I grew up in a high density city overseas and I can see the appeal of both types of city. I personally prefer low density, car centric cities (obviously we need to finish solving the emissions problem from cars, but that's separate).
Low density suburbia can, and usually has, plenty of walking spaces with a ton of nature around. I lived in multiple suburban neighborhoods and I was always either within a short (and easy) drive to a park or had great walking areas in the neighborhood itself. Contrast with high density, where you have to deal with pollution, noise and potentially crime just to walk to a park (and in the park itself)
Regarding "fear or interacting", in my experience I have a lot of more interactions, of the cordial and polite kind, with the few neighbors I have in my low density area than I've ever had when I lived in a high density city where you can feel like an ant in a colony.
If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, here we have few realistic options given where employers are located and how poor the transportation options that remain. It's a racket.
The part that rubs me is in both Thailand and Vietnam, despite Bangkok and Hanoi being dense with inexpensive and comprehensive public transportation, even the current youth generation still want cars. When I ask "why?", it's still about status and other reasons are secondary.
I hope I'll never have to own a car again.
Where I live has walkability by accident but the car infrastructure is so massive here, to support as many (probably more, TBH) employees who commute to our area for work as there are people who live here, that it destroys your ability to walk anywhere quickly. The street crossings turn a 10 minute walk, one way, into a half of an hour or longer.
I’m angry that urban design for decades, almost a century, was planned around these machines. Obviously in rural areas they are incredibly freeing and useful. But having traveled the world I’ve come to realize and hate how peculiarly dependent we are on them in the US. We are heavy outliers among developed countries in how much we rely on cars and eschew public transit. They’re dangerous, expensive, and an annoying. In most cities in the developed world it’s normal to be able to get to a convenience store in a 5-10 minute walk.
Try it. I lived in Chicago years ago, where cars are expensive and inconvenient to own, at least by American standards. I would walk to the grocery store, which was about 4 blocks I guess, about a 10-15 minute walk. So your shop is limited to what you can carry back, so you have to shop every day or every other day, with the walk there, the shop, and the walk home taking the better part of an hour. Every other day or so. And on the way you are accosted by at least one street person asking for money, and with your hands full of grocery bags you feel a bit defenseless. And then there were the rainy days. And the cold days. Not fun walking 10-15 minutes at 6 degrees F with a 20mph wind in your face.
It had its charms, but overall it sucked. I prefer my rural house and easy weekly shop with a car now.
In Copenhagen, I can walk to several grocery stores in 5 minutes.
Although since my 15 minute cycle to work takes me directly past seven (yes, seven) grocery stores, I usually stop at one of them on the way home from work. It is essentially like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk
It is ridiculous. In order to have food and shelter you need to be dependent on not just a landlord and grocery store but also insurance companies, car dealers, oil and gas companies, DMV/DPS,mechanics,etc... and infractions against driving law can leave you unable to work, get food, go to the doctor (outside of ER),etc... a traditional city does not require a regulated license for teansporation and you don't spend almost as much as rent on transportation. Especially for low-income people, liquidity is important, it is the reason behind why it is expensive to be poor. Think if all the tragic social cost that can be avoided if people can instead spend money on their other needs instead of cars.
I read somewhere how car makers bribed and played dirty to prevent things like rail cars from being adopted by cities. To me it relfects on how much corporate-run the city is.
But then again, I'm a weirdo who pulled out a car's entire wire harness to install a CAN-BUS system and solid-state power distribution modules....
That’s one major reason American infrastructure is so bad. Towns have to balance their books, and that means they cannot afford to maintain their infrastructure until the federal government, which is not legally required to balance its books, borrows a ton of money to give away for basic infrastructure to be maintained.
These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development.
Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems.
Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people want to live there, it's their prerogative.
You can buy a 2,000 square foot house for your family in the suburbs at a cost lower than a 700 sqft box in the city.
With remote work, it's not even clear that cities are an essential construct anymore.
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-02/inside-th...
Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around.
You're making value judgments about me, and they're not even factual. I happen to live in the city. I just see the value of suburbs and the incredible waste, inequality, and ineptitude of cities.
Servicing suburbs isn't expensive. With wind and solar, they'll grow even cheaper. Suburbs often have their own municipal water supplies paid for by their tax base. Roads aren't as expensive to build or maintain, and many people own trucks that can drive on dirt, gravel, and potholes.
Cities have pollution that contribute to cancer and pulmonary diseases. Noise that increases stress. Busy people that have less sense of community.
Name a city where an average American can even afford to buy a home.
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/lo...
I won’t disagree with your comments on noise and pollution, because those are real factors, but you are 100% moving goalposts now.
Just from a logical perspective, companies don't build skyscrapers/increase density in cities to lose money.
The best intro points to the argument are probably still https://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B... or https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gates-Fighting-Housing-America... although neither is free.
You sure went off on a tangent and didn't address a single point, correctly - but mostly at all, I or the article made. Pipes are expensive, underground utilities are expensive, roads are expensive. All of those things scale much better within a city and its population & density. Servicing suburbs IS expensive compared to cities. Water is typically metered and paid for as a user rate not from the general tax fund.
Sense of community is on you, not where you live. Either you're not getting involved or people don't want to be around you.
You are talking right past me to be heard, with subjective facts, not to have a discussion.
With suburbia, you get low cost infrastructure, but also low tax revenue. You better hope that your tax revenue exceeds the costs of supporting suburbia.
> The Green Line Extension (GLX) project will extend the existing MBTA Green Line service north of Lechmere Station and into the communities of Somerville, Cambridge, and Medford.
> The Green Line Extension (GLX) is a construction project to extend the light rail Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) Green Line northwest into Somerville and Medford, two inner suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts.
I’m not familiar with the Boston area, are Medford and Somerville mainly urban extensions of Boston?
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
We need to place more emphasis on the efficiency of transportation and infrastructure in new developments, and density is a major factor there.
I grew up in a mid-size suburban town where I knew many families in my neighborhood and generally felt a strong sense of community. I’ve lived in various cities over the years since, and I’ve never quite felt the same connection with my immediate neighbors. I still know and identify with many people in the area I live now, but they’re much more interspersed.
Then city residents shouldn't have to pay for the roads that make car-centric suburbs possible or the various subsidies given to rural residents. Honestly, one of the benefits of civilization is that we help each other out even when it does not immediately benefit us as individuals. Rural and suburban life would not be possible without cities, and cities would not be possible without rural and suburban residents.
Cities form naturally because of industrial operations that are more efficient when they are concentrated in a single place. Remote work changes nothing about it because there are still plenty of jobs that cannot be done remotely, including many of the jobs needed to support remote work (e.g. data centers, warehouses, intermodal terminals). Suburban life depends on industries that make no sense in suburbs or whose presence will ultimately transform suburbs into cities.
If suburbs were as superior as you suggest, cities would not be growing and real estate in cities would not be as valuable as it currently is. People are choosing to live, work, and raise families in cities more than they are choosing suburbs. Remote work has not changed anything and will never change anything. COVID-19 led only to a transient spike in demand for suburban homes that is already declining as people realize that the pandemic is already in its final stage.
This is commonly stated but is not backed up by any real world evidence. Infrastructure costs are on the order of 10-15% of government cost. The cost of government is almost all in paying salaries (and pensions) to employees providing services. Governments that have gotten into fiscal trouble are there because of ballooning pension cost.
The federal government maintains the highway infrastructure (and subsidizes other non-highway building) which does help enable suburban living in many places. I suppose that you aren't advocating to get rid of that because the immense usefulness of such system (travel, trucks, buses etc), though.
Eliminating the suburban lifestyle wouldn't have a massive impact on sustainability of the system because a lot of it isn't maintained by the federal government or simply needs to be maintained anyway. Reducing the number of cars that are on the road due to the suburban lifestyle will reduce the amount of money that comes from the federal government and shared money pools, but probably not too much in the grand scheme of things.
Thus, I think that saying that "suburban living is fiscally unsustainable" is an exaggeration and we should instead say "we need to better allocate the costs of suburban life to suburban taxpayers" (which wouldn't make such a huge difference anyway, especially if we also remove the city living subsidies that come from rich suburbs).
That's not plausible... think about how much gas a car consumes per year, compared to the amount of mass of tires and brake pads consumed. Even minimizing my car use, I fill up the tank every few weeks. The wear from my tires is barely visible on a week-to-week basis. I don't think they're even within an order of magnitude.
Where does my comment imply that the US needs anything?