Americans do not want to return to urban living | Hacker News Reader

Americans do not want to return to urban living

aei.org

22 pointsRickJWagner21 comments

Modern American cities are downright bleak. There are no small businesses anymore because they have been priced out by insane rents so they have very little character. Most of the space is taken up by insanely noisy motor traffic on 6 lane roads that are absolutely packed. Public transit is slow and poorly maintained. Pedestrian spaces are narrow, noisy, hot, polluted strips.

I'm sure there are a few out there that aren't a total wash at this point, but why would you want to live in downtown LA or SF? Commuting is almost as bad. Unless you have an excellent income and few personal expenses it's untenable.

There have been some recent changes to make cities more livable and financially viable, but it's going to take some huge efforts.

I've lived in SF (Soma, the Mission) and NYC in both Manhattan and Brooklyn. I'll never move back to a city and share a wall with somebody, if I can help it. There's one reason and one reason only: noise pollution.

American cities are completely unserious about enforcement of vehicle exhausts, quiet hours, construction permits, and so forth. When I finally moved away, my stress levels plunged. I miss the amenities and the restaurants, but my life is a thousand times better not waking in rage as yet another 110 dB motorcycle zooms under my window, or the unit demolition next door starts at 5:30am again.

It could be done if we cared at all. Look at Tokyo, they make their construction sites surround the plot with a barrier many stories high and then put a digital noise meter on top, with the limit painted next to it. Or Paris, where they've started digital enforcement of loud exhausts; one of their city officials estimated a single bike with a loud exhaust could wake up as many as 10,000 people.

This is exacerbated by the incredibly cheap construction of all modern apartment buildings. We are talking single layer sheet rock sound insulation with wood flooring that lets me hear even the cat upstairs walking around.

I’m staying for 10 days in a hurricane zone where structures are all concrete and I cannot express how much better it is.

Can confirm, live in Tokyo, most residential neighborhoods are 30-40 dB, even with constant construction activity all over the place.

inb4 "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"

Yeah, and oddly enough, suburbia seems to be getting more and more fun. My town keeps having new restaurants and breweries open, plus we have great local parks for hiking and stuff. I don’t miss living in a city at all, and I thought it would suck.

I think this comes down to how badly designed cities are now since we've been nearly 50 or so years into the single use zoning regulation scheme. What we've gotten in return for this experiment is lower tax revenue, higher infrastructure costs, and ungodly amounts of commute time. If anything, this is a great time for cities of all sizes to down size their physical footprint and get more multi-use zoning in play. It'll take decades but we might actually start looking like Amsterdam or Barcelona in a half a century or more.

The most popular way of living in the survey was suburban. People want that single home, bunch of personal space lifestyle:

> The majority of Americans today are willing to sacrifice easy access to amenities to have more space to themselves and distance from their neighbors

I 100% don't endorse the suburbs, but it is interesting how different the results of the survey were compared to what I've been reading in HN comments for years!

I wonder how much of that is due to not having alternatives to compare it to other than the kind of cities that parent is talking about.

Have you noticed that everyone who lives in the city in their 20s is saving up to buy a house? Not “a big apartment downtown”, a house. The dream is still a house and that implies suburbia.

Well they're going to have to pay more to have that single family home with a huge yard rather than having urban centers subsidizing their lifestyle choices. I know that's mean but they chose to have semi-rural density that shouldn't be serviced by centralized water treatment plants and the like.

What caused single-use to take over?

There are quite a few factors, I'd encourage checking out the following videos by Not Just Bikes and Climate Towns that cover a broad range of city planning and zoning in the US.

Strong Towns Play List by Not Just Bikes (This heavily covers city planning issues in the US):

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN...

The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry by Climate Towns (This covers zoning):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfsCniN7Nsc

How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream (This covers the auto industries impact on US cities.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo

Dutch Cities are Better for the Climate (and my sanity) by Not Just Bikes (Not super relevant to zoning, but it's part 1 of The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry so I figured I'd link it.):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO6txCZpbsQ

These are pretty snarky, but fun videos and the authors list their sources. Their video descriptions are worth checking out just to find a ton of reading material on each topic.

Maybe they just want urban living with some space? Having done both, it was really nice being able to walk everywhere and ignore the car and traffic most of my life. More things to do, etc.

I’m sure there aren’t too many people into commuting, so if they don’t want cities they want WFH? Or do they want lots and lots of regional offices? Y’know, when a FAANG drops an office somewhere, rents and mortgages are going to increase..

Yeah, exactly. This article and its survey questions seem to completely skip over the _why_ of wanting to move out of cities. And the big reason of course is that it became unaffordable for most people and isn't getting better.

Urban, suburban, and rural really under describe alot of the different living densities available from American cities. My old suburban areas are getting more dense with shopping centers turning into pedestrian blocks with a outdoor shopping mall. The area I'm currently living in outside the city core, Is a really nice mix of tall and short buildings, and new large apartment developments fixing and improving walk ability. Compared to the city center, it's much quieter, cleaner, greener. How do we describe the suburban+ or urban-? At the end of the day, pedestrian accessibility is really underscoring new desirable developments, and this is what's open and accessible for the youth to move into.

A lot of my friends are moving into big condo complexes in the suburbs. Rents are cheaper, the amenities like pools are fun, and they’re closer to work. They have to drive everywhere but that’s not really a gigantic problem - in fact it’s much more convenient than dealing with city transportation. They can even Uber to get drunk in the little town centers.

Which Americans?

I would also remark that AEI's offices are on the 1700 block of Massachusetts Avenue, NW, in Washington, DC. This is a short walk from the Dupont Circle metro, so I guess that the devoted suburbanite could make it there in 40 minutes from the Bethesda metro--though Montgomery County tends to lean much more liberal than the AEI. For anyone commuting from the occasionally red state of Virginia, it is not handy.

In a past life, I did the Bethesda to NW commute. For me, Bethesda was urban enough, with walkability, transit, parks, etc. and overall better than most places, but unaffordable.

> Cities are not where the hearts and minds of Americans are

People don't want dense, urban NYC, I get that, but that doesn't mean they want a lonely McMansion development either. Maybe they want a more urbanized suburban town, with just enough walkable amenities. I think people can have love for a town or a neighborhood. In general though, the best American towns are unaffordable as usual.

Prices of housing in urban areas demonstrate otherwise.

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