Our self imposed scarcity of nice places | Hacker News Reader

Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

strongtowns.org

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I'm pretty addicted to "Not Just Bikes" youtube channel which seems to be either directly or indirectly related to stongtowns

https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes

It's frustrating. Even though I'm currently in SF, SF still doesn't feel remotely as nice as many other places outside the US. Public transportation is slow and although the muni is okay the busses are kinda gross compared to good non-US cities. There are 10 or so walkable neighborhoods but they're missing something. Not sure what it is.

Does zoning prevent the walkable neighbourhoods from acquiring a full range of amenities?

Or maybe the planning restrictions prevent the kind of organic infill development that leads to these places acquiring their own local character?

Absolutely:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/heatherknight/article/S-F-...

Yes it does. I find it really ironic too because a lot of the places praised by modern planning doctrine were allowed to spring up more organically according to need and less subject to such intense planning regulation.

It's even worse in that, just like people complain about the personality types that go into policing, I find there's a particular common personality type among planners: weak/mousey people that tend to be low on the totem pole of organic social hierarchies, but who are strongly opinionated and happily embrace their bureaucratic positions to exert power over people and to impose their agendas on the world.

SF neighborhoods are missing strong social fabric and welcoming vibes. I moved to Oakland after 7 years of stretches in the Lower Haight, Inner Mission, Outer Sunset, Outer Richmond, Cole Valley, Divisadero, and Potrero Hill, for a better sense of community. I love it here, but must admit I’m afraid to name my Oakland neighborhood for fear of (further) letting the cat out of the bag. I feel like SF is a sink for the forces that lead to social tension, and it protects Oakland somewhat in that way.

The biggest problem with NJB is that he completely ignores important fact: there are many people that don't want to live in apartments or even close to other people. Surprise surprise, we really want to live on 10 acres of land in our 3500 sqft house, with our motorcycles, garage workshops, dogs et cetera. We don't need "sense of community", we just want to have quiet space for ourselves.

I think you're touching on really common mistake a lot of new urbanists make, and the linked article generally is about. The problem is there's a lot of demand for dense neighborhoods but not enough supply -- not that suburbs and rural developments are objectively bad or that nobody actually prefers them. In many cases certain interests, hobbies, preferences and lifestyles are completely incompatible with the dense developments preferred by certain opinionated urban planners.

New Urbanists should focus on "why dense neighborhoods are good" over "why suburbs/car-oriented neighborhoods are bad", because they probably need the support of all of us suburb-loving car-driving folks in the first place, and a lot of us interpret criticism of car-driving and suburban living as a heavy-handed attack on our way of life rather than as a reasonable argument for having affordable options for both lifestyles.

There are people who actually like the suburbs? It's the worst of all worlds.

Well, I do like to live in my suburban house. At least I like it more than living in apartments in "dense neighbourhood", where I grew up. I have parks, playgrounds, a grocery store, school for my kids, convenience stores, fast food places, a pet store, a booze store, even two cannabis dispensaries in 600m radius. I have a huge tech park with tons of jobs in 10 minutes of cycling. I'm happy here. Why would I need to move anywhere? For what?

Interesting. I grew up in suburbia and hated it.

sounds like the dream tbh. cities are overrated

The plurality of Americans do, even (and especially) those with the means to afford dense, walkable urban life. I don't see why this should be a surprise to anybody to be honest.

I dunno, the really rich tend to be attracted to cities more then the merely moderately rich. I think its possible that you are just working with a too low assessment of what really affording dense urban life looks like. Once you get into the realm where you can afford as much space as a generous suburban home but in a dense urban environment,...

The really rich have city homes sure. But they also have beachside cabins and vacation homes in rural and suburban areas, so they can enjoy both worlds. If you're still in the realm of merely moderately rich mortals who can't own both a penthouse apartment and a generously large villa in the suburbs, you'll have to choose one or the other -- and in most cases in America, they'll choose the suburban home.

> a lot of us interpret criticism of car-driving and suburban living as a heavy-handed attack on our way of life rather than as a reasonable argument for having affordable options for both lifestyles

It's just folks punching up. The vast majority of the US is zoned for the car. It's really difficult to find a place that allows a car-free or even a low-car lifestyle. People would react a lot differently if there actually were multiple cities that allowed these lifestyles.

I don't disagree, I just think that being anti-suburb is a less efficient strategy for fixing the problem than being pro-density.

That's fine, 99% of the US has been built to accommodate exactly this style of living.

Where's the space for the people who want density and public transit though? The comment you're responding to is lamenting the fact that even SF, one of densest urban areas in the US, is mostly vast tracts of suburban housing overlaid with a slow, barely acceptable transit system. Surely we can do better than that.

He literally has a video praising a suburb with detached houses, while attacking a suburb with 40-storey condo buildings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

Sure, we'd all love to live in spacious mansions with robot butlers. But in the real world, most people live in crappy suburbs, where much of the land is dedicated to useless front lawns and excessive parking requirements that make walking a major PITA.

When I was a kid, my dad would refer to the Urban Sprawl as "The Cancer." All of a sudden, beautiful orange groves and rural communities would be turned into noisy car infested bedroom communities for a city that was 30-40 miles away. If you want to have 10 acre rural homesteads, you also have to have good urban planning. Otherwise all the good farm land will turn into cookie cutter "Planned" communities where you can't fart without a permit.

And SF is way better than most other cities in america. The muni is "okay" but worlds ahead of transit in any other west coast city. Most of SF is way more walkable than most other US cities (outide of the North-East).

I take it you’ve never been to Portland and used Tri-Met? It’s the second best public transit system I’ve used in the US, NYC being #1. And I’ve used transit in Boston, Chicago, SF, Seattle, Philly, Denver, and a handful of other big cities.

That channel is pretty terrible for giving good information and more made to cloud people's judgement and appeal to emotional sides. There are reasons places are different and comparing the two is usually quite bad.

The channel, to anyone who has no emotional skin in the game, and has lived in both environments.... is sadly very shallow.

I think what it's missing is the full lack of cars. You still don't own your streets in SF! The few days Valencia street was closed to traffic in lockdown, for example, were incredible. Street musicians and people dancing, tables and picnics all over with people who wanted coffee having dinner with friends who wanted pizza alongside vegan sushi. It didn't feel like a party for festival, it felt like _life_.

Everybody wants walkable cities, but nobody wants to live in tiny-ass flats.

I'm a European and if you look at the size of housing here (perhaps excluding the few cities that have low population density) it's tiny in comparison to most of the USA (except for NYC).

So as always there are pro's and con's - would you want to live in a city like NYC? Would you like to raise a family in those conditions?

NYC apartments are tiny because NYC just doesn't have enough housing in general, so everything that's allowed to be subdivided gets subdivided (and some things that aren't allowed get subdivided too).

Partly, but also smaller living space is in fact part of the tradeoff that you make when building stuff close together. It's a worthwhile tradeoff in my opinion, but I'm also not saying that single-family car-centric suburbs should be illegal for people who prefer it, unlike how building denser housing is illegal in many expensive cities.

While that's true, there's a significant difference between "you can't give everybody a McMansion" and "everybody must live in spaces objectively describable as 'tiny'". My objection is to the latter.

When I first played Sim City I imagined a future of towering soundproofed arcologies where everyone still had a private yard on a giant balcony, so you could increase density without overly decreasing living space per household. Is anyone trying to build like that?

I get the impression Americans buy these huge houses that they then barely use any of most of the time. And a dense neighbourhood can substitute for many rooms - I have a community hall around the corner if I want to host a party, I don't have a home gym/cinema/pool/sauna but I have those things a ten minute bike ride away....

Sure, 1bdrm apartment is more than enough when you live alone and don't have any hobbies aside of hosting parties.

Can you elaborate on this? What sorts of hobbies necessitate having a giant house to engage in them?

Sure! In our family:

- bicycles: in my case it's five bicycles plus trailer for the youngest

- motorcycle

- woodworking: tools, worktables, storage etc

- tinkering/DIY: separate table + shelf

- mountain ski gear for three people (soon four)

- hockey gear

- piano

Plus car (and her stuff), storage for seasonal clothes and such, separate rooms for kids, ideally a room for guests, IT den, deck and backyard (and garden stuff) just because I love it, so it adds up to ~1500sqft pretty quickly.

I wish I had bigger house, so I wouldn't have to share my garage between {1..3}

Fair! However, keep in mind that you're nearly 2 standard deviations above the average household size in the US [1], and probably above 2σ in physical activity as well... ;)

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/242189/disitribution-of-...

Not necessarily a giant house, but many hobbies require having a detached house for noise isolation (music, woodworking, cars, etc.) or a garage to work with materials you don't want in your living area (glues, paints, 3D printer resin, etc.).

Exercise. I have a bike trainer and a rower. Plus I need stretching space. Add barbells and other equipment and one needs at least 144sq ft. That's bigger than most bedrooms.

I have plenty of hobbies thank you very much, I just don't find taking up a bunch of space for stuff I do occasionally to be a good tradeoff compared to living somewhere dense and walkable. Honestly, most of the things you listed sound like exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about - how much time did you actually spend last month doing woodworking, skiing, hockey, and piano? How often were your guest rooms occupied? How many of the seasonal clothes you store actually see the light of day again?

There are definitely downsides to having to cycle to a nearby music practice room or workshop space (I happen to live next to the community farm), or putting guests in the hotel round the corner rather than hosting them myself. But there are also upsides to doing these things as part of an actual community rather than in isolation (half the fun of making music is the social side, and at least some of the fun of cycling too). And plenty of other hobbies (team sports, theatre, ...) outright require living somewhere with enough other people around to make them doable.

Obviously the ideal would be to have a huge amount of personal living space and also a huge range of neighbours and facilities within walking/cycling distance. But given the inherent contradiction in that, I'm very glad to choose density (and while those who want the suburban lifestyle are welcome to pursue it in their own spaces, they shouldn't feel entitled to impose car traffic on the city; you can pay for your road use, pay for your parking, give way to pedestrians, follow speed limits, and carry strict liability for any injuries).

I love living in a walkable city and a tiny-ass apartment (3 people, 75 square meters). When the neighborhood is attractive it becomes part of "your space". I don't need my whole world to be within the confines of these walls.

This is a key, I think. If you live somewhere that has no common space and nowhere to walk (which is most of US housing) you "need" the larger space of your own because you have nothing of any value available to you (unless you are willing to get in a car and navigate the hellscape of suburban sprawl that isolates these types of housing developments from each other and from any amenities).

It's a "tragedy of the commons" kind of scenario, since the more of this kind of living there is the worse the traffic gets and the more isolated everything gets from each other by stroads and walls of traffic.

Despite the article's suggestion that there's money to be made here I am doubtful that developers are going to be taking the risk. They have a formula that works and they are glad to keep running it. I guess at some point commutes get so bad that something has to give somewhere, but if anything the "remote first" revolution seems to just encourage more sprawl, since you don't need to live near where you work.

Removing the artificial restriction that you need to be close enough to the steel and concrete temple to go worship there 5 days a week means that people can now make more free choices about how to live.

That will result in some people choosing higher density areas and some people choosing lower density areas, but it should improve freedom of choice significantly, which is great for people.

> the "remote first" revolution seems to just encourage more sprawl, since you don't need to live near where you work.

It might be my impression, but lots of traditional tech companies have offices out in the suburbs. Because land is cheaper there for a sprawling single-story office park.

Remote work has done the opposite and allowed me to live in the city. And because I'm at a central site choosing where to commute I have more opportunities. Rather than living in one suburb and commuting to another suburb.

It’s shifted to some degree but it’s only in the past decade, two at most, almost no tech companies were actually in cities and most offices are still in suburban office parks. So most tech workers aren’t walking or taking public transit to their jobs.

and this is where things collide with capitalism. Once your neighborhood is a part of "your space", you're much more invested in that neighborhood and its future evolution. However, under the "rules" of a capitalist economy, in which the private ownership of real estate generally trumps most other concerns, you have very little ability to control the future of your neighborhood. If it starts changing in ways you don't like, it's not likely (though not impossible) that you can do anything about it.

This is at least part of the motivation for people seeking out their own larger properties, not to mention buying land adjacent to them: it's not necessarily that they have any use for the acreage, they just want to be able to exert (more) control over what happens in the "space around them".

Note: I'm not condoning that behavior in any way.

No- this is unintended consequences of anti-discrimination laws.

Capitalism had contractual things like deed restrictions and binding neighborhood covenants to deal with this problem, which were all but eliminated in the name of integration.

Of course we have trouble dictating the character of our neighborhoods- it was the express intent of those laws that we couldn't.

Berlin rents have risen a lot, but still is an exception to your rule. I pay less (with utilities) for a 3bedroom, 95sqm apartment in a super central location than what I paid for a (tiny) 1bedroom in Boston or for my room with 4 flatmates in NYC.

This is kind of a weird response to an article which is explicitly talking about high density family housing. The streets depicted are a lot like the one I live in - in our case a terrace of three bed houses (many extended into the roofspace to make a fourth room) in a residential area that has every amenity you could wish for within a ten minutes walk. The housing values are high because many people want to live here - they’re very happy to trade off the small gardens & relatively smaller houses against the obvious advantages (for them) of living in this area.

The choices are not between “tiny-ass flats” & “exurbia” - there’s a whole range of housing density in between those extremes.

The US is not a good comparison because the house sizes are just ridiculous – and those huge houses are just as out of reach for most "common" people and are rapidly getting even more out of reach because they never were sustainable at all! But there’s a spectrum between 40m2 highrise flats and 800m2 single-family McMansions.

Not at all. Get outside the big cities and houses are very affordable. We’re talking 120m^2 homes for under $200k.

Yeah, but then I'd have to buy a car and drive it to get simple basic tasks done.

That's kind of the whole point. People want that.

Do they? Or are the places that people can afford constrained to offer that, making them think that what they can afford and what they _want_ are the same thing?

I live in a reasonably walkable section of Toronto, but I still need a car for some of what I do (if I got a bike trailer, I could reduce that need to a larger degree than I already have, but public transit where I live is suboptimal for short trips and doesn’t go everywhere we want).

I could not now afford the house I bought twelve years ago because the market has gone crazy (we estimate we could get 3–4x what we paid for the house—but then we’d have to find a place to live), especially for the more walkable sections of the city.

I _want_ more walkable, transit-able, and bikeable parts of the city. I also want it to be more affordable to more people in the city, because I don’t particularly want to force people to have 2 hour commutes into the city because they think they want more space, but in order to have more space they have to move where nothing is as reachable as it is here.

Is that why real estate in dense, walkable cities/neighborhoods is the most expensive in the country?

No one is saying get rid of suburbs. They’ll always be in the US. But when 95%+ of zoning laws make it so suburban sprawl is the _only_ thing that can get built, then you’re taking a choice away from the people who want to live in cities.

There's more choice than just 'megacity and walk everywhere' and 'bumfuck nowhere and drive everywhere'.

Small/medium towns with a fairly dense downtown/market square exist, and while yes, it's more useful to own a car there than in a large city, you still can get tons of things done by walking, biking or taking a bus.

Random example: Alsfeld, Germany, population 16,901. A 1900s house (3br, 120m^2, downtown) 180kEUR [1]. Within walking distance: daycare, multiple doctors/dentists/pharmacies, restaurants, stores... and a train station with an hourly regional train.

[1] - https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/130222273

Median house size is > 2000 sq ft, so common people are buying large houses. They're certainly not out of reach.

The US has (except maybe Australia) the largest median house sizes on the planet. Home ownership has bounced between 63% and 69% for over 50 years, and is currently rising again.

What force makes a smaller home sustainable but a larger one not sustainable?

800m2 is 8600 square feet. Thats easily less than 1% of houses in the US. The average house in the US probably less than 2500 sqft (232 m2).

The available housing options govern our housing choices. I cannot afford a large flat in a very desirable and expensive neighbourhood, but I could possibly afford a very tiny flat there. If I want more space, I can live in a larger flat in a less desirable neighbourhood. If I want to own a car and have a car-centric lifestyle, I can live in a more distant suburb and live large. I can freely trade space, location, and cost as needed if the options exist. To the article's point, breaking the artificial scarcity on walkable neighbourhoods, and increasing the diversity of housing types, will allow more people to make these types of trade-offs.

>> would you want to live in a city like NYC? Would you like to raise a family in those conditions?

A good example of this is San Francisco. Only 13% of the population is under 18. NYC is 21.

Yup. I’ve lived in a few dense cities in Asia and when I told people I owned a house in the US with its own yard that cost less than their 50 m^2 apartment in a block of 150 units they were shocked.

Plus most of bought cars if they could, especially families.

Most of the compromises on size of housing were due to affordability, not choice.

Yes, but you can make the US far more walkable without crushing home size by changing setback rules for homes and businesses and having mixed zoning. A major problem now is just the amount of space between things. Want to walk from one store to the other? Better cross two massive parking lots. Want to walk past six houses? Better cross some huge lawns. Want to walk between residential and business zoned locations? Fat chance.

Yes, a city constructed this way won't be as walkable as a European city. But it'd be a hell of a lot more walkable than existing suburban sprawl.

I think there's a happy medium. Perhaps closely spaced SFHs or row-houses near a small downtown with rail access to a larger city.

How big are the homes that most people raise families in?

For houses? Probably about 2000 to 2500 sq. ft.

There's a whole world of difference between Manhattan and 2500-sqft single-family homes with large setbacks, street-facing garages, loads of surface parking, and vast backyards, set on culs-de-sac in exurban environments reachable only by car.

And it's not hypothetical. Every pre-war U.S. city has districts full of duplexes, tri-plexes, and other kinds of modest density -- with limited setbacks, small yards, spaced fairly close together, mixed in with commercial uses. Historically, many of these buildings would be owner-occupied.

These are medium-density neighborhoods. They look nothing like NYC, but they look nothing like the typical U.S. exurban development, either.

In my city these neighborhoods have all been taken over by lawyer's offices, therapists, accountants, etc., or turned into multiple unit housing for single people.

The problem in the United States is there is almost no choice. If I want to live in walkable/bikable area, I might be fine with living in a tiny flat at a reasonable price. But because of zoning, parking minimums, discretionary review, setbacks, roads designed for traffic throughput etc. there is a huge shortage of these areas so they are not only small, but expensive.

We need to allow these types of communities for people to have choice.

I love tiny apartments. In Tokyo houses are tiny but enough. You have to be clever when there is no space. Also, we should be more careful with the space we use for living. Smaller living spaces equals more space for park, forests etc

Really enjoyable article. There's a thread that's running through it - that places that are rare and desireable are expensive. While this article talks about a specific kind of place, the pattern is true on general. It's another way to say "supply and demand"

Whenever we talk on HN about high rents or house prices, we need to keep this in mind - what makes a place "affordable" is that either not that many other people want to live in a place like it, or that there's a lot of other places like it that exist. I am not implying policy but simply that this is the baseline of all real estate conversation whether we want it to be or not.

Existing homeowners don’t want more “nice” places because it reduces the value of their own homes. When you have more options and less of a perception of scarcity, prices adjust.

We really erred in allowing homes to become a vehicle of generational wealth. It creates perverse incentives that prevent cities from growing in ways that serve their populations, and instead only serve people wealthy enough to own property in desirable areas.

> Existing homeowners don’t want more “nice” places because it reduces the value of their own homes.

Well - what does that actually mean? I own a home, and I am not interested in a huge apartment building going up next door (for reasons that aren't property values) but I have no objection to the boundary of my town expanding, or a new town being established a little bit down the road. Yes sure those things will create competition for my home and lower my values in some way but it's just not something I or any other sane homeowner go around thinking about.

Nor frankly do I have any influence over that.

Huge apartment buildings are “lumpy” and indeed impose externalities locally. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about if we could evenly distribute housing, we could cut through some of the NIMBY opposition. Quad plexes by right [0 for example] makes a lot of sense to me. If you’re OK with a quad plex next door, IMO you’re not part of the problem. Unfortunately, in many places SFH owners will come out in force to fight nearby quad plexes.

[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2020/08/portland-changes...

Car culture makes this difficult. Either you make requirements for on-site parking (more expensive; limits housing styles in residential areas) or the neighborhood becomes a parking lot.

Until we have a less car-centric economy, anything more than a duplex will change the character of most residential neighborhoods.

>> Quad plexes by right [0 for example] makes a lot of sense to me. If you’re OK with a quad plex next door, IMO you’re not part of the problem

I would actually not be OK with quads next door to my house right now, because that is not the type of life I bought into. That may sound crazy so let me explain.

For 39 years, I valued density/walkability/convenience of city life, and lived in NYC for most of that time. Now that I have a family, I value certain other things in my life. We specifically chose a town that was "dense enough" but not "too dense" - zoning here allows neither mansions nor quads you're talking about. This has impact on things like - how busy the traffic is on local streets, how much green space there is, etc. Everyone who lives in this town chose it for the same reason.

Is not wanting quads next door NIMBYism? I don't think so... When I lived in the city, I wanted more tall buildings next to me, when I live in this town, I want more "this-town-style" homes next to me. Why am I ok with this? Simply because nobody moves to this town unless you want this life. If you want a more dense town with duplexes, triplexes etc, then there are other towns around us that are already zoned this way and people who live there want that. If you want even more density, NYC outer boroughs are just a few miles away. So people have choice.

>I would actually not be OK with quads next door to my house right now, because that is not the type of life I bought into.

This is, definitionally, NIMBYism. Resisting necessary change in your town because it doesn't jive with what you want is more or less the problem.

Now, maybe your town doesn't need quads or apartments or anything of the sort. Maybe the properties and zoning laws that exist are able to meet demand. But if your town is growing faster than single-family construction can keep up; if people aren't able to afford to live close to their jobs; if you see your town becoming more exclusive, something that often comes at the expense of local businesses or municipal budgets; then reality dictates that we embrace change.

Of course, it sounds like you're in an area close to NYC, so you would hold that there's already suitable choice of housing in your area to meet peoples' needs. I think the areas where this debate is more prevalent are the ones in the PNW, Southeast, and Mountain west/Southwest portions of the US where cities are busting at the seams and zoning is a huge barrier for the stock of housing.

You may be totally right about PWN etc. and I think you're right about my assessment about the NYC area being already fine. But I guess I am not super comfortable with this sentence: "Resisting necessary change in your town." Who gets to decide what is truly necessary? Is it people who already live in the town? That seems the most democratic and least tyrannical. Or is it people from elsewhere that are somehow empowered to decide how the town ought to be, and if so how does that work?

How do determine what growth is necessary and what is optional? Should we compress more and more people into existing cities, or would it make more sense to build new cities in regions with fewer geographical constraints? How do we balance the interests of existing residents versus those who would like to move in? Considering that most US population growth is due to immigration, what is the optimal level of net migration?

> Resisting necessary change in your town because it doesn't jive with what you want is more or less the problem.

Should there be a process to determine what change is necessary? Who should be able to participate in that process?

Thanks for the reply!

I can empathize. Have you experienced a neighborhood with a mix of half SFH, and the other half a smattering of 2, 3, 4 and occasional 10+? I currently rent in such a neighborhood and it’s fairly awesome. It supports a fabulous small business district, and the families playing and riding their bikes to school seem very happy too. If you are familiar with a neighborhood such as mine, can you describe the difference in quality of life that you experience in your SFH-only neighborhood?

I guess my town sounds just like what you describe, especially since my town does have some low-rise apartment buildings, though not exactly in my area.

I guess the difference would be - the greater density becomes, the fewer of your neighbors you know, etc. Also, because of how our town is, everyone who lives here is either a young family who moved here for the space and community, or people who have lived here a long time (ie raised their families then stayed). Once you mix in 10+ apartment buildings, I assume you get a higher mix of single people etc, which is a totally different vibe.

That’s so interesting. In my case, other nearby neighborhoods are slightly more trendy and attract the single etc vibe, so our vibe is very safe. Hm

> it's just not something I or any other sane homeowner go around thinking about.

> Nor frankly do I have any influence over that.

Very much this. There is no cabal of homeowners opposed to lower prices despite it being often repeated. People buy a house to live in it, they're not paying attention to who is building what. Also nobody is asking homeowners opinion on what build sites get approved or not. If there ever was a proposition related to housing approval it would be in the ballot open to all citizens. Early in the history of the USA only landowners could vote, but it's been a very long time since that's been the case.

> Very much this. There is no cabal of homeowners opposed to lower prices despite it being often repeated.

Then let's raise interest rates to 5% again. It's some coincidence that we "need" zero-interest rate policy and quantitative easing when the boomers are in control... even worse in Japan, which is even more boomer dominated. Sure... just lots of coincidences.

It’s not just scarcity. People “need” a place to park three or four huge (subsidized) vehicles. Also, people like to brag. N-thousand square feet and an n-car garage provide an objective measure. It’s harder to one-up by saying you have a really nice trattoria three blocks over.

My impression was the whole article is basically just “why don’t people like what I like”.

These houses are scarce but that doesn’t necessarily mean the mainstream market wants that. It’s a niche.

When a niche becomes expensive, that indicates that there is a bigger market for it, even if it doesn't rise to the level of "mainstream."

That's not what the article argued at all. It said that the reason these places are expensive is because they're rare (so demand > supply) and the reason they're rare is because people doing construction just assume that nice houses == expensive, so the average person won't be able to afford it. Except, if there were more of them, the prices would go down (supply >= demand), and more people would be able to afford them.

Yes more supply would make it cheaper for the people in the niche that wants that type of house. The writer hints at this but the penny doesn’t drop. It’s most likely that maybe he doesn’t understand the middle and working class market as well as the entire home building industry of America.

Regular people need schools, offices, shops etc which need a level of scale to operate efficiently. That is going to counter the type of atmosphere and lifestyle in the towns the writer talks about. In the UK where small houses and towns are abundant, the quaint shops go where the money is and the rest of sit in traffic to drive in and out of town to go to school and work.

This isn’t about “quaint shops”. This is being able to walk or cycle to your GP, or to the local shops to grab some milk, or to the nearest park to play with your kids. In the most sought after places, it’s about being able to take regular, fast public transport to your place of work, because it’s obviously quicker & less hassle than driving.

In most of the US, you can’t build like this, because of zoning & planning restrictions, so regardless of whether the “middle and working classes” want them, they can’t. The fact that the neighbourhoods that do offer these features have incredibly expensive housing is evidence that people do want to live in these kinds of places.

The UK, like a lot of Europe is a mix - in general new development is very car centric, but still much higher density than in the US.

The author didn’t really talk about those practical concerns, the focus seemed to be about aesthetics. If you have a look at Milwaukee avenue it’s much lower density than anything in Europe.

I live in a much denser town and I couldn’t walk to the GP, school or train station. They’re all 30-40 minutes walk in different directions. And we don’t tend to just choose the closest services to where we live.

There's plenty more content to watch from Strong Towns if you want to convince yourself that you aren't being attacked

Concur. There's a good argument in the article, and a useless one. The useless one is the one you perceived.

The good argument is that there are an array of characteristics that tend -- in various combinations and degrees -- to correspond to places people like. The correlation can be anecdotal, empirical, whatever, that's up to the writer, who should have made a case, not a whinge.

Closeness to good cafes/restaurants/shops, parks, and so forth absolutely confers bragging rights to those who value such things. It is a question of each person's preferences.

Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor.

I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple.

You can check out my hoods in Helsinki in Google maps and streetview (not giving my actual address but close enough).

There are has several high quality universities, and several well known startups and game studios operating within the view I linked below. All of it is walkable/cyclable/public transportable.

https://www.google.com/maps/@60.192987,24.8679369,10181m/dat...

Most of Scandinavia is similar, as you get to mainland Europe with bigger population density the story diversifies, but we don't really hear "only rich people can walk" stories here.

> I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier.

Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying. I want my neighborhood to be functional and efficient, I already have access to several parks for taking a walk if I want to.

Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

That's just a problem of having crime and drugs, not of having inviting public spaces.

If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly (e.g. not a residential-only section of suburbia pretending to be a proper neighborhood) your schlepping shouldn't be any longer than a 15-minute walk either way, at which point instead of doing the periodic bulk shopping that cars incentivize, you just pick up a limited amount of stuff as you need it every day or every other day.

A lot of U.S. cities have gotten this fundamentally wrong by just not being dense enough to support businesses like this and/or zoning strict residential instead of allowing natural development of small stores, so you end up with neighborhoods that are nominally walkable but that are still pointless without a car because there aren't any businesses at all within a mile radius of your home.

I grew up in such a properly built out environment, and I just think it's a complete waste of time and effort to insist on such inefficient and inconvenient modes of transportation, and I hate wasting time and effort on recurring daily chores, I just want it to be as efficient as possible. You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different if you drive all the way to your doorstep, or make a pointless boring schlep for the last 15mins every day.

You can also just put every public transportation stop 15mins away from everyones house so you're forced to walk the last bit, look walkable paradise!

> inefficient and inconvenient

Just the other day I was about to start cooking but realized I was out of butter, so I walked about 5 minutes to a nearby store, got some, and walked back. It would have literally taken me more time and effort to drive to a store nearby with parking than just walking. The same holds for most household basics (paper towels, garbage bags, etc), for which I have about a dozen options within 15 minutes of my home, ranging from cramped bodega-type stores to large grocery stores.

> You rely on cars/trucks indirectly anyway, that bring the groceries to your closest store, and deliver your packages so what's the different

First, basic efficiency of scale when it comes to general impact on the environment; second, as I mention above, it would literally take me longer to do it all with a car than just walk.

Yeah but now you are optimising for the minority case at the expense of making the most common case worse.

The most common case is that I'm picking up about three days' worth of ingredients at a time, in which case I walk either five or eight minutes (depending on which shop has the better stuff for my list) and carry home one large grocery bag. Since I don't need to worry about parking or traffic, I can fit this into my schedule whenever and usually do so when I'm already on my way home from somewhere else.

The actual minority case is that I'm picking up something in bulk (replacing pantry stock, getting supplies for a party, etc), in which case I might switch to using my car, depending on how heavy or unwieldy it is for a half-mile walk.

Three days of ingredients is a lot, with your toilet paper and laundry detergent and everything, this breaks down immediately if you're only two people. So if you are a couple then both of you have to go shopping, that's twice the time you spend. Not to mention if you are a family

Three days of food ingredients for two people isn't actually a lot, assuming you already have bulk staples (flour, sugar, rice, etc) in your pantry. I'm already including all the other incidentals outside of bulk staples: add occasional toilet paper rolls, paper towels, olive oil and vinegar, minor snacks, etc, and you get the one large grocery bag on average per trip. Maybe two if you're eating things that are bulky to carry (e.g. kale or something with a ton of eggs).

Like, come on. No typical two-person household is going through a full package of toilet paper and an entire mid-sized bottle of laundry detergent every three days.

So you mean it works if you assume that all the heavy stuff you "already have" somehow. Ok, not exactly convinced..

Dude, you have 15 comments in this thread arguing against other people's preferred way of grocery shopping. Let it go.

> somehow

"Somehow" being "carrying a 10 pound bag of rice home over my shoulder when I eventually run out". There's no special mystery to it.

the most common case surely is groceries?

Hmm, I find it very hard to relate to this perspective.

Perhaps this is a cultural difference: I don't value efficiency in my life nearly as much as you seem to do. I don't go out of my way to waste time, but I'm perfectly happy to walk through the quiet roads while carrying groceries, thinking about what I've recently read, wondering about things I happen to see on my walk ---such as the Jugendstil reliefs on facades, a very inefficient type of decoration---, trying to identify trees and shrubs, etc.

I also really don't mind taking the time to write this comment, even though there's nothing efficient about communicating like this.

My work and art likewise are not efficient --- elegant perhaps, pretty even; but no artifact I leave behind is primarily efficient (unless it's code that was meant to be efficient only, the worst kind of code).

I used so many words to inefficiently say: I feel that efficiency is rather overrated. I won't ever give up being slow and being at ease with living slowly --- with plenty of opportunity for life to happen by accident.

PS: most of the public transportation stops are 10 mins away from where I live. Even the train. It's 10 mins away by bus ;)

Yeah, but my point is that the things everyone must do should be made as efficient as possible, so that everyone is free to choose how they want to waste their time. We shouldn't force anyone to spend their time and effort in a specific way by deliberately making something less efficient that's just stupid.

Good, then please don't build cities that force me to use a car if I want to live efficiently.

For me, it’s not about carrying the groceries, but the mental and temporal overhead of thinking about what I needed, making a list, walking however many additional minutes, spending 15 minutes shopping/paying/packing, etc would strike me as a terrific waste if done daily.

I used to do that when I interned in Germany. The market was near the bus stop and our dorm had limited fridge space, so I’d tend to buy and eat the same day (and rarely cook from scratch). That wouldn’t work so well to feed a family of four that way.

With a folding rolling cart or a bike with good panniers one could easily do all of that for the family of four with minimum hassle with one or two shopping trips a week, plus irregular trips to stock up on bulk stuff like toilet paper.

I think part of the disconnect here, though, is that you're associating this process with extra mental overhead, but when there's no extra effort needed to just get stuff you don't need to think about it as much. Forget to get butter? Oh well, you can literally just get it the next day on your way back from the park or the movie theater—or if you really need it right now, you can get it at corner store just a few blocks away at a slightly higher price.

In my house in the Netherlands, we feed a family of four each day and buy food an hour or two before we cook it precisely because we can't handle the mental overhead of planning food more than 24 hours in advance. ;-)

We don't really make lists.

That's a good point, we walk to the supermarket (or the farmer's market) multiple times a week, get one or two bags and go home. That way we don't have to have a huge space/fridge/kitchen to store everything in, either.

If you're living somewhere urban that's built out properly you have (or ought to have) doorstep grocery delivery costing $1-$5.

In the UK at least, there are at least 5 competitive services offering that in every city, including most major supermarket chains, so there is no need to shlep, ever. I only go to the supermarket for fresh bread/milk occasionally in between deliveries.

I've never owned a car in my life, never got a drivers license. I live in a walkable city (Berlin, close to the border). When I need to haul things around the city I take the cargo bike.

For decades I simply carried groceries in a big backpack and walked to the markets on foot (they are all within a 10 minute radius from where I live). I'd call the layout of my neighborhood functional and efficient.

Adverse weather has never been an issue for me. It's not like I regularly have things to haul that cannot possibly be rescheduled to a time after a thunderstorm. Some drizzle is barely even an inconvenience. Having to share the road with cars is the most annoying part of being mobile in the city.

> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

I'd like to have more convenient access to drugs, but our parks don't seem to attract enough dealers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Seriously, though: when drugs and crime become a problem, making public spaces hostile to all people seems like a solution that should not be among the top ten.

Yeah and if you stopped doing that and instead used a car to buy your groceries or ordered them delivered to your doorstep, you would have more free time and more energy. People want free time and energy. Just because it "works" for you to walk in the cold rain carrying groceries in a backback, doesn't make it the best solution. If there are better solutions, why insist on doing it the worst possible way?

Walking for 10 minutes with an umbrella to the shop takes about the same effort as packing all this things into car and later unloading it and driving.

Or even less if shop is 300m away.

Oh, you misunderstand. Involving a car would most definitely not make it a better solution.

I have no interest whatsoever to involve cars in my life. Having to share the roads with them is bad enough. (The arrogance of space is ridiculous.)

Deliveries: these cost little because people aren't paid properly. If I wanted to pay them properly, I wouldn't be able to use their services much. So instead of normalizing exploitation in the name of convenience, I prefer not to use delivery services when it can be avoided. And with different supermarkets in almost every direction, within 10mins on foot they most definitely can be avoided. I don't mean to moralize, and I'll step right off this soap box, but keeping bad jobs alive is a disservice to my community.

More energy / more free time: neither the time nor the energy are wasted. If you want, you can see the time spent as an investment into health and focus, a tool for stress-reduction, an active period of mental rest, but really: this is not a zero sum game.

I don't think any of this will convince you, and I'm not trying to. But perhaps you can see that your view on the "best solution" is hardly universal and well-established alternatives exist that work for a surprisingly large number of people.

> and with different supermarkets in almost every direction, within 10mins on foot they most definitely can be avoided.

You do realize that this is just your privilege? Most of people don't have everything in the walking reach, some would have to bike up a hill for a few kilometers to get to a shop, etc?

Don't get me wrong, it's great that you can, but it's just a lucky consequence of where you live, not something that's universally applicable to everyone.

> You do realize that this is just your privilege?

This is exactly what TFA is about. It should not be a privilege, but it is, because we made it scarce. Not because it is more expensive to create, it is not.

I live in the Netherlands. Being able to walk to the supermarket in 10mins is very common. What you call privilege, we just call urban planning.

Good for you, I don't, and that's my whole point. What works for you wouldn't necessarily work for me, and not because we are savages incapable of urban planning, but because there are real challenges totally different than in Holland (geographical, economical, historical, cultural, etc.). Simply, what you call "urban planning" is way easier to do in a flat land and specific types of architecture, where cities where already built with planned street layouts, wide boulevards, etc. I happen to live in an old city with lots of narrow, one way streets, steep hill slopes, etc. and urban planning can get you only as far, without resorting to destroying historical neighborhoods just to make space for bike lanes. And btw my city is perfectly walkable, to make it clear, it's just not particularly bike friendly...

Anyway, my point being that IMHO it's not always a good idea to just try to copy/paste architectural and urbanistic solutions between regions with very different geography, culture and population density, no matter how trendy the idea is.

> You do realize that this is just your privilege?

Yes, that's the point, though. This discussion thread is about walkable cities.

I should also point out that urban planning that gives priority to people who walk benefits everyone, independent of their income. This cannot be said for designs that give priority to cars.

What bikes have to do with walkable cities? IME the explosion of popularity of e-bikes, e-scooters, etc. made my own city only less enjoyable for walking, not more. IMHO if you want a walkable city it should be organized around pedestrians and efficient means of public mass-transport (trains, trams, electric busses), not bikes... and all I hear is a push for replacing cars with e-bikes...

> Yeah and if you stopped doing that and instead used a car to buy your groceries or ordered them delivered to your doorstep, you would have more free time and more energy. People want free time and energy.

From my personal experience, I've found that doing physical exercise (paradoxically enough) seems to give me more energy. On those days where I've sat still all day I'm much more likely to feel like doing nothing after work, whereas when I've done my usual cycle commute I'm usually a lot more mentally alert. YMMV of course, but given the choice I'll personally rather do more than less physical exercise, even if it's small activities here and there like lugging some groceries.

Yeah but people should be free to use whatever form of physical exercise that they want. Should we never do any sports anymore and instead just force everyone to do inefficient transportation? That's just making life so much more poor.

Seems to me you’re the one insisting in doing something in the worst possible way.

I have a high street lined with shops on my way home where I can stop by, have a quick chat, perhaps pick up something that caught my attention as the scent of freshness overwhelmed my senses when I walked into the shop owned by a person that invites me for a drink and has visited my house socially.

The newest place near me right now was opened by an investment banker that chose to optimise for his hairline in his own words, so when I stop there to get stock up on exotic groceries, that is the best solution for me and if it’s raining, so what? I’ve got towels at home.

Same here, the supermarket is 3' away by foot and I've never even thought "oh man, I should take the car and go to the larger supermarket that's 15' away".

It's just not inconvenient at all. I wonder if the difference in opinion is from a lack of exercise? I don't mind carrying 20kg of stuff back home in bags, I'm used to it and it's good to get at least some exercise.

Haha carrying 20kg of stuff back home in bags, that's ridiculous! Yeah do that after a long day of work, and also you can forget ever having any energy left for doing any sport because now your only sport ever is carrying groceries. What a poor life

This is the way I live, you think I've never shopped after work? If I couldn't carry 20kg for 200m, I'd have more of a problem with how I live than where.

Yes but it's an incredibly strenuous and unnecessarily hard way of life, if that's what you want, fine, but society at large has as a core value to eliminate unnecessary, hard, repetitive tasks so that's not going to be a good way to structure neighborhoods.

I don't think we'll ever agree, because there seems to be a fundamental difference here. You speak as if I'm toiling in the mines all day, whereas I don't even think of it as particularly hard or annoying.

I'm also noticing the absence of any 'average American' experiences in this thread...although COVID has disrupted average a little.

> Yes but it's an incredibly strenuous and unnecessarily hard way of life

What are you, a granny? It is not strenuous or difficult at all.

I agree it's a hassle, but at least it does help provide some exercise.

It's no wonder the US has such a high obesity and diabetes rate, with a sedentary society like that.

If anyone seriously considers transporting 20kg for 200m "incredibly strenuous and unnecessarily hard way of life" then it is hard to treat them seriously.

Note that you can put it into backpack or use something like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wozek+na+zakupy&t=ffab&iar=images&... (sorry, not sure how it is called in English).

PS Unless they have serious medical issues, far worse than typical. Or they are really old or really young. But in such cases they likely should not drive anyway.

I think the most common way to call it would be "utility trolley" or "utility cart". Usually the ones you'll see in the U.S. are all metal and can fold up to make it easier to put them in car trunks or carry them on buses.

do you even lift?

20kg is quite on extreme side. Also, walking for 350m with 20kg of stuff is unlikely to be a problem unless you have massive health problems.

With something like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wozek+na+zakupy&t=ffab&iar=images&... it is even simpler - my 80 years old grandmother is using it for shopping.

> your only sport ever is carrying groceries. What a poor life

Just how much stuff you buy? Maybe you live in awful city with shops more than 500m away from your home?

Yeah, that’s a big part of it. If you have shops within walkable distance, you don’t need to carry huge amounts of groceries. You can just grab a few things to last you the next three days on your way past!

If you think this is strenuous and unreasonable for an able bodied person, then I think you need to level set with the rest of humanity. Also, just get a bike with a basket if you don't like carrying stuff. Personally I feel super stressed and mentally exhausted on the occasions I have to spend the afternoon urban driving... Give me the 20kg walk any day!

20 kg seems like a lot for walkable grocery shopping unless you're intentionally getting a bunch of bulk staples all at once.

It's not every time, but when we need water I get two sixpacks (for balance) and those are 18kg alone.

Not that there's anything wrong with tap water, but eeeh.

Tap water plus SodaStream is the life for me.

Oh wow, that's a great idea! I don't much like carbonated water, but if you do, this'll make your life amazing.

Regular brita filter is great solution for drinkable tap water.

I tried that but the jug had a weird smell. I don't know if those filters that go on the tap directly are better, I keep meaning to try them. Have you?

Filtering tap water at home has been a solved issue for generations. From ceramic water filters (CWF), ceramic candles to reverse osmosis and etc...c’mon dude.

Haha, I'm sorry my filter question offends you.

>I've never even thought "oh man, I should take the car and go to the larger supermarket that's 15' away".

This is funny and I think very cultural. I'm American and would walk 20 minutes to a large super market and carry 20kg back, up and down hills in San Francisco no less. I too enjoyed the exercise. I knew plenty of people who would shop at smaller stores, mostly people who grew up in cities, but I never really liked it. I grew up going to large super markets and find grocery shopping at them cathartic.

I think I'm the opposite, I prefer smaller shops because I find the big supermarkets extremely tiring. I think it's because of how hard your brain needs to work in them, you need to be making "do I need this?" snap decisions very quickly as you roll through the aisles.

Our neighborhood supermarkets are the size of, say, a basketball court, so they're not as tiring.

Having a grocery store five minutes away is wonderful, and a pram helps with the schlepping.

As far as crime - that doesn't seem to be a big problem in places popular and busy with residents. Personally I'm more worried about a driver (the leading killer of children) hurting my child than someone selling weed.

You can get delivered in most cities now.

Yeah this is what I do, and I think it's great! But it relies on there being a driveable street outside of the house, and not a stupid walk path.

Road/driveway next to a residential buildings is standard and not contradictory to having a walkable access.

Delivery people can and do walk the last stretch, the same as they do when delivering to apartments and townhouses that don't have streets or parking directly adjacent to individual units.

>Yes, you still want a car for such things, sure it's quaint and nice to have a "walkable" neighborhood, if you're a tourist, but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying.

Depends on your lifestyle but I'm quite comfortably car-free. Shelf-stable stuff like tins, rice, beans I get delivered once every few weeks. Meat, veg, eggs and milk I want fresh so I rarely buy more than a couple of days in advance. If it's less than ten minutes walk to the supermarket, or on the walk home from the train station.

>Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

Crime and drugs happen where there aren't lots of people to witness them. If you're walking at night and can choose between a busy street and a quiet one, which do you choose?

> but if you live there and have to schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying

Even with quite large family walking for 10 minutes with groceries seems to be not problematic.

Unless you live on South Pole or something.

I live in the Netherlands. We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing.

Much Urban planning was involved in making it better for cycling though, and it wasn’t always great for it. Off-road cycle paths being a mainstay for the country with separate lights is the biggest differentiator, and took a lot work to get there, but now you can safely cycle the entire country!

Even Cambridge in England where I used to live (and is famous for thousands of cycling students and locals) Is laughably bad compared.

Northern Ireland where my family live has also transformed large parts with Greenways projects and it has been transformational, I ran along them, walked along them to shops and cycled a long way and it was amazing I thought.

https://nigreenways.com/

> We bike rather than just walk everywhere, and generally people do more frequent small shops rather than big weekly shop. It takes some imagination and a lot of urban planning work, but quality of life improves dramatically, it’s life-changing.

Yeah which means that you spend a lot more time and energy on grocery shopping. That is for me directly inverse to quality of life. The more time I spend in traffic (cycling is also sitting in traffic) and queueing in crowded grocery stores, the lower my quality of life is. Who are you to decide that cycling and grocery shopping is automatically the best quality of life for everyone? Some people prefer to play tennis, or paint, or read books or whatever. No freedom, only inefficient transportation.

> The more time I spend in traffic

Where I live, walking to a small grocery store is literally faster than driving plus the ancillary annoyances of driving (finding parking, loading and unloading, etc).

To come out ahead in the time side of the equation while driving I would need to make significantly larger shopping trips spaced further apart... which would each then eat up significantly more time in loading, unloading, carrying, and putting food away.

> and queueing in crowded grocery stores

Walkable neighborhood grocery stores have smaller queues than big-box stores, as a mostly-even distribution of customers across multiple stores and floors on staffing (e.g. you can't have less than one register) mean an average of more staff per customer.

It takes me less time to bike to the shop from my home then it takes to find a parking spot in the underground parking garage and walk from the parking spot to the shop.

Same for walking to a smaller shop if I am not feeling like biking that day (so most likely taking metro to work that day). Though the chances of finding a place to park that is closer to that shop than my home is almost 0.

It is not automatically inefficient. In Zurich, I have around 5 supermarkets near by, walkable in about 5-10 minutes. Don't even need a bike. Taking the car would increase my travel time, not decrease it.

So my walkable city is more time efficient and has health benefits for using your own body instead of a machine to do the traveling. It's better if we measure for time efficiency and health. And it shows. Looking around, 95% of the people here, at least those not in cars, are healthy, slim and fit. All as it should be. What else would you optimize for?

No because you only have to take the car once a week, and you have to walk 3 times per week. If you want to force physical exercise by inefficiency like that, what exactly are the machines that should be forbidden and which should be allowed? You can do a million things from scratch which gives you physical exercise, we all rely on using machines that saves us from this poor life, why put the walking/cycling on a pedestal?

Just no. It is more efficient for me. Really don't care that you don't want to accept that. So take your efficiency argument and scrap it. You want cars and want everything to be optimized for it. That is your actual point and we both know it.

No, I want as much free time and energy as possible, and don't want to waste my life carrying water in buckets when I can have a tap. Likewise I also don't want to waste any time carrying milk either

Waling is free, you need the exercise anyway so time spent walking isn't wasted. Driving however is a waste of time.

I live really remote, as in driving 25 minutes up a mountain on a one way street remote. I still don't have a driving license. I can get everywhere by public transport, I have no stress.

Also I am talking about me, I guess most people still do their daily grocery runs.

However I buy 90% of our food online. 9% in nearby farmer shops. The relatively high population density makes next day delivery a normal thing even in the most remote places. There is literally no reason to waste time for grocery shopping these days.

How you think about exercise and time may influence whether driving increases your quality of life. To me, time spent driving is a pure waste with no redeeming value and I make every effort to minimize it. Whereas time spent engaged in physical activity (up to about an hour a day) isn't wasted at all since it improves my mood and energy levels. If that physical activity happens to save me a car trip then it's doubly useful.

For example, this morning I drove a kid to school because we were running behind and it was a ~10m round trip. Usually we bike and it's a ~20m round trip. I saved 10m of clock time but lost ~20m of exercise. Now I can choose whether to make up that exercise later and end up net ~10m poorer or skip today's exercise and end up slightly fatter and lazier.

(I agree about grocery shopping though.)

The quality of like is a personal reflection, but cycling is not inefficient, for door to door short trips bike is literally faster than public transport (which is also specifically pretty good in Amsterdam) and driving.

The layout out cities to accommodate lots of cars and easy parking is a huge cause of inefficiency often.

I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but I would go as far as to say most people don’t accurately imagine how it would be, when they haven’t lived somewhere like Amsterdam.

I live in a walkable urban location and have never drove, in order to shop without having to worry about carrying heavy milk etc

I just use a trolley capable of going up steps it cost me £35 and allows me to carry a lot more comfortably

Before that I used deliveries a lot, I notice people with cars don't think very hard about alternatives like they can't even imagine a world without their car

Which means there's parts of the city that are just inaccessible to the rest of us and permanently degrades the experience of walking in most other places

> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries? At least in Poland it is not a real problem at all. Some parks are locked for night and that is all.

If making nice park is instantly resulting in crime/drugs/etc then something went really wrong.

> Maybe in some third-world crime infested countries?

Like Seattle and San Francisco? This isn't a third world problem, unless you consider these cities to be third world.

OK, I was unaware that USA really had such runaway crime problems. I thought that it is an exaggeration. (and still suspect this)

Almost every single park in downtown Seattle and San Francisco is covered in drug users. It's been this way for about ten years now.

Walking with groceries in the rain won't kill you, I promise. It's a small inconvenience but in my opinion you get a lot back for it, everything just becomes more village like and friendly. Being in a car does not tend to make people more friendly.

And just because there are nice places to hang out does not automatically mean there will be drugs and crime. That is not my experience at least.

Yeah but why do you want to turn back time to a village and make things less efficient, what's the point of pretending to be poor. Americans are the friendliest people in the world and they drive the most, the more people cycle and walk in the cold rain, the more depressed and unfriendly they become

This may be a controversial opinion, but not everything is about efficiency, especially when it comes to social interactions. But even if your life's aim is to impose rigorous efficiency on every aspect of your life, I doubt you'll be more time efficient if you do your groceries by car compared to living in walking distance of a supermarket.

Society is about efficiency. Social interactions are voluntarily and can be organised around any random activity such as games, sports, hobbies etc. It's really inflexible and incredibly limiting to force inefficiency of transport, because that increases social interactions.

People had the same argument when banks went online, all the retired people want to still go and pay their bills at the bank, because they get to go outside, meet people etc.

I can tell that we're very different people. Society to me is not about efficiency at all. I like a bit of randomness to my life and not live an absolutely regimented and organised existence. But I guess that's not for everyone.

I also like a bit of randomness and don't live an absolutely regimented existence, my point is just that people should be free to choose this randomness in their own space and time, and we should not force a particular way of randomness on everyone, and we also should not put it in the way of getting our work done.

> ... schlep around by foot with your groceries every day, in all weathers, it's just annoying.

You seem to be either contradicting your position, or not accepting other people's comments in good faith.

Here you are arguing against carrying groceries every day, whereas I expect most people would - even in the proximity of markets and grocery stores - do perhaps 2 or 3 trips a week.

In a comment below you fixed upon someone's en passant claim that they're happy to carry 20kg groceries a short distance (a few hundred metres).

Of course, no one is doing 20kg of grocery shopping every day, and there's clearly a happy medium in there between mass/volume and frequency. Obviously the grocery shopping by foot continues to work well for an awful lot of people through Europe and elsewhere, and seems to be well correlated with a higher (perceived) QoL - so I don't understand how you can argue against these realities?

How can you argue against the reality that it's better to use a car or delivery for 20 kg, than to carry it when walking. And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless. It's just a middle class virtue signalling competition oh look who can be the most neo-amish and eschew modern conveniences.

I churn my own butter, because that's better for the environment! Everyone should make their own butter, it only takes 4 hours, that's "nothing" Ban butter factories!

> How can you argue against the reality that it's better to use a car or delivery for 20 kg, than to carry it when walking.

If you're really going to have trouble carrying 20 kg on your back for a couple of city blocks, you can use a folding rolling cart instead to do the same at the same speed and with negligible effort.

> And since it's already delivered by a truck, why walk the last bit it's pointless.

One truck carrying twenty tons of groceries is not the same as one car carrying a few cases of bottled water.

Half a bag of concrete? A cart is definitely the way to go. 51 lbs (23 kg) under ideal conditions is where National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health says manual laborers should take precautions against back injuries. Being able to deadlift it doesn’t make schlepping it all the way home a good plan.

I am in no way an activist of any kind, but especially when the weather is bad (think about rain) going around with the car is a nightmare where I live, that's why I prefer to buy my groceries everyday walking to a local supermarket.

It takes a few minutes, it's a break from work, walking in the fresh air clears my mind and I avoid the traffic jams or having to park where there is no parking space available.

> Also in urban environments, making a lot of "inviting" public spaces for people to hang around and loiter is not always a great idea.. this also attracts a lot of crime, drugs etc

This not problem for inviting spaces per se. But spaces where you can hide. If you have this in ordinary "inviting" public spaces the that is sign of dysfunctional society. Most parks and town squares in cities I have lived are safe (at least if you are man).

Making places inviting does the opposite for crime if you do it right. You get what’s called ‘natural surveillance’ that is, where there tends to be enough people around, seeing what’s going on that it discourages crime.

This is talking serious crime - obviously things like pickpocketing can still happen.

I live in such a walkable neighborhood and for groceries I use a rather big backpack and I can get groceries for multiple days that way. For the my two-person household it is possible to get enough groceries by going to the supermarket twice a week, so either of us only needs to go once a week. Actually, I do not walk the 1 km to the supermarket but go by bike stead.

The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though.

Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD).

The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. And housing has become a "store of value" against inflation for investors, driving up prices and becoming a retirement fund for landlords and homeowners so governments can never let the prices drop (e.g. by embracing the abundance of development proposed in this article).

'And housing has become a "store of value"'

'Not become' but 'has been' for decades. You only now start to notice it as inflation and wages have not kept up.

This is by design in most post-WW 2 western economies as an economic policy to "increase national wealth". That's why housing loans are subsidized and whatnot.

Well post-WW2 there was a huge boom in construction in Europe at least.

Especially since many cities were almost completely destroyed. Even where my grandparents lived in England, the Blitz destroyed a lot of homes and meant mass construction was inevitable.

It's really been since the 80s, that all infrastructure and construction projects have been slowed down and hampered by NIMBYism - and it's all about just pumping up the existing prices through artificial scarcity.

If you use price per square meter to compare European housing to American housing, Europe seems super expensive. But, if you compare by the functional space (# bedrooms), Europe is cheap.

I moved from San Diego to Amsterdam and was very happy to find 3-4 bedroom apartments to buy (the bank accepted my self employment income and gave a 1.6% interest rate). Apartments are well designed so you don’t need as much space.

I live half a block from a grocery store and still get a lot of groceries delivered. We have 3 kids and no cars. Cheap and easy to rent if we want one for the day. I love this life style where the kids can walk and bike everywhere themself.

Son: “Dad, I have to go to guitar, but it is raining”

Dad: “Here are your rain pants. Hurry, but be careful biking in the rain”

I guess you're on a US salary as a contractor? There's no way I could afford more than 2 bedrooms in the city as a senior engineer, and even that's a push.

I’m not in Amsterdam, but my mate works in Amsterdam and lives on a single engineer Dutch salary in a beautiful 2 bed with a separate dinning/kitchen/lounge near Sarphatipark, 10 minutes walk from Museumplein, walking distance from the Rembrandt Museum and to work.

Did he buy or rent the apartment recently and from his own savings+income? Many such stories involve an old rental contract, a family-owned apartment or sizeable inheritance.

Yep, and commonly also a loan from parents for downpayment to buy.

Not a lack of 75-100 m2 (3 bedrooms) under €600,000 in walking distance from the most famous tourist attractions, I know as I looked.

Smaller 2 bedrooms can be bought in the center of Amsterdam for €350,000 with a €35,000 deposit (10%).

How is that not viable for a tech worker?

It's sort of viable, but you'd have to spend 2-3 years living in overpriced temporary sublets while trying to save up to that deposit, and still it just supports the original comment which was that you could only afford 2 bedrooms and even that is a push.

To get one of those 600k apartments you'd have to flip your first apartment for the bigger downpayment, and that's gonna take another 2 years.

That 2 bedroom apartment costs way more than my 5 bedroom house that is ~420 m2. Housing prices in some places are crazy.

Evidently.

That 2 bedroom apartment is in one of the most desirable areas of the most desirable city in the country. Location matters.

We are talking about living right in the centre of Amsterdam. No one is stopping you from buying something with a much lower deposit at a cycling distance from the city centre or a much smaller deposit with a 30 minutes public transport commute for 2 years so you can then afford to live in one of the most desirable areas of a main city with a sizeable tourist industry.

That’s 2 years saving to then live where you want and then an extra 2 years to live where you want in the apartment that you want which is oversized for a single person.

Why do you need a 3 bed as a single person and what’s your ideal scenario? Do you want to be able to afford a house without a deposit, is that it?

Bought from own savings and income 4 years ago with no help from parents, not a family-owned apartment or sizeable inheritance. Owner is an immigrant from a developing country, the exchange rate alone would be prohibitive for any family assistance.

>Bought from own savings and income 4 years ago

IIRC the housing market in the Netherlands 4 years ago was way more accessible than the madness of today so that's probably not a surprise that he could afford it. Ask him if he could have bought in the market of today please.

Still affordable in today’s market. This shouldn’t even be up to discussion as anyone can check the available houses for sale in Amsterdam and what they sold for.

My own company. Capitol cities are expensive; but compared with most, I still find Amsterdam reasonable. Part of the reason is that it isn’t necessary to live in Amsterdam to have the kind of lifestyle I’m describing; there are so many walkable, bikeable, transport accessible,kid-friendly and beautiful neighborhoods in this country. Open to critique; it’s a beautiful day today so I have my rose colored glasses on.

Here are the family places in Amsterdam for less than 900k. According to ABNAMRO, that’s affordable (with mortgage), if you have two incomes that gross 150k. https://www.funda.nl/koop/gemeente-amsterdam/

Yeah, that US viewpoint kinda irks me too. Of course Europe is cheap when you earn US tech salaries. Amsterdam is definitely not cheap on your average non-FAANG/IB local Dutch wages.

Even FAANG pays shit in Europe. I was paid 75k at Amazon.

Europe is designed for the landed aristocracy, not working people.

For FAANG, levels.fyi shows pretty competitive salaries in European cities where it has presence (Munich, Amsterdam, London, etc) — most are in six figures. Every time I put those figures in expatistan.com, I absolutely don’t get the feeling that FAANG salaries are low in Europe.

Local European IT firms (your local broadband provider, or a supermarket chain) normally pay much less though.

I recall housing prices being mostly reasonable 15-20 years ago, I don't think our current woes are the result of any "design".

>I recall housing prices being mostly reasonable 15-20 years ago

And bitcoin was a fraction of a dollar just 10 years ago. Unfortunately, we don't have a time machine and the housing prices of today have far outpaced the earning increases that the working class saw in that time.

15-20 years ago, housing was seen mostly as a place you'd buy to live yourself, not an investment vehicle you'd buy to get grand returns from. That's the difference.

Our opinions on the cause aside, we had reasonably priced housing before, we can have it again, without fundamentally changing the way our cities are built (that's not to discount any other reasons to do so).

Europe is a museum.

This might be useful to you - trimodal nature of comp in NL.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

In my experience, it's bullshit. The author must be conflating staff positions with "senior".

I was paid 75k as an L5 engineer at Amazon, that's like intermediate senior (two levels down from Staff). So maybe one level up you'd get 100-110k?

I've never seen salaries anywhere close to that article. Even contractors might pay $150k (and then you have to pay your own taxes, insurance, etc. out of that).

The author is spot on. You just happened to be working for the scrappiest/shittiest faang that's all. Shop around, there is decent money to be made in Europe - but of course it's not as easy to walk into it as in the US today. Oh and don't forget that it's TC that matters in big public tech, not salary.

I have gone through interview rounds a few months ago at several of the companies the author mentions in the blog post and I can confirm that the range seems about right. The offers I received for their EU offices were between €120k - €170k (total comp).

But - compared to what I have heard about the US, the variance between offers is much more extreme in the EU, depending on whether these companies only compete in the local market or globally, and it is really hard to figure this out before going through the whole process. I have been surprised by a few companies that pay very competitive salaries in the US but which are barely competitive compared to some of the salaries I know from local companies here in the EU.

So yeah, it is possible to find these salaries in the EU, but they will still be considerably lower than what you can expect in the US and the bad offers are harder to weed out in the EU.

>You just happened to be working for the scrappiest/shittiest faang that's all.

You know, with this statement you've just proved his point, that good tech wages in Europe are super scarce when you need to be very picky with wich FAANG you join for good compensation. That's basically skimming the cream off the cream you just skimmed. How much are you left with now, ~1% of the total tech jobs?

Amazon is worst payer among them in the US as well. Facebook and Google pay decent money in London and Zurich, almost on par with US in the latter, London is maybe ~30% less.

> How much are you left with now, ~1% of the total tech jobs?

If you want top 1% pay, you gonna have to hunt for top 1% jobs, seems obvious, no?

>If you want top 1% pay, you gonna have to hunt for top 1% jobs, seems obvious, no?

Of course, but the discussion was about the fact that the tech job market in Europe is poor. You pointing out that the top 1% devs in Europe make really good money doesn't change that since the 99% are left with sub-paar options.

To make it clearer, a better indication would be to look at median opportunities and wages in the tech sectors, and here the wages in the EU are far lower than in the US even when adjusted for the local purchasing power and real estate prices (actually, I think this makes it even worse for Europe, as stuff cost more and real estate is more expensive).

If you remove the 1%ers like FAANGS and other US unicorns pumped with VC money form the EU tech scene, you're not left with much good local grown opportunities, the wages take a massive nose-dive, which is what the majority is earning.

I am a senior dev (not staff, not even senior 2) and I make more than that. But I work remote for a US company - maybe investigate options there?

Anyone getting USD75k/EUR65K/GBP55K in Europe can afford to buy an apartment in any of the major cities, including London with access to a walking lifestyle.

Add a partner’s salary to the equation and you are walking your kids to school and living the dream.

> USD75k/EUR65K/GBP55K in Europe can afford to buy an apartment in any of the major cities,

That doesn't seem likely. I live in Dublin, and the median household income for a first time buyer is approximately 90k in euros.

I'm surprised that this is possible in London.

Evidently.

On £55k you can afford to borrow £247.5k.

£247.5k + 10% deposit and you are looking at £272k properties.

Check sold house prices in London and you’ll find plenty under £272k.

Possible in London which is one of the most expensive cities in the world.

So this depends on what multiple the bank will lend you. In Ireland, it's 3.5 whereas it looks like it's 4.5 in the UK.

Honestly though, apartments anywhere near the city in Dublin are still way out of reach for a person on your wage, even if the rules changed to 4.5.

Nevermind that saving a deposit while rents are quite high is no easy feat.

To be fair for me (Swiss and self employed) the renting prices in beautiful places like Haarlem or Rotterdam appeared really tempting. Nice big apartments nearby the city for less than $1000/m are basically unheard of in Switzerland, or Austria for that matter.

No idea what locals earn there, but from a outside perspective it appeared really affordable if you ignore the high taxes :3

If I may ask, your profile says "Professor of Human Centered Design" - is this why you moved to the Netherlands? I'm very curious about your work, based on that.

That’s why I moved to the Netherlands. While the pay for professors was almost half the pay in the USA (ouch), it was allowed for me to continue to run my company.

> Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD).

Isn't that still really cheap compared to NY or Silicon Valley? Rising housing prices has more to do with pressure to move to a select few cities rather than walkability or rising population. E.g. in Germany housing in Munich, Hamburg or Frankfurt costs multiples of housing in smaller eastern German cities.

Yeah, but the salaries are much, much lower.

SF: ~$167k USD p.a. - https://www.builtinsf.com/salaries/dev-engineer/software-eng...

Stockholm: 45k SEK per month = ~$63k USD p.a. - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/stockholm-software-engine...

Taxes are also much higher (especially if your employer has good health insurance coverage in the US, so the added benefits are less). Like I pay an average 40% rate on income plus 25% sales tax, the marginal rate on income (and RSUs, etc.) is 56%!

It's really painful for stuff like housing which is a similar price (and increasing!), or inelastic international goods like electronics, cars, fuel (which is also heavily taxed), etc.

Americans are incredibly lucky - far higher wages, and the freedom to manage your own finances (not forced to pay for irresponsible parents' lifestyle choices through extremely high taxes).

“Americans are incredibly lucky - far higher wages, and the freedom to manage your own finances (not forced to pay for irresponsible parents' lifestyle choices through extremely high taxes).”

USA is a huge nation with extreme variations in housing costs and salaries depending on location. Most workers get few benefits, no vacation time, and meager government benefits. Homeless people wander most areas especially urban due to these issues. Still think Americans are lucky?

Don't forget the 31.42% payroll tax that's hidden from your salary but a tax right on it.

A salary of 50k SEK costs the employer 65.7k SEK on their books, which is what actually matters. The actual marginal taxrate flowing from your employers books at that level is somewhere up at 75%-80%, not even counting sales tax when you use the money.

Yeah, but even considering that, the gross salaries are still much lower.

Taxes are too high (on income), and wages are too low.

The US has a 7.5% employer side payroll tax up to some limit.

Effective marginal tax rates in the US are higher than they look at a glance.

> remember those freedoms can also destroy your life, if you end up on the other end. Americans have to step over homeless people on the sidewalks, who got fired, who got sick while uninsured, who are addicted or mentally ill. Those who do well live in suburbia, where their kids are also not that free, going outside alone is too dangerous.

Those taxes pay for other forms of freedom

I support universal healthcare, free life-long education and universal paid leave.

I don't support inviting 3 million refugees (to a nation of only 11 million people at the time) when we have no spare housing, or being forced to fund others' childcare (it's a lifestyle choice).

Taxes can be much better managed.

For software engineers, there are employers in Stockholm that pay much more than 63k USD p.a. A good income combined with the low mortgage interest rate (~1.4%) and the basically tax-free investment accounts (ISK/KF) make Stockholm a pretty good place to make money in over time.

I was just in Italy and it seemed like all the restaurants were packed every night. They're not cheap. How are people able to eat out so much in EU on these salaries?

>They're not cheap.

They are.

Pizza Margarita in Naples cost 4 Euro when I was there in 2019.

I was just in Italy the last few months and it's true that street food is cheap but normal restaurants are similar to US prices and those places were packed every night in every city I visited.

If 5 people go out 5 nights a weeks there will be the same crowd as if 10 people go out 2 nights a week.

Maybe there's just a ton of people and not a lot of restaurants and people like to eat out occasionally.

The immediate conclusion doesn't have to be that the Italians have a bunch of money that they are being frivolous with. There are other options.

I’m not assuming they’re being frivolous I’m just trying to figure out the economics. There are loads and loads of restaurants everywhere.

'loads and loads' is kind of not quantitative enough imo.

Not saying you're wrong.

I've just read that Europeans make objectively WAYYYY less than American's in tech jobs to a staggering depressing amount for the same amount of work...

So just rustles my jimmies to see unscientific hearsay rumours about them to make their situation worse.

Probably a fair bit of pent up demand from Covid. Also, the economy is strong at the moment, even in Europe.

Of course, were the other patrons tourists?

The ratio between real estate price and income is much higher in many European cities compared to the US: https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealth-management/insights/202...

I think the original poster is off by a bit, 350-450k USD for 60m2 is what you pay outside Stockholm. In the city proper, it's ~770k USD for 60m2. Basically this segregates society into the "haves" and the "have nots".

>The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world.

Not sure about Sweden but at least here (Spain) housing being bought for investment is much more of a problem than physical unavailability. And I don't mean it as a store of value:

People (and companies) buy houses to rent them and have the rent payments pay for the mortgage payments, since it's basically free money - For those that can get a mortgage, since it's pretty much mandatory to pay 20% of the cost upfront (plus taxes).

Basic needs really shouldn't be investment material.

This guy gets it, others seem to be making incredible effort not to see it.

I agree completely, at least here in Sweden it's harder to rent flats out, so this is less common (it might change next year though when the conservatives/nationalists win).

IMO I'd make renting restricted to government monopoly (like alcohol sales in Sweden, and the old first-hand contracts system), and property ownership restricted to your residence only, and then build much, much more whilst stopping mass immigration (it's crazy to invite 2+ million refugees when there isn't enough housing already!).

Renting is basically already restricted to government policy in Stockholm, and the result is 15 years waiting time to get a flat.

Yeah, the first-hand contracts system is a disaster atm.

But note that waiting time only applies to first-hand contracts. You can still rent second-hand.

The idea would be to build much more, and buy up the former second-hand places.

> Basic needs really shouldn't be investment material.

Companies providing and selling food, energy, and consumer staples are investment materials. I don’t get why housing should be a special carve-out and don’t see a workable answer to how to provide food for everyone while banning all investment in companies that grow or sell food.

These companies are invested in precisely because these are basic needs. The company gets the capital it needs to operate, consumers get a reliable supply of food, energy, and clothing, employees get steady jobs providing these staples, investors get a relatively safe store of value and some income. Who exactly loses in these investments in supply basic food, energy, and consumer staples?

But this clearly isn’t true for housing. Landlords keep buying up more and more, supply only goes down, and the prices keep going up.

And are the landlords just leaving the house empty for the hell of it? Or is it being rented out to people? I know with one is more likely.

The thing is, housing is a surprisingly flexible commodity (too expensive, people live with parents/share, and then move back out if prices fall) , and encouraging everyone to buy a full on house in a suburb is a recipe to drive expensive housing.

>And are the landlords just leaving the house empty for the hell of it?

No, but a landlord who got into the market early when properties were dirt cheap can leverage that and buy more and more for renting them out, reducing the supply and increasing the competition if you want to buy your first property and not be a renter your whole life. You know, like when you want to settle down and have kids, you're gonna be out-muscled by a landlord who already has 3 properties and is is looking to buy 2 more.

>housing is a surprisingly flexible commodity (too expensive, people live with parents/share, and then move back out if prices fall)

The thing is this is one of the reason why birth rates are so low in rich western cities. How can you expect people to start families if you expect adults to live in shared accomodations or move in with their parents?

Having access to cheap, spacious housing that's just for living and not part of someone's investment vehicle, would definitely make "nesting" an enticing proposition for young adults, like it was for the boomer generation. But if you expect them to bum around between living with roommates and living with their parents like adolescents, and their only hope of nesting being to grind away after years in university at some soul-sucking job 40+ hours/week plus commutes just to afford a bank loan for a shoe-box that they'll have to pay off till they die, then of course they'll realize this expectation of their life is a scammy wage-salve trap and say "to hell with that, I'd rather stay single, childless and free and spend my time and money on travelling, clubbing, netflix, meme-stocks and videogames".

But of course, fat chance to get governments to admit their policies of enriching the banks, property investors and the older owning class by squeezing the young is the cause of this. To them, the real reason why the young can't afford to settle down is because "these pesky millennials and zoomers spend all their money on iphones and avocado toast, so to fix this we'll allow uncontrolled mass immigration from the third world".

Housing can't be an affordable necessity for starting a family that everyone should have access to while at the same time being an investment vehicle design to enrich their owners. It's either one or the other and most of the west has chosen the latter while talking how the former is more important.

In Austria, the goverment isn't even hiding the fact that housing is officially an investment vehicle, with the conservative party throwing the blame back on the people for not having bought properties as the reason why they stay poor and can't afford to keep up with rent increases. Despicable!

I think you are over stating the flexibility of moving out, getting a roommate, or moving in with your parents. What if your parents moved into a smaller residence and can't fit a family?

Yes, a lot of landlords do leave the house empty. Maybe not for the hell of it, but if it is empty you don't risk getting a bad tenant.

Even with good tenants, a tenant means you have more responsibility w.r.t repairs/maintenance costs etc.

If the property is appreciating at 10-30% yoy, why take the risk of renting it?

Basic food is subsidized and regulated. Even in the US: corn subsidies, grain reserves, and the Onion Futures Act.

Housing is also subsidized in the US, the FHA, USDA and VA all have housing subsidy programs. States and local governments also operate housing subsidy programs.

> I don’t get why housing should be a special carve-out and don’t see a workable answer to how to provide food for everyone while banning all investment in companies that grow or sell food.

The economy exists to support everyone's life, not the other way around. Just because you can argue someone can make a quick buck selling a basic necessity, that does not mean it's ok to deprive a whole community of basic necessities.

Take for example water. Would it be ok to hold everyone hostage over access to it, and even lobby for municipalities to stop the public sector from encroaching onto a service provided by a private business, just because Nestle and the likes bottle and sell it?

The current delta between the have and have-nots, and the profound impact that "small" real estate investments have on pushing access to housing far out of reach of your average middle and upper-middle class family, is a collosal social and economical red flag. Access to housing has a profound impact on everyone's lives and even community. You accept jobs based on access to housing, and the amount of time wasted supporting said job is time eaten away from the time you spend doing far more important things like caring for your children and family. Being deprived from that just because a faceless investor wanted to park his bailout money somewhere and decided to dump it in real estate hurts society.

i think you misunderstand. the tail has been wagging the dog for some time now. it is not for the market to adapt to our needs, it is for us to adapt to the market and hopefully we can extract what we need.

> it is not for the market to adapt to our needs, it is for us to adapt to the market and hopefully we can extract what we need.

The market isn't a magical entity which demands human sacrifices. It's quite possible to keep it reigned in with a combination of banning private property investments[1] with public housing and urban renewal projects. Cut down on detrimental demand and increase supply.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28422768

>Companies providing and selling food, energy, and consumer staples are investment materials.

>companies that grow or sell food.

House builders would be the analogous party to that. The parent comment is describing landlords, specifically part-time landlords who buy up family homes and turn them into rental properties. Your analogy doesn't apply to those landlords.

A supermarket is in the business of buying food in bulk and then offering portions of food suitable for a shorter time period. A gas station buys 8000 gallons of gas from a tanker and offers it by the gallon at retail. Target/Walmart buy pallets of jeans and offer them individually to consumers. The supermarket didn’t grow the food, gas station refine the fuel, nor did Target manufacture the jeans.

A landlord is in the same business but for housing: buying in bulk (in this case in the time dimension) and selling a shorter time period’s worth of housing.

No, a grocery store is like a sub-developer, buying in bulk and splitting it up.

There is no other physical necessity sold on a time dimension. I cannot rent you water, or rent you food. Once the grocery store has sold a certain amount of food, they have to re-enter the market and buy more. Once a gas station has sold a certain amount of gas, they have to re-enter the market and buy more. Once a sub-developer has sold a certain number of homes, they have to re-enter the market and buy more.

A landlord does not. A landlord is not the same thing.

Its an interesting way of describing landlords, but we have now worked our way back to GP's original criticism, just stated in a different/less-tangible way: For landlords, the simple act of buying housing (a basic need) allows them to extract a profit in the time dimension, and it shouldn't work like that.

Why not?

Seriously, what is your proposal for how it should work? Presumably the people renting the housing would have bought it themselves if they had the financial resources to do so (unless they just like having housing with no real downside investment risk).

So what would they do without a landlord? If the builders didn't have people to sell the property to, they wouldn't build them and the housing just wouldn't exist.

> Presumably the people renting the housing would have bought it themselves if they had the financial resources to do so

It's actually quite the opposite. By literal definition, every renter that's paying their rent can already afford the housing they currently occupy, because every renter is already paying for (their entire unit) as well as (all cost of maintenance) and (some extra profit for the landlord)

So by definition, every renter is always already paying more than it would cost to own, operate, and maintain their unit. Every renter on the planet (who isn't like, behind on rent) has already proven they have the financial resources to own their unit.

> So what would they do without a landlord?

Save money every month. (By the exact amount of profit the landlord currently makes).

So if you want to move out of your parents house to attend college or to begin your career, you can do so by simply purchasing an entire dwelling in perpetuity and will save money doing so?

That seems unlikely to hold true.

I don't know where "in perpetuity" comes from. Nothing stops you from selling your small apartment condo later or whatever.

But yeah, generally speaking, adults should be able to own their buy and own their own housing, and be able to reside there as long as they choose to. For the same reasons we expect people to be able to own their own coats and shoes and laptops and such, and hold on to it as long as they are alive. And if people change jobs or move to a new city or start a family or whatever, they sell their old one and buy the new one.

The “in perpetuity” doesn’t mean you can never sell it, but it does mean that at the moment of purchase you’d have to pay for the discounted cash flow value of consuming that housing for the expected lifetime of the building and for using the land for the expected lifetime of the land, because that’s what you’re buying: the perpetual right to exclude others from that dwelling and land/shared land until you decide to sell it.

That is unlikely to be affordable or practical for 18 year old high-school graduates starting work or starting college away from home.

If instead of requiring people to pay for the perpetual right to occupy and exclude others, you allow them to pay for that right for only one year or one month at a time, well, that’s what renting already is.

> If instead of requiring people to pay for the perpetual right to occupy and exclude others, you allow them to pay for that right for only one year or one month at a time, well, that’s what renting already is.

No, that's what property taxes are -- and they're already paid out little bits at a time. (Here, twice yearly). Rent vs buy has nothing to do with the "right to occupy", the taxes do, and renters and owners both pay their property taxes in full (renters taxes are rolled up into their monthly rent, but same thing).

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Every benefit a landlord offers is a lie -- it's a benefit the renter setup, and the landlord is stealing credit for. A landlord does not "maintain" any property (the renter does, the renter pays money that gets spent on a property management service that does the work). A landlord does not pay any taxes for the land (the renter does, through monthly rents). A landlord did not build the structure on the property (a construction firm did, using money exclusively paid for by current and future renters). A landlord does not protect the property from risk or damage (the homeowners insurance / property insurance company does that, paid for entirely from monthly rents from the renter tenant).

You could potentially argue that the landlord is a bank, a form of financing to get money upfront and paid back later -- except they don't do that either, the Federal Government does that through a mortgage that the landlord just gets to hold for no reason, so the landlord usually isn't even risking any finances there either. A default doesn't leave a landlord high-and-dry, it leaves the general public (through the Federal Government) holding the bag.

The landlord doesn't even take on any opportunity cost risk in the US, because the US soft-mandates (though fiscal policy) that property values continuously rise on average, and passes this cost on to citizens. So, even if hypothetically all renters abandon the property in a few years, the landlord will be able to 'cash out' (sell) the property, nearly always for more than they paid for it (using appreciation paid for by past renters).

A landlords choice is literally "do I do nothing and get free money forever for no labour" or "do I cash out now, and dump the money into some other place, for the chance at more free money for no labour". That's the only "opportunity cost" they ever have to weigh.

The landlord *literally* *does* *nothing*, they provide *literally* *zero* value. They exist solely to skim money from people. It's a political choice to let these people exist and take the bulk of earned value from a given area, not some kind of need-based response to anything.

I agree with your premise that the cash flows from the tenant to pay for these things, just like employers don’t pay salaries but rather customers pay salaries and the employer just handles the money. (I disagree that property taxes are the only charge to exclusively occupy a structure. Purchase price and property taxes [and insurance] are.)

My parents were (very) small-time landlords having 0, 1, or 2 houses (or half-houses) at the time while I was growing up.

The reason that I’ve stayed away from doing it is that I saw firsthand just how much work it actually is, notwithstanding the claims from people (almost invariably never-landlords) about how easy it is.

This is false. It improperly assumes that the cost basis of a landlord and tenant are the same, which is almost never the case.

A landlord can make a profit charging rent that would not even cover the mortgage payment if the tenant bought it.

The main service landlords provide is maintenance.

There's no direct food analogy but I don't think it's too stretched

> The main service landlords provide is maintenance.

Is that how it works in Europe? In Michigan, landlords mostly exist to prevent maintenance, and extract money.

A home needs so damn little maintenance. They're not providing that as a service. If the person owned a home maintained it - what fix a broken hot water heater for 600? And that's a reason to make more people required to rent?

Isn’t it something like $8K to replace the roof every 20-ish years?

Like $33 per month if it's 20 years, but the average is closer to 30 and can last as long as 50.

The real difference (surprisingly not mentioned yet) is land for housing in cities is incredibly finite. Food, energy and consumer staples can be produced endlessly

Metaverse to the rescue! Soon everyone will lay in their capsules with oculus on and walk the endless green pastures!

The key here being housing in cities and I would also add in nice neighborhoods, in cities. You can still expand the city, and build more cities. For practical matters, land is not finite. Food and consumer staples are similarly finite if you only look at the nicest and most attractive versions of it. There is a constant "shortage" of michelin star food and ferraris

> banning all investment in companies that grow or sell food

Nobody wants to ban companies from building and selling houses. Buying them and keeping them as investment vehicles is something else entirely.

Investment buyers and owner-occupants both provide the cash to the homebuilders to allow them to go build the next home. You can't sell a home without a buyer.

I don't think requiring anyone who wants housing to be financially able to buy an entire home is sensible, meaning that some entity needs to be in the business of paying for more housing than they personally need to allow people to have housing who can't or don't want to buy an entire dwelling unit.

Maybe you want the government to have a monopoly on that activity, but someone needs to provide it or you end up with far less access to housing and far more people living on the street than currently.

Nobody wants to ban them, but also NIMBY.

"I don’t get why housing should be a special carve-out "

Capital and leverage.

Wealthy and access to capital can build, rent and make giant returns.

Students paying off debt cannot even get the minimum down payment.

If everyone rented, and, if transition costs were very simple i.e. you could 'jump homes with ease' - then this would be less of a problem.

Also I would add stability. A government job which can be had for life, they will get a mortgage. A private sector worker or freelancer, may have blips in income, a bad blip means no mortgage payment which is very bad.

The consistency required for 25 years of paying off something lends power to the entrenched kinds of workers.

> Students paying off debt cannot even get the minimum down payment.

This is huge. My wife and I are pretty privileged and own a very modest fixer-upper home on the very edge of a coastal metro area. We somehow managed this only after a decade of paying off ~150k of student loans that our parents encouraged us to take out when we were effectively children.

I have friends who are software engineers who own big houses in the city who skipped a 4 year degree altogether or their parents were able to pay for their education.

The difference between them and me? They were able to pocket that 150k as opposed to giving it to some useless university administrators and various federal lenders.

Private utility companies are often subjected to regulatory board controls. Their local monopoly is limited by a representative (supposedly) of the public's interests. That low-risk investment has its potential returns limited to what a board deems "reasonable".

Some states regulate residential housing, or at least taxes on it, to limit what municipalities and counties may do with their taxing authority. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to regulate the rents charged by "housing provider" individuals or companies to be, on average, 1/3 of average local income.

>Companies providing and selling food, energy, and consumer staples are investment materials. I don’t get why housing should be a special carve-out and don’t see a workable answer to how to provide food for everyone while banning all investment in companies that grow or sell food.

Companies providing and selling food are providing a service. Large investors that buy in bulk, keeping new hosing out of the market to keep prices high, are not really providing anything - they are just a different kind of consumer.

I would make a parallel with the relation between gamers and bitcoin miners in the graphic cards market: miners can pay more and buy in bulk, which makes prices rise and prices out gamers. Only in this case, the people who are being priced out are no longer able to cover a basic need.

If it's so easy, do it yourself then?

Who do you think funds the building and maintenance of property?

The people who rent it after its built, duh?

Not everyone can buy property because not everyone is sitting on unallocated capital.

Housing cooperatives are a thing, most people don't seem very interested, but if you are, you can certainly get some other like-minded individuals together and start one!

> unallocated capital.

i imagine one day when you have " unallocated capital. " this will be a distant embarassing memory for you

>If it's so easy, do it yourself then?

A decent apartment here costs the equivalent of 20 times the average income. you need to have roughly 25% of the cost for a mortgage to be granted, according to local regulation, which would be 5 times your yearly salary. Try to save that considering that just renting (while you save) will easily take 50-60% of your income.

Even those who can do it will only achieve it after more than a decade of paying through the nose.

> A decent apartment here costs the equivalent of 20 times the average income

And there will be places where that will not be true

The role of investors in the economy is ultimately to finance new development.

It's easy to see how this works when an investor is the first owner. If it weren't for the initial investor with the required capital and/or credit to make the purchase, the housing likely wouldn't have been built in the first place.

Now you may ask, what is the role of investors who buy up older properties? They provide valuable liquidity to the market, which provides an incentive for the initial investors to invest. Both investors and regular homeowners alike prefer to own a property that they can easily sell on short notice if needed. Without investors buying up "second-hand" properties, it would be harder to sell a property making homes a less attractive investment. Fewer people would buy new properties, resulting in less new housing being built.

All of this extra development spurred by investment money pouring in leads to lower rents for everyone since rents are pure supply/demand. If you build more, rents will go down.

This simply isn't true in the UK. You can't drive 5 miles without seeing some giant new sprawl of new build housing, yet rent is increasing year on year.

Not just the UK, but virtually everywhere in the developed world.

New apartments are being built because it's more and more profitable to do so. It's more profitable, because the property prices are increasing. The property prices are increasing because rent is increasing. It takes tremendous mental gymnastics not to realise it.

The way to lower the rent is to make renting less profitable (eg. by taxing it higher), limit any homeowner support (eg. tax breaks on mortgage) only to the first residential property and control the mortgage amount that can be provided by banks.

Ideally someone who's buying property to live in should be paying 20%+ less than someone who's buying it to rent.

Then perhaps building even more is what's needed to keep up with the demand. If you keep building at a fast enough pace, then at some point, there will be more housing units than prospective renters, landlords start having trouble finding tenants, and that's when prices will inevitably fall. If demand is rising, then housing needs to be built at an even faster rate. Rising demand can be very hard to keep up with, and I believe that's what we're experiencing right now.

I don't live in the UK, so I'm not too familiar with the specifics there, but what seems to be happening worldwide is that young people are flocking to cities. I'm fairly young myself and I don't know anyone my age who would like to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere - everyone I know was either born in a larger city or moved to one.

In the past, if you were born in a small town, maybe there was a factory nearby and you'd end up working there. Only a few would move out.

These days the factory has most likely closed, and the jobs were shipped off to China. Even if, by some miracle, it happened to still be open, most young people wouldn't want to work there anyway. Young people tend to be more educated and want jobs where they can make use of their education. These jobs tend to be located in big cities.

There are only two ways out of this mess:

The first one is to satisfy the demand -- that means building more, a lot more. No Western country is currently building enough. The demand is so huge that the only way to satisfy it would be very high-density housing. I'm talking 30+ stories apartment buildings everywhere like you see in East Asia. This would have to be accompanied by enough public transport because at that population density, you'd need super wide highways everywhere to support people driving cars. I don't think allowing such construction is politically feasible, however, as it would completely change the character of existing cities.

The other one is to embrace remote work and revitalize small towns. Remote work is not enough since people still demand the amenities cities provide. These are lacking precisely because so many young people have left, causing a negative feedback loop. We need trendy cafes and restaurants, we need WeWork locations, and for young families, we need high-quality school/preschool/daycare. If small towns "gentrify" with such amenities causing young remote-workers to start moving there, this may significantly ease the demand pressure on city housing.

The best solution is probably a combination of the above two.

I think you're locked into a Capitalist view there.

What you say amounts to "without rich people to pay every time they do some work poor people wouldn't be able to build houses". I don't buy it. I think it's perfectly possible to organise society without the driving force being "how can we as a society benefit this tiny cadre of super-rich people without pissing-off everyone else enough that they revolt".

Of course you need to wrest control from the people who can buy "mind control", and vote to allow corruption from the ruling party (cf UK parliament yesterday).

>All of this extra development spurred by investment money pouring in leads to lower rents for everyone //

The more we give to the rich the cheaper everything will be for us plebs, yeah, you're going to have to spend a bit more on your PR to press that idea home.

Who are you suggesting to build houses for rent then? The government? I would love some examples of where that actually went well.

Check out home ownership rates: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ow...

Countries ranking at the top have had a few decades of government provided homes (communist countries).

Now, they are not the most prosperous countries in the world, but my theory is that it's exactly because there is not as big a pressure to work just to have a roof over your head. Which is why foreigners frequently comment on the easygoing attitude and carelessness they see in people.

Supply and demand is the simplistic view of economy taught to middle schoolers, it's disappointing that people use it for reasoning about the world after completing that level of education.

The role of investors in the economy is ultimately to finance new development. ===> False. The role of investors is to make money.

If you build more, rents will go down. ===> In theory True. In practice self builds lower the pricing. The barriers set by bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy are the problem and they cause property prices to go up. EDIT: Restrictions set by bureaucracy is what creates artificial scarcity(think diamonds market)

"They provide valuable liquidity to the market" ===> False. It's long term value storage and/or speculation. The same properties would be bought by new families if they were closer to a realistic price. You'd get the same if not more cash movement if it would be affordable. By affordable I mean: A young couple with minimum wage should be able to pay it off in 10-15 years with no problems. Not in 35-50.

As a sidenote(IMHO): Ideally, property ownership should be limited to 1/+18 year old to prevent/reduce speculations. Maybe 2 if we're talking about adding a holiday home(yeah. I know it's a strech). Companies should not be alowed to own residential properties unless they are a developer. In that case, they can own the newly developed properties for up to ?5? years.

> The role of investors in the economy is ultimately to finance new development. ===> False. The role of investors is to make money.

No. The market pays investors if they managed to allocate capital well, and takes away their money if they happened to misallocate it. The investors take on a risk of loosing their money if their investment goes bad. This is how capitalism is so successful. Investors who make good decisions grow richer and that allows them make more good decisions on how to allocate capital, creating a positive feedback loop. Investors who make bad decisions go broke and that prevents them from misallocating any more capital.

> If you build more, rents will go down. ===> In theory True. In practice self builds lower the pricing. The barriers set by bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy are the problem and they cause property prices to go up. EDIT: Restrictions set by bureaucracy is what creates artificial scarcity(think diamonds market)

I'm all for small government and cutting down on bureaucracy.

> As a sidenote(IMHO): Ideally, property ownership should be limited to 1/+18 year old to prevent/reduce speculations. Maybe 2 if we're talking about adding a holiday home(yeah. I know it's a strech). Companies should not be alowed to own residential properties unless they are a developer. In that case, they can own the newly developed properties for up to ?5? years.

That's exactly the kind of regulation that prevents efficient capital allocation and leads to increased pricing.

"and leads to increased pricing. " ==> I can see the effects efficient capital allocation and no limits on properties owned had on the price of properties in the past 20 years.

Don't take this the wrong way mate but this is exactly the sort of mentality that led to this situation in the first place.

Keep in mind this comes from someone that owns 8 fully paid off flats (going 9 next year) and a good sized house(enough for a family of 6-7) in the country side with 50HA of arable land+forest. I am not complaining about the current laws or that it bothered me in any way. I'm saying that current laws+ speculation are keeping youngsters away from owning a property in a reasonable ammount of time. The way I see it, they live with a chain around their neck for 1 lousy house with cardboard walls.

"The market pays investors" ---> Stakeholders pay investors for sucessful speculation(in other words - investment)

I see.

I am a part of the young demographic you're talking about, so I have experienced the (compared to my parent's time) inflated prices first hand. I only own one investment property (in a large city) so far and it's mostly debt.

If you scroll down a little bit you'll see that in another comment I have written that I think the high prices of today are caused mostly by the influx of young people into cities. It is for the most part simply a case of having too many people wanting to live in a limited geographic area. In particular, they want amenities and jobs which tend to be concentrated in big cities.

The only way out is to either build more (with much higher density) increasing the capacity of existing cities or to revitalize small towns as hubs for remote workers with all the amenities they want. As it stands right now, even with remote work on the rise, myself included (I have a fully remote job yet I choose to live in an expensive city), not too many people my age would want to live in a small town their parents or grandparents may have happily lived their whole lives in.

The reason I believe that is the case is that rents are expensive too. Speculation may affect property prices, but it does not lead to increased rent prices. That is barring a few extremes where people buy housing for investment and don't rent it out or live there, which fortunately doesn't seem to be too common -- just take a walk outside in the evening and you'll get a good idea of how many houses/apartments are lived in. In general property tax is designed to prevent this.

Bad policies like rent control may lead to inflated rents (cheap rents for original residents only mean much higher rents for everyone else), but you do see high rents even in cities without such bad policies.

As a landlord, I charge market rent. I'm happy to lower it if I have trouble finding a tenant, as even an absurdly low amount is much better for me than having the property be empty -- I have a mortgage to pay. So far I haven't had to. In fact, the current tenant offered to pay me more rent than what I had originally listed the property for in exchange for me making some minor improvements to the property! I was more than happy to oblige.

There's one more factor making the situation look worse than it is -- low interest rates. People often calculate how many average annual salaries it takes to buy a place and compare that with the past, but I believe that is not the right metric to look at.

The right metric to look at should be yearly interest as a percentage of one's annual salary. In theory, if the interest rate is cut in half (i.e. from 2% to 1%) you'd expect home prices to effectively double since one can pay the same amount of interest to own a place twice as expensive.

This doesn't quite happen in reality, because when home prices rise, even when accompanied by lower interest rates, a mortgage usually requires a down payment which does scale linearly with the house price along with the principal you are required to pay every month.

You'd be right to point out that this does disproportionately affect younger and less wealthy people, since the more wealth you have, the less you have to rely on traditional mortgages -- you could borrow against your stock portfolio for example, and only pay interest, in which case the interest rate being cut in half indeed does let you own twice as much house with the same cash flow. Of course, you do need to be prepared to weather the storm that may come should the interest rate start rising again, which is precisely why it would be too risky for banks to let the average Joe do something like that -> hence a down payment and monthly principal repayment is required for most mortgages.

I'm not sure what's the best way of solving this. Ideally, your average young person should be able to buy twice the house when the interest rate is halved, but they do need to be shielded from the risk of the interest rate suddenly going up somehow. The government stepping in as a guarantor would likely lead to moral hazard deforming the market which I'm not a fan of. I'm of the opinion that interest rates are mostly determined by the broader market and large secular trends like demographics and technological advancement, as opposed to central bankers, so I don't think this can be solved by attempting to manipulate the interest rate either.

Overall I think the first problem of housing scarcity which is reflected in rent prices is a much bigger issue and solving that would help lessen the effects of the second one.

>> Basic needs really shouldn't be investment material

If you make something less profitable, less of it will be provided.

legitimate (non-speculative) demand is more than enough to fuel construction. People will still need to live somewhere, and therefore will pay for it. They just won't need to pay stupidly high prices because half the offer is hoarded by large companies to artificially inflate the price.

> The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though.

Is it really obligatory? I know that it is often correlated, but it is possible to build apartment tower with decently sized apartments, in a walkable neighbourhood.

Maybe it tends to be more profitable to split apartments into smaller one? While splitting house plots into smaller being less profitable and resulting in this effect?

Walkability is highly correlated with population density. Dense walkable neighborhoods are more attractive. These two together make housing small and expensive.

Walkable neighborhoods need destinations you can walk to. Businesses need a minimum number of customers to be viable, so the denser the neighborhood the more variety of destinations it will have.

To avoid cars taking up the space, it's necessary to have high-frequency public transport, and that also requires high population density to be viable.

> These two together make housing small and expensive.

Nothing small about these houses in the walkable neighbourhood of Roncesvalles:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roncesvalles,_Toronto

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

You still have a (back)yard and can have a garage attached to a laneway. Just up the street there are more modestly sized houses (3 bedrooms usually):

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

Video on the concept by the Not Just Bikes channel, "Suburbs that don't Suck - Streetcar Suburbs (Riverdale, Toronto)":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0

I guess for walkable as in literally able to walk somewhere that works.

But I was thinking about walkability from European perspective where it means you don't need to own a car (the places you've liked to look like every household has a car). When I lived in London on multiple occasions I've had jobs within 20 minute walk from where I lived.

> you don't need to own a car (the places you've liked to look like every household has a car).

I know people who are in the area that do not have a car, but the area has been gentrified over the last few years, so folks have cars 'just because why not' really.

Still generally applies per the label of streetcar suburbs. The area in question is just south of a subway line, and Roncesvalles has a streetcar line going through it to a station.

Isn't Toronto one of the most expensive cities to live in North America? If you are building large houses in a nice, walkable area, you can't fit enough people there to match demand, and so the cost of the housing spikes. The point is that you can pick 2: walkability, large houses, affordability.

* Walkability, large houses = very expensive neighborhoods and gentrification

* Large houses, affordable = rural areas where cars are required

* Affordable, walkable neighborhood = Tiny apartments/homes in an urban area

* A bit of the best/worst of all 3 = Suburbs

Those houses—actually the land that they're built on—are expensive nowadays because living in the urban city is cool again.

Up until ~2000 it was not so, because living in the city was for immigrants and all the WASPs moved into the innter/outer suburbs with their white picket fences. The area of the links is where the Poles concentrated; to the west were the Ukrainians; to the east is Little Portugal (then onto Chinatown); to the north-east is Little Italy. Toronto is a good example of what Jane Jacobs saying 'you don't live in a city, but in a neighbourhood':

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_neighbourhoods_in_Toro...

And the reason why Toronto (SW Ontario) is so expensive, especially since 2015, is because we've had so much immigration in the region, but housing hasn't kept up by pure volume (regardless of density or other factors).

Basically over the course of about 20 years, college educated twenty somethings decided they liked living in the city. When I graduated from grad school, aside from those working in Manhattan, almost none of my cohort moved to a city.

No, it's not walkability that makes apartments in central Stockholm expensive. There's just not much more space there for more houses. For decades car traffic was what was prioritised. Just look at old Slussen which was just a couple of big traffic circles, with narrow tunnels for pedestrians. Or Sergel's torg, arguably the most central square in Sweden, which is dominated by a big traffic circle and with shops and pedestrian areas underground.

Then it is true that too little housing is built, and with the current very low interest rates people can afford to pay a lot for their dwellings. But I don't think it is intentional to not build more.

Car traffic is still prioritised, the new slussen is still an 8 lane highway right through the middle of the city, and the biggest reason it's downsized is that the ring road is now finished. And the biggest reason why Stockholm is managing to be so "car free" is because the highways are in tunnels underground.

I do think it is an improvement that they nowadays put cars in tunnels and people above ground.

But it would of course be much better if they had spent all that money they used for car tunnels on public transport and more bicycle lanes and highways.

Stockholm is not car free by any standards. On the opposite it’s very car friendly.

Too car friendly for my taste and I don’t get why people drive so much.

Stockholm is small enough that it’s walkable with fast public transport connecting everything.

I don’t think it ever took me over 30 minutes to get anywhere, none of my friends drive in town but over half of them own a car so we are often traveling north for skiing, south for the summer, weekends in someone’s parent’s farm, but I have no recent memory of driving around town, there’s just no need, plus, no drinking, so it’s a nonstarter.

Similar prices here in Prague...

I think that the reason is similar to why stocks have appreciated so much - long-term interest rates have dropped as a result of QE.

What central banks usually do is that they buy short-term bonds to affect short-term rates. QE means that they buy long-term bonds to affect long-term rates.

> The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world.

With falling fertility rates, natural population growth in the west is about zero today. If not even (going to be) negative.

Yeah, but the neoliberal governments have opted for mass immigration to suppress wages and maintain property prices.

Here in Sweden the population has increased by almost 30% in the last 15 years.

Similar story in the UK (but a smaller proportion by %, as the base population is higher).

How comes in eastern Europe where fertility is low, immigration is practically non-existent and wages much lower than Sweden, the property prices keep rising too?

Because of internal immigration. Due to povery, lack of investments and lack of opportunities, the countryside there is becoming empty fast as everyone moves from the villages/small cities to the 3-5 big metro areas in the country with top universities and cushy skilled desk-jobs instead of bumming around in rural areas begging for low paying manual labor type jobs.

In western europe, rural areas and small towns, although boring AF, usually have some trade schools or small collages and local industries of their own that still keep locals there and sometimes attract foreigners so not everyone has to scram to the big cities, although big cities there have major housing issues too.

From what I hear, salaries in some eastern european countries, like Romania, are higher than western europe, in local purchasing power.

Wages there are high for skilled workers who can sell their work on the global market, like tech workers, but people are tired of the herd stupidity of the population, political corruption, the incompetente of government institutions, underfunded healthcare, useless police, etc. so they pack up and leave even though they'll take a hit on lifestyle frivolities.

> The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though.

You might have your correlation/causation things mixed up. Walkability means higher quality of life, which means higher demand thus higher prices. In turn, as real estate prices go up, real estate developers are pressured to provide more houses from a limited construction area, thus this means shrinking apartment sizes.

Offering smaller apartments also has the advantage of increasing price per unit of area, while keeping selling prices within reach of the market segment you're targeting, i.e., you might not afford 1M for a house with 200m² but you might afford 500m for a house with 100m².

Walkability demands density, and density intrinsically is encouraged by smaller units. Now, obviously the economic factor you describe can exacerbate this, but fundamentally dense walkable neighborhoods can't have the kind of sprawly mcmansions some people have grown comfortable with in suburbia.

> Walkability demands density, and density intrinsically is encouraged by smaller units.

You can have sizeable homes even in walkable neighbourhoods. Look at any suburb constructed pre-WW2:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

You still have a (back)yard and can have a garage attached to a laneway. Just up the street there are more modestly sized houses (3 bedrooms usually):

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

I live in exactly that kind of pre-war streetcar suburb and yes, I've heard suburbanites complain that the houses in these neighborhoods are too small and narrow and lack attached garages. So yes, even the moderate walkability created by streetcar suburbs is still requires a shift to noticeably smaller homes for many North Americans acclimatized to sprawl.

You have it mixed up.

Firstly, walkability only means higher prices if supply is limited. If it's the default, then supply matches demand.

Secondly, a grocery store needs say 500 potential customers (households) within walking/transit distance. A cafe 2,000. A specialist shop 5,000. Otherwise they need parking for customers arriving by car, which takes up yet more space, making the area less walkable, inducing more car demand and car lanes, etc. The same calculation applies to schools, parks and other amenities.

It isn't possible to reach those customer numbers while giving each family American suburbia levels of space.

> Firstly, walkability only means higher prices if supply is limited.

Isn't it, though?

In fact, not only is it limited, it's also a market on the supply side.

> Secondly, a grocery store needs say 500 potential customers (households) within walking/transit distance.

In consolidated urban areas with medium density occupation, such as city centers in pretty much any relatively large European city, you already have multiple supermarkets at a stone's throw. In some places like Madrid some suburban areas even have multiple supermarkets on the same apartment block.

> the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier

How large is your family?? We are five (2 adults and 3 kids) and we do most grocery shopping by bike.

Think the double question mark is a tad disingenuous there. Everyone will have their own peculiar circumstances.

We, for example, are a family of 4 and our shop for ten days is I would guess 30/40 kilograms. The grocery is 2.5 kilometers away and the journey includes one very dangerous roundabout.

So I think a car is reasonable.

> The grocery is 2.5 kilometers away and the journey includes one very dangerous roundabout.

Well, if city is so poorly designed that it requires cars, then you will need a car.

For comparison, I have small supermarket 250m away (on the ground floor of an apartment block) - and I do not need to cross road to get there. And withing 250m there are several other shops like bakeries, pharmacies, haidresser, convenience shops, clothes shop, fast foods...

>Well, if city is so poorly designed that it requires cars, then you will need a car.

It also very much depends on the geography of the area, some cities simply sit on steep hill slopes and bikes are just not an option unless you're young and super-athletic. Most of "bike-cities" are in completely flat areas and it's not a coincidence.

Increasingly less true with the adoption of electric bicycles.

I'm guessing you pay significantly more for food at these local places than you would at a big box grocery store. Plus, you're less able to buy in bulk to get those time&money savings.

The other big factor that people miss in these comparisons are schools. Generally speaking housing in dense places with good schools is usually very expensive. People that can't afford that typically have the choice between crappy urban schools or good suburban schools. Most of them choose the good schools.

>I'm guessing you pay significantly more for food at these local places than you would at a big box grocery store.

I think you have a very wrong picture of what the GP is talking about, since this is not really the case at all. We're not talking about NY-style bodegas here. In Germany for example, cut-throat discount stores like Aldi that constantly try to lower the price floor for groceries are ubiquitous and can definitely be found in dense neighborhoods. Come to think of it, a while ago I read that they started building apartment buildings with a store integrated in the ground floor because that concept works well for them.

Yeah, I have hilariously expensive convenience shop at ground floor of my apartment block. As bonus quality of products is low.

Twice the distance, 20m away there is another overpriced convenience shop but with a better quality.

I shop in supermarket about 250m away on ground floor of another apartment block that has quite good prices, good enough that it is not worth time and other costs to shop further away for many products.

> People that can't afford that typically have the choice between crappy urban schools or good suburban schools.

That sounds like USA specific problem, in Poland, Kraków all good high schools were in city center. Most of students were using bus/tram.

> I'm guessing you pay significantly more for food at these local places than you would at a big box grocery store. Plus, you're less able to buy in bulk to get those time&money savings.

Not really applicable in Poland, prices in Biedronka supermarket (closest to me is on ground level of apartment tower) are basically the same as in Auchan (big supermarket on suburbs).

> Plus, you're less able to buy in bulk to get those time&money savings.

Last time I checked any savings would be eaten by extra cost and time of going over 2km to the shop.

Ok, maybe the question should be: how often do you buy groceries. We buy most things fresh and do it every day. If we shopped once every ten days then yes, it wouldn't work.

I think that's a huge factor generally between cities and not. If you shop every 10 days you also need a large amount of space to store it. I've also noticed if I can shop every day I'm less sensitive to inventory issues. If they're out of milk today, I'll get it tomorrow. If I won't be back for 10 days, we either go without or I need to make another stop and I'm less likely to shop there.

Well, that's $10 Uber ride, three times a month.

Yeah it's conceivable...but:

1. Uber isn't big in Ireland, so not so reliable

2. Taxi or Uber won't wait for me to shop

3. Taxi or Uber won't have appropriate child seats for my kids

4. My car cost 1,400 euros and is useful in other situations.

But honestly I dislike cars alot - it just makes sense at present.

> AF (anno ford)

Nice reference to Brave New World, I suppose?

Oh, yes, I actually forgot the original reference. While Ford did not invent the automobile, he can be rightfully to be considered the icon of affordable automobile for the masses and hence a clear demarcation line on the design constraints of inhabited areas.

If so, in my view that’s a feature as most large European cities have wide enough roads for cars and the new neighbourhoods that were designed with cars in mind have never outperformed the old areas, where people actually want to live.

London Canary Wharf being the epitome, where no one wants to live so badly the people that work there will pay more to live further away and suffer the horrible commute to go live in a walkable, older area.

Walkability isn't uniform across Europe, Scandinavia or even within a single country: other people have mentioned Stockholm - which is still a walkable town, even though car-traffic is prioritized over cycles and pedestrians[0] - but other towns in Sweden are definitely not modelled for pedestrians. Nyköping is a town I need to visit regularly, and there pretty much all of the grocery and larger stores have been placed in out-of-town complexes, which means that everyone takes the car for almost all activities: I was there at the weekend and sat in a car-queue myself (I was part of the problem) for about ten minutes just to get past one of the roundabouts that accesses one of these shopping areas (which are vast car-parks and ugly buildings effectively cut-off from the town and inaccessible to anyone without a car).

So any characterization of USA vs Europe positing Europe as some sort of walkable-heaven is really just idealized bullshit.

[0] I've received (Swedish?) downvotes for this contention before - Swedish-speaking readers can see https://www.cyklistbloggen.se for good documentation.

I do think there is an ambition to be pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly, but at the same time it seems very appealing to build sprawling American-style suburbs with big-metal-box-style commercial districts that are only accessible by car.

In smaller cities, you often have the same people setting lofty ambitions to become the bicycle capital of united federation of planets while at the same time greenlighting yet another massive mall at the edge of town because "oh my god $BIG_CHAIN_STORE wants to come here, we're gonna be like a big city now!", usually at the expense of the stores that are accessible by foot or by bicycle.

The problem is that to go from not needing a car every day to not needing a car at all is a huge leap that has a lot less to do with the geography of daily tasks and more to do with the geography of everywhere you'll go, as well as things like crime and pleasantness of local spaces, etc.

That's why 85% of German households own a car, even though many of their cities are more walkable. Being more walkable doesn't get you to being car free, it gets you to fewer miles driven. But if your goal is to be car free then you need to focus on a lot more than getting groceries.

But as long as a large majority have cars, you are going to have a car focused city, which is exactly what most European cities are once you get out of the touristy downtown areas. So at best the walkability metric will give you a small downtown area that is not car-focused. That downtown area will be populated primarily by tourists, and most locals will live outside it, in a more car accessible part of the city.

I agree that it is idealised, but the point of comparison is the US which is an extremely car centric society, which makes Europe shine by default

I live in Västerås which is sometimes touted as one of the, at least, top 10 cycling cities in Sweden with 390 kilometers of cycle/walking paths.

And still we have expansive shopping malls outside of town which is heavily in favor or cars. We still have the downtown shopping but it can barely hang by, and parking is very expensive. It would not really have been possible to build all this shopping in the city center, so there is the physical limitations. I think this is the main problem, that the cities outgrow themselves, and it is just so much cheaper and economical to build mega-malls instead of smaller centres for shopping and amenities. They do exist here, but are very small. So you can often get by with walking of bicycling but the "big" shopping is done using a car, the local shops are 99% food-related or restaurants.

Yeah it's just transport and travel that naturally outgrows the pace of walking and cycling, it's just technological progress.

> just technological progress.

Despite the social consequences.

What on earth does that even mean?

Ir seems to imply that it is a demand that technology not change things socially or if they will be bad. Both are flat out impossible as the inventor(s) don't even know what will change ahead of time. It is neither reasonable nor actionable.

If it doesn't imply that it is meaningless as the dumb luddite line "Science never sacrifices, it always murders." How the fuck is a process of discovery supposed to sacrifice anything when it isn't even an entity! Attributing responsibility of murders to it is similiarly daft - why not blame murders on violence instead?

Sure scientests should come out with ethical codes of "what not to do" after infamous incidents like say Harry Harlowe's gratitutousness monkey torture or human experimentation on the vulnerable but moral culpability is on the men responsible, not those who engage in a common different process. It would nonsensic like trying to declare eaters responsible for some depraved cannibal eating an infant!

The question is how will a group of people decide their own key performance measures. Different groups have different KPIs either intrinsically or some statistic, e.g. PDG, ESG indicators, Real return, etc.

If your only or main KPI ignores the social consequences , then you're doing it

> Despite de social consequences.

But I get your point, it's a well known school of thought based on selfishness, I'd guess.

>It would not really have been possible to build all this shopping in the city center, so there is the physical limitations. I think this is the main problem, that the cities outgrow themselves, and it is just so much cheaper and economical to build mega-malls instead of smaller centres for shopping and amenities.

But this is a matter of chosen-lifestyle.

This was really brought home to me talking to my mother-in-law (who lives in Nyköping). She is a keen walker and owns a bike - but when I ranted about the incredible scale of traffic in what is a small and should be an eminently walkable town, she said "How else can people buy their weekly groceries?"

The point of walkable towns (which these small and quite intimate towns in central Sweden could be), is that the center of town would be full of flourishing small and specialized grocery and other stores, and people would buy food from their nearby store, and keep the center of the town alive and busy.

Instead of this, people prefer to sit alone in their car and drive at a snail's pace in a polluting traffic-jam, to a stadium-sized parking-lot where anonymous super-grocery chains are located out of reach of the 'poors' who have no car, and therefore no means of getting there.

People prefer to buy all of their weekly groceries at a single store instead of chasing all over town, and they want to spend as little as possible. This is totally rational. You can't expect them to shop at nearby stores if the selection is poor, prices are high, and parking is limited.

> People prefer to buy all of their weekly groceries at a single store instead of chasing all over town

Right. The change only works when you switch to a model of buying your daily groceries, because the market is close, and smaller, and quick to get in and out of. You may still make a weekly or bi-weekly trip to the big market in a car to get bulk stuff, but each day's meals are based around the perishables that you bought earlier that day or the day before.

(Yes, this is hard, and it only worked for us when we lived in Chicago, and the market was a few blocks away or we passed by grocers on the way to and from work, but it was a nice way to live.)

I sure don't want to waste time going to the grocery store every day. There are about a hundred other things I'd rather be doing.

There is unbelievable competition in Amsterdam right now for grocery delivery. The big markets all offer it, then there are specialized delivery apps like Picnic (cheap), Crisp (quality) and Peter Pot (all reusable packaging). Then, in the past year, the VC funded fast delivery apps showed up: Gorrilas, Flink, Zapp and Getir.

Driving to buy groceries may be necessary today, but maybe not tomorrow.

Yeah same in other big cities, it just shows how incredibly impractical it is to do grocery shopping without a car, and what big demand there is to get rid of this annoying chore. I think it's great! The solution is not walking and cycling, that's for sure.

For me it's not been that it's inconvenient to do it without a car, but that it's inconvenient to do it at all. I used to do my shopping on the way home from work, and the stores were on my way so they added nothing to my travel time, yet they added time spent in shops, and I had no desire to keep doing that when delivery options appeared.

I'm in London, and use Ocado, which means if I can't even be bothered to open the app to decide what to order they'll populate the order for me based on my favourites and my past shops. I know I'll get something that's generally "close enough". When I can be bothered to open the app, I have a starting point that's ~90% right. My weekly shop takes me ~5 minutes.

I can't possibly imagine going back to doing grocery shopping - or pretty much any shopping - myself again. Ever. The exception is the very occasional urge, usually if I'm going for a walk anyway, or want something extra. But even most sudden urges is so much more convenient to handle via Deliveroo or similar.

The big out-of-town supermarkets will die soon enough, and be replaced by warehouses. The shift to deliveries has been steady in the UK at least. Small town centre grocery stores might survive to some extent for that occasionally extra shop.

One less reason to want to own a car for me at least.

> I can't possibly imagine going back to doing grocery shopping

I know, same here, it's so great. I used to have an annoying 30min detour 3 times per week, and now I do my grocery shopping on the phone for 5mins while I'm commuting. The time I save has gone into more cooking, and healthier meals. Delivery is definitely better than using a car. Nobody that already has a full time job should have to put up with such annoying chores.

But delivery services, and services related to house work has a big stigma in northern Europe, people think it's really important that "everyone cleans up their own mess" and you should not be able to "buy your way out". You see CEO:s in companies having kitchen duty doing dishes to get brownie points and you often get very negative reactions to using such services.

It'll change - there are rapidly growing online grocery delivery companies all across Northern Europe too. I think deliveries are very different in terms of cultural acceptance than things like "kitchen duty" which is often more about showing you care about shared spaces, to the point where doing it is often as you say a way of getting brownie points that is cheaper than actually doing something more meaningful.

This seems to be straying from the topic of the article which was making walkable communities more mass market.

Not to pick on you but this sentiment is that sure I can handle groceries without driving to a store. I’ll just have some gig worker deliver it for me.

Personally I prefer shopping in person anyway. It’s not a big deal once a week and usually have multiple errands to run anyway.

> This seems to be straying from the topic of the article which was making walkable communities more mass market.

I don't agree that it's straying from the topic. The shift towards getting groceries delivered is likely to start to kill off the big out-of-town super markets in certain markets, and it fundamentally changes the dynamics where grocery shopping was a big factor for people living in areas with few walkable shops with respect to their real or perceived need for cars.

E.g. my mums neighbourhood in Norway is one she'd likely have had to move away from when she gets a bit older than now if it wasn't for delivery services. She's close-ish to shops, but not close enough to be comfortable carrying lots of groceries any more. Having delivery services means the neighbourhood remains walkable enough for her for longer.

> Not to pick on you but this sentiment is that sure I can handle groceries without driving to a store. I’ll just have some gig worker deliver it for me.

No, my weekly shop is delivered by salaried drivers. They're not paid great (I've checked), but they're certainly not paid as poorly as the typical gig worker and thankfully they've recently been forced to up salaries to deal with the ongoing lack of delivery drivers in the UK. My very occasional extras via Deliveroo are delivered by gig workers, and I'm conscious they're paid shit so I generally tip heavily.

Personally I utterly hate shopping in person unless it's something that I like to look at, and I'm very happy to pay extra to avoid having to.

But to bring it back to the topic, if having someone deliver groceries takes away the main reason why people otherwise need a car, it's a net win. For me it e.g. makes a big difference in where I'd be prepared to live as I don't need to take into consideration whether it'd be a long walk with heavy bags any more. I enjoy long walks. I don't enjoy long walks with bags full of groceries.

I started using Instacart in 2013, after few years completely stopped using and any other grocery delivery. The problem is that often the shopper thinks things are “out of stock” if they don’t find them, or they just buy the wrong item. So each delivery you are always stressing about if you get all the items and if the quality of produce is good enough. I’d rather order stuff from Amazon or another web store that only ships when they have the right product at hand.

Personally don’t believe the supermarkets will go away. I don’t think the business model of these delivery platforms allows having qualified staff to do the shopping.

This is rarely a problem with Ocado, which I use. Their stock management is good - they're not picking up from stores but from their own increasingly automated warehouses. Very occasionally they do run out, in which case they ship you substitutes. If you don't want the substitutes they take it back to questions asked, but it means it's rare I get a delivery where stuff is missing and there isn't a viable replacement.

Ocado is increasingly licensing their warehousing platform internationally, so it's likely to show up near you.

I'd agree with you if we were talking about staff picking from a shop floor - that does not work reliably enough at all, but that model is several years outdated and the only reason some of those still survive is that the more automated systems like Ocado's and a few others are a lot more capital intensive to roll out as it means building dedicated specialized warehouses.

Eh. Living in Beijing without a car, we had a big grocery store near our apartment so a cart was sufficient. There was also a wet market and convenience store downstairs from our complex, while taxis are cheap and plentiful for anything that benefited from a ride out to get.

Back in the states, I shop for groceries daily (again, choosing to live in a semi urban area with two grocery stores in easy walking distance) after dropping the toddler off at daycare. A stroller works wonders. Not sure how I will shop after he starts kindergarten next year.

If you look at the history of the Supermarket, the concept is only about 100 years old - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kullen

From Ruth Cowan's More Work for Mother: "Butchers, greengrocers, coffee merchants, and bakers employed delivery boys to take order from and then carry purchases back to the homes of their more prosperous customers. Smoked, dried, and pickled fish, fruits and vegetables, second-hand clothing, and linens were routinely sold from pushcarts that lined the curbs and traveled the back alleys of poor neighborhoods."

If delivery happens by the same means you would have been doing it (eg. a car), it adds nothing to the communal or ecological value of a neighbourhood — it's merely a consumer's convenience in saving time.

Only if delivery was organized in a way to deliver to multiple households in the same area does it start to make sense from an ecological perspective: but your neighbourhood still has to have those delivery trucks in the walking/biking paths.

A delivery person will probably not do a roundtrip between the store and your house, just for your groceries. They'll have an optimized route for doing a dozen deliveries at once, and amortize the ecological / social cost across all of them.

It's a bit like a bus vs. a car. They're not equal, even if they both drive on the same roads.

Most of the deliveries take place by bike, at least for the fast delivery sites. For the stores and others, they have trucks that deliver to 20-50 people. So, you replace many cars with a single trip.

"any characterization of USA vs Europe positing Europe as some sort of walkable-heaven is really just idealized bullshit"

Ouch, a bit harsh, that. I did not intend to claim Europe does not have unwalkable areas, but that walkable areas are not considered as such novelties. I should have used a more cautious tone.

Never the less, using Helsinki as an example, you can plan to purchase an apartment within one hours of commute from the Helsinki center and never get a car, as there are sufficient amount of neigbourhoods that facilitate that, even though every possible combination of housing and employment does not support not owning a car.

Yes, Helsinki. A capital city. Which is where most of these comparisons end. In most European countries, people have trouble even affording a place close to a larger or capital city unless they inherited money or already live there, at which point the quality of transport rapidly diminishes (same goes for a place in that city with good connections). That includes young professionals working in tech.

When you have to go home by midnight as a student / young professional living outside the city because public transport service ends (or even before that because you don't want to get stranded), or you live somewhere off the beaten path, or even the other party lives off the beaten path a little, getting a car to drive at least a part of that becomes more and more enticing.

I say this knowing that improving public transport to reduce the number of roads and cars on the road has been a topic for a few decades now, and even the most obvious national lines aren't being funded in my country, whereas there is money to create more roads and maintain older roads. I don't doubt The Netherlands is far better than the US, but while possible, there are still tons of hurdles to overcome in going car-less. Japan is another example, where the cities do it much better than we do, but the outskirts arguably do it worse.

I live in a smaller city called Västerås in Sweden and although you will always find problems if you look hard enough. Don’t compare Europe vs US. Compare cities instead and see what they do differently.

In Västerås i lived in the rural outskirts when I was younger and missing the 2am bus meant I had to wait until 6am but I think it only happened once to me.

I also lived in Houston, Texas. I never took the bus because it would take 45 min to walk to the nearest stop. Biking was fun though because I lived near a large reserve but there was always the fear of getting hit by a boar or bit by something poisonous.

In Västerås walking or biking was always easy and felt integrated to the planning of the city. In Houston you had to seek out special areas where it would be nice to walk or ride your bike.

How far could you have walked in the four hours instead of waiting? In case of good weather, no rain, or snowstorm, or such?

It would have taken a little over an hour to walk home and I would have had walking/biking paths and sidewalks most of the way. Close to where I live I would have had to walk on the side of the road but it was very low traffic

The smaller cities in Finland tend to have dedicated bike/pedestrian paths separated from roads, with almost every school age child bicycling or walking to school.

The only way I can understand someone complaining about the lack of such options in Northern Europe is that they haven't lived elsewhere, and seen how bad it could be.

My favorite personal US-is-for-cars anecdote: We once got into cars just to drive across the road, as there was no pedestrian crossing and six lanes of traffic.

It varies a lot! Some places in Finland are almost exactly like some places in America. Huge windowless stores next to a big road. You are supposed to drive from one big parking lot to the next. There are also inside playgrounds for kids and gyms in some of these big box buildings.

https://www.google.fi/maps/@60.2791313,24.9709347,3a,75y,66....

There is usually a bike and pedestrian way also, and there are buses going there too. But it's not human scale. The inside is divorced from the outside. In the winter it's a pretty noir experience as you visit these places after you get out of work, when you need to buy some lumber etc. It's dark and it rains, it's +1 C, there's a highway close by and the orange light from street lights and the car head and tail lights are lighting up the place. Salty water and brown sleet is splashing there from the large mass of cars driving around, and the constant noise from the studded tires. There is no cover, no trees, nothing living really except some barely struggling grass on some traffic dividers. These are built outside city centers, near the outer ring roads. Land is cheap. It used to be a field 30 years ago.

And vice versa, some places in America are just like some nice places in Europe, like a lot of Boston.

Motorised traffic, and cars in particular, are prioritised over non-motorised traffic everywhere I've been in the world, including Stockholm. The problem is cultural. You see, motorised traffic wins by default, unless there are strict rules to stop that happening. If you think about a street full of pedestrians, some will be quicker and stronger than others, but it's not OK for them to use their might to take priority and get in front. In fact, we tend to do the opposite and prioritise people who are less able when we can.

But that's not true on the roads. We teach children to literally fear for their lives around cars. Right now a child is being taught to give way to cars because if they don't the car will kill them. Vehicles with enclosed cabs like cars are the worst because the drivers are completely removed from the road. Their experience is not human. They can't express themselves, which leads to anger and road rage. They can't feel the speed they are travelling at or the effort it is taking. And we just let them assume priority. They've taken the roads for themselves and they are not going to give them back.

> The problem is cultural. You see, motorised traffic wins by default, unless there are strict rules to stop that happening.

It's not cultural, motorized traffic wins because it's more powerful.

> Right now a child is being taught to give way to cars because if they don't the car will kill them. Vehicles with enclosed cabs like cars are the worst because the drivers are completely removed from the road. Their experience is not human.

Subways, trams and buses will also kill them, that's just as dangerous.

Subways, trams and buses are not just as dangerous as cars.

> Subways, trams and buses will also kill them, that's just as dangerous.

Do you have any source for this? AFAIK it's not true. Trams and subways specifically kill way less people than cars, even though in many places they transport more people than cars do.

For buses, IDK, but i would be surprised if a single bus was twice as likely or more to kill a person than a car. And a single bus transports way more people than a car.

In the 1970s, the Netherlands experienced a mother-led political backlash to cars that was expressed in the “Stop Murdering Our Children” movement. Thousands protested and the government responded by deprioritizing cars. People think that Amsterdam is walkable because it is an old city. It is walkable because it’s people demanded it. So cool. This site has a bunch of news articles about the movement:

https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...

>It is walkable because it’s people demanded it.

Can you please come and do the same in Austria, this boomer-mentality country that's all about everyone owing cars and driving and parking everywhere, where cycling is seen as a sport or means of transportation for poor people who can't afford a house in the suburbs?

> Motorised traffic, and cars in particular, are prioritised over non-motorised traffic […]

For a history of how this happened in the US see Fighting traffic: the dawn of the motor age in the American city by Peter Norton.

> Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as "jaywalkers." In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its streets had to be socially reconstructed as places where motorists belonged. It was not an evolution, he writes, but a bloody and sometimes violent revolution. Norton describes how street users struggled to define and redefine what streets were for. He examines developments in the crucial transitional years from the 1910s to the 1930s, uncovering a broad anti-automobile campaign that reviled motorists as "road hogs" or "speed demons" and cars as "juggernauts" or "death cars." He considers the perspectives of all users--pedestrians, police (who had to become "traffic cops"), street railways, downtown businesses, traffic engineers (who often saw cars as the problem, not the solution), and automobile promoters. He finds that pedestrians and parents campaigned in moral terms, fighting for "justice." Cities and downtown businesses tried to regulate traffic in the name of "efficiency." Automotive interest groups, meanwhile, legitimized their claim to the streets by invoking "freedom"--a rhetorical stance of particular power in the United States. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2924825-fighting-traffic

> So any characterization of USA vs Europe positing Europe as some sort of walkable-heaven is really just idealized bullshit.

Or that is just a strawman of what is clearly true, but not literally universal in every single individual location. Biking/walking is utilized at least twice as much in Western European countries as in the US, and often 3 times or more [1]. European cities are, in general, more walkable and bikeable than US cities. If you want to read an in depth article about the many factors that led to US urban sprawl vs European cities, I’d recommend [2].

[1] http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/trnews/trnews280western...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/are-europes-cities-better...

>Biking/walking is utilized at least twice as much in Western European countries as in the US,

What's it look like when you include eastern Europe in that comparison?

I'm sure the rich half of the US bikes a heck of a lot more than the poor half too.

only for recreation, not for getting around... at least that is my anecdotal experience.

It's likely the other way around: most Soviet block cities have not only historic centers equally centered around walking/biking but Soviet city design focused strongly on public transport and walkable neighborhoods because cars were unaffordable to most people.

My experience in ex-Soviet bloc countries is the opposite. Unmaintained sidewalks, parked cars blocking safe walking access, unsafe driving behavior/routing near pedestrians.

I often think of a time in Sofia, Bulgaria where I saw an elderly woman trying to get around a car parked on the sidewalk, up against a wall, by walking on the car bumper with her groceries. It was terrifying and precarious.

yeah, my experience is mostly limited to Poland and Czechia. But I would say that issues around the maintenance of public infrastructure apply to more than just sidewalks. And the attitude of drivers towards pedestrians/cyclists isn't great in most European countries (outside of the Netherlands)

In the US, I'd bet the rich half rides bikes more than the other half but the other half commutes by bike more than the rich half. That likely depends on location, though.

"So any characterization of USA vs Europe positing Europe as some sort of walkable-heaven is really just idealized bullshit."

This is actually bullshit.

Europe is fundamentally more walkable, it's not even an argument.

In Europe walkability is great in cities but you usually pay a premium on housing because land is scarce.

You can walk in the suburbs but there’s often no where local to go because the shops, schools, and workplaces need a level of scale to be efficient.

You'd be surprised. Housing in Berlin is cheaper by far than housing in the least walkable cities in Canada.

I meant a premium for being central compared to 20km outside the city centre for a similar property.

I haven't been to Sweden but I lived in Germany for three years and never felt the need for a car. Partly it's walkability, partly it's great public transport. I toured a lot of Europe by train and bus and trolley, and could get anywhere I wanted as long as I was willing to walk a mile or two.

> So any characterization of USA vs Europe positing Europe as some sort of walkable-heaven is really just idealized bullshit.

What’s “bullshit” is using the example of satellite malls, a global phenomenon due to obvious reasons (land and real estate pricing) as somehow proof that Sweden or similar countries aren’t walkable, without mentioning the huge divide in the feasibility of using public transport.

It’s not equal if a mall is kilometers away from the city center, but in one case you have public transport available and in the other it’s for all practical purposes impossible to get there without a car.

In addition to that, even locations outside the city center are often safely walkable, if you would want to. This comes down to a difference in city planning and the assumed value of pedestrian traffic. I seriously don’t understand how that can be a contentious point, it’s well known that city planning in the US is more car-centric than that in Europe, and that consistent public transport is almost unheard of in the US outside of large cities. That doesn’t mean all of the US is impossible to access without a car, nor does it mean all of Europe is possible without one, but the difference in planning is completely obvious.

So often I read a German engineer lament that one pedestrian is causing hundreds of motorists to stop.

I listen to French people in documentaries and podcasts who can't go five minutes without using an analogy about cars and garages.

I appreciate your sharing your personal experience, and counterintuitive points are always welcome - but please don't point the threads flameward like this:

> So any [...] as some sort of [sarcastic overstatement] is really just idealized bullshit.

You made the pH of this discussion noticeably more acidic with this swipe, and the parent did not deserve it. It's not hard to make comments in a swipe-free way—for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29105572 is making a similar point to yours in a conversational style, as opposed to a cross-examining one. That's what we're going for here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Related: Most European cities are comparably beautiful compared to North American ones. Pick a random European city, and it's probably more aesthetically interesting than any in NA. I'm curious why this is the case (Older / less centrally-planned? A subjective difference in tastes?)

Well, the USA is only ~250 years old and most of its planning was done in the past ~150 years, whereas most European cities date back to the middle ages or even before that, growing much more organically, often around a castle, wall, church, or all of the above. It's only in the past 100 years or so that cars are a thing.

But the other is just different approach to planning. I live in a relatively new, so-called "vinex" suburb [1], a neighbourhood built according to certain specifications - relatively small gardens, bike- and pedestrian safe, the only cars you see are the ones heading to- and from their house, the rest is redirected to a ring road. And, very low uniformity in housing designs; common themes, but a lot of diversity.

That said, at the moment we have a massive housing crisis - we need 100K houses in the next decade, probably more - and I feel like the only way to solve it is to build boring houses, big apartment complexes, that kinda thing. The alternative is population reduction, but nobody wants that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinex-location

> we need 100K houses in the next decade

That's a lot for a country with 17M inhabitants. Is that mostly driven by urban flight (not enough flats where people want to be) or is it more about population increase or less people living together (no enough flats anywhere)?

The UK has the same issue. One cause is the house builders have permission to build a lot, but only do so slowly to not affect the price. Another cause is the market and government’s mess with mortgages. The southeast has it worse but it exists everywhere that employs enough people densely (ie multi storey offices often reached by public transport).

> the USA is only ~250 years old and most of its planning was done in the past ~150 years, whereas most European cities date back to the middle ages or even before that, growing much more organically

Agree. This is key. To be sure, Europeans are busy making plenty of wasteful American-style car-based future ghost towns around the edges and satellites of their beautiful (or at least walkable) dense old urban cores. Places tourists don't usually see, what I recall travel writer Rick Steves referred to as "Dullsdorf or Nothington".

Dresden was leveled by bombings in WW2, and rebuilt. There was an attempt to preserve its architectural heritage - red tiled roofs, cobble stone streets, large piazza at the center. There's a burnt church somewhere that's preserved but everything else is new. I remember it being nice, but not as charming as similar places which had preserved its centuries of haphazard, worn, old buildings and alleys. In the main square there's plenty of swank shops, Wempe, Chanel; the bricks were new, so were the unstained roof tiles, the avenues were wider, the water drain quickly, but I remember it as a Epcot version of a European city; there was a tram service, not sure if that qualifies as walkable but it was easy to get from one end of town to another.

Düsseldorf is similar. There is an “old town” which is mostly similar to what you describe and the rest is with some exceptions a fairly generic modern city along a pretty river. Nothing wrong with it but not exceptional.

There are currently 720k unsold houses in the US alone[0]. How is building 100k more going to help anyone but builders?

There are probably other factors in play here rather than simple availability. Perhaps we should stop treating housing as an investiment?

Edit: not sure if I misunderstood your comment to mean that 100k more houses should be built in the US or elsewhere. My point still stands I believe.

- [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ESALEUSQ176N

North American cities were destroyed, and we did it to ourselves. I can't find the link atm but NotJustBikes did a video on youtube showing how current car-dependent sprawling London, Ontario used to actually have a nice downtown. Or for a graphic example check out

https://citymonitor.ai/transport/parking/what-bombs-did-rott...

Just acres and acres and acres of asphalt hellscape where there was once life.

Probably only the old parts, turn of the century apartment buildings. Construction from the 50-70s looks like communist dystopia even in western europe, and newly constructed buildings are also not at all ornamented or colorful

This is selective bias. Many European cities were devastated by bombing in the 1940s, forcing rebuilding of terrible building stock. Various dictatorships, of both the right and the left, have blighted cities around the continent with monstrous buildings. Past generations of urbanists rammed highways through cities or built ugly social experimental housing projects.

European towns and cities are mixed.

Maybe don't try this experiment with an ex-communist-state cities full of dreadful concrete blocks of flats.

I'd guarantee it is. Every American city is slowly homogenizing to a soulless mash of 5 story apartment buildings separated by strip malls of Chipotles and Jamba Juices. Local businesses are virtually extinct.

"Most of Europe is more or less walkable"

Europe is not just Berlin, Helsinki and Paris.

There are a lot of very rural areas where you need a car to get things done.

Finland is beautiful, one reason for that is very low population density (1/2 of US and 1/10 of other european countries).

Finland has fewer people in the entire country than Singapore. I’m not exactly shocked that it’s capital city is walkable.

> but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor.

Unintentional design, or rather emergent structure (as extolled by Jane Jacobs who was/is a guiding light for urbanists), is also a reason. So things like not destroying neighborhoods for multi-lane expressways, and not doing exclusive residential zoning, thereby allowing small scale non-industrial businesses to be interspersed with housing.

>I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier

I've lived in the center of an older US city, and one thing I loved was how easy grocery shopping was. I went to the market almost daily, so I never needed a vehicle to get 10 bags of groceries home. Friends who lived outside the city always asked if it felt limiting to not have a car, but I actually found it very freeing. I walked or took transit, and while the transit wasn't usually time-competitive with driving, it was basically free time for me to read, think, etc.

The article applies to farmers markets too. By any measure, farmers markets are better than supermarkets and takeout. Cheaper, faster, more convenient (if there's one nearby), more friendly, cleaner, healthier, but talk about their benefits and prepare to be called privileged and lectured on single moms in food deserts who only have time for McDonald's.

Do they think people at farmers markets want to wall them off and keep poor people away? A moment's thought and they'd realize everyone involved is trying to fill in food deserts, reduce big agriculture subsidies, that McDonald's is causing poverty in time and money, but their defensiveness and I'm-so-smart-ness blinds them.

I love the idea, and I'd never push for fewer farmer's markets, but I must say I've always found them more expensive, slower, and less convenient with hardly any selection. I often wind up heading to the supermarket immediately after, because I need another ingredient to cook what I've just bought.

This isn’t my personal experience. Farmers markets are always more expensive than going to a grocery store. Substantially so as well.

Otherwise I would spend more time at them.

I don’t get why there are so few walkable places. The demand is there and willing to pay a premium, and the small lots and narrow streets should make it fairly inexpensive to build.

Regulation, education, inertia. All of those tell specialist things like "streets have to be at least this wide in residential areas". Zoning can make it impossible for the requirements of daily life to be in walkable distance.

There is also some scale issues. A walkable city is great. A walkable neighborhood might not be, not if it is too small and everyone has to drive to work, to the grocer and to the doctor. Public transport makes only sense if it can move enough people. All drivers (so everyone) will be uncomfortable with the walkable, but disconnected small neighborhood.

There has been some rethinking in the last decade or so and cities are trying to become more walkable, more livable and less car focused with increasing frequency.

> A walkable neighborhood might not be, not if it is too small and everyone has to drive to work, to the grocer and to the doctor.

If a "walkable neighborhood" has none of those things, it's really a neighborhood with sidewalks.

There are doctors, dentists, grocers, a theatre, bars, restaurants, hardware store, ... all within walking distance in my neighborhood. Neighborhoods can be like that.

Zoning is the biggest impediment. Most US cities have parking requirements, rules for setbacks, and limits on number units in a building.

There is a strong incentive against changing the rules to allow more construction because scarcity increases the value of existing units.

Also, residential-only zoning that prevents the kind of small businesses that give people any reason to actually walk around walkable neighborhoods.

> Zoning is the biggest impediment. Most US cities have parking requirements, rules for setbacks, and limits on number units in a building.

Surely that's not it, because zoning in general and urban planning in particular is what determines walkability, and that is determined by design. Even if you have the most stringent requirements for parking, plans are already produced with that in mind.

Therefore, either a urban area is designed with walkability in mind, or it is not.

Walkability requires a certain degree of density and mixing of residential and commercial buildings. When a lot of zoning is only single family homes on large plots with the commercial structures separated a few miles away, walkability becomes basically impossible.

When you don't have those requirements, it doesn't even make sense to design around walkability, as nobody would walk to you even if you built a walking path to their doorstep.

It is a little crazy. I live in a pretty little New England village that is very walkable and has a functioning two-block downtown (real grocery stores, banks, pharmacy, etc with 2nd and 3rd floor apartments).

The crazy thing is the current town zoning would not allow for most of the existing small lot residential and all of the downtown commercial properties to be built now due to minimum lot sizes and parking requirements.

We already have a hole in the middle of downtown due to a couple of local part time real estate investors buying the one eyesore and having to tear it down as it was literally falling down and then not being allowed to rebuild on the same footprint because of the need for 1 car parking space per bedroom for their upper floor apartments.

I see the need for some zoning but enacting laws that directly prevent the thing that everyone that lives here loves about the town is crazy.

Aside from zoning, there's also wealth disparity. What do I mean? My local historic neighborhoods are beautiful, walkable, with modest houses, and the most expensive place in town by a long sight. People are buying up adjacent properties, knocking everything down, and building big, fancy houses on the merged plots. Essentially, thanks to tremendous wealth, people are inserting suburban houses & attempting to have it all - large modern house in cute old walkable neighborhood. The end game, unfortunately, is obvious.

My cynical view is that if you put not nice people into nice places, you make the places not nice, not the other way around. 99% of the time.

It seems weird to use ‘having a lot of money’ as a proxy measure for how nice someone is likely to be though?

This is covered well in Parasite. There are degrees of “niceness”, some of which are enabled when money is no object and you don’t have someone taking a piss on your house.

You’re right, maybe stable, tidy and can afford a lawnmower would be a better pidgeon hole than ‘nice’ :)

In the US housing developers heavily lobby local government officials to overturn or grant exemptions to laws requiring the preservation or construction of communal spaces. It’s not something citizens choose. It’s corruption at the local level.

The UK Government set up a commission to look at how to improve the quality of places, which reported last year: https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/building-better-buildin...

The UK has an amazing abundance of models for excellent dense walkable villages and neighborhoods... and then builds endless swaths of American-style car-based single-family houses, with not a grocer, chemist, cafe or pub within walking distance.

Only one motivation is powerful enough to propel such wave of single-use disposable crap over this green and pleasant land: shortest possible timeframe profit for landowners, developers and builders, ably aided and abetted by jobsworth planning departments and clueless in-their-pocket Councils. Bleh.

And let's not forget the elephant in the room. Money.

How much would it cost to add, say, a cycle lane to an existing road 1km long if it required more than just painting the pavement? £100K? More? How many Kms would be required to change even a small town over to be more pedestrian friendly? I just don't think the money is there.

Also, you have many places in the UK that to pedestrianise the centre would create genuine bad problems for drivers. Many small towns simply don't have more than one main route through them.

But then it does depress me when they create new build estates that they don't seem to take that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do it right from the beginning.

The Cambridge City Deal assigned £8M to install 5 new off road cycle lanes around the city, IIRC. I don't have the actual costs and delivered distances to hand (the data is online to be found somewhere), but we're talking about a few miles.

I guess there's also some of "beggars can't be choosers" paternalist mindset going on when _deciding for the poor_ what they _deserve to have built with our money_.

Bizarre article. Calling out working class housing built in 1880 seems to ignore why it’s not longer a working class neighborhood - because it’s now in a prime location.

While that's a good point, the article remains spot-on. People would readily pay 1/2 to 3/4 the price of that neighborhood to live in a place that felt similar in terms of the general neighborhood even in a much less prime location. By contrast, the people who choose to live in this particular prime location would not prefer to live in the same location if the neighborhood were razed and replaced by car-dependent style development but in the same land.

The prime location will always have a premium over other locations, but that is far from the determining factor here. There's *tons* of examples of formerly-prime locations that were razed and made car-centric with tons of parking lots and such, and they aren't so desirable or expensive, they are crap and far less people want to live there.

Right but what’s the argument? That the people who razed it 50 years ago should have known that the old style would be more desirable in 2021?

I mean, cities change. Shit gets torn down, neighborhoods that were wealthy go to crap, neighborhoods that were crap become trendy.

The article infers there is one “right” was to design a city and complains that people in the past didn’t know that.

No, the point is that these neighborhoods aren't just relativist taste and opinion. Human-scale walkable life is more deeply and objectively a better way to live.

Your last sentence gets in the right direction. There are TONS of "right" ways to design a city. ZERO of them are car-dependent. Car-dependent building approaches are a completely new experiment that is less than 100 years old, and it is a failure.

This is not about styles and trends. All the changes in styles and trends across huge diversity of human societies went along for thousands of years without car-dependency.

Around 80 years ago, people started building fundamentally unsustainable, impoverished, inhuman, financially insolvent styles of development on a grand scale, and it turns out that about any place that has been protected from that experiment is now desirable, and it's not because the features are culturally associated with wealth or because they are in historic prime locations, it's because car-dependent life is crappy, and people with enough wealth to escape it without cramming into extreme density are often doing that, and it's possible to build medium-density non-car-dependent life for far more people and we should be doing it.

This approach seems to be based on “there is only one right way to live and that’s without a car”.

You may not like a lifestyle that is car dependent, but plenty of people do. I’ve lived in cities with high density and excellent transit and what do people buy when they can afford it? A car.

Your claim that these areas are desirable because they aren’t car dependent is clearly not supported by fact. Plenty of areas are highly desirable and people still want their cars.

This article is written like someone complaining about someone else’s taste in wine. It’s all arguments about subjective tastes.

That's an uncharitable and incorrect view of what I'm saying. There's TONS of right ways to build cities and communities, and ALL of them are not car-DEPENDENT. Whether some people want to use cars is a more fuzzy and complex question, and there's definitely a place for them and lots of good arguments for the benefits of cars, especially for specific cases. But there's no good case for building communities that are fundamentally car-DEPENDENT where you CANNOT live there other than by complete car reliance.

It's not about subjective tastes. Objectively, car-dependent places are financially and environmentally unsustainable. It's a matter of scale. Some individuals can live car-focused lives within a system that is not entirely car-dependent, and that can be fine. Cars can have a place. But if everything is car-dependent, we get non-resilient places that are not economically productive enough to maintain the massive amount of infrastructure that car-dependent communities have.

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

Subjective tastes are like choosing the color for painting a house. It's not subjective to notice simple facts like that cars take up orders of magnitude more space than all other forms of transit.

You are completely right that many people want cars. But people also want to be free of traffic jams. There is no actual way to build a system in which everyone has all that they want when our wants are incompatible. These things have to be balanced.

A lot of people might want to live in beautiful wilderness locations, but if we let everyone build homes there, the wilderness goes away. Saying that it's wrong to ruin the wilderness with suburban sprawl doesn't in the slightest deny the fact that many people like living in the wilderness and countryside. We simply can't all live in beautiful wilderness. But we COULD all live in non-car-dependent walkable places. So, while living in a special wilderness or ocean-side cliffs and so on is necessarily scarce and elite, it's possible to build enough human-scale walkable places for everyone who wants to live that way, and it's a tragedy and market-failure that we don't do that — and THAT is the point of the original article.

I would imagine most people agree with the What and the Why of the article in about 30 seconds of reading. What I think is missing from the article and perhaps from all of us is the How. Tracing the line from urban design aesthetics to policy to legislation to legislators and lobbyists is a very obscure line with many sharks looking to stay obscure and keep their cut in the pipeline I imagine.

This probably explains the prevalence of bike lanes (I do use them frequently) because its so much easier for polticians to say “I built that!” than it is to say “I prevented abstract concept X!”

Great article. I’d like to see a follow up addressing how to get from A to B without causing displacement due to gentrification. The article treats it as a false scare but it is real and can’t be overlooked. Millions of houses can’t be built over night so there will be gentrification. Sucessful development needs to maintain mixed income, and price caps/rent control need to exist in order to avoid that IMO. Property developers will not do that without a helping hand from the government.

For NYC's little island read London's Marble Arch hill https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2021/07/londons-worst-a....

The things Westminster have done to persuade themselves people don't want Oxford Street pedestrianised.

When housing markets are extremely tight, people fear improvements. Improvements mean the neighborhood will be more desirable. More desirable neighborhood means people with more money will be interested. More people with money means higher rents. In tight housing markets, people come to see the unlivability of their neighborhood as a shield to defect attention of people who could price them out.

Is is just my feeling or has there been a large increase in anti-car sentiment, interest in neighbourhood niceness and walkability, etc?

There has been. With work from home, people are spending way more time in their neighborhoods, and online. They’re simultaneously discovering that their neighborhoods aren’t very nice, and (through urbanist social media) that nice walkable neighborhoods do exist!

When you don’t have to commute by car to your job, you spend more time walking around your neighborhood. It’s nice if it’s a nice neighborhood to walk around.

It's bizarre how this article defines "nice" in terms of architecture and walkability. In the US most people care more about crime rates and school quality. If the local school is rated 2/10 and there are drug dealers in the neighborhood park then it doesn't matter how many shops and restaurants are within walking distance.

I suppose it depends on how you define walkability. I think a good walkability metric decreases when you no longer prefer walking — which tends to be the case when the neighborhood park becomes a drug hotspot, per your example.

I read this and think “ah, well there are many more non-rich people so the density requirements make this sort of thing complicated” and then I look out the window over the European city I live in where it has been achieved. Then I think about the town an hour away with a vibrant community and pleasant human-scale environment. What makes it all possible? Good transit. Clean buses. The US simply doesn’t have that, and probably not even the political will to make it happen. What a shame.

I'm afraid it's not simply about political will. To have affordable and safe public transport, one would need to completely revamp the fabric of American society

Why is there no public transport? Because it's losing money due to low ridership. Why is the ridership low? Because people are afraid of dangerous neighborhoods, wackos, homeless and other people of lower castes. Why all of these factors? Because of massive inequalities, rugged individualism, broken healthcare, missing social nets,... Unless that is fixed, the public transport won't be a decent option. Driving everywhere allows people to form a bubble that shields them from daily witnessing the ills of the system

> Why is there no public transport? Because it's losing money due to low ridership. Why is the ridership low?

This certainly is not it, because public transportation is in general a public service whose main output is not turning a profit but positive externalities that boil down to quality of life. Consequently, there are plenty of cities around the world where their public transportation network is subsidized to the point where the service is completely free to use.

Let's put things in perspective: in the US, Texas wasted close to $3B dollars to expand a highway to a whopping 26 lanes[1]. Wouldn't it be far better if that cash was instead used to put together a commuter railway service that serves the same route, or even in Houston's appallingly tiny light rail network[2]?

[1] https://www.cntraveler.com/story/the-worlds-widest-highway-s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METRORail

> Why is the ridership low? Because people are afraid of dangerous neighborhoods, wackos, homeless and other people of lower castes.

Where do you get this? PT ridership goes down where it is unreliable, has insufficient hours, has too few runs and where stops are far away. These things are all from investing far below what the public needs.

What I have personally seen over and over is that PT fills up with all the people who can overcome the hurdles and make it work. Remove more hurdles, get more riders.

He doesn't talk about who is going to pay for everything. In a road with lots of private ownership, one person can improve their property but they can't force their neighbours to do it as well.

The only likely method is the deep pockets of the developer but why would they do this to only sell the properties to low-income families, which might be zero ROI when they might as well do the same in an up-and-coming city and sell for muchos dollars to the rich?

I love the idea but the main reason why most good ideas are not implemented is that they are much more difficult than it sounds, often for many reasons, not one.

You want every topic covered in one article? Strong Towns has done the math on who pays for everything: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

The Strong Towns vision is pretty holistic and deals with all the interrelated issues and their difficult challenges. It's the exact opposite of naive just "this should be easy" attitude.

Even Europe is terrible because we have no urbanism except on areas of cultural heritage, square cheap shops, add panels etc. really destroy everything for all.

In a capitalist society, when you find something that people are willing to spend above average on, there's usually no shortage of providers trying to produce it. Why isn't that happening in this case?

Put simply, zoning doesn't allow it.

and land — largely speaking — isn’t producible. a capitalist can’t really spin up a land factory when demand for specific land grows whereas one could spin up a silverware factory as demand for at-home dining grows.

> Would you like to raise a family in those conditions?

apparently hundreds of millions of people already do it...

A provocative answer to your comment: would you like to raise your family where your kids can walk to school and play with other kids in a nearby park at walking distance and never be afraid of mass shootings?

I get the impression that huge houses are a symptom of a bigger issue: people in US feel they need a lot of "safe space" around them because the more they are isolated from strangers, the more they feel safe.

I would like to (and do) raise my family like that. We live in Cambridge, MA; our kids walk to school and to play with friends in the park, I’ve never feared a mass shooting*, we have reasonable accommodations for cars, bikes, and pedestrians.

* - Do you live in fear of drowning, choking, or bicycling? All are significantly higher lifetime risks in America than mass shootings. Drowning is 10x more likely but few live in fear of it. Use statistics to guide your intuition on fears. (I’ve had well-meaning family members caution me about sharks before a day at the ocean. Sharks are sensational and sell ads, but are not the actual risk.) https://www.businessinsider.com/us-gun-death-murder-risk-sta...

It's sad that "riding inside a car, van or truck" and "pedestrian" are so high on that list, but also surprising that "bicycling" is so significantly safer.

Lifetime odds of dying due to an activity is a poor indicator of how safe that activity is.

Lifetime odds of dying due to an activity = Probability of dying due to activity while performing it x Expected number of times that activity is performed in lifetime. (Only the first factor corresponds the inherent safety of the activity.)

It is not that bicycles are more dangerous than sharks. It is that people are cycling much more than they are interacting with sharks.

It is not that walking is more dangerous than cycling. It is that people are walking much more than they are cycling.

Choking can happen anywhere you are; preventing accidents from drowning and bicycling is 100% under your control (just don't swim or ride a bike). Mass shootings don't and aren't.

>preventing accidents from drowning and bicycling is 100% under your control (just don't swim or ride a bike)

With a risk profiles like this I'm starting to see why emergency covid measures never end.

I mentioned relatively extreme measures that are still reasonable for the sake of argument. The point is you can greatly reduce risk from these activities without affecting your life too much (except maybe if you're a professional swimmer/cyclist); the equivalent for shootings would be to never leave your house and that has an obviously much worse impact on most people's lives.

Walkability isn't a binary thing I guess. I'm in a pleasant but unexciting town (population 12K) in the UK and everybody is in walking distance of the schools, the supermarket, parks and leisure centre. Most houses here are 3 or 4 bedroom (but probably small compared to US family houses and gardens aren't huge), but you do really need to drive to say get to many types of shops, a cinema or any restaurant that isn't an Indian or Chinese for example. I get the impression that most people drive to work (most jobs are in larger towns nearby, some come be reached by train but not all). I suppose there is a balance between house prices, space and the level of walkability and like many families here, this is the compromise we've gone for.

> A provocative [...] mass shootings?

Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29104807.

Judging from the subsequent posts nobody took it as a flamewar, but as an announced provocative answer aimed at exposing the hyperbole contained in the message I was replying to.

The problem is that in the general case it would with high likelihood lead to a flamewar.

Dropping a lit match in a dry forest is a bad idea even when that particular match doesn't happen to catch fire.

> Dropping a lit match in a dry forest is a bad idea

I'm sure you studied this metaphors a lot over the years, but that wasn't a match in a dry forest, it was the image of a match in a dry forest with the label "this is not how you should do it"

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

That's much too complicated. What you posted was flamebait. Please don't do that on HN.

The planet boils because Americans are afraid of living in places as beautiful as the ones they vacation in.

If you're an American who'd like to escape, check out the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, or Portugal's new visa for remote work. PT's NHR tax program makes it very popular for FIRE too.

It's not Amsterdam but moving to Dublin from LA did wonders for my happiness. The next goal is living somewhere my kid can walk or cycle to school.

(edit - in case my other comments look inconsistent - I moved from LA to Dublin then back to San Diego for a year (bad idea, that!) then back to Dublin and recently to a dirt cheap place an hour away from Dublin because Dublin's overpriced and still has no neighbourhoods I'd like my child ride a bike to school in)

Did the change in weather not upset you? LA's winters are mild at worst, I think that'd be the biggest hurdle for me.

I hated summer in Los Angeles and remember running the aircon in February thinking "I need to get the hell out of here".

January is rough but overall I prefer Irish weather.

Winter in Ireland are wet and dark, but they're not actually all that cold compared to anywhere in the northern US

That sounds pretty nice. I hate unfiltered sun.

Not to burst your Amsterdam bubble, but you basically have to be a millionaire to be able to buy a house there right now. House prices have been rising like crazy in the Netherlands and Amsterdam in particular. Amsterdam is now for the elite, basically the point the article is complaining about.

OK, but every single other town of any size in the Netherlands has an area comparable in walkability to Amsterdam. Maybe there’s no famous museum and not the same energy level, but you can hop on the train and go get it.

It’s called the “bid rent curve”, and almost every satellite town of a big European city can be a local spike where there’s urban density around the train station. Americans don’t really have trains, thus screwed.

Sadly true, after watching NotJustBike's video on Halloween I looked up Apollobuurt and it looks like places are a million or so (still cheaper than SF, at least!)

A second-tier city like Utrecht, etc. is more likely. Or just staying put because $currenthouse is paid off and that's awfully nice.

Amsterdam house prices are high - but interest rates are negative - and you can get very low down payment loans.

You just have to have faith that the Dutch government will continue to distort the market further and further.

Most people on here could probably get a loan to buy an apartment in Amsterdam or a modest house not even that far outside of the city (which is still super bike-able and walkable).

I'm in the process of DAFT right now. I got lucky and found a decent place at a decent rate in the center of Amsterdam (this rate is only really affordable because I work in tech, though). I've taken exactly one taxi ride so far (airport to airbnb with lots of luggage). Every other time I've walked, cycled, or taken public transit (OV Chipkaart is really great). It feels great to just...be around people.

> I got lucky and found a decent place at a decent rate in the center of Amsterdam

The 2021 US ver of Finding A Place To Live is likely to mean you paid all cash+above listed price or you beat out hundreds of other applicants for one of the few rentals.

From what I'm reading, much of Europe is in a similar state.

That's wonderful! If you care to write about your experience with DAFT I'd love to read it. shawnindutch.com kept a blog about it for years but that appears to be a dead link now :-(

I'm not sure there'd be much to write about to be honest. There are a lot of resources and Facebook groups but we all basically use the same exact process. What are you curious about?

I suppose I am more curious about getting on in Dutch society, making friends, etc. I worry we'd have a hard time finding friends, especially since we're in our 30's and have two young kids, but then again I messaged NotJustBikes and he mentioned they moved with kids older than our own and they've gotten on fine.

I think as long as you make an effort you'd do great :)

>I moved from LA to Dublin then back to San Diego for a year (bad idea, that!) then back to Dublin and recently to a dirt cheap place an hour away from Dublin

I'm sure all those long distance flights help the planet a great deal.

They do not.

But this article is about nice places, not particularly about climate breakdown, which is another pressing issue.

At the end of the day I want to live somewhere drivers don't get away with killing kids cycling to school.

There’s many towns in the USA where kids can walk to school and shops are walkable, etc. especially on the east coast there are numerous pre-war towns like this.

But your experience is in California, a place notorious for being designed around the highway.

The walkable bit I see, but proper, fully segregated cycle infra is very rare.

Yeah, if you want to ride a bike then you ride on the street and try and stay to the side. Kids can ride on the sidewalks.

It works for me because I can walk to my butcher, coffee shop, various restaurants, book store, etc and if I need to do more then I can drive my car. Sometimes we'll bike for fun when going to places not too far away. I only end up driving a couple times a week generally. I think it's a great balance and I wish more towns were like mine since the typical home near me is around $1M and out of reach for many people.

This sounds like my neighborhood (Coolidge corner, Brookline)

Where are you?

> There’s many towns in the USA where kids can walk to school

Especially where there's no bus transport within 2 mi of the school. Kids walk to school inches away from dangerous roads.

> many towns in the USA shops are walkable, etc

"Many" is doing a lot of lifting here. What's a good estimate of the percent of platted neighborhoods (or Census Designated Places or zip-codes or whatever) that are generally walkable? Less than one? Less than .1% or .01% or .001%?

I don't think you can get a quantity (ie ".1%") from a non-quantifiable thing like "generally walkable". I consider my town very walkable except for grocery stores, which is a pretty core aspect.

Not sure, but in the north east many of the old towns have residential and commercial very close to each other. Train lines run through town and the different stops have commercial around it with residential a short walk. Schools are spread across the community and crossing guards exist to help kids cross streets. Otherwise they use the sidewalk.

I think people have a weird perception that everywhere in America is sprawled suburbs. People have choice here. Some people want to live in towns that are walkable and some people don't. I know a lot of people that would hate it and enjoy having their subdivisions un-walkable from just about anything and like getting in their vehicle to drive places.

I know my preferences for lifestyle have changed as I've gotten older and started a family, etc. I loved big city life, small apartments, etc at one time but wouldn't want to live like that today. Now I like being in a town where I can walk places and have parks nearby and commuter trains and decent sized properties. But in the future I could see myself wanting to be more remote. It's nice to have choice.

China and India emit far more CO2 than we do.

per Capita?

per capita isn't a useful metric. Imagine if you are China and your population is declining, but your GDP is still going up so your per-capita CO2 is going up. That's not fair for them.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

At the same time, if you are a developing country and your GDP is going up, then your absolute emissions will also go up. That's not fair, either.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KT?location...

So you look at emissions per dollar of GDP to measure how efficiently you are producing. This is why China's own CO2 commitments are expressed as Kg per GDP. This is what they are targeting to decline, it's what they set policy around, and it's how they publicly measure their own progress. So let's use their own preferred metric:

China's CO2 per GDP is ~.47 and dropping

For the US it's .24 and also dropping

India is .27 -- almost the same as the U.S.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?locat...

So what?

China yes, India no.

Also, "far" isn't a description you should use. The China emissions relate to the US about the same way the US emissions relate to the entire EU.

Besides, any comparison that does not take the population into account is dishonest.

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

If that is true, why are there so many international tourists in U.S. cities every Summer?

Furthermore I've both vacationed to - and lived in - SF at different stages of my life.

Any stats about tourists in Houston or Phoenix?

I'm pretty sure that international tourism is more of a thing in more "walkable" cities like New York.

I think there are quite a few other factors that could explain the difference in international tourism between Phoenix and NY.

LA seems to be doing alright though with ~7.5M foreign visitors a year: https://www.discoverlosangeles.com/sites/default/files/2019-...

I think LA has some other advantages, like being a movie cultural center.

LA != America. I've lived in cities and rural mountains. I loved the walk-ability of Boston with really good public transport.However, most cities have awful public transport. Additionally, I can afford to live in/near a city. A lot of people can't and drive because they can get 2x the space with a yard for kids to plan in for less than a 1BR in the city. They get an awful commute in the bargain but I don't think it is about beautiful places at all, it is about lifestyle.

Also, I don't understand your edit. You say everyone should move to a beautiful city in Europe like Dublin and then you move out of Dublin because the city isn't bike-able. It sounds like you really just hate California so good for you that you don't live there anymore.

> A lot of people can't and drive because they can get 2x the space with a yard for kids to plan in for less than a 1BR in the city.

Until this year, this was true all over. Now, it's radically different. Homes go to all-cash buyers paying over list price. Scarce rentals get hundreds of applicants each.

Fair point, but it's more complicated than that.

People choose where to live for a huge variety of reasons. I moved to Dublin because I wanted to live in Europe and it was the easiest place to get a job and a visa at the start of my career. It also was vastly more bike friendly than the place I came from. I rode my bike and walked everywhere and had no car for several years. I loved (and still love) that work culture is less-poisonous and everyone who works full time gets a month off a year.

Then, after having a kid, I got a 100% remote job. There were a lot of things I liked about Dublin, but it turns out I like paying basically nothing to buy a house an easy bike ride from a train station where I can restore degraded grazing land in to native broadleaf forest even more. Had there been reasonable options in Dublin (2 bed flat we could afford in a completely car-free area near secular schools), or if I had already been naturalised as an EU citizen, we would've looked at something else.

Meanwhile, the 1 year move to San Diego was because I wanted to try starting a company with a San Diegan. Also, California is vastly superior for funding. The decision to give up and leave California came after the very operators of this site rejected interviewed us and said no. Oh well.

Also, I didn't say everyone should move to a beautiful city, I shared my experiences and what I hope are useful tips for anyone else interested in the same. I don't even live in a beautiful city anymore, I live in the countryside, because it's cheap as hell, beautiful, and gives me more freedom to do what I want with my life. But I miss walkable, and cycleable, cities. In a few years we might move again, though we'll see how the gulf stream is looking at that point.

"Can my child ride the bike to school" is the test for me as well. I'm struggling to find such a place, in Germany ideally.

What an odd comment. You don't need to move out of the US in order to reduce how much you drive, or live somewhere your kids can walk to school (source: me). Expecting people to make such a drastic change for fairly minor lifestyle changes isn't realistic.

Also, I don't think it's fear that prevents Americans from moving across the world. I think it's more related to, they don't want to leave their family, friends, and life they've been building for the last 20-60 years.

> I don't think it's fear that prevents Americans from moving across the world. I think it's more related to, they don't want to leave their family, friends, and life they've been building

You aren't wrong but it only applies to the minority who could afford the expense of an overseas move.

Moving across town routinely costs the equivalent of 2-6 mos rent and most Americans would struggle to manage that.

You're also not allowed to simply move to other countries. You generally need to get some type of work authorization if you want to be able to get a job. This isn't available to everyone, and can often require proficiency in the native language.

Yes, this is why I referenced visas that might be attainable for people who can't go the usual "I work in tech and have companies courting me at every turn" route.

I'm all for moving to nice places but my takeaway from the article is that if people primarily focus on moving to the current supply of nice places it'll just continue to make nice places a luxury good.

If, instead, we actually kept building nice places then the supply would be such that it doesn't need to be a luxury good anymore.

Please don't post flamewar rhetoric to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Places like this are expensive because places like this are scarce, and scarce things almost always become expensive.

> The answer to this isn't to lower our standards for design or to be dismissive of the things that are really lovable about these places. The answer is simply to allow a lot more Milwaukee Avenues to exist. And the same goes for the likes of all of today's beloved, "charming" historic districts.

It's hard to me to point at the right paradigm, but it reminds me a lot of the "trickle down" principle, of flooding the top with valuable properties at affordable prices and expect that some of it will still be there for the plebes like us once the top people are satiated.

I'm totally in for building more quality housing and neighborhoods, but there needs to be a lot more thought put into it.

> and expect that some of it will still be there for the plebes like us once the top people are satiated

Well, there definitely won't be any still there if you don't build something in the first place.

Housing is an interesting one though - it's not very liquid as in a very small % of the inventory changes hands every year so removing a premium with extra supply might have a big impact, especially if supply costs are not impacted. If impact on supply cost is marginal then ensuring that all properties are nice might be a way to improve the standard of living for a whole lot of folks.

The difference is that usually expensive properties are expensive to build. They are expensive because the houses and lots are huge, they are designed by expensive architects, use expensive materials, require custom and labor intensive techniques and have luxurious amenities.

Walkable neighborhoods can be build cheaply. What makes them expensive is demand and land.

I am not sure to follow you.

> They are expensive because the houses and lots are huge[...] What makes them expensive is demand and land

So, cheaply built or not, as long as they are high quality either way they're expensive, no ?

The notion that increasing housing supply is similar to "trickle down" economics is common in discourses of housing policy in America, but it is misguided. Reagan's notion that increasing the margins of the wealthy would induce them to pass profits to workers was mistaken in that its proposed mechanism was entirely altruism.

Price reductions in housing from an increase in supply do not occur because the rich voluntarily leave some housing for the rest of society, but simply that they will less totally dominate the competition for this resource by virtue of there being more of it.

My point is that increase in supply alone doesn't automatically lead to less domination.

For instance increasing the supply of high quality affordable housing by 2% in a place where there is high demand might not mean 2% more people will get the houses at a good price. It can mean instead that investors buy 2% more houses in that area to rent it at a price aligned with the market value.

Wouldn't it be ok then if the increase was 5 or 10 or 50% of high quality housing ? Sure...but have we ever seen this level of increase result in actual well designed and livable areas ? I've personally only seen mild ghettos and weird super structures, and not all by skimping on the budget, but also because it's just damn hard to create a flourishing living environment from nothing.

I mean that's a weird way to describe Tokyo but it does work. Your last point still stands though & I'm not sure where the tipping point is.

Does Tokyo have much affordable housing ?

It's a very special situation on its own, but buying a house will usually get you into the 30+ years mortgage plans, and old buildings are earthquake hazards so I wouldn't call them high quality. Rents haven't much fallen even as inflation grew, and cheap places like Leopalaces are a hell to live in. All in all it looks to me to be a hard to live town if you're not in a decently good paying job.

> Reagan's notion that increasing the margins of the wealthy would induce them to pass profits to workers was mistaken in that its proposed mechanism was entirely altruism.

No it wasn't.

Reagan push to lower taxes so rich people money would be used in investment instead of sitting idle. The notion that money in investment has a higher velocity than money sitting is basic economics. The main issue with Reagan is that his prediction that the increased velocity of money would produce enough economic activity to make up for the reduction in taxes - was totally incorrect.

It's really disappointing how many commenters criticize Reagan's economic policies without understanding them at all.

I don't think that's as simple as the article tries to make it out to be.

As poorer people start moving into a neighborhood, the richer people will flee away en masse. It seems to me that rich people will pay any amount of money just to make sure they're living where other rich people are, even if that means moving somewhere less convenient.

As the poorer people start taking over a hood due to prices going down for whatever reason (e.g. building more "affordable" accommodation), it begins to deteriorate such that in a decade or two, it becomes a "rough" place with badly maintained houses, dirty streets, broken street lamps, youngster gangs roaming around and so on.

That's not the default of the poor people themselves only, I think, but a combination of them naturally having lower standards (so they complain less about broken things to the local government - not sure I can accept that poorer areas are less maintained because there's no people living there who are in government), less money to keep up with maintenance (so houses deteriorate and stop looking cute), higher tendency of the youngsters in getting involved in gangs and crime (simply because many of them have far fewer opportunities in life, and they become aware of that very early) and so on.

Where I live is not a rough hood by any means, but it's more "affordable" than many other places... and I can see at least some of these things happening here... the government doesn't keep the vegetation on public places nearly as well trimmed as in the rich areas, there's definitely less care with the quality of the street pavement, houses are not completely deteriorated but most are not in perfect shape either... I just need to walk around 20 mins to get into an area where everything changes and houses are all of a sudden perfectly well kept, the public areas are beautiful, even the people look "prettier".

This segregation seems to happen naturally with humans everywhere.

This is function of house prices, not of natural segregation.

When I was growing up in London the streets around me were fairly mixed. You could find public school educated lawyers, minor celebrities, and even a few financial types living close to factory and shop workers.

As public housing was sold off and property prices were goosed towards the stratosphere the inevitable result was separation, because the poors were economically cleansed into poverty ghettos.

Now houses on the street I grew up on - built as cheap and dense worker housing - sell for around £1m.

I think the arrow of expense points in both directions. Building more nice neighbourhoods would lower prices. But one of the reasons nice neighbourhoods aren't built is because it's so easy to make money by building cheap trash housing and selling it to people who can barely afford it.

> one of the reasons nice neighbourhoods aren't built is because it's so easy to make money...

Neighbourhoods require infrastructure, which require a functioning government. Easy money will always be made one way or another - neighbourhood quality is a political problem.

It's like creating new software vs maintaining software.

Most people can only maintain, sort of. It takes a different breed to create and an exotic, rare breed to create well.

I'm not surprised that most politicians are pouring money from one government program bucket into another. That's all most people can do, is maintain. I'm surprised there hasn't been a single political movement worth a shit within my lifetime.

This is a real dynamic seen times and times. The catch is, poor people's houses are not owned by poor people. "Rich" people don't need to live there to own the land and dictate prices up to a point. They'll flee away and rent the house basically, and they can afford to keep it at the highest price the market validates.

> I don't think that's as simple as the article tries to make it out to be.

Well I also don't think that's as simple as you are trying to make it.

What you wrote is true sometimes. But it is not the rule. Social mix is broad topic in urbanism. There are many developments with some social housing included. And market housing there is not inhabited by poor people just because some poor live in the neighborhood.

> higher tendency of the youngsters in getting involved in gangs and crime (simply because many of them have far fewer opportunities in life, and they become aware of that very early)

They have no opportunities, so they make the most opportunity-reducing choice imaginable? Yeah right. This reminds me of the drunk from Little Prince who drinks to forget his shame of being a drunk.

Luckily this explanation isn't true. Crime doesn't come from desperation. Crime comes from crime, it's a contagious social disease. Hang around with criminals enough and you'll soften to the idea yourself, even if you're from a rich family. Hang around with people who shun the idea of crime, and you'll shun it too, even if you're dirt poor.

The article isn't trying to engage problems at the lowest end of the housing market, it's concerned with the strange dynamics of the middle 60% of the market.

> Every advocate for making urban design more [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale] has at some point or another faced the charge of elitism.

No. That's not how that works. You're not an elitist just because you want a nice neighborhood. You're faced with charges of elitism when you advocate for this type of stuff after you've moved into a space once inhabited by low income people who were chased out by developers who artificially beautified the neighborhood thereby inflating its value overnight.

Those low income people would love to have a beautiful neighborhood too. Instead they spend most of their day toiling at shitty jobs and riding public transportation. They have so little money things like tree shaded bike paths and flower beds are a fantasy.

The real issue is no one wants to spend money making low income peoples lives better. How many beautiful housing projects have you seen vs luxury condo towers?

> artificially beautified

What's the difference between artificially beautifying and genuinely beautifying?

Genuine beautifying comes from the community.

The article isn't saying gentrification-complaints are wrong! Gentrification is a serious problem, and the author isn't denying it.

Strong Towns absolutely wants to see money spent making low-income lives better. And the movement does the work to grapple with all these challenges.

Tree-shaded bike paths are cheaper than all the costs of crime and health-care issues that are caused by the unhealthy environments imposed on poor communities.

Here's an article highlighting their critique of luxury-condo-tower approach: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/8/23/beware-the-fou...

And here's a focus on how poorer neighborhoods are actually more fiscally sound while the systems we have effectively subsidize the wealthy: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/2/6/the-hidden-valu...

That one happens to be by the same author as the article you're replying about.

And here's one about the way our suburban experiment is creating poverty: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/8/15/what-does-subu...

The Strong Towns movement is all about addressing these things. And the initial posted article here is about the tragedy of how good-for-humans places are associated with elitism. It's not saying there's no reason for that association, it's saying that association needs to end by way of making everywhere better.

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