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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

If you’re anti-car you also need to be pro-city-shack for yourself.

I’m 40 and have lived in the US my entire life. I grew up in a very rural area, went to college in a small town, and now live in a tiny urban apartment. I have been anti-car my whole life and have never learned to drive.

Makes me laugh to see anyone in the suburbs say, “Boy I wish I didn’t have to drive everywhere.” You don’t have to drive everywhere! I’m living proof of that. You just have to make different choices and prioritize not-driving over having a McMansion. Yes, it’s inconvenient at times but that’s the trade off.

The gulf between what people say they value and what their actions say they value is monumental.

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> If you’re anti-car you also need to be pro-city-shack for yourself.

Many people would like to live in a city but can't afford it because even a multi-bedroom "shack" is incredibly expensive. You're basically suggesting that those folks need to suffer in order to validate their (totally legitimate) desire for better transit and more affordable housing?

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting.

If people aren’t willing to suffer today, then everyone is going to suffer immensely from climate change over the coming generations.

The fact that everybody wants change but nobody is willing to change shows me that climate change is an absolute lost cause.

That's a totally false choice. No one has to suffer for more (and more affordable) housing and more (and more convenient) mass transit - except perhaps the "winners" of the current system. It's also quite an entitled position you're espousing: just because you have the economic wherewithal to live in cities and forgo driving, doesn't mean that many people (and their families) who work in those same cities do.

Yes, I am quite privileged. Anybody who’s privileged (most people reading HN fit into this category) and isn’t thinking about the sacrifices they can make today for the good of the future needs to take a good hard look in the mirror.

But like I said, humanity is fucked. The next 200-250 years are going to be unimaginably awful for the descendants of people alive today who can’t imagine their lives being unimaginably awful.

Drive if you want. Live in a big house. Do whatever. It clearly doesn’t matter at this point.

The comparison is to a "rural half-acre". If you can afford a half-acre of land in a rural area but not a "shack" in the city, that implies a lot more about the continued under-valuation of "rural" land than costs of urban living. (Which the Georgists were arguing about more than a century ago.)

Why do you say rural land is under valued? What is society missing that should be included in the price?

Land is a very finite resource on this planet.

The easiest "carbon capture" (though it is slow) is and has always been: Trees. We need more forests than ever and we keep bulldozing them instead.

Rural development is often at the expense of trees and forests for at best mostly unvariegated farm land and at worst useless (but "pretty") green yards.

(Here again the externalities of the greenhouse gases aren't felt by corporations building the houses nor the average home owner. We'd never pass Carbon Taxes in the first place, but especially no one wants to talk about Property Tax Carbon Taxes on their homes. But we need to reforest a lot of land to better deal with climate change and that's not going to happen with just market forces at work. Trees, deer, and birds don't have the money to buy land/houses.)

Well said.

It seems to me those who came first, benefited the most. At the cost of everyone who follows. (if you think longer term). Eg; open land, develop it, live a grand life from the large profits. Subsequent years will have the property market determine the financial benefits from those who come and go. But then eventually, the natural loss starts to become a problem. And then everyone suffers. Everyone who is still around. This is just another kind of debt, just like "kicking the can down the road" wrt finance/national debt/money printing is.

Not only can those much further into the future not "benefit" (financially) from the ability to "cheaply" obtain undeveloped land, but they also sit with the problems due to the natural resources having been depleted (development of land does not only negatively affect tree...)

The whole concept of land ownership as it is, imho , is a problem.

It's also a spectrum. My wife and I have a nice house in an old suburb.

I bike to work, and I walk to one of our three grocery stores and to my nearby coffee shop. My kids can walk to all three schools.

It's not feasible for us to have _no_ car, but I get behind the wheel _maybe_ once a week.

You can say "we should adopt lifestyles that use cars _less_" without saying "we should adopt lifestyles that don't use cars".

Precisely. I used to live in NYC, and didn't have a car there because it was expensive, inconvenient, and generally not worth the effort.

Moved cities, and now I try to walk/bike everywhere locally, only using the car on weekends when I want to go 50+ miles from home. There's issues sometimes (my city's bike and pedestrian infrastructure is... not ideal), but I do prefer this situation to feeling completely trapped in NYC.

Curious if you have any recommendations for "old suburbs" like where you live -- that's precisely the kind of environment my partner and I are looking for. I know there are some in the suburbs of Boston, but it's really tricky to try to find those places because in my experience walkability scores don't really mean anything.

I live in NYC, but grew up in one of those old towns north of Boston (Salem). Generally these sorts of old towns were originally built with a very walkable downtown area and over the years may have added areas that were more typical of the post-WWII suburbanization. A town like Salem has also gentrified quite a bit from when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, so it's probably completely possible to live in the downtown center and really not need a car at all. If you live in the newer, more suburban parts then your reliance on a car will increase.

Personally I prefer large, dense cities with lots of public transit and the access to international culture you get from being in a place like NYC, but a place like downtown Salem is probably really nice to live in if you're happy being in a small community.

Either way, the fully car based living most of the country relies on has always seemed ridiculous to me (I've never had a license or a car).

Thanks for the tip, Salem is actually on my list of places to check out. Much appreciated.

Agreed that fully car based living is ridiculous -- it's so sad to visit family and realize that I literally cannot go anywhere unless I hop in a car. I run for exercise pretty frequently, and find it a fun way to check out neighborhoods, and it is absolutely pathetic that most of my family members suggest driving someplace to run because their neighborhoods have no sidewalks, 60mph speed limits, and not even a shoulder to run on.

Traffic, price, and crime issues in big cities have largely turned me off from them since Covid started -- I just don't see the price:performance ratio there. But I also don't really take advantage of cultural things like museums and music venues very much, and I grew up in a rural community so cities have always felt a bit uncomfortable for me. So don't take that as an outright hatred of cities... I just feel they aren't for me. Hoping to find that "walkable/bikeable large town/small city" middle ground soon.

My partner and I were in a similar situation several years ago. Escaped from NYC and moved to the greater Boston area. We initially looked at places like Arlington, Waltham, Lexington, Watertown, Newton, and Somerville.

I agree that walk scores can be misleading, especially in this area. There are places that are listed as "walkable" because they have a lot of strip malls bunched together even though there are no actual sidewalks. On the flip side, we ended up moving to a small town with an abysmal walk score but good sidewalks, trails, and bike paths and a small but hardy contingent of neighbors who walk or bike to our local school and grocery store all year round.

I ended up just walking or biking around prospective neighborhoods during weekdays to get a sense of how many people actually get around in the neighborhood. I also ended up chatting with a couple of coordinators from the MA Safe Routes to Schools program to get a sense of which schools had the most kids walking to school. While they didn't have the numbers I was looking for they were friendly and helpful and I got a better sense of the different priorities in different towns.

> You can say "we should adopt lifestyles that use cars _less_" without saying "we should adopt lifestyles that don't use cars".

Essentially nobody is willing to do either of these things so it doesn’t much matter which I say.

Thar only worka because almost every one else is either driving to the store and school or living in an apartment. It's a simple matter of geometry.

> If you’re anti-car you also need to be pro-city-shack for yourself.

Not necessarily. If you don't want your nice rural area to be turned into McMansions centrally located on a Wal-Mart, it's important to support stronger cities and towns. I don't think any farmers want to deal with $500,000 4000+ sq. ft. single family homes constantly trying to shut them down because the farm they moved next to smells and sounds like a farm.

> I’m 40 and have lived in the US my entire life. I grew up in a very rural area, went to college in a small town, and now live in a tiny urban apartment

My situation is the same as you except where you veer off the deep end and "I have been anti-car my whole life". I did learn to drive, not sure if I can still do it, but I never liked driving. however, I am not 'anti car'. some people enjoy different things or have different things going on in their life, stop this anti-hate bs.

> I however, I am not 'anti car'.

I suspect it is worth differentiating between `anti car` == `I don't want to need a car in my life` and `anti car` == `nobody should have cars`. I see both usages pretty commonly.

There is a more subtle boundary around opinion about how much city infrastructure should be manipulated to facilitate cars (or not), but this is difficult policy stuff.

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