated the same time to a more boring job like management you very quickly make a lot more money with almost unlimited room to bump your prices.

This is from a German perspective, but here this is absolutely untrue. Masters earn a hell of a lot of money and business is basically limitless, even for masters. Being charged 120€-150€ per hour plus drive for a master and an apprentice is not unusual.

Add to that that they start earning 5-9 years earlier. Sure, they start lower, but they have a lot of time to catch up as well as save money. In my circles, these guys drove awesome cars while us students survived still survived on ramen (or parents).

Lastly, you can absolutely scale your business. If you go on to be a freelancer or even make your own company and hire people, you can get very far, if you intend to do so.

Sure, the absolute top of white collar workers might earn more; eight digits is probably not going to happen. That being said, that's the 1% of the 1%. Here in Germany, 100k€ per year is already a really high salary and to get there in white collar work, you'll need to make quite some career jumps. For masters, on the other hand, this is absolutely doable if you don't suck at your job.

A lot of these people prefer the stability of knowing their income over a long period of time, rather than focusing on maximising profitability and therefore losing time working on their craft and also introducing instability longer term. My job is similar to this sort of thing and I have gone down the maximising profit route, and even though I've not pushed it to an extreme it can be difficult to stay disciplined about it. You lose a lot of time to it, as well as intelectual bandwidth - you're bouncing back and forth between business brain and craft brain a lot more. Crafts people also tend to be more community orientated which likely reflects in their pricing.

Super interesting answer. Thanks!

Not to discount the answer you've had, but to offer another factor:

100 * £10 > 50 * £19

It plays into the other really: you have to multiply your fee by more than the reduction in volume to make more money; if you break even on the trade, in a way that's great, less work same money, but now you're not practicing.

So there's a trade-off there, and for it to be obviously worth it, there really has to be a significantly outsized boost to fee compared to reduction in number of people prepared to pay it, that just isn't going to happen unless you had it really wrong to begin with.

(Maybe if you're already on the very high designer end you can suddenly go 10x or more as a result of being 'discovered' or going 'viral'? But not lower on the ladder, like the difference between DIY shop 'it works' vs. bespoke; carpenter vs. joiner; as discussed above.)

Because people don’t actually want to pay 5x-10x for craft items and that’s how much it costs. Craftsmen are in competition with labor in the 3rd world that gets paid 2-10$ a day instead of 50$ an hour

That's the current situation, but what about the past several decades? The article claims that very few attractive neighborhoods were built in the US post WWII.

The cheap box aesthetic peaked in the sixties.

That's where I think there's hope for a third option. Where I grew up there were a lot of Sears catalog homes, and they were really nice. Those were all manufactured and are a whole lot more beautiful than a builder grade home today.

Or you can buy Ikea cabinets and have whatever quality you build (+ better hinges than prebuilt)

Plus

Cabinet making is a lost art. It used to be very common, but now most cabinetry is mass produced in factories so there aren't many people around who are skilled in the art.

It’s slow and inefficient without scale and tooling. Just like how most people don’t have custom cars because it’s too expensive

Cabinets are not almost exclusively made to order in factories. At least the ones that aren't picked up in a box at Lowes. We just had a new bathroom installed and each cabinet was hand made--in a factory settings of course, to our specifications.

A lot of them are picked up in a box at Lowes (or Depot or Ikea). Sure you can have custom ones made in a factory, but 60+ years ago most every carpenter worth his (well, they mostly were male then) salt knew how to make decent cabinets. I went to an estate sale a few years back where the deceased had been a cabinet maker - the cabinets and homemade furniture were amazing.

> hand made

It was most likely CNC made and hand assembled. The guy doing the assembly would have no clue what to do without the CNC’d parts. The guy designing the CAD files would have no clue how to assemble the CNC’d parts. Neither of them know how to install the cabinets in your bathroom. This used to all be done by the same guy.

Baumels' Cost Disease.

>It's not the cost, it's the availability. I'm currently in the process of a home renovation. If you want a master craftsman to build you say, kitchen cabinets, you may have to wait years for them to be available.

Crown molding and things went out WAY before any of these supply chain issues you've brought up from the last 1-2 years.

The cost of trim wood is exponentially more than it was 50 years ago, and on top of that you cant find anyone who knows how to make custom ornamented trim.

Same reason we don’t have stone masons in every town nowadays. Too much time, too much material, not enough customer volume. Can’t operate with today’s (lack of) disposable income and material availability being diluted by an increasing population.

The standard of living has gone up IMHO bc of increased efficiency in the face of dwindling resources. We don’t all live in stone mansions with servants, but a nice apartment built to code as cheaply as possible with electricity, AC and a roomba is by some measures a better life than anyone on the planet had 100 years ago. As a builder, you make more money too.

There's actually way more disposable income today than even 100 years ago. We just spend it on things that didn't exist before like car insurance and iPhones.

What do you consider "disposable income"?

Car insurance is legally mandatory if you drive a car. If your income is predicated on being able to commute by car (as it is for many Americans, though hopefully a trend toward remote work will ameliorate this somewhat) then your insurance is no more optional than your gas.

People also talk about smartphones as though they're a luxury item, but for most intents and purposes owning one can be viewed as required. Tons of services, including your bank, require a cell phone for authentication, if not to use their services at all. Everyone from your boss to your spouse has an expectation that you can be reached most if not all of the time. I try to avoid being reachable at all times, but this is a luxury I can afford because I'm relatively well-off and technologically adept, and I still can't get around 2FA requirements for everything.

So like, if that stuff is bought with "disposable income", is rent?

"Disposable income" is not some vague philosophical term that we have to haggle over. It simply means income minus taxes paid to government.

Please please don't redefine economic terms to suit your intuitive belief about what a word "should" mean because you are wading into an area where you don't know the agreed upon terminology. That impedes communication.

If you want to refer to income after paying necessities, then this is "discretionary income".

I wasn't aware this was a technical term, but if we insist on this usage, the post I'm responding to is even less meaningful, because this is drawing a pedantic distinction between money that's tied up in expenses and thus, at any rate, not money that the relevant party is really making decisions about

I mean do you really want to compare my disposable income with my great grandparents? They'd hit me up side the head if they knew how much I blow on weed a month and random bullshit like latex Halloween costumes. To them eating out was a luxury they could afford maybe once or twice a year. I eat out like every other day.

Our standards are way higher these days cause the truth is we're all spoiled.

You keep saying disposable income (money after taxes) when you mean discretionary income (money after necessary expenses such as rent, bills, transportation and food).

Laymen versus technical. If I'm talking to a random person on the street I'm gonna say disposable. But yes I mean discretionary. My discretionary income is still huge. Well over 50% of my paycheck. It's also not even fair to say though because it's still my choice to have upgraded my living situation. Sure I'm locked in now but I could sell my house and downgrade at any time and my discretionary will go up.

Unfortunately, your confusion is endemic of the problem with government statistics using disposable income as an indicator of prosperity, and is even being quoted by others in this thread. Indeed, you likely googled "historical disposable income" to back up your statement - which is exactly the problem with using the incorrect term.

I wont make the comparison to 100 years ago (as you did) because that was a period of time including 2 world wars and the great depression., But adjusted for inflation, people generally have LESS discretionary income now than they did in the 60s. Again, this is hard to corroborate with official poverty statistics due to changes in the cost of living (and conversely, the provision of benefits such as food stamps), which are frequently petitioned to be amended.

Over 12% of americans have such low discretionary income they have to rely on food banks - a figure comparable to the 1970s.

10x more people in the UK are accessing emergency food from food banks than they did 10 years ago.

It is a terrible state of affairs, to be honest. Please dont use disposable income :)

I'm not confused lol. In America homes are just bigger now than they used to be. You can still go small though. No one said you had to take on a huge mortgage. That's why discretionary is a bad metric to use.

I see, so people are in poverty because their houses are too big...

Maybe you should check your privilege. Your 50% discretionary income is FAR from the norm.

Median income is less than 45k (gross - this means before tax, etc) - than means 50% of the population earn LESS than that. 25% earn less than 24k. 10% earn less than $9k...

These people cant afford a small house, let alone a big one...

Lol this is hacker news. I could care less what you think about my privilege. It's hilarious that you're assuming my so-called privledge when my family came to the USA with almost nothing. I'm not here to be your little social justice pawn while you make assumptions.

Just to be clear so there's no ambiguity. I don't care about the poor in america. I seriously could care less. My entire family immigrated to the USA in the 90s and none of them are poor. They all self made themselves into upper middle class lives within 20 years. Meanwhile Americans born in America with every advantage and privilege just whine all day and want more more more for nothing.

Also sick and tired of constantly having social justice internet warriors tell me I'm privileged when I'm literally self made from zero. It's not privileged when you work your way up from fast food to six figures tech work. that's called "earning" things. Please learn the difference.

you are privileged.

No one cares about your little opinions

The reality is you are spouting crap about people being poor because (apparently) their houses are too big (??), while also not knowing (VERY) basic economic terms. I was just giving you facts.

Honestly, your lack of awareness is quite astounding - but it appears that you are overentitled as well as privileged, so that kind of makes sense.

Im sorry you care so much about my opinion.

Disposable income in the US is at record highs, both at the median and average, inflation adjusted. It has not gone down.

And the median and average for disposable income is a lot higher in the US than in Europe. US disposable income is only comparable to the most affluent nations of Europe: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland.

Americans waste an enormous amount of money on consumer garbage. Until recently it was very common for households to have $150-$200 / month cable or satellite TV plans. It's still common, just slightly less so thanks to Netflix etc. $200-$300 family smartphone plans are common.

Americans also flip in and out of cars frequently, losing huge sums of money doing it. And they buy ridiculously over-priced new vehicles, which they keep for relatively short periods of time.

Seems a lot of these comments are thinking “nice” refers to the livable sense, but the article is specifically referencing aesthetics. And then makes the argument that modern neighborhoods don’t look pleasing because there is no consistency between neighboring houses.

I don’t buy this at all. There are many tracts of suburban (USA) houses where every house looks consistent and similar, with subtle differences in coloration being the main changes. And they do NOT look aesthetically pleasing.

I have a different theory. Go look at an old building and note the intricate details on trim, along windowsills, above doors, under roofs. Look at old bridges, lampposts, street signs or skyscrapers.

Humans used to build things with passion, and the builder’s pride shows in the result. Even low cost buildings like brownstones in the cities have these details; they give the buildings personality.

My theory is modern construction, since it is often prefab or cookie cutter parts, lacks these human touches, and we subconsciously sense it when we think they don’t look “nice”.

I think your observation is spot on. When I travel in the older parts of cities, I like to point out to my children the details in brickwork that we just don’t see in newer structures.

I remember the whole “identical suburban house with a white picket fence” being derided when I was growing up. So now this kind of sameness is encouraged?

I think at the end of the day these folks just detest suburbs and can find a flaw about them no matter what aspect they look at.

I really like your observation about craftsmanship. I think modern minimalism is a nice cop-out for cheapening out on details and mass producing the same things.

For some reason the vast majority of houses are ugly for the following reasons: the proportions are off.

I mean, I understand the need to have smaller lots. But, if you're going to have a small 3K sq ft lot then you need to limit the width of the house to allow at least 20' on each side and raise the height of the house to two stories, if it's more than 800 sq ft.

Another big reason for ugliness is the extremely shallow and underdefined rooflines typical of ranch house style. You need to have steep well defined rooflines that give the house shape. And add a small stone tower off to the side to make it look even better.

Another big problem is the 2 or 3 car garages which always have to be immediately infront of the house which makes it look like you'r coming home to a parking garage and not a home. Put the garage in the back, where it belongs and have a 6' wide small driveway with nicely paved bricks.

Another even bigger problem is the propensity of people to put down pavement EVERYWHERE. the driveways are insanely big. the streets are waaay to wide. and then if that's not enough, they fill up the backyard with pavement too. If you take an arial shot, you'll notice almost half the lot is filled up with pavement: talk about ugly.

And, there's no trees. Why? it doesn't cost much to put down some trees. it makes the neighborhood so much more beautiful and even decreases the temperatures in the summer. you could even make them fruit trees so people can get free food.

> Another big reason for ugliness is the extremely shallow and underdefined rooflines typical of ranch house style. You need to have steep well defined rooflines that give the house shape.

These are clearly conservative preferences, not objective truths.

Like social conservatism, there are valuable learnings embodied (steep roofs shed water -- more important in some climates than others), but there is also a lot of fearful aversion to the unfamiliar (i.e. anything not traditional western European).

> And add a small stone tower off to the side to make it look even better.

I would never want to live in a structure that pretends to be a castle. Or, more generously, one that is a vague echo of a style that once served a purpose.

It’s odd to me to place this as a “conservative” preference. In what way is this conservative? And why is that meaningful?

Anyway - there is growing evidence of “objective truths” in architecture and design. Namely work tracking things like heart rate, eye movement, etc. Findings are indicating that asymmetrical houses or imposing skyscrapers are actually stressful to humans. The fist being stressful because you naturally look for symmetry (notice how you see faces in certain things?) and most “modern” architecture was created by people who lived through World War 1 and 2 and created houses that were asymmetrical and in some cases even shaped like bunkers if you are inclined to spot it. Skyscrapers create a disconnect not just from their imposing presence (will this fall on me??) but they’re also bad because they remove the human presence from the street and create sterile environments.

Anywhere you look the most desirable neighborhoods and the places where everybody takes pictures of and travel to feature “conservative” housing styles that were almost universally adapted from local building materials and for local weather patterns (white building in the Mediterranean or a-frame cabins) and naturally attract people.

When you search for a city like Amsterdam you get pictures of the beautiful homes on the canals. Nobody travels there for the ghastly glass modern architecture which certainly has never been described as quaint.

We already know how to build homes and walkable towns and neighborhoods. Unfortunately that doesn’t stroke the ego of useless academic architects who are trying to create more and more self-serving, disfigured structures so we get houses that just look ridiculous. Does a car live here or a person? I can’t tell.

And if you’re still confused go look at the Soviet style bunker apartments that look like crap or Boston City Hall building which surprisingly doesn’t cause people to commit suicide on the spot on account of its absolutely hellish design.

I think you are mistaking the word "conservative" for a political position. The parent is using it as in this definition "averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values." Steep roofs are more traditional.

I'm definitely not buying the idea that asymmetrical houses are "stressful" in any meaningful way. I mean, I guess you could say anything that is interesting and non-bland is stressful, but that is quite a stretch.

Sure, my “this is unnecessarily political” radar might be off. Especially given there is a lot of angst about Trump’s decision to mandate all federal buildings follow Greco-Roman architecture (maybe the only good thing he ever did) so there is a pushback now where anything “conservative” or traditional is bad and modern is good kind of thing. I’m surely overreacting.

But I’d also challenge this notion that buildings built a certain way are conservative in any meaningful sense. And calling them conservative as though that’s an attack on them has a hidden assumption that everything new must be good, which we surely know is not the case. So it’s not really necessary in this context to call the architecture conservative. It wouldn’t be a true description of the architectural style, and it wouldn’t add any interesting perspective to the conversation. Are Boston City Hall and the African American History Museum “liberal” because they are new? And if I commented and said that they were liberal would you seriously not see political undertones?

Anyway, I think if you think about it a bit it makes a lot of sense that we look for symmetry and would find symmetry in our environment more pleasing. Asymmetry could indicate a predator or something not “normal” which must be dealt with.

There is ongoing research, though not much. I’ve enjoyed reading some of Ann Sussman’s work [1] on the topic and I’m sure one can find ways to poke holes in her work. Ultimately I feel like it makes intuitive sense. Hell, why are we intentionally designing houses to be asymmetric and why does that only become prominent now? Relatively speaking.

> I guess you could say anything that is interesting and non-bland is stressful, but that is quite a stretch.

Right which isn’t something I’d say. I also wouldn’t consider American suburban homes or brutalist architecture to be interesting to the eye except in that they are good examples of things you wouldn’t want to do; cheap in the case of American suburbs and psychotic in the case of brutalist.

[1] https://geneticsofdesign.com/

Yeah I didn't see the usage of "conservative" above as being a negative per se. It was only saying that the negativity expressed toward some modern architecture is very subjective.

I'll agree on your opinion on brutalist and typical suburban. Yuk to both. I like neighborhoods like many here in San Francisco, where a really modern house can be right next to a Victorian. Very close to me is this street, which is one of my favorites (let's just say I like "funky"): https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7399065,-122.4298453,3a,75y,...

Sorry, "conservative" is not intended politically -- it's the word that the industry uses to describe itself.

Not architecture in general, but definitely residential homebuilding.

There are many good reasons for this. Embodied knowledge, building for unknown future buyers, buyer preference for familiarity in expensive products, buyer hesitancy about resale, liability for inappropriate materials choices or poor execution of unfamiliar methods, etc.

The commercial space is a bit more adventurous, certainly in facade but also in design. They have more leeway thanks to sturdier structural components (e.g. steel beams and floor pans) which can support a broader range of layouts, etc.

I disagree with the overly-simplistic theories on symmetry though. Sure, symmetry is pleasing in general to humans, but some of the most attractive and appealing structures are asymmetrical. Your example of "imposing" skyscrapers is unfair. Of course imposing things can be stressful.

You then go on with a lot of exactly what I'm talking about -- viscerally held opinions which are presented as absolutes. Boston City Hall makes you consider suicide? It's not an attractive or organic building, I agree, but that's a bit dramatic, no?

I don't know anyone who loves that building. But I know many people who love other brutalist buildings. I'm a fan of Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander, but I think they both express well-developed opinions and reasonable conclusions, but few absolute truths. Jacobs aspires to a bit more empiricism than Alexander, and I think she fails at that despite being "correct" IMO.

Buildings, cities, and humans are extremely complicated organisms. Some are failures, but describing the reasons is not simple.

PS: My proposal for "the only good thing" was withdrawing from the Universal Postal Union Treaty, which made it more expensive for US businesses to ship products to US customers, than for foreign businesses to do so.

"I would never want to live in a structure that pretends to be a castle. Or, more generously, one that is a vague echo of a style that once served a purpose."

That's a valid aesthetic choice, but I personally enjoy such callbacks to the past. Based on aesthetics alone, I'd love to live in a place like this: https://i.pinimg.com/564x/6a/9f/3e/6a9f3e7d4304c5f463ddf8c2b... (but only if they were rare, it wouldn't be nearly as fun if everyone had houses like that)

> i.e. anything not traditional western European

Traditional Chinese housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siheyuan#/media/File:Siheyuan_...

Traditional Japanese housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukiya-zukuri#/media/File:Shoi...

A style of traditional African housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Africa#/media/... (and many more are like it)

Slanted roofs are super common throughout the world and history.

North American houses from my UK perspective:

- Detached no matter the cost - so close they may as well be terraced, but they'll be detached 'gah-damnit'!

- Garage in front. I.. ok. Practical I suppose. Bloody ugly.

- Fake shutters!! I'm mentioning it last but it bugs me the most. At least have them wide enough that they look like they might be usable. But no, inch-wide 'shutters' on a six-foot window, why not.

Detached makes sense, you need to airgap for noise

Better insulation such as compressed cellulose will beat a 10 foot air gap any day.

The other problem is with shared walls you have to deal with your neighbor every time there is a shared problem. If folks are reasonable that’s not a problem but not everyone is and your reasonable neighbor might move and sell to someone that’s not at any time

The airgap costs you in energy terms in most climates in N. America.

Sanity trumps energy every single time. Noise from shared walls will drive most of us insane eventually.

The majority of denizens of most major cities around the world would disagree with that, at least to some extent.

You don't _need_ an air gap. I live in a high rise apartment building which has very soundproof walls. You can be having a full party in your apartment and only get the faintest of sounds from the hallway, and absolutely nothing from inside your own apt .

I live in an apartment building built in the mid 1800's. I can play music, yell at the top of my lungs and my neighbors can only hear anything if they put their ear against the wall, and even that only faintly. We tested this when we moved in so that we knew we were being good neighbors!

The culprit is cheap, stick-built construction that has a useful lifetime measured in a couple decades, not a couple centuries. [And if we, as a society, say with a straight face that we can't afford to build that anymore... isn't that a sign of how much poorer we all are collectively?]

Bricks vs. timber, perhaps?

I do realise the general answer is about availability of materials and both work. But ceteris paribus, talking about noise, the prospect of a timber terrace does seem.. unappealing?

IME (in the UK) noise comes through windows, not (external, including to an attached neighbour) walls.

Modern 'partition' (those between rooms within a dwelling) walls aren't brick, but typically between semis or in a terrace the dividing walls are. You might hear the neighbours in the garden through the windows, but not through the wall between your adjoining rooms.

My 42sq m German apartment had concrete walls. So quiet. In Boston, I have stick walls, but the building is built in such a way it's not too bad.

I've lived in some very loud stick built buildings though. Americans seem to love to put multi family housing on 5 lane roads.

Agreed. All of the above. The garage in front thing has a name as well 'snout house' as it looks like it has a snout.

> Detached no matter the cost - so close they may as well be terraced, but they'll be detached 'gah-damnit'!

The difference between "so close" and "terraced" is hearing your neighbors fucking at night. No thanks.

Agree with you about the shutters, though...

Through nearly a foot of solid clay bricks, you can't hear anything. My neighbours across the road with a window facing towards them are more audible than my neighbours next door.

I think US homes are usually timber, so they might not block sound so well.

In California they're definitely timber because earthquakes.

US soundproofing code has always been lacking because code was mostly invented to solidify single-family detached housing. For example, the 2019 California Residential Code doesn't actually mandate anything related to soundproofing, but includes an _optional_ section on soundproofing in Appendix K[1], which mandates walls and ceilings have an STC of 45, about the same insulating capabilities as a 4" brick face wall [2]. Some cities have opted into these requirements. Notably if you live in the SF Bay Area, neither San Francisco nor Berkeley mandate any soundproofing (e.g. they do _not_ mandate adherence to Appendix K), but the City of Oakland _does_. This is the real reason shared dwellings are so noisy; code doesn't care.

[1]: https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/CRC2019P1/appendix-k-sound...

[2]: https://www.hud.gov/sites/documents/DOC_16419.PDF

In a half decently built apartment building you can't hear that, let alone in terraced housing. Are those houses made of paper? :-)

One of the thing that struck me about British houses and apartments is that they tend to have en-suites "no-matter-what". I don't think I've ever seen a single house or apartment with an en-suite before I moved to England (also: carpets in the bathroom, wtf?! And the weird thing with two taps.)

I find it rather curious waste of space, especially in ~50/60m2 apartments. Why do you need more than toilet and shower? I suppose that parallelized pooping and/or showering can be useful in rare occasions, but usually doing it serially works well enough and overall seems like an exceedingly poor trade-off. But the Brits seem to love 'em shrug.

Crossing borders can also be fun; with some crossings you can see an immediate and marked difference in building style; the Dutch/Belgian border is like that for example.

New Zealand houses are just horrible, full stop. Don't know how they managed to get so far behind on the rest of the Western world with that.

Not sure what I'm trying to say with this comment; don't really have a specific point as such. I just find it interesting that different countries have such different approaches to building and arranging houses, even though they're relatively similar in culture, climate, etc.

I think we've over-corrected on that front. Indeed, one place in which I lived (a modern build) had (on paper) five bedrooms and four bathrooms (three en suite). But there were four of us, so two of those 'bedrooms' weren't used as such; leaving too many bathrooms. Mad really, I agree. Downstairs WC in addition to those.

(And it's not like there were a plethora of reception rooms to go with them - surely a family that was going to actually use five bedrooms as five bedrooms would want space to spread out a bit, even if a couple of them had to share a bathroom as a result?!)

(Before that a three-bedroom Victorian build - one nice large bathroom and a small WC+shower room, I suspect the latter was a later division. Neither en suite. Point is it is (was?) a modern fetish, and I think (hope?) it's waning slightly.)

> I mean, I understand the need to have smaller lots. But, if you're going to have a small 3K sq ft lot then you need to limit the width of the house to allow at least 20' on each side

A 3,000 sq ft lot is 54' on a side, if square. Your suggested 20' wide perimeter would leave a 14'×14' postage stamp, or 196 sq ft. That was about the size of my freshman dorm.

> and raise the height of the house to two stories, if it's more than 800 sq ft.

There's no second story — you've got no room for the stairwell!

Stairwell? Just hang a climbing rope! Better home and personal aesthetic.

You're describing a lot of US residential neighborhoods built between 1900 and 1940.

> Another big reason for ugliness is the extremely shallow and underdefined rooflines typical of ranch house style. You need to have steep well defined rooflines that give the house shape.

On the other hand, you can go overboard with rooflines and end up with McMansion monstrosities: [1].

1: https://mcmansionhell.com/post/149948821221/mcmansions-101-r...

> it doesn't cost much to put down some trees.

It would cost even less to leave some on the site, but it seems that builders prefer to scrape all the topsoil off.

Two reasons:

1. People (in the US at least) overall consistently choose more land over living somewhere walkable. In a lot of places, the marginal cost of more land is near zero; and

2. The dirty secret of car dependency is that most people (in the US) like being car dependent. In all but the densest largest cities, private vehicles are so much more convenient. Even in Manhattan there are a nontrivial number of people who cling to their cars.

When a lot of people say they want to live somewhere walkable what they really mean is they want their same 4000 square foot house on half to one acre of land next to somewhere walkable.

Walkability is predicated on high land costs so obviously that doesn't scale.

Pretty much this. I bought a house with half an acre to get away from the walkable city where I'd have constant harassment from homeless and drug addicts. Yea when I have a kid this house might be boring for them but to me... At the moment ... It's like a paradise of peace and tranquility. I can actually work on my woodworking hobby or blast my music and it's a non issue.

> 2. The dirty secret of car dependency is that most people (in the US) like being car dependent. In all but the densest largest cities, private vehicles are so much more convenient. Even in Manhattan there are a nontrivial number of people who cling to their cars.

We recently moved from city center to a blue-collar suburb and it is notable to me how much of a car aficionado culture there is here! A lot of my neighbors are into repairing and working on old (and new!) cars. They LOVE their cars and go to car meetups.

It amuses me sometimes on here when people talk about how every car on the road is going to be self-driving soon and I think of my neighbors... they will ride around in a self-driving car when hell freezes over. One of my more redneck neighbors actually told me he enjoys brake-checking and cutting off the self-driving test vehicles he sees on the road. Which... I was kind of horrified but maybe that's good for the car's AI to learn. :-/

I know a lot of guys and some gals who really love their cars. In a post-Communist country, people over 40 still connect car ownership with luxury, even though the economic situation is now different.

But no one, no one loves the unavoidable traffic jams. So the thing about clinging to their cars is sort-of two faced.

I love cars and am constantly researching and talking about them with other car people. Except I don't have a car. I would love a weekend car to enjoy specific roads and go on trips with, but the financial cost of having one doesn't seem worth it to me.

I still love em though.

> But no one, no one loves the unavoidable traffic jams. So the thing about clinging to their cars is sort-of two faced.

I don't understand this reasoning at all -- I find it quite irrational.

So let's remove that irrationality and instead talk about swimming pools.

You build a free public pool. More people will use it until it gets so crowded that it's not worth it to enjoy the pool. That means that the marginal swimmer will be indifferent as to the pool, but all the other swimmers will benefit from the pool -- that is a large amount of benefits.

Fun Fact: One reason why public pools are filled with kids rather than seniors is because kids don't care so much about things being crowded or privacy. We have a heterogeneous population with heterogeneous preferences.

So now we have a crowded swimming pool. Does that mean that "clinging" to the swimming pool is a bad idea, because it is so crowded? Is a bar bad because it is so crowded? Are those who attend the crowded bar "two-faced"?

Now let's say you decide to build a second swimming pool. Well, it becomes as crowded as the first. Does that mean that building more swimming pools provides no value to the community, because they are all crowded?

Some are willing to put up with a crowded pool more than others, and these will be the ones that crowd up the pool, making those with different trade-offs feel left out.

Much of the rationale behind things like congestion pricing is to make the world more palatable to those who have different trade-offs, specifically to those who place a higher value on their time/privacy/personal space than others. This often boils down to questions of class - but not always. For example someone that has to drive around to make housecalls values the road more than someone who can work from home or has a more flexible schedule.

Now going back to roads and cars. People will again use the road until the congestion makes it not worth it for the marginal user. The road offers a trade-off between mobility and time, just as the swimming pool's trade off of swimming versus privacy. As with swimming pools, this creates a situation where the roads are always too crowded for some, and these insist there is no point in building an additional road. But the same road provides a great benefit to others -- the actual users of the road who, by revealed preferences, prefer to use the road even though it is congested.

>1. People (in the US at least) overall consistently choose more land over living somewhere walkable. In a lot of places, the marginal cost of more land is near zero

Yeah this pretty much. In some other countries, it's really expensive to own a large piece of land somewhere remote, so only the Uber-rich can live in those sorts of settings.

Owning a large piece of land somewhere remote with urban infrastructure as you see a lot in NA is also incredibly expensive, yet these places are rather cheap due to heavy subsidies. At least they're cheap until the infrastructure maintenance bill comes around. Strong towns has a good article on this: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/

Buried in the article is an important point: people care a lot about interior and not much about exterior appearance. Typical cookie-cutter suburban neighborhoods are built assuming nobody walks around in them anyway. On the inside these houses are pretty deluxe, though.

Also, in the US it's very difficult to build a house out of solid wood like my house from 40s. New materials might not look as nice but are less wasteful, more energie efficient and faster to build with.

Finally, people do come to new neighborhoods, e.g. in Portland the newish neighborhoods like Pearl District are successful in the sense that they are new, high density and mixed shopping/dining/living. Not for low income though.

I’d strongly disagree about people caring about interiors - houses are built and sold as a list of checkboxes as if they were enterprise software. They have the commensurate problems of enterprise software. Also, I’ll note that maybe only 10% of US houses are designed by an architect in the first place. Developers think in dollars, first, second, and third. They may upgrade your countertop to granite, but that’s the extent of it.

> They may upgrade your countertop to granite

For a fee, of course (which speaks to your overall point).

I recently told a builder I wanted simple white cabinets. That would be "an upgrade to a level 3 cabinet" (whatever that means) because white is popular right now. So if I want faux wood it's included. If I want that wood painted white, we have to change the entire kitchen and add $10K. I politely left the meeting at that point.

If only 10% of homes are designed by architects then it's probably 1% who have an interior designer involved.

We are in the middle of a remodel and involving an interior designer as early in the process as the architect resulted in a much different layout and floor plan than if we only worked with an architect.

The architect helped us make sure the house was structurally sound and the interior designer helped us make sure suited our needs.

There seems to be a lot of variability in what architects do and care about. In your last sentence, I feel like you could often replace architect with structural engineer and interior designer with architect in other situations and end up with the same outcome.

Agreed, I know architects who only do interior layouts.

I'm not familiar with the courses and topics that are included in an architectural program and if they subsume that of an interior designer. If so, then you're probably right.

But, as far as I know, they're separate disciplines.

Quality of interior is so overlooked in these sorts of threads. Yes - from orbit it might look trashy.

From the pov where people actually exist, it's got 13' ceilings, plantation shutters, induction cooktop, tesla power wall, gigabit symmetric connection to the goddammit internet, dedicated home office with bookshelves and brick facade, and a monstrous 5 ton air conditioner to keep it all comfy. Oh and the sprinkler system is on an automatic timer so you don't have to even think about how shitty a typical American lawn is. You pay guys to do that for you.

Living in American suburbia is an unmitigated paradise if you can get over the principled outrage of how bland it all is in aggregate. The uniform nature of the developments is the reason why we can have nice things like fiber to homes. It makes economics of infrastructure way more acceptable and predictable.

Wouldn't it actually make things like fiber, road construction, and every other piece of infrastructure predictably non-economical because of how sprawling suburbs can't pay for themselves?

> From the pov where people actually exist

You think if the outside would actually offer something instead of depressing scenery: stores and cafes within walking distance, parks and playgrounds, would people prefer to exist outside a lot more?

I could not exist at all in those suburbs. A cafe, various stores, and a supermarket within a 5 minute walking distance is as integral to my lifestyle as owning a fridge. Also having some forest around to go for walks is nice. The only thing walking for 10 minutes in an American suburb will get you is probably more suburb. If you're lucky a McDonalds and 20 acres of concrete parking lot will provide a change of scenery.

This is why I live in California. I want to prefer the outside to the inside. I want fast food to be non-existent. I want walking/biking to be quicker than driving.

Anything that nudges me towards a better lifestyle is a bonus.

Every suburb I've lived in in the USA has had everything you've mentioned, except maybe a supermarket, and that's normally only been ~15 minutes by bike at the most. The only ones I've seen that didn't have parks and nearby shops were wealthy neighborhoods, and its because they didn't want poor people to have a reason to walk through the neighborhood. Even a local neighborhood that was off-limits to military personnel because of the high amount of violent crime still had free recreation areas and a locally owned convenience store.

I pretty much zoomed on a place in the US at random, and this is easily repeatable: https://i.imgur.com/rCTqZU4.png

I plotted a route across that for a sense of scale.

There is no public transportation. For most people there's hardly anything within a 15 minute walking distance, except more suburb. Most children in that area will have to walk over 30 minutes to get to an elementary school, or the one playground. If you want to go shopping (not pictured: there's a mall to the northwest) or have a coffee, you won't fare much better.

At least it got some lakes, some green, and isn't laid out in straight lines. I could've easily found worse places, but that was the first one I landed on. Most of it even has a sidewalk! It's almost liveable.

I did this exercise too, it was fun!

I think I got a biased sample but it seems more likely you'd live within a 15 minute walk of a fucking golf course than a convenience store.

> On the inside these houses are pretty deluxe, though.

I assure you, they are not. Some materials left to the buyer's choice may be upgraded to something actually deluxe, but anything and everything else will be kept to the cheapest "builder-grade" materials that are the bare minimum fit for purpose, assembled in the quickest and cheapest way possible.

Extend that deluxe interior to accommodate many of life's other joys and activities -- say a home gym, a theatre system, pool, study -- and folks can enjoy these things at home and thus not need neighborhood gyms, cinemas, recreation centers, libraries.

It's my opinion that the increased availability of such robust interior living has lessened the demand for many local services or public goods, leading to inevitable underinvestment (don't fund libraries! no one* uses them anyway) or otherwise lacking places (why add grills in the park if everyone* has their own patio with a grill anyway), creating further incentive to retreat into the perfect home with everything one can need, rinse and repeat.

If you ask the objective and measurable question of which neighborhoods tourists pay money to see, the answers are almost exclusively older neighborhoods,

That doesn't sound like a good objective measure of what is a "nice" neighborhood -- I visit a lot of places as a tourist that I wouldn't want to live in. We have the neighborhoods we have because people are choosing to live in them.

Some things, like a central car free housing core with cars relegated to the outside edges of the neighborhood sounds attractive on paper (and for some people in real life too), but when you picture yourself schlepping groceries 2 blocks to your house, or walking the baby out in the rain to the car to take her to the doctor, it's less attractive for living, at least to those accustomed to living in the American car culture.

But really, it comes down to the bottom line -- people prefer to pay less than to pay more. If houses in a cookie cutter boring neighborhood cost 10% less than the ones in a planned neighborhood that's objectively nicer, it's going to be a lot harder to sell those expensive homes. So the developer's not going to build them in the first place.

> If houses in a cookie cutter boring neighborhood cost 10% less than the ones in a planned neighborhood that's objectively nicer,

Minor point, planned neighborhoods are at best a local maxima but I’ve never seen one that wasn’t sterile and bland. Irvine ca is a soulless sterile place with gobs of early 2000’s office park style landscaping all over the residential areas, and that’s even true for the just built areas. The new dev areas are all continued to be “master planned” and they are just sad. But hey, it’s family friendly!

From "A City is not a Tree" by Christopher Alexander:

> It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities. When compared with ancient cities that have acquired the patina of life, our modern attempts to create cities artificially are, from a human point of view, entirely unsuccessful.

> Architects themselves admit more and more freely that they really like living in old buildings more than new ones. The non-art-loving public at large, instead of being grateful to architects for what they do, regards the onset of modern buildings and modern cities everywhere as an inevitable, rather sad piece of the larger fact that the world is going to the dogs.

Christopher Alexander has a whole website dedicated to the idea of designing "Living Neighborhoods": https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/

Architectural beauty is heavily dependent on context. Ornate gothic architecture, for example, peaked in popularity in the USA around 1870 and fell out of style in the early 1900s. Interest in it was revived in the late 20th century, so the same neighborhoods that would have been considered ugly and outdated 60 years ago are now "beautiful" again.

A lot of it is also about uniqueness. The author is rightly awed by pre-war architecture in Europe when he travels, but tourists worldwide are similarly fascinated by glass skyscrapers in New York.

Talking at the neighborhood level, houses constructed today are meant to be more transient vs those from the last century. Builders (whether a property developer or individual resident) will consider sale and resale value first and foremost before anything else. A "unique" house will have far less buyer interest.

On the surface what you’re saying sounds right but the only example I can think of is neo-brutalism though there aesthetics was never the point.

Your transient point is very appealing to me. The line of thinking that people move more-> lower incentive to build custom-> cheaper finishes/less creativity feels logical and can be tidily appended to the Enrico Moretti argument that economic opportunity has concentrated in the cities-> more people detach from their hometowns to chase opportunity.

There are two pieces of information that I struggle to integrate into this model and would be interested in how others reconcile:

1) US census data suggests (surprisingly!) that the % of residents moving each year has declined significantly since 1990, and before that was about the same back to the first data collected in the mid 40s (though with some collection gaps) [1]

2) Anecdata: most of the new builds I see around me (Boston MSA) are luxury apartment buildings or way out in the suburbs. The former aren't quaint, but are decidedly custom architecture. The latter, I stereotype as "folks settling down in the suburbs". Maybe McMansions, but I wouldn't expect transient. This one might just be a sampling error on my part.

[1]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-189...

I live in a wonderful neighbourhood that was developed in the early 1900s in an old factory converted to lofts. The workers lived around the area, the GM home was across the street. Similar factories, all lofts now, randomly dot the neighbourhood.

Our "main" street is half a kilometre away and has shopping, bookstores, restaurants. All small businesses.

Several transit routes run by the edges of the neighbourhood.

Everybody walks. Everybody used to walk to work. Streets are almost all one way.

It's cars. It's always cars that make neighbourhoods terrible.

Wow sounds nice. Where is this?

Toronto, we have multiple neighbourhoods like this.

> For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars.

The presence of cars does not mean it was built for cars. The most important difference between pre-war and post-war neighborhoods is that one was built FOR cars

How did the author miss the point of cars so much?

> One common explanation for the decline of urban and neighborhood beauty is the rise of the automobile, which makes it harder to develop such places. Surely cars and traffic can ruin many an attractive scene. Still, this is not even close to a full answer. For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars.

The problem with cars isn't how they look, it's how they lead to communities where people don't share space, can't walk from place to place, encapsulate once open spaces, and separate everyone. Plus they pollute and kill people. In cities built before cars, like Paris, people share space and interact. You can walk to the produce vendor, tailor, etc without parking in giant lots around box stores.

Airplanes repeat the pattern on a national scale.

In the suburban neighborhoods built around cars I live by there are still many people walking around, kids playing and riding bikes, people growing gardens, lots of trees, and lots of friendly neighbors. Also if you choose to live in a smaller city (say < 500k?) the air quality can be quite fantastic. The quality of suburban life imo is a lot better than what people on HN tend to make it out to be. HN is rather hyperbolic.

> where people don't share space … Airplanes repeat the pattern

What do you mean? The person ahead of me on airplanes shares my lap space on the regular.

also not to mention that Paris is one of the forerunners when it comes to actually getting rid of them again. In some European cities driving is more like trench warfare, trying to drive through parts of Rome at peak hours is quite an experience.

yeah sorry im sticking to my car as long as our population behaves like this

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10109987/Fiston-Ngo...

We can and we are!

I’m the CEO of Culdesac. Our vision is to build the first car-free city in the US, starting with the first car-free neighborhood built from scratch in the US. That’s Culdesac Tempe, a 1000-resident neighborhood that is under construction now. Residents move in next year.

Join our waitlist at culdesac.com. If you want to visit in the meantime, drop me a note. We have something exciting happening on site next month that is open to the public.

Hiring-wise, we're hiring in Tempe or remote. Dm me on socials if you can’t find something. https://www.culdesac.com/jobs

Here's our insta, which has lots of construction updates https://www.instagram.com/liveculdesac

Here's our tik tok https://www.tiktok.com/@liveculdesac

Here's our twitter https://www.twitter.com/culdesac

Here's my twitter where I also talk a lot about ebikes https://www.twitter.com/ryanmjohnson

Here's our intro article https://medium.com/culdesac/introducing-culdesac-3fbfe7c4219...

Here's a longer piece on us https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/10/31/busi...

So FYI, this is really off-putting. You've got a few sentences that I might be interested in (but not really, there's nothing about how this is actually going to solve the problems except for "if you build it they will come"), and 4x that amount of CTA and social media spam.

I'd much rather read a substantive comment about how your neighborhood is going to solve the challenges of being car-free, how it's going to interface with the rest of Tempe, etc. Directly on here, not just a link to your website and definitely not via a Medium or AMP link. A couple of links for further reading would be plenty.

> Our vision is to build the first car-free city in the US

What if I like my car, and the ability to easily travel outside the city limits that comes along with it?

you don't have to move there, its not a personal attack on you.

> its not a personal attack on you.

Who is implying that it is?

You.

Then you would probably choose to live somewhere else?

I'm raising this point because it seems like an idea that's mostly targeted at a very specific HN subculture. The shared area in the venn diagram of people who want to live without cars and people who want to live outside the urban core of a large city is quite small.

How is this not spam?

"Culdesac" sends the opposite message to what most of the Strongtowns crowd believes in: a proper grid where everyone takes their share of the cross-town traffic, instead of selfish suburbia that funnels everyone onto highways.

While it's great there are efforts here, it looks like it's being over-architected, over-engineered, such that people don't own it. This leads to uneasy privacy concerns and dystopian feels. I'm not sure what the solution is, and at least this is an attempt, so at least there is that.

I disagree: Many of the most attractive neighborhoods to me were built recently.

I used to love walking around the area in Palo Alto around University Ave, on the residential side of Middlefield. Many of those buildings are new.

When I could buy, and then build, a house in Massachusetts, I chose recently-built, upscale neighborhoods. The difference, compared to most neighborhoods, is that the houses are more expensive, and built to a higher quality. (I also favored neighborhoods with restaurants in walking distance. This is possible, even in suburbia.)

I suspect that the older neighborhoods the article favors are just the upscale ones. The cheaper neighborhoods built centuries ago didn't last.

Yes survivor/selection bias was mentioned in the article.

Agree about the Palo Alto observation, when I visit my in-laws down there I enjoy just walking around the old PA neighborhoods. It's like a free luxury house and garden tour. Total outlier nationally and probably globally, though, to be honest.

I've seen some reasonably beautiful, middle class neighborhoods that were designed as recently as the early 1970's, but nothing since then.

And while there are many aspects of modern interior design that I appreciate, floorplans tend to be universally terrible for anything designed since then as well. I have yet to walk into a (non-custom) home that was built since the year 2000 that I would ever want to live in.

The floor plan thing is real. A 1960s-1970s split level will have 3 bedrooms, 1.5 bathrooms, a huge living room, a good size dining room, and a kitchen, all around 1800sqft.

Or, you can buy a new 2500 sqft home that has the same, plus a walk in closet in the master.

Heck I've seen plenty of 3000sqft 3 bedroom homes!

It is insane. Sure these new floor plans have 2 dining rooms, a breakfast nook, a living room, and a family room, but that is also monumentally stupid.

I've talked to new home builders and they have said that due to the demand of immigrant buyers for more bedrooms, they are now starting to make some 4+ bedroom houses at 3500sqft and above. Like... what? If you want a 5 bedroom house from the 70s you'll be out less than 2500 sqft, and that will be a very generous and spacious house.

I just don't get it. Modern floor plans are asinine. Builders will reply "Well it is what buyers want", sure, but your pool of surveyed buyers is limited to people who can afford a 1.5 million dollar 4 bedroom house[1]!

I do sort of get it, because land is such a huge portion of the overall house price, builders are basically stuck making high end "luxury" housing (never mind that the quality is very far from luxury) at high prices. If a plot of land costs $500k+, no way is anything resembling reasonable housing going to be built.

Oh this also contributes to why people are having less kids. If an extra bedroom costs $200k or so, of course no one is going to have more than 1 baby.

Disclaimer: Above rant is only applicable to large coastal cities.

[1] I've talked to people in this pool, a majority of them are also wondering why the hell they are forced to purchase a house with 2 dining rooms.

I think you're giving too much credit to most people and their ability to plan for kids.

Yup, I have a 1-story, 4-bedroom, 2.5 bath, 1800sqft home in a solidly middle class neighborhood that was built around 1970. Bathrooms and closets are small relative to modern standards, but everything is well proportioned.

We also have a decent yard that the kids actually use, and the exteriors aren't ugly.

The trend now days seems to be as many, or more, baths as number of bedrooms.

With the hopefully rare exception of family wide food poisoning, I fail to see the need.

I think there is more to that disclaimer then you think. With the ongoing trend of the young moving out from rural areas to more urban areas, it would make sense that some of those people still desire the type of housing you could get where land is cheap and material is cheaper.

Totally agree. Even if you can afford it, all the "bonus" rooms that aren't bedrooms are just more space to keep clean, keep warm and maintain. Unless you close those rooms off, but then what's the point?

I just bought a 1600 sq ft home and it's honestly too small cause both me and my wife want our PC gamer setups so we have a dedicated room for that but then I need an office too so we end up hanging out all day in literally the smallest room in the house.

I'll be doing a major remodel to address this among other issues. But yea if we had a game room or a loft or something similar it would be a lot better.

The appraisal came in with the lot being 600k and the home itself is only 350k.

Half an acre though.

USB C or thunderbolt Hub.

Get a desktop with a thunderbolt port. Run all monitors and input devices through a hub.

Drop your work laptop into it and use that during work hours, swap 1 cable to desktop after 5. :D

But yeah 1600 can be small based on layout. I've seen some 1800sqft houses that are super spacious though. It really depends on if the architect had it together.

I live in a solid little house built in 1950. One thing I really notice about an older house like this is that the closet space is quite limited. Apparently people back then didn't have so many clothes compared to now. Overall, though, I do like the hardwood floors, the solidness and quality of build compared to what I see in more recent homes.

Older houses also assumed you had a wardrobe, so likely you were on the cusp of that change.

Right. I don't mind a house that looks old from the outside but is actually well architected and maintained. However old folks had very different lifestyles, which makes their houses awkward for modern use.

In my country, the typical old house or flat has several tiny bedrooms stacked next to each other, offering little privacy. Oversized common areas are to be expected. Tiny bathrooms where baths were replaced with small showers, and claustrophobic kitchens that double down as dining rooms are common.

However, my biggest pet peeve is orientation. Apparently, suburban architects didn't know how to use a compass until a few years ago. As a result, rooms often face south, which makes working from home in the summer nearly unbearable.

The other thing that old neighborhoods have is mature trees and landscaping. Trees old enough such that the canopy covers the street. It takes about 75 years to get most of the common deciduous trees to that size.

There are two simple answers, one of which was mentioned already, in the comments and in the article:

> I can visit many European cities and find lovely parts of town to walk through

1. Cars. They have ruined walkable neighborhoods, and in the US there are artificial walkable shopping centers, but you have to drive ther anyway. Everything being spaced out affects the architecture/landscape.

2. Building technology and ethos. It seems to me modern buildings are not built to last, and this is on purpose. Of course this is a huge factor! Old villages around the world always had many buildings that were made to last. This automatically means you will think deeply on its aesthetics, its symbolism, etc. Nowadays it's just about getting it done, and having an indoor space, with the outside looking as plain as possible for buidling costs and speed. I really wish building tech would also explore extremely durable constructions at smaller scales for towns and such. This would force people to think seriously about outside look and feel.

I live in a small, gated city in Los Angeles with 1 acre minimum lot sizes and rigorously enforced exterior styles, like white paint and single-story elevations. The average lot size is closer to 2 acres. You could snip the street map in one place and have a tree, meaning most streets end in cul-de-sacs. With a couple of exceptions, canyons have not been filled or bridged for roads; roads respect the preexisting contours of the land.

The city isn't walkable at all—and it's on average 1 hour from my office in Santa Monica—but the open spaces between houses, the lack of terraforming abominations you see in other hilly developments in LA, and the white ranch motif make the neighborhood "nice" to me.

Much of what I personally find "not nice" about modern neighborhoods is the clumsy imposition of our collective human needs—architectural, infrastructural—on the land itself.

Christopher Alexander had developed this idea of pattern languages and living architecture. Although the idea of pattern languages turned into cookie-cutter design elements selected by the developer and enforced by the HOA, they were originally meant to allow residents to have functional, aesthetic, and cohesive architecture. That is, in all the possible pattern languages, there are pattern languages that, no matter what combination is chosen, you have functional and cohesive architecture.

Residents and communities then, can then choose something that work for their family and for their communities. Architecture comes alive, and lives and grows with the residents.

I imagine the lifestyle in many planned Soviet housing blocks was more pleasant than a low income American

Edit: I just mean the physical environment, not political / social / economic

Why would you imagine that?

No need for cars + greenery and public parks? Weren't there LeCorbusier style.

I dunno. East Berlin is pretty soul-crushing, with its block upon block upon block of blocky blocks. Warehouses for humans.

Sad, I thought the whole idea was apartments with parks with 15 minute walk to doctor, school, etc and taking the bus to work

Maybe there are.

Less soul-crushing than most of the Montreal for me, which looks mostly like that outside of the fancy neighborhoods https://goo.gl/maps/vH7SwbRXdZndQszt5

You're right. East Berlin is not so bad: https://goo.gl/maps/KtpqjfJW2eUUcbP8A

> Yeltsin, then 58, "roamed the aisles of Randall's nodding his head in amazement," wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."

…

> About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin's next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn't stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.

…

> "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people," Yeltsin wrote. "That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it."

https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/amp/When-Bor...

Sorry I didn't explain well! I only meant navigating the built environment! Nothing economic or political

It’s not clear to me that American poor are actually more happy with all their Nike shoes, big screen TVs and fast food than Soviet poor with nothing but cheap vodka. I think seeing others be rich is more unhappiness producing than having everyone be generally poor

Nice neighborhoods are not built but grown, pruned and grown in cycles of fortune that seem good in retrospect but aren’t within human capability to foresee predictably.

Beauty or aesthetics haven't been quantified so they cannot be used as a metric to guide decisions in a world where all decisions are made via metrics. Looking at modern architecture or urban design, everything is designed based on a few metrics - cost, time to build & energy efficiency primarily.

How does a policymaker argue to spend $X more on a prettier building? That would just come off sounding too subjective to justify today. Now we will no doubt see psychological studies telling us obvious truths about humanity - that living in nice places feels good actually. The paper will say things like "pretty buildings improve quality of life by 23% and productivity by 6%". But unlike subjective opinion, a scientific paper is a defensible piece of evidence so we need the study to justify building a pretty neighborhood in a modern context.

This clinical economic view of the world is pervasive today so nothing can be justified outside of a utilitarian lens.

This article seems all over the place and I don't agree with most of it.

>For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars.

The boulevards and avenues of Paris were built by the government as infrastructure improvements and became known for their use as long parks, effectively; yes, they were built to be scenic, and the fact that they're wide enough for car traffic is a nice side effect. Modern automotive architecture, though, goes further; you need parking lots or garages, and large signage visible from the road. Developers don't really care that a roadside commercial development looks pretty; people are going to drive to Target all the same. And, of course, let's not forget that Paris wants to limit automobile traffic as much as possible.

> Diamond Head may also contain a partial answer to the larger mystery. Perhaps what modern neighborhoods are lacking is coordination...

If we're using Diamond Head as our benchmark, it looks like what most modern neighborhoods are lacking is millionaires, not coordination. Your average suburban development is going to be quite tightly coordinated: built by a single builder out of a book of facades, floorplans, and materials.

> These days, most homeowners decide to “go it alone.”

Who is "most," here? I don't think most homeowners are building custom homes; heck, a quick source I found shows that only 13% of home buyers in 2020 bought new construction[0].

The only thing I agree with here is that homes are designed around the interior first. Look at any suburban sprawl house, and you'll see a hideous mishmash of materials, window shapes and sizes, and rooflines--especially when you go past the front of the house and start looking at the parts you can't see from the street.

[0] https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/home-buying-statistics

Here's one attempt to address one aspect of this. The claim is that all the beautiful stuff we like has lots of detail, stuff that isn't so simple and plain and nothing to look at.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/6/3/cognitive-comfo...

Village Homes in Davis Ca

https://www.villagehomesdavis.org/home

Widely viewed as an improvement over plain tract suburbia but not copied anywhere that I'm aware of although cohousing does the same sort of thing on steroids. Reason might be that buyers have selfish insular motives initially and don't see the benefits of community.

One thing that drives me insane about modern neighborhoods is the instance in tearing down every damn tree... so you are left with endless unshaded lawn. You would think with this modern movement towards reconnecting with nature, etc we would build neighborhoods that work with the surrounding environment instead of tearing it all down and flattening everything.

I used to joke about the first neighbourhood I lived in after university that they developers named the streets after the type of trees the cut down ... 30 years later that neighbourhood finally has some semblance of tree cover.

Seattle has very stringent tree protection codes that have prevented the worst of such impacts. However the urbanist push for a high pace of concentrated development and population growth has led to many trees being cut down as exemptions were carved out for big apartment developers. With the additional population, it feels like the per capita tree count/green area has fallen behind. Now small neighborhood pocket parks feel like they’re always crowded rather than like a welcome escape, and driving through arterials feels less “organic” and more like driving through a concrete jungle. The thing is you can’t protect the environment and maintain a localized sense of balance if unchecked development is allowed. The aesthetic aspects of it, which I feel are important for mental health, simply don’t carry over. If you think about it, the promise of a high density core with everything within a 15 minute walk means that something else has to give and get pushed out.

One word: stroads

https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM

I found this video yesterday: "Why Japan Looks the Way it Does: Zoning" which was very illuminating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfm2xCKOCNk

Survivorship bias.

All those old nice neighborhoods were also built by and for the wealthy. The lower classes lived in squalid tenements and slums that are now mostly gone.

Nice website except for the popups and information bars every where.

The way we finance housing is a factor.

Wow, what? IMO this article is way off the mark.

Regulation is not preventing beautiful homes. There are three things probably most detracting from neighborhood beauty in America are: a lack of regulations, capitalism and materialism.

All the places he lists as beautiful, especially in Europe have some of the most regulations regarding what you can build. A community design review, where a council literally has input upon the visual design of your building is almost unheard of in America but is common in European countries. The closest you get in America is some CCNRs saying you can't have a metal roof or the like. Parts of Switzerland literally require you to build a frame which represents the shape of the house you want to build so community members can walk by for some weeks and see how it affects the neighborhood skyline.

Capitalism has probably had the biggest impact. The reason older neighborhoods are beautiful because they were built at a time when practicing a craft was hugely important to a profession. You built those houses with all the mil-work and trim because that's just how it was done. Yes, builders were seeking to turn a profit but in many professions, a kind of cultural ethic prevented raw profiteering. That changed after the war. Post-war programs and an economic boom meant that you could start a business around moving shear volumes of houses. These builders hired people who weren't trained to think a porch without corbels was a sin. It's not just they didn't have the know-how. It's that they didn't think it was important or essential the way an old-school builder might. Modern American neighborhoods are what you get when profit is maximized and community input is minimized.

What people wanted in a house changed as well. The desire for material comforts like multiple bathrooms with indoor plumbing, loads of electrical equipment, forced air systems and more caused a good deal of the cost of the house to shift into equipment rather than aesthetic. The standards of home construction have gone way up too. From structural elements like the foundation to the quality of insulation to weather tightness.

Edit: BTW, I'm not saying one way or the other is the better way to do it. But if you want beauty, that requires a couple things: community review to increase coordination and enforced aesthetic quality. (These used to come from cultural sensibilities and now usually only are the product of regulation, HOA, CCNRs, ordinance, etc.) Both of these things requires the market to sell something people don't necessarily want to pay for.

> All the places he lists as beautiful, especially in Europe have some of the most regulations regarding what you can build. A community design review, where a council literally has input upon the visual design of your building is almost unheard of in America but is common in European countries. The closest you get in America is some CCNRs saying you can't have a metal roof or the like. Parts of Switzerland literally require you to build a frame which represents the shape of the house you want to build so community members can walk by for some weeks and see how it affects the neighborhood skyline.

I can’t tell you what’s more revolting to me—the idea of a bunch of neighborhood busybodies having that amount of power, or the fact the busybodies themselves are shameless enough to participate in this nonsense.

You know what neighborhood I want to live in? A neighborhood as far away as possible from those types of busybodies. Maybe somewhere across a vast ocean on the other side of the world, where people have come up with handy expressions like “it’s a free country” and “mind your own business” that you can use if some obnoxious busybody shows up to complain that they don’t like the architecture of your house.

To quote myself, from above.

> BTW, I'm not saying one way or the other is the better way to do it.

Fair enough, but I am ;)

Unfortunately this plague of bland boxes has come to my neighborhood. Internal volume is more valued than neighborhood aesthetics. It seems there's a correlation between these boxes and people never leaving the house but to work.

So my spouse and I built a 'bland box'. We did it for simplicity and practicality sake. Few breaks to the roof line = few opportunities for my roof to leak in 40 years. Simple design with a smaller footprint = more money available for high quality materials in the walls, floors, and ceilings. Tan siding because it's cheap and easy for me to fix on my own when it gets broken. Dark brown shingles because they will fade to light brown over their life and still look okay instead of needing to be replaced in the first 10 years of their 30 year life.

Just saying, some people do these things for different reasons.

I think this very much reinforces my point. 100% focus on the structure itself (especially interior) and relatively zero on the neighborhood or exterior. In a word, atomized.

“How dare people build houses for themselves to live in and not for me to look at!?”

That's a clever twist of phrasing. You could just as easily have said "How dare people build houses for themselves instead of thinking about all the other people that have to look at them?"

Clearly, there's some tension between these two goals, and the balance shifts back and forth over time.

If somebody doesn’t like the look of my house, they are more than welcome to get off my lawn.

I agree a lot of the balance has shifted this way but I don't see this as bad.

When you are very wealthy you can have both but for those without that much money I don't blame anyone for choosing functionality over the aesthetics of a neighborhood. It seems rather insane to me to insist that your neighbor must increase their budget 20 or 40 percent (perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars) just so your house can be a couple percentage points more desirable.

Insane perhaps from the perspective of a dweller. Some neighborhoods put more emphasis on walkability, not merely from aesthetic consideration but a desire to have walkable local businesses. Of course this is not the case if the extent that you see your neighborhood is confined to your driving commute. If this is the case then aesthetics matter little and why not live farther outside the city.

This attitude is a good-sized chunk of the reason why the article was written. The constant focus on "how to make it as cheaply as possible, now" has brought some benefits: we can make housing that in many ways (not all) is better and cheaper than it ever has been in the past. But ... building neighborhoods of "desirable" character is about more than how much your house costs right now. It's about the legacy a culture leaves to the future. It's about the difference between driving through small towns in America and small towns in Europe (probably the middle east and asia too). It's an investment, not in your home, but in your culture's future.

I just think this is insane to me. We know the cost to build more intricate builds - it isn't a 2% cost increase its a 30 or 50% cost increase. There are already tons of restrictions on building and zoning in America.

I like nice cars but I dont insist that everyone drive a European sports car just because it would be aesthetically more pleasing. Ultimately, a city/town will be better off if people can spend 20% of their income on housing instead of 50%. Not just because they are selfish or short-sighted but because they can actually use the additional resources on things for themselves, their family, and their community.

And in 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 year, some of our descendants will walk/drive/fly/float through it all and wonder why we never built anything to last, or anything beautiful.

Beautiful and comfortable neighborhoods ARE additional resources for ourselves, our families and our communities.

Nothing is stopping you from building a castle on your property now. My guess is the difference in price is about 5-fold - and the castle will need tons of costly repairs to adapt to whatever the favored amenities are.

I've lived in really old buildings. Even if the bricks on the outside were over 100 years old it was extremely expensive to update the air conditioning and windows to be a good living experience. Why take such a superficial view of what is "built to last" just because the outside stays the same? Best case scenario for a long last building is a ship of theseus situation. And while it may be cost efficient for historic college campuses to renovate their old buildings continuously, chances are this not applicable to random middle class homeowners.

It's not about castles. It's about neighborhoods.

I've lived in really old buildings too. Right now, I live in an adobe house that was likely first constructed in about 1870. Growing up, I lived in some houses that were built (of stone) in the 1700s. And yes, there are problems caused by the fact that our idea of what a home/house ought to be changes over time, for lots of different reasons.

I still think we can do better than most mid-range contemporary US stick built housing, and the neighborhoods it creates.

We've lost all sense of aesthetics as something that exists outside an individual's mind. Aesthetics used to be an independent study of philosophers for millenia, until our modern age decided that all aesthetics are equally good. This fundamentally has to do with the embrace of relativism at all levels of society.

This is going to be controversial, but in the west, the ultimate cause of the decline in objective beauty is a rejection of Christianity, which, for millenia in the west, has insisted that there is such a thing as objective beauty.

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/ugly-as-sin

I'd also recommend "The Abolition of Man" by CS Lewis (not explicitly christian, but Lewis was obviously extremely devout and a major apologist)

It remains to be seen if the west will develop a sense of objective beauty without a shared moral system.

>This is going to be controversial, but in the west, the ultimate cause of the decline in objective beauty is a rejection of Christianity, which, for millenia in the west, has insisted that there is such a thing as objective beauty.

Just to play Devil's advocate, if that theory held up you'd expect there to be a correlation between how religious people in a given area are and how much they value architecture.

Yet, for example, the Deep South in the USA is not known for it's architecture, whereas parts of continental Europe are (even today).

No not really. Protestantism is so divorced from traditional Christianity as to be something else. Half the gospel preached is terrible new age nonsense bearing no resemblance to Christianity.

If we look at more catholic countries in the Americas, the middle class neighborhoods do look nicer in my opinion.

Edit: I should specify I don't believe this is specific to catholicism. Other religions also embrace beauty, like Islam and Hinduism. Protestantism by and large rejects the idea that material goods can embrace God, in their rejection of icons for examplr

Fair enough. Any Irish people reading this? Which areas are more architecturally beautiful? Catholic or Protestant?

Are you trying to start something?

If I was, I picked the wrong topic. Far more likely to start a punch-up here by mentioning affirmative action, US partisan politics or Rust.

> This fundamentally has to do with the embrace of relativism at all levels of society.

Oh, dear Dog.

That's a cliched reframing of decades of social change. Which is the deeper rejection of the Almighty? Strip malls or McMansions? Skyscrapers or Tiny Homes?

If you start with a narrative, and squint hard enough, anything can be about Relativism. It usually isn't though.

Many of the ugliest buildings (trashy Brutalist stuff, say) were built before relativism (however defined) became dominant. This doesn't fit your pet theory.

Further, many people have had and have objective theories of aesthetics, while not being religious.

Finally, many beautiful buildings from the Renaissance era were inspired by classic Rome and Greece. The ultimate cause of that gain in objective beauty was a rejection of Christianity and an embrace of pagan learning and ideals - that's a trollish way of putting it, but at any rate the delineation between religious and secular aesthetics is not so clear as a partisan might hope.

Many of the most intellectually interesting people I know have revived their interest in religion, especially Christianity. There is no excuse for approaching the matter simplistically.

Our ruling class is extremely moralizing. They aren't relativist at all.

They only seem that way to you because their morality isn't identical to yours (though they are genealogically related)

Okay sure. I don't buy that theory at all. The ruling class uses morals as a way to control society while having few themselves. Just look at the behavior of the Saudi royals.

I'm talking about our own PMC, not the Saudis. This comment from the recent Facebook "whistleblower" sums up this flavor of moral sentiment pretty well:

> “I don’t know why it went down,” Haugen said. “But I know that for more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies.”

It's the sort of warmed-over end of history liberalism you see in Ivy League schools, NGOs, corporate HR departments, the UN, etc. It includes wokism but it extends much further than that. It is not becoming more relativist, it is supremely confident about what is good and what is bad, what is sacred, profane, taboo, etc. In fact, its conception of the sacred just seems to be getting larger each year. It has most of the elements of a religion at this point, and will probably have more in the future. I think Yang's "Successor ideology" is a good term for it because it also lacks a lot of the features of historical liberalism.

In any case, we are hardly ruled by libertines.

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