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Comment by zwieback | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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