All it takes is the big box stores to setup camp 10 minutes outside of town and almost everyone with a car will opt to save money and shop there.
It's kind of similar to how good shoes can be resoled.
And I thought that's just the way things are.
But I got a Hoover upright, which was much cheaper, looks cheaper, like a toy, mostly garish purple plastic, and is also much heavier. But it sucks up an order of magnitude more dirt. It's bagless, which some people don't like, but it makes it very visible how much crud it's removing and allows it to be dumped after every use.
So I feel like the Oreck was perhaps a swindle, having the looks and characteristics that older people associate with appliances from long ago, except the actual performance.
And I'm glad I didn't spend a lot on a Dyson just to get a vacuum with no bag.
I've never gone there, but I think there's a storefront near me that says they repair vacuum cleaners. Don't recall what kind.
I remember quite good prices in the Netherlands as well which is quite densely populated and where people shop in downtown stores rather than out of town big box stores. The exception would be things like hardware and furniture.
They very well might work in a downtown, but I have yet to see it in the US.
But you see it in Europe. I walk to lidl and buy my groceries, basically every person I know walk to get groceries. Some do big weekend shopping trips now and then to bigger stores, but that isn't the norm.
In the US, these are few and far between. And Aldi/Lidl are going to optimize for their costs, which means not paying rent in a downtown if they have the option to build on cheaper land 5 minutes away from downtown. Which makes no difference to them, because 99% of their customers have a car.
It's pretty similar to the way medium sized Safeways are spread throughout San Francisco, except the rent isn't $3000/month for a 1 bed and the soap and shampoo doesn't have to be kept locked away.
Sure, if you want a big electronics store, you go to the centre of the city (10m biking), but for groceries, coffee, takeaways, restaurants, doctors, DIY stores, pharmacies, etc there's tons of these scattered around the city. It's quite multi-polar, there are many shopping streets, for these kinds of needs you're rarely more than 10 min walk or 2-3 minutes cycle away from those.
Where I live, for example, there's even 2 branches of the same chain of supermarket within about 400m, so <5 min walk, about 1 min on a bike. (Handy on the rare occasion that one of them is out of something!)
One thing I hate about the majority of the US's urban centers is they are extremely touristy and expensive. It is common to be paying $6+ per beer (it's local but still) and that's not even on weekends.
If there is retail, it's _highly_ differentiated from Big Box.
The problem in the US is mostly cultural. Most rural/semi-rural/exurban people think nothing of an hour driving each way. So why would they want what they perceive as a tiny lot, with more expensive housing where they can hear their neighbors when they can get a huge lot and drive a little more?
The non-cultural part of the problem is that the drive-everywhere paradigm is so heavily invested that even in a small walking-oriented European -style village, everyone would need to own a car anyway. If you built a train to a regional hub it wouldn’t solve the problem of the regional hub itself having terrible public transit. Plus, it’s a lot easier to build a road than a train politically.
Beyond a certain point (which was a long time ago) we're just building roads and highways to create artificial growth.
It blows my mind how people don't realize the cultural piece either. They travel, "omg it's so walkable here! this is awesome! wow that cafe is so cute. Of course i buy bread from the local shop." then come back and it's like their experiences were completely wiped clean from their memory: "wait what do you mean not drive a car a quarter mile down the road to sit in the Zaxby's line?".
You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.
I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity from car crashes and deaths (among other things)? Scale can make things cheaper, but is cheapness the goal? And scale in this context also creates centralization which has some fragile properties at times.
> You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.
Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. The only reason all of the best neighborhoods you've ever been to are so expensive is because we just don't build mixed-use, medium density development. And also you can look at countries in places like Europe to see how it has been achieved. I'm not sure the premise of 4/3 suburban house is a good one. It's like saying how can you use AWS when you have this server rack in the basement that you have to use.
It's just cultural and institutional inertia driving us down bad paths because we don't have a good market mechanic to realize costs.
The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc.
Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.
Remote work should make them more viable, before you could either just farm or mine.
Industrial period nearly killed small towns as people flocked to the city for factory work.
Though some starkly do not. Before the pandemic, a friend was living in a San Diego area suburb apartment building that was located on a strip of land between freeways with the complex and a strip mall.
There's at least one, but not more than a few, exceptions in each state (Asheville, NC for example) where people move in with their money to larp "small town living" but it depends on outside capital to work and the original residents end up getting priced out.
Except everyone with a reliable car still drives to the large grocery store and with a wide selection which has lower prices and better selection on basics but makes it up with lower volume, high margin luxuries that the small market c doesn't have floor space for, and the small market, even if it starts as something else, ends up specializing in alcohol, tobacco, and dry goods, and neglecting general grocery items. Unless it's an area with a particular ethnic concentration and the small market survives by focussing on the unique demands of that ethnic community in a way that the larger store with a wider catchment area doesn't have any real incentive to.
Its not that there aren't enough small markets opened in areas of single-family homes to see this trend; you can't fix it with zoning, at least not in the manner you describe. (You can by driving density to transport capacity to the point where driving to the large grocery is impractical, of course, but that tends to be beyond allowing medium density, mixed use development.)
High enough density to have a locals within ~1/2 mile, and or a location where people stop on their way to or from work are how you keep prices reasonable. It’s never directly competitive with Walmart etc but being much closer is a real advantage.
Wiley St. Co-op and Jenifer St. Market are both relatively small grocery stores in the Marquette neighborhood of Madison, WI. The co-op is a bit larger, but less densely stocked and has no alcohol. Jenifer St. is packed to the gills, and sells alcohol. Both are surrounded by primarily single-family homes, with a few apartment buildings within walking distance. Neither are "ethnic" food stores, and neither sell much in the way of junk food, and neither sells tobacco.
I've been visiting them both for about 20 years whenever we visit relatives in Madison. I've always found them both remarkable, even given their placement in probably one of the most suitable locations in the USA for this sort of thing.
Of course, were I to comment on my own comment, I'd probably say "Yep, the exception(s) that prove the rule".
So I know this problem is solvable because it is solved in places that are not the US
It would take me 3 minutes just to walk out of my apartment complex, and another 5 to get to the supermarket right next door to the apartments.
What you have as a supermarket in your country must be different than what we have here in the US: Kroger, Albertson's, SafeWay, Von's, etc... These are very large buildings that take up a lot of property.
Taking a different friend's address in the suburbs, he has 3 supermarkets within a 10 minute walk (800m).
In the city centre, there are 10 supermarkets within a 5 minute walk.
The supermarkets in the city centre are smaller, and have a relatively limited range, although in practise I do 95% of my shopping at one. You choose a different supermarket if you need an upmarket/wider selection, but it doesn't matter as it's so close by (exception: if I really need something like a particular lactose free cheese for a recipe, I'll just go to an inner city supermarket rather than checking 3-4 shops in the centre). There is no parking.
In the inner city, perhaps 20% of them are large enough to be selling clothes, a few toys etc. There might be parking for 0-6 cars. Not having to walk across a ginormous car park saves a lot of distance.
You'll need to travel further (on average) to buy a barbecue, tent, etc. I think I remember the large American supermarkets selling this sort of thing — in Denmark, you'll need to go to the DIY / sports / etc shop. This will have a car park.
Example, though you could zoom into any European city and search "supermarket" on Google Maps: https://www.google.com/maps/search/supermarket+in+Herlev/@55... -- Coop 365, Netto, Fakta, Føtex, Lidl and Rema 1000 are normal supermarkets.
And that's if you don't get it delivered. And even so that is when you use the car (hence why Europeans have a lot of hatchbacks). Not driving to a grocery store a quarter mile away to get a bag of chips that you forgot for a party. The energy expenditure for that is crazy. It's no wonder America has such high resource consumption.
> The supermarkets in the city centre are smaller
Then maybe they are not actually supermarkets, instead small markets or grocery stores?
Otherwise, I am not sure where to draw the line between a grocery and a supermarket.
It used to be that groceries were smaller shops with fewer categories of goods and less range within those categories -- they didn't sell toiletries, or light bulbs, or paper plates, or socks. Rice came in white and brown.
But around 10 years ago the large supermarkets started to take over shops this size, except with the same building they can use more floor space for retail. Their well-run logistics means they can deliver to them every day or two, so the smaller shop doesn't need a large stock room to maintain a wide range. Therefore, the smaller/independent general grocery businesses have mostly gone, but I can choose from perhaps 8-10 kinds of rice, compared to the 16-20 they have at the largest stores. The 8-10 kinds will be varied according to the area.
I do 80% of my shopping at one of these shops, 15% at another one (when I fancy a change, or walk home a different way), and less than 5% at a supermarket large enough to sell toasters, toys, televisions and t-shirts.
As for the rest of it, I'm not arguing that the suburbs is a good choice. It's just the one people do choose and they choose it because of space and cost of living.
If the urban areas have more expensive housing for a given unit size, that would imply it is actually preferred.
It’s like saying nobody drives because there is too much traffic. Or sporting events always sell out so nobody goes.
But to the point of the person you are replying to, the price of a house in almost any reasonable case I can think of reflects desirability for one reason or another. If you see that suburban homes are cheaper than a mixed-use, medium density neighborhood (the kind that everybody visits and take pictures of) that would indicate that the preference is for that. Though I guess you can argue that due to lack of supply that the cost is increased.
The broader point I am trying to make is that if the main appeal of suburban living is lower cost (rather than the actual suburban lifestyle) this is addressable not necessarily by expanding suburbs but by addressing the costs of urban living. In fact that would be better if it were really true that urban living is preferred.
In practice though I am sure many people would choose suburban living even if costs were equal to an urban environment. But the price difference does indicate that one (urban environments) is in higher demand than the other (suburban environments)
Compare with the Great Harvest Bread location a mile or two down the street from my dad's house. (It's a chain, I believe mostly concentrated in the midwestern USA.) The bread is overpriced and hastily made. The only reason they can command such high prices is that there's nowhere else anywhere nearby that makes bread that doesn't come in a plastic bag is because they can position themselves as a sort of luxury good. But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions.
This is contradicted by this:
> But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions.
It is not overpriced, it is prices according to its supply and demand.
The argument I'm trying to make comes close to suggesting that their bread functions as a sort of Veblen good. Which is an example of a kind of product whose pricing dynamics are slightly more complex than can be neatly explained by the econ 101 model.
Or maybe I do not hang out in circles where bread is considered a status symbol.
They are not expensive. The price is comparable or the same as any other bread.
The DC metro, which I used to ride, is extremely well funded. It’s actually regressed since it was built in the late 1970s, with the automated train control (which used to provide a smooth ride) having to be shut down due to poor maintenance. Headways are now 33% longer than they were a decade ago. (Well even longer now due to covid related collapse.) Trip times are slower—everything takes 10-20% more time than advertised.
Or look at Biden’s build back better plan. Amtrak would get $30 billion and build nothing: https://www.slowboring.com/p/amtrak-should-bring-in-foreign-...
> Because as Henry Grabar points out, while $30 billion should be a game-changing investment in the Northeast Corridor, the actual plan from Amtrak is to spend about $30 billion on one tunnel under the Hudson River.
Americans are not as dumb as Europeans think. If we could build light rail for $30 million/mile like Germany, instead of $350 million per mile, that stupid 16 mile light rail could be a 160 mile network all around the Maryland suburbs. That would be a totally different value proposition. The high costs mean that
I live in a suburban master planned development now that oriented itself around the residential-commercial interface.
Having previously lived in an urban core, it's not too much of a downgrade. Sure, you inevitably trade local for chain (boo!), because that's who the anchor tenants originally were. But over the decades the smaller spaces have filled out with organic stuff.
And the fact that re-building cities is really expensive and hard and we're (somewhat) stuck with what we have.
There's a kind of exurban suburb that was built in the 1990s that has an outsized influence on our conception of suburban living. But there are lots of older "suburbs" that are actually quite pleasant.
That seems mostly the norm in my experience. These HN threads always talk about suburbs where you need to drive 10 minutes on a highway to get to the nearest store but to be honest I don't know where those are, I don't think I've seen areas like that.
These neighbourhoods are denser than American suburbs of course; houses come in rows, and you get a front and back yard, but not an entire plot of land around your home. But that also means plenty of kids to play with. In the street, because often cars are required to drive at walking pace and playing kids have right of way.
I grew up in a street like that. I hated it, and preferred a real city, but it's pretty comfortable living.
Lots to dislike, but I love Paris human side ^^