We’re a Suburban Nation. We Need to Get Used to It
governing.com
governing.com
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-...
https://www.illinoislawreview.org/print/vol-2017-no-3/the-cr...
Making it that much worse -- there are no public indoor spaces but libraries.
My question isn't whether the same thing will happen for car ownership, or even when, but what we're all going to call the people who do it.
Small example in lieu of a long post.. climbing gym halfway across Seattle is a convenient 13-18min drive, so when I was visiting family in Moscow I was grumbling about how it took 45-50mins to get to one by transit, including 10mins of walking, sometimes in the rain. I remember Moscow being very convenient, I thought, why do gyms locations in particular suck so much? Then I realized my definition of convenient has changed with driving... taking 45-60mins and the weather is how I used to go pretty much anywhere, but driving in Moscow is even worse, so I thought it was great. Now that I've discovered properly organized environment, I could never go back to transit without a strong incentive (ie some other major advantage an area has), and if someplace is too dense for cars I just wouldn't live there.
Where do you live where a single-family (assumedly detached?) house is the most affordable? I know of rural areas where they are the only housing available, but in the US apartments are (almost always?) more affordable, if nothing else than they are smaller. Rent/buy considerations, true, but house plus land > just house/condo/apartment. Sounds like an investment opportunity…
And how is owning a car making you *miserable*? Not the commute, but just the ownership? The expense? The option of convenience of carrying the whole family and/or cargo? The option of climate control? The option of direct À-to-B routing? The option of immediate availability? The option of relative privacy and safety? The option of a boring monoculture of people just going from A-to-B without the piquancy of urine, drug addicts, random attacks, infections, etc.? Find a good mechanic…
Not the original poster, but when I first got a car of my own it was such a huge worry. The cost of an unexpected repair, the worry about it being broken into or stolen, the figuring out of maintenance and buying insurance and all that hassle. It was a huge asset, that I could barely afford, but needed in order to get to a job to feed myself. And now I have to worry about it all the time. It was terrible.
> Find a good mechanic...
This is a perfect example of the worries that a car induced. How do you know if a mechanic is good? How do you know if they are ripping you off? It's such a needless hassle to have to find a personalized service person. How much time have I wasted with mechanics in my life? Way too much, and I would love to have all that time and money put to more productive uses.
In the past couple of decades, cars have become a lot more reliable. They just don't need that kind of repair very often. It's a lot easier to let a professional do it, and save yourself the hassle of storing ramps, oil wrenches, etc. for 99% of days that you don't use them.
That changes as the car gets older, and you need to decide between another $1,200 mechanic repair, a $300 self job, or a new vehicle. If you're into doing the repairs yourself, you can save a ton of money. But that only occurs once a decade or so these days, and it's just not worth it to many people.
When you only have hundreds in the bank paying someone to do a timing belt when the kit of parts is $120 just isn't an option. You either do it yourself or you cross your fingers.
Especially with the ongoing pandemic, I don't see the appeal of being crowded into public transit with tons of strangers.
And a comfortable route. Spending an hour in a traffic jam doesn't sound enjoyable regardless of the comfort of the car you're in.
personally i love cities & biking, but a safe, coordinated, available, municipal, semi-personal/pooled or personal ride hail system operated as a not-for-profit utility would be such a neat virtue, such a way to make the distance not count for as much.
One of the biggest problems our society currently faces is a lack of knowledge and interest in understanding why things like infrastructure cost so much, and that channel makes an interesting case as to why suburban infrastructure is prohibitively expensive to deal with long-term, and we're already starting to see that. Cities like Austin, with major suburban populations, are struggling to deal with public transportation expansion because everyone is so spread out, so meaningfully increasing access to transit becomes much more expensive. Suburbs are a perfect example of "make the next generation pay for it, I'm gonna enjoy this now."
New suburban infrastructure is typically paid for by debt instruments, either directly (municipal bond) or indirectly (costs passed by developers to a new home’s first owners, usually paid via mortgage). Same goes for future major repairs or replacements: financed by new debt. No big deal.
I agree with you, people should understand that their taxes do not pay for debt (usually), that public debt is `good` for their pensions and the economy at large, so the debt isn't an issue. But this is not a trope specific to new urbanists, it is a general trope of people not understanding modern economy. And a lot of old "economist" (Tv economists, not real researchers usually) still believe in this (or use it as a talking point for their own political agenda)
So at what point is society rich enough to afford it?
Imagine if all of your production code was developed on a Library desktop with a single user login, or a 100kb folder that could be yours and everything else had to be public.
It's very personal to each person.
That's the kind of thing that a collaborative space can aspire to.
It's possible to combine a lot of square footage / meterage and walkable density:
* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb
Just get rid of the large ornament and generally useless front lawn. And it's not like more recent developments in the US suburbs aren't getting closer together either:
> Have you noticed that the yards of American homes have been getting a lot smaller in the last few years? It's not your imagination. Cheddar explains why lawns are shrinking across the US - and why we even have them the first place
> Further reading […]
walking (my dog) around my neighborhood, which has a surprising number of different setback standards, has led me to think about this issue abnormally often. some blocks designate as much as ~40 ft of setback, requiring large front lawns, while others have ~10 ft, with just a strip of greenway as a buffer between the street and building.
observing that, i've settled on 12-15 ft setbacks being an ideal transition from public to private space in our urban landscapes: 4-5 ft of parkway, 4-5 ft of sidewalk, and 4-5 ft of vegetation to the building envelope. this provides plenty of greenspace and the requisite public walkway right through that greenery, while also maximizing the space left for housing. for unusually space-constrained blocks, you could remove the parkway, put the sidewalk right on the curb and get this down to 8-10 ft of setback.
on top of this i'd convert all on-street parking to protected micromobility lanes and narrow neighborhood car lanes to 9 ft max. this would minimize the amount of urban space dedicated to cars, while still providing car access, and also allowing a diversity of mobility options.
the last but most difficult change i'd suggest is requiring all car parking be underground, accessible via a single underground alley down the lengthwise spine of each block (houses with basements could have entries directly from the underground garage to the basement, for instance). this drastically reduces driveway cutouts and cross-modal intersections, thereby reducing cross-modal collisions, injuries and deaths, while also minimizing the surface area dedicated to driveways and parking.
> 112. Entrance Transition: Make a transition space between the street and the front door. Bring the path which connects street and entrance through this transition space, and mark it with a change of light, of sound, of direction, a change of surface, of level, perhaps by gateways which make a change of enclosure, and above all with a change of view.
Part of the reasons why large setbacks are defined may be because a lot of these places have roads in front of them where cars zoom by, and so the distances are used for safety in case of a car going out of control and/or to have the noise of the cars be more muffled.
If the area(s) in question had more gentle streets then vehicular traffic can be more gentle.
* https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2011/11/21/a-45-mph-worl...
Possibly develops more creative, industrious people who learn to just do things without waiting to ask for permission?
Id definitely have to agree, over the last decade Ive seriously tried committing to life in the suburbs, megalopolises and extreme rural areas.
Walkable to downtown in a midsized city is the only thing that even remotely works for me personally / my family. You do have to be "rich" but it was worth getting a dayjob for.
Theres just something that feels really unsustainable and backwards about other types of spaces unless youre actually a millionaire or are growing your own food? Idunno again just my experience / opinion.
Poor suburbs nobody gives a crap if you're breeding animals, restoring a sailboat or dismantling vehicles in your back yard. They might care if you build a warehouse building but they only care about their cut so you just pay them and they stop bothering you.
It’s absolutely luxurious being able to afford 500 to 1,000 sq ft per person with your own yard. Having to drive everywhere is a fine trade off for many.
more privately, townhouses in my area often include this kind of space with garages and what realtors like to call "bonus" rooms.
and there's nothing that prevents apartment buildings from having shared space like this among the other amenities, except culture.
if there's no collective space near you, perhaps that's an opportunity to establish one.
If I wanted to live in the city I would. I don’t want to bring these “urban values” to my neighborhood. I want to put all my groceries in the trunk of my minivan, not make 10 bike rides back and forth. I’m in my mid 40s and my knees can’t handle that.
I don’t want to step over puddles of vomit and hypodermic needles. I like my functioning police department. I have no interest in the way you live.
There is nothing fundamentally incompatible about picking up your groceries with a minivan and later biking to a coffee shop or a local park. Local governments just don't seem to make the ability for people to do so a priority when developing their municipality.
I live in a city and do not deal with any of these things. Have you considered your impression of "urban values" may not match reality?
> I like my functioning police department. I have no interest in the way you live.
The police in the suburbs may be less 'functioning' than in urban areas:
* https://www.axios.com/report-suburbs-arrest-rates-surpass-ur...
AMA
Then you shouldn't mind if other people chose to live differently ( without any of the ridiculously exaggerated downsides you mention). But the problem is that due to zoning laws, buildings densely or anything else other than sparse suburbia is just impossible in the US. People like you shouldn't force everyone else to live in a thoroughly unsustainable manner, subsidised by everyone else.
Many people in urban centers read impressions like this and think the person that holds/writes them is describing something from another planet.
You have that kind of roadwork for multiple square miles. All those people need to go to and from work, and so that's increased traffic.
The larger the suburb, the further people need to go to get food, the longer they'll be on the road, the more cars will be on the road concurrently (most traffic in long commute times is going the whole length of the slow commute time because everyone lives further away)
They're unsustainable financially and have a myriad of serious problems.
More walkable small cities/towns would be extremely welcome! I don't enjoy living where I can't walk for coffee and groceries. But I'd love a cheaper cost of living.
As far as driving is concerned, why not push for electric and end gas subsidies over a time period to allow for adjustment. Yes, I understand that we're in a desperate situation, but I also understand that too much change too quickly tends to have the opposite effect of what the original intention was in the first place.
By setting up small, suburban "communities" that have many of their shopping needs met (a grocery, an open air market, a couple of whatever strip malls are called now, a school, an urgent care), proper bike paths and incentives on even plug in hybrids and work from home programs for jobs that didn't need to go into the office, we could focus on clean energy solutions for the grid - all of which are current technology and current lifestyles without much forced change, just rezoning and a continuation of what we learned during Cov19.
Proper mix would overall lower the load on roads as travel distances would be much shorter for some.
I will continue to pay a premium for space in a city (relative to the local population). I'd go as far to have a less comfortable shitty place in another part of the city just to be more relatable to some people.
That's quite a bit different than what the article describes (eliminating cars).
I think even the push to get people to move to electric cars is difficult enough. I'd love to have a fast electric car, but I know a lot of people that don't want one.
Real reform will be hard.
I am really stupid with economy stuff but I have the strong feeling that we - in the west - are living off of cheap credits and cheap debt and it gives the illusion of being rich because we can buy obligations and financial products and balance spreadsheets between tax-payer's money and private sectors and welfare states and debt payments, etc. but at the end of the day when we need to work on our infrastructure our money is not worth the paper it's printed on since our workers and our tools are not up to the task or we need to pay a huge premium to get some quality work ? Something like that...
Edit:grammar, spelling
From another of my comments: Rates have gone up and down (down overall at the federal level), but inflation-adjusted revenue is way up, and spending has increased even more than that.[1]
>"I am really stupid with economy stuff but I have the strong feeling that we - in the west - are living off of cheap credits and cheap debt and it gives the illusion of being rich because we can buy obligations and financial products and balance spreadsheets between tax-payer's money and private sectors and welfare states and debt payments etc. but at the end of the day when we need to work on our infrastructure our money is not worth the paper it's written with since our workers and our tools are not up to the task or we need to pay a huge premium to get some quality work ? Something like that. "
I don't think you're stupid at all; the reduction in purchasing power are complex and hard to measure.
[1] https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax...
Landlords raising prices has less to do with the issue of forex and more to do with the housing market and inflation.
[1] https://annualreport.usafacts.org/articles/43-government-tax...
With a rapidly rising population and high immigration, the early 20th century US had a pool of cheap labor at the ready. The "cost/benefit of a life" was assumed lower because mortality was higher, i.e. assumed optimal societal use was to break a body with labor before disease took them. Grooming them for the professions would be a waste. Cities were relatively smaller but more crowded, with lower standards of living.
This changed by mid-century. Mortality was now down to historic lows which made the post-war baby boom have a uniquely lasting impact. A generation with expectations of long life now faces the prospect of "retiring well", which pushes them to focus on education and career and demand higher margins of safety in their everyday lives. This creates an inflection in the early 1970's - the same one everyone has remarked upon in finance, culture, and politics - as the boom generation reaches working age and floods into the markets, looking for jobs and assets. This allows the suburbs to continue to boom: the marginal cost of adding another subdivision is low, and the technical foundation is established.
Then fast forward 30 years, and you have a new large generation of working age, but the world isn't being built out to accommodate them. Cities have gone from disinvested to overpriced. The trades are now in neglect because of a new bias towards academics. They graduate into job and asset markets that are locked up by older cohorts who enjoy the benefits of still being alive and able to work at advanced age. This is the Millennial's dilemma: They have been groomed for jobs they can't access, and there's no war or other crisis that would let them be utilized. Infrastructure is something they could work on, but the political system biases towards pleasing earlier cohorts, who will interfere with any change to the arrangement, which they are now fully invested in (in all senses of the word). The costs of changing anything spiral out of control, the politics compounded by the fact that there's been a lot of productivity improvement in information and finance, but little in physical assets. If 20 guys slinging code contain more speculative value than 20 guys swinging hammers, you'll see a lot of investment in code and not hammers - and that gives you cost disease. The high price of infrastructure is in part reflective of an uncorrected disinterest. It's irrational exuberance, but the other way around: nobody wants to pay for quality when there is "something better to do," so every project that needs it is a special case deserving a high price tag.
Thus, deferred maintenance becomes the norm and stays that way until - just recently - mortality finally starts taking its course, the grip of the Boomers starts to slip, and the bills come due. The "Great Resignation" is in large part a reshuffling of jobs and assets preceded by the demographic changes and then catalyzed by the pandemic crisis, which is going to change the infrastructure investment climate towards a new equilibrium going forwards - even though the Biden infrastructure package has been cut, the trend of disinvestment has reversed.
There is a lot of interest in the future of construction right now, and in new technologies that don't just change the products, but also make construction jobs better, safer, and more productive - e.g. two people building a house rather than a crew of 10. And there is a market that will still likely bias suburban, but is ready to see a slightly denser built environment with lower car dependency. Our ideal goal is "denser yet less crowded" - crowds are a combination of people needing to travel to destinations (suddenly in decline with WFH) and the travel being space-and-time inefficient(big cars travelling long distances versus short walks). Do some "road diets", allow some fourplex lots and ADUs, and install some walkable retail - and you'll have the suburbs of the future.
Most Expansive Definition of Population (TriState + Bay Area) — 28M Just the Population (USA) — 330M
Most Expansive Definition of Land area (TriState + Bay Area) — 11K sq mi Just the Land area (USA) — 4000K sq mi
A common bias for non-US folks is to put too much focus on “the biggest” US urban center.
For England, 20% of the population lives in “greater London”. For France, 15% live in the Paris unité urbaine.
It’s different in the US. The population of NYC is almost a rounding error in the total US population (~3%). The population of the NYC “Tri-State” area, in its most expansive definition, is ~6%. They are also the only folks who think NYC is any sort of unique cultural lead for the US.
The population of San Francisco actually is a rounding error for the total US population. The whole Bay Area is bigger, but only at about ~2% of the US population. And again, they are the only folks who think San Francisco is a unique cultural lead.
Both urban regions are actual rounding errors when it comes to US land area.
And divide by a factor of 10 when discussing the dense urban core of NYC or San Francisco, which is what some folks rant about. Just move the decimal point over one to the left. Yes, they are that small.
So don’t read too much into these sorts of (NYC+SF) discussions as a barometric reading on the entire US.
With the exception of producing your own electricity and roads, that's how many (most?) of the suburbs in Virginia are.
However, if you do that then the average plot size usually goes up since septic installations need unused field space for drainage, and wells need a separate arera to draw from.
Roads can be private, but it mostly doesn't make sense to me since USPS and county services need to use the road as well. I'm not really sure why some roads are private and some aren't, but many neighborhoods with private roads will just use gravel or dirt to save costs.
Electricity, at least in my area, is hydro so that's as sustainable as the water cycle and since the river is within spitting distance, I doubt the cost of the powerlines is a real burden.
I'm going to make a claim that you'll probably think is absurd: there is far more in common between a small town and a big city than there is between a small town and the suburbs. A small town and a big city are places where people live. People know each other because they see each other on the street as they go to work or get groceries. They meet each other in local businesses or community centres. Suburbs are simply places where people have their homes. Everything else takes place elsewhere. People are unlikely to know someone a block or two over, unless their kids go to the same school, simply because they never encounter each other on the streets and their lives are completely divergent outside of their (so called) community.