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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

Great, just make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places so that people who are "middle class, suburban, and white" want to live there. Then we can all live in four story walkups and ride our bicycles and eat fresh baguettes...without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted.

I'm being genuinely serious here. I used to love the concept of relatively high density living. For years I walked or rode my bicycle everywhere in cities. But I got sick of the fights and the filth, got too many concussions, and now I'm out here in the country side where I "see the world as a foreign and scary place".

Make it nicer and we'll come back. If that doesn't happen, don't complain when we make rational decisions for ourselves and our families.

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The perception of urban blight is, to the best of my understanding, a mostly separate cultural phenomenon. It doesn't have to be the case for every city in the US to be a shining pillar of civic excellence (many of them aren't!) for it to be the case that suburban living drives alienation that feeds into statistically irrational fears of strangers.

In other words: we're talking about two separate things. You're describing an abstract quality of life concern, which is a valid concern that a lot of people share about major cities. I'm talking about a cultural zeitgeist around treating strangers as predators or latent criminals, which is statistically unborn.

(We can also play the anecdote game: I've lived in NYC my entire life, and I've never dodged human excrement or needles. I've seen needles and human waste, but they're a vanishingly small component of my experiences living here.)

Similarly, I've lived in and around Boston my entire adult life (I'm 34) and I don't think I've ever seen needles on the street. I've seen what was probably human waste two or three times. It seems like San Francisco and Portland in particular are pretty bad, from talking to folks who live there and from visiting both. But most urban areas I've been to in the United States are fine.

(Now, are American cities kind of dirty? Yeah. There's a ton of people who travel through every day. But Americans, as a rule, seem to not like paying that much for other folks. Certainly not enough to pay for the kind of urban cleaning that'd be necessary.)

As a Bostonian myself, I'm getting used to the idea that we're the exception, rather than the rule. I typically _do_ see these things when I travel within the country. But I'm increasingly seeing it as a "Boston success" rather than a "San Francisco problem" or "Austin problem" or "Seattle problem", because it seems more like a default state, given the current way of things.

That said, I'm not sure what to attribute that to. It could be the broad availability of drug rehab and housing services. It could be that the climate is inhospitable to living on the street for the majority of the year. For all I know, it could be an aftershock of the city's love affair with redlining, effectively putting me away from where I would see it.

It's just a mix of climate and policy. In Milwaukee you can see some serious blight but they don't even allow overnight parking on the streets without a permit, let alone overnight pooping.

DTX is regressing in the last 5-10 years. Not to combat zone levels, but certainly not the calmer place it was becoming

even the wealthier areas? southlake, prosper, parks, celina?

Sorry, by DTX I meant Downtown Crossing in Boston :)

Personally can't recall ever seeing needles or human feces in or around Austin. Some areas/alleyways around 4th-7th can get pretty urine-y on the weekends.

Generally speaking, one is more likely to run into horse manure around Austin.

Was this down voted because the horse manure comment?

To clarify, I meant that quite literally. Horses are considered a legal vehicle. It is not uncommon to see people riding horses (small groups, solo, & APD mounted patrol) along the shoulder of a road or along the creek and river trails in central/south/southeast/east Austin, especially on the weekends. Probably other places too, but those are the areas I am familiar with.

It is certainly more common to see horse manure in the city than it is to see the human feces or needles that was alluded to in the comment I replied too. At least, in my personal experience spanning decades.

It's more a US culture thing IMO. Go travel to other cities in other developed nations and you see this kind of crap SIGNIFICANTLY LESS, if at all.

It is sort of shocking that an objectively rich city like San Francisco has considerably worse homelessness problem than, say, Uzhhorod in Ukraine. (With average income perhaps 10 per cent of SF one, if not less.)

Just guessing, but could it be because the homeless in Uzhhorod starve to death or freeze in winter, while the homeless in San Francisco survive?

It's mostly because the political culture of SF is trying to solve a mental health issue in compromising way, because the real solution set is not a local level thing, but a state and federal level thing. It's same with the current DA, trying to activist create an alternative to arrest vs. using social workers, while such a solution needs more than the power of the DA's office to properly implement. So you get half-assed solutions that don't actually solve anything much.

Also pure corruption. You'll notice there are a bunch of regions where the homeless roam, and bunch where they do not, and there are very good reasons as to why that is the case.

Most of Europe has homeless shelters, including the poorer countries, it is not as if modern countries just let them drop dead like bugs.

> the homeless in Uzhhorod starve to death or freeze in winter

I doubt it. Housing is one of those problems that is quite easy to solve and the fact that poorer countries can do it while the US can't must be because of nefarious. The same shit is said about developing countries having a lower COVID death rate than the US, "they must be hiding a lot of bodies." In fact, it is quite hard to hide a lot of bodies.

The fact is the US does poorly on a lot of metrics and we have the capability not to.

Also a Bostonian, but have been in NYC metro for 10 years. I'm back in Boston enough to say this with clarity: Boston is very clean.

You can’t easily survive the winter out east on the street, you sure can in the west, so the west gets all the permanent homeless.

You can also fairly easily survive winter in the street in Málaga or Madrid, but those cities haven't turned to an Europe-wide haven of homeless people.

Europe has a strong social safety net?

Also, presumably the issue of needles and human waste can be resolved with further prosocial investments in harm reduction facilities for drug users and housing for the homeless. These problems aren't intractable.

The UK's hardly a haven of social democracy, but I've never seen human excrement on the street and only seen needles off the beaten path. We don't do a very good job helping our homeless population though.

In terms of urban detritus, some of the colder US cities might have comparable counterparts in the UK, just with shotspotter and much larger jails.

>harm reduction facilities

To those unsympathetic to addiction being a medical condition, these facilities are just seen as legalization which goes against everything they've been fed. This isn't even a NIMBY thing as they don't just not want it in their area, they don't want them to exist at all.

Showing how they have worked in Europe, then they will just write it off as socialist policies run amok.

therein lies the rub.

In Europe do they give the users needles and drugs or do they actually fix the problem?

giving people needles and drugs is called harm reduction for a reason - it's to reduce the risk of dirty needles and street drugs, these policies don't solve drug addiction, they just keep drug addicts safe(r). Solving drug addiction is actually a tremendously hard problem but it starts with helping rather than punishing addicts. Portugal is a good example of doing this right: drugs are broadly decriminalised and the government provides help to addicts. Here's an article on drug policies across Europe (and some other countries): https://www.foundationswellness.net/drug-abuse/do-other-coun...

Portugal: https://deserthopetreatment.com/addiction-guide/drug-industr...

I’m all for providing help to addicts, but giving them the drugs doesn’t seem to help. While I offer no solutions, I don’t think this is working and believe there is a better way. Perhaps rehab centers or synthesized equivalents that decrease potency over time.

Glasgow is the single exception to that rule in my decade living in the UK and Isle of Man.

LA /Minneapolis citizen here.

Urban blight is so real it's a tautology to use two words.

The lack of enforcement and the actual protests against enforcement of the most basic laws borders on satire.

No. That's the point. The cops take all the money and don't fix the actual problems we have.

Do you think cops should be responsible for finding homeless people homes? You can't just throw them all in jail. Being poor isn't illegal yet.

> Do you think cops should be responsible for finding homeless people homes? You can't just throw them all in jail.

We used to do just that, and it worked just fine.

We have never done that.

It is also extraordinarily expensive to do that.

Yes, we had and enforced vagrancy laws. It didn’t use to be expensive.

Vagrancy laws were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court almost 40 years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/05/03/s.... A bit of reflection will suggest the possibilities of abuse under them.

Indeed, but a bit of observation shows me the abuse that happens without them.

Perhaps if you were poorer or of a disfavored ethnic group, observation would show you the abuse that happens with them.

Find them homes or throw em all in the clink?

Perhaps greed is a factor in non-enforcement, but I suspect in LA it's more of a "overly humanitarian" subculture. See Echo Park protests. bodies were turning up in that park, and it was unusable for local residents due to a massive encampment and rampant drug use. When the police showed up to clear it, they met actual protestors from outside the neighborhood who thought it was inhumane to force the campers to move on.

I lived in Studio City for a bit. We had a well-known vagrant who lived under a local bridge who regularly accosted women, including assault, groping, etc. The nice walking paths along the LA river, and the immediate neighborhood around them were completely unsafe even during daylight hours for my wife and daughters to walk along. What could be done?

I lived in mount washington for a bit. There, the citizens would quietly organize, bring lots of shovels, and go "clean up" even the smallest encampments. I suspect if that word got out, they'd meet protestors, or even police.

I'm all for helping those who need and want it.

The trouble is, there's a significant enough population that doesn't want help, and wants to camp and live among drug use wherever they choose. This is the only case where "Not in my backyard" makes absolute sense. Police can and should protect the safety of neighborhoods and parks which are funded and occupied by tax payers.

Go to venice. It looks like a third world country. Last time I went to the beach, none of the shops were open and obviously-mentally-ill people were sitting in their own filth on residential and commercial doorsteps. One obviously intoxicated person was holding a can of gasoline on the sidewalk, and swaying between cars he didn't own. What good can come of this? The rights of the people in that area need to be balanced against each other through the use of local laws and law enforcement. We've gone way too far past "balanced" towards an ideologically-forced tolerance of vagrancy.

It is not the job of the average citizen to come up with solutions, it is normal and fine for citizens to collectively demand change from their government and to weigh the outcomes during the next election cycle. My own lack of ingenious ideas for it does not mean I need to be silent and tolerate the solution.

It’s good to be you.

https://pavementpieces.com/on-the-front-line-of-the-heroin-e...

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/rockaway-beach-needles...

https://nypost.com/2021/09/25/nyc-drug-users-shoot-up-in-bro...

https://nypost.com/2021/08/07/new-records-reveal-rampant-dru...

http://bronxink.org/2019/09/19/28351-a-zone-of-neglect/

https://patch.com/new-york/new-york-city/these-are-nycs-poop...

If you're trying to call me a liar, it's better to not be oblique.

I've lived in three neighborhoods for my entire life: Bloomingdale (now called "Manhattan Valley"), South Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant. The only one that I regularly saw needles in was South Harlem, and that was only by one apartment where we had a guy dealing on the corner. That was a pretty unpleasant situation. I only saw needles once or twice in Bloomingdale, and I've yet to see them anywhere in my current parts of Brooklyn.

As for the poop: NYC has a big dog poop problem, which is what that article is about. I don't think anybody has ever contested that.

I'll call you a liar. Or at best, someone who could be more observant.

Of all of the positive and negative things I've been called in my life, "not observant" has never been one of them!

We have crime here. But this isn't a superhero comic; it's just not an overriding feature of life. I'm sorry if that's difficult for you to believe.

Where on earth did you get liar? You just have a very different context from many of us. I worked three jobs for 30 years so my kids could live a sheltered life.

Here’s an example of me not being oblique. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31363040

That was how I read "it's good to be you." I apologize for the misinterpretation.

I've said this in other threads: there is crime in NYC. It's a big city with a lot of people in it, and I am not pretending that it is a utopia. But it just isn't an overriding (or even pressing) feature of life here.

It is if you’re paying rent for a storefront and junkies are blocking the door so customers can’t get in, the cops won’t do anything, and “nonviolent misdemeanors” aren’t prosecuted.

Then it’s an overriding and pressing feature of your life.

Yes: if you're actually victimized, then it becomes an overriding and pressing feature of your life. But you're sidestepping the claim: it's just not that common here.

I've never seen drug addicts block a storefront here. The closest thing I've seen to that is someone (and I really do mean one individual) try to panhandle in a restaurant. They were kicked out.

Murder and rape are down a few percent each. Almost everything else is skyrocketing. Robbery is up 15.8%. Felonious assault is up 13.8%. Grand larceny is up 18.6%. Grand larceny auto at 14.2%.

Crime overall is up 11.2% in one year. That’s affecting a lot of people other than you. I find your dismissal of so many people’s misery to be callous at best.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr1103/nypd-citywide-cri...

Of course, it's useful to keep in mind here that overall crime rates are still around only half what they were in the 70s-90s. Combine that with the obvious aftereffects of a lasting pandemic and lockdown (and pandemic-related stimulus evaporating while outbreaks continue) and it doesn't seem very prudent to adopt a sky-is-falling attitude.

Who adopted a sky-is-falling attitude?

He's telling his story, and you're telling him he's wrong for having it.

Then by your logic you are doing the same to me. Quoting easily verifiable crime statistics (along with a link to said statistics) and photographic evidence of obvious degradation was simply an alternate viewpoint from my perspective.

Both “stories”, as you put it, are true. In fact, I congratulated the person for building a sheltered world. I did the same for my wife and children. Nothing wrong with keeping your family out of the muck.

I think you misread your own link. Crime in October 2021 was 11.2% higher than October 2020, but YTD crime (the thing people usually call "crime overall") is only up 1.3%. It's the next sentence in the same graf.

I have not been callous, in any ordinary sense of the word. When people are affected by crime (and indeed, they are in this city), I feel bad for them. What I have no space for is breathless accusations that my city is an unlivable hellhole, when I've seen with my own two eyes how much it's improved over the last two decades.

(If you want real callousness, read about the people who died in last year's flooding[1]. NYC has a flood control system that should have lessened the damage, but it didn't function because the city hasn't done regular street cleanings for the past two years. Why haven't they done street cleanings? Because car owners complained about having to move their cars during the pandemic.)

[1]: https://abc7ny.com/nyc-flooding-deadly-13-killed-basement-ap...

> What I have no space for is breathless accusations that my city is an unlivable hellhole, when I've seen with my own two eyes how much it's improved over the last two decades.

I assume that is a general statement and not based on something I said, because of course I made no such accusations.

I am however glad that you give your own two eyes credibility for reporting. Each of the articles I posted was a product of someone else’s two eyes and included pictures of what would be considered an alarming situation if one lived in those neighborhoods. Many of them are from a borough called “The Bronx”, which is north of you. It’s a big place with lots of problems, tons of amazing people, and a rich multicultural environment. You might be intrigued to visit it some time.

As far as the statistics I gave you, year over a year is obviously a much better sample then part of the year. It’s smooths out the curves. I could easily have chosen some statistics from the summer of 2020 that would make it look much worse. I did not.

Not sure why you threw in the drainage situation but I like that you did. Offhand the only city I know of that plans properly for this is Phoenix, Arizona. From what I can tell no other major city in the country comes even close to that kind of preparation.

> It’s a big place with lots of problems, tons of amazing people, and a rich multicultural environment. You might be intrigued to visit it some time.

I went to high school in the Bronx, and spent most of my adolescence walking around it (including the "scary" part, which is the South Bronx). It's not a hellhole either, "rich multicultural" dogwhistling aside.

Edit: This is going to be my last comment. I don't think you live here, which makes me think that the back-and-forth of "here's what it's like" versus "here's an eye-popping news story about a crime" isn't accomplishing much.

Duly upvoted because I love a good debate. Thanks for engaging!

Where I live is a little hard to pin down because I own residences on multiple continents. I say Seattle because that’s where my farm is and I spend most of my time there.

New York City was the greatest city in the world until recently, but I’m equally interested in what’s going on in Shanghai, Beijing, and other places. But in my view it’s perfectly acceptable to talk about a place even if you haven’t lived there for a while. Or ever. I listen to lots of wonderful commentary about the USA from people in the United Kingdom, for example.

Could you pay for some "security staff" to "clean up" the area around your storefront? As long as the clean up process doesn't involve anything more than misdemeanors it sounds like nobody will be prosecuted.

Here’s a crazy thought. Have your police, who are already paid for by usurious New York City taxes, be allowed to enforce the law.

In theory police enforce the law. In practice, police do what democratically elected officials tell them to do, and there will always be more shoplifters and homeless people than business owners. So buy private security and know that they work for your interests specifically. The cleaned up street will attract more customers and the added security will pay for itself.

> So buy private security and know that they work for your interests specifically. The cleaned up street will attract more customers and the added security will pay for itself.

“Will” pay for itself? Spoken like someone who has never had to pay the bills to run a retail establishment.

If it's noteworthy enough to be in a news article when it happens, that sort of feeds into OP's point imo.

Today, I walked a couple blocks west of where I work to grab a slice of pizza and while I ate, a dude just hauled forth his member and urinated in the gutter, not 15 feet away from me. I felt bad for the tourists and their kids, but only because the pizza was overpriced and tasted like Digiorno.

Usually I find defecation is easiest - not for me, but for the unfortunate souls without access to privacy - at the far end of a subway platform, away from the glare of publicity.

Depends on where you are. San Francisco absolutely has a real, extremely-visible problem in a number of places. In a "walk from transit to work, you'll see it quite literally every day for years on end" kind of way.

When it rains, a significant amount of the Market Street area (and surrounding blocks) smells like pee for a day.

---

Part of the issue with the "perception vs reality" claim in big cities is that people who live near-ish to places with issues like this avoid those places, either consciously (x area is dangerous so don't park there) or subconsciously (none of your friends go there, so you don't know anything there, and have no reason to go randomly). Visitors and new arrivals are pretty often more likely to encounter it at a more accurate rate.

After regularly getting catcalled directly outside my door and being followed at night, I said “fuck this” and moved to a small walkable town not far outside the city. It’s much easier to not treat strangers as predators here, because they generally don’t act like predators. I still enjoy a day in the city, but at home I can take nighttime walks with no worries. I do feel a little bad that I couldn’t stick it out like other people can.

I don’t feel it’s fair to criticize someone explaining why they live the way they do when you where the first to criticize said group:

>>The communities that hand-wring the most about predators and risks to children tend to be middle class, suburban, and white.

The presence of this comment purposely invites controversy.

If these people are supposed to behave differently (from a cultural standpoint), there are issues that need to be resolved first. These “two different topics” are heavily intertwined.

> make the city centres safe, clean, friendly places

Agreed. Exactly as most of the rest of the world has done. In the developing world (India, China) and the old west (Europe), cities are the place to be. They are safe, easy to get around and much much more happening.

> without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted

This is such a west coast experience. I have seen this in SF/Seattle, but Boston/NYC's homeless have seemed pretty innocuous. It is local politics problem. Cities around the world don't have these issues either.

Cities continue to be expected to be havens for every kind of person, while suburbs create their own walled gardens. But if a city every proposes suburb style discriminatory policy, it will immediately be viewed as 'racist'. (Usually Racism of this form is just people looking out for their own socio-economic interests. I won't always call it hatred driven Racism. But, the standard west-coast suburbanite surely would) Because it is, and suburbs have been able to get away with massive unsustainable, economically draining and exclusionary policies for half a century.

> fights and the filth, got too many concussions

Where did you live ? I have spent my entire life in high-density cities and have never come close to anything like this.

> This is such a west coast experience. I have seen this in SF/Seattle, but Boston/NYC's homeless have seemed pretty innocuous. It is local politics problem.

It's a numbers and climate problem. If you're homeless in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, or New York in the winter, you die. If you come to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, or Vancouver, you survive

It's common to see arguments of this form, which are essentially "the current state of the affairs is simply the result of what people prefer: they prefer to drive everywhere, live in big houses with big backyards in sprawling suburbs, etc." In other words, just explaining (and excusing!) the state of affairs as being "what the market wants." I do think there is some truth in these arguments. Of course there will always be some people who prefer that and some people who prefer living in more dense communities/cities. But what's missing from this is discussion about how non-market forces affect the state of affairs? What about city planning, zoning, even direct subsidies like paying for freeways and streets?

100% I am in the suburbs because the two cities we love (Portland and San Francisco) have inconvenient busing and/or lottery systems for their public schools. And we would prefer to use public schools over private.

That being said we picked a suburb that is actually quite walkable for our daily needs due a good public trail system and being adjacent to a large community college campus.

That's a good point. I think there's also the question of us this really the result of what people prefer? Maybe there are other inefficiencies that are not non-market forces that caused this.

With low birth rates, certainly a lot of people may have large backyard suburbia as the ideal but do not want to deal with single family homes for their small family of 2 or 3. A condo or townhome with green space can be a life with much fewer hassles.

Detached homes, especially the lovely ones with mature trees and gardens, require a lot of work. Things like snow removal, leaf pickup, scrubbing mildew off the siding, tree trimming, concrete repair, roofs, hvac maintenance, cleaning and servicing multiple vehicles, and the list goes on. And of course older homes are booby trapped wrecks of lead, asbestos, cloth-insulated wiring, corroded pipe, and shoddy insulation. Naturally, in many desirable locations old is the only affordable type, too.

There's also the observation that indulging everyone's preference doesn't necessarily lead to a global optimum. A straightforward analogy is traffic, or crowd control - if you let everyone follow what they perceive to be the optimum route, the flow becomes dysfunctional as everyone tries to occupy the same space, and occasionally people even get squished.

Subsidies are a big one. All the core aspects of American suburbs have been subsidized for 70 years: oil, autos, highways, single family homes, freight (via highways), service lines. People talk about a free market but there was a great deal of post-war central planning which decided this was the community of the future (Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Moses come to mind but it began as early as Roosevelt). Part of this was the dual-use aspect of oil and auto industries and highways for the military.

strongtowns.org has ongoing research that shows most suburban communities are not self-sustaining as a tax base and rely on nearby cities and outside investment to support their infrastructure.

Where did you live? Right now I'm in the middle of Chicago with my elementary aged children sleeping peacefully. I don't live in the wealthiest neighborhood. I don't live in the poorest. It's pretty diverse (by the standards of Chicago).

I haven't been assaulted. I'm pretty sure the excrement I see is canine, not human. I haven't seen any heroin needles, though I don't live far from a methadone treatment clinic. And a halfway house for recently released prisoners. And am only a mile from the lakefront where we now have year-round tent camps for the first time in anyones' memory (homeless who camp through Chicago's winter are a tough breed).

Maybe the rabbits eat the heroin needles before I see them. Lord knows they eat everything else. Everyone on social media complains about the coyotes and how they're everywhere. But I think that's bullshit - if there were as many coyotes as people claim we'd have way less rabbits.

Surprising how much of what people post on the Internet is bullshit like that, isn't it?

> But I think that's bullshit - if there were as many coyotes as people claim we'd have way less rabbits.

Not necessarily - the rabbit population might be large and sustaining enough to support a fairly large coyote population.

It's not the case that the existence of prey means that there are no predators around - usually it is the opposite. Predators go where the prey is.

I moved to Tokyo a few years back, right before the pandemic. Seeing comments like this makes me feel very lucky that I didn't instead choose a large US city.

I wonder if some of the people commenting here have ever been to a city like Tokyo. It is a great example of what is actually possible when it comes to cleanliness and safety in a massive urban environment.

Yeah, just move to Japan! Osaka, Kyoto, Tokyo, take your pick!

Good luck with the visa and cultural barrier if you like families.

If Pewdiepie, a man worth millions of dollars can do it after four years of Byzantine bureaucracy can do it, anyone can! Seriously though, he documented just how difficult the process is on his YouTube channel. Moving to Japan is insanely difficult.

I think it's a lot easier for employees than for freelance types. Even the companies hiring language instructors will do most of the paperwork for you.

Assuming you get a job, it's actually not difficult. If you work in tech, you can probably even get a visa that gets you PR in 3 years. I moved mostly on a whim directly prior to the pandemic, and haven't run into any major stumbling blocks.

The language barrier is the biggest issue. Assuming you live in a large city (and really, you should), the town halls have translators. You may need to wait for them to be available, and the translations may not be amazing, but they'll help you solve any tasks you need to do.

The next biggest issues are getting a phone number (you need a residence card first), getting a bank account (you need a residence card and a phone number), and getting a credit card (you need a residence card, a phone number, and will need to deal with them sending your card with your katakana name on the envelope). If you have a job, they'll help you do all of these things.

Getting housing isn't really a problem. At this point there's lots of gaikokujin housing (short-term rentals, month-to-month leases, sharedhouses, etc). It's possible to find it online with no Japanese language skills. Again, if you have a job, they'll help you find housing.

If you're coming in as a student, your school will also help you with all of these things.

Pewdiepie makes money off of making content. Saying "hey, this isn't very hard" isn't entertaining. Don't use him as a real-life example.

I think their point was that safe cities are possible, not that we should all move to Japan. Someone who has only experienced a dangerous city or a car centric city, the possibilities might not be obvious to them so there is a very defeatist attitude, as if this is just the way cities are.

I remember cruising through the streets of Tokyo in the middle of the night, still worried that I might get jumped by a meth hear even though it was extremely unlikely. It's a pre-conception that is hard to let go of.

There are many developed European cities that are totally fine and do not have major cultural barriers. Some of them even speak english as a first language!

Dense living doesn't necessarily have to be a big city.

I live in an area where I see people out and walking. The local neighbourhood feels bustling. If I needed someone to watch my kid, I could call outside for someone from a number of faces I have known for years.

This is in a developing country. Houses are smaller, closer together, and without things like a driveway. I guess most people in the US still wouldn't want to give up these things. But I wouldn't want to live in a place where I never see people because they are all either in their house or their cars.

That's really not my experience with the U.S. I'm from a smaller city (250k) and there are constantly people out in my neighborhood. Kids playing, riding bike, people walking, pets, etc... Just a lot of activity!

We have large windows too so it's fun seeing it all.

> But I got sick of the fights [...] got too many concussions

While lots of people in cities live very different lives, either you were very unlucky or this is your own fault. Or do you think the majority of the 8 million people in NYC have gotten a concussion since moving there?

The filth, yeah, it's neighborhood dependent but NYC as a whole (really anywhere other than right on Central Park) has a lot of room to improve. Pretty rare to see needles or human excrement (dog excrement is way too common).

I believe the multiple concussions are related to the danger of bicycling in the city, which he also states he did. The appropriate question, then, is "Do you think the majority of the N people in NYC that commute primarily by bicycle have gotten a concussion while living there?"

His answer might well be yes.

Cycling in NYC is indeed very dangerous (I do it every day). That being said, I've done it for about 20 years now and I haven't gotten a concussion.

Yep, and there is a major difference between a casual ride to pick up a sandwich at 2pm on Sundays compared to the morning hustle jockeying for position in the delivery truck avoidance dystopia--surely gamified somewhere on Steam.

First big concussion I got was me walking home at night. I was living right in the centre of town, a few minutes from a grocery store. You know, like how people on HN moralise we should all do.

Three people jumped out of a car, beat me up and left. It was a gang initiation thing - beat up a random civilian and get to the first rank, or something. After that concussion I was a lot more susceptible to other concussions.

Can't make an NYC analogue - do people feel safe there walking at all hours of the night by themselves, even in dark areas? If so great, maybe that's a place I'd live too, like Tokyo or Taipei.

There's a big, but disappearing, middle ground between "urban city center" and "suburban housing development."

Single-use zoning laws are a big part of why we have this model where everyone living in a house needs to drive just to get to the corner store, and everyone who can walk anywhere is living in a small apartment in an expensive city.

I grew up in two different suburban small towns, where we were each just a couple blocks from the corner store, the laundromat, and the local library. I could walk to my friends' houses to hang out, ride my bike around, and pick up a pizza for $5 to share with my friends.

It wasn't glamorous or fashionable like city life, and it wasn't as sterile as a housing development, but it was a good place to grow up.

That multi-use zoning “middle-ground” town describes what I live in now and it’s lovely. I wish there was more like it so that everyone could live like this.

> just make the city centres safe, clean, friendly

+ good public schools

Or no public schools. What's even the point? The whole k-12 curriculum needs a revamp. Can they at least compress it to k-9 and leave the rest of those years for actual preparation for adulthood?

Ha, we're at most 5-10 years from public K-16.

How about make them better? I hated public school, but you're an imbecile.

You know name calling is against the rules here.

* Bring back honors classes for those districts that removed them

* Stop no child left behind

* Teach more hardcore math at a younger age. Calculus should be introduced in 6-8 grades.

* Require more writing and reading in general.

In general bring the lower performing students up to par with the high performers, not the other way around.

Oh dear lord no. Have you ever met a 9th-grader? They still have so much to explore about the world and themselves! It would be a tragedy to stop formally educating the public so soon.

Honestly, I feel the same way. My wife and I left a bigger city for similar reasons. Now we life in the country, and it’s inconvenient, but it’s just nicer out here.

I think we need to stop talking about cities and suburbs as if it's a binary decision. There are a ton of options in the middle which are not as loud or dense as cities while also not being as isolating and unwalkable as suburbs. Building more missing middle housing would help solve the problem significantly but no one (at least no one with the power and means to do so) wants to do that.

LoL. I still won’t come, no matter how nice the city is.

Living in a big house is waaaaaay better than a living in an apartment inside a building. No contest here.

At some point you're going to have to pay for the externalities you free-ride on to enjoy that life right now.

(I have a modest house on the commuter rail network. I probably will, too.)

I'm already paying an order of magnitude more for the same facilities I'd get in states that are less dense than California.

At least out here, things are so screwy that minor details like cost of materials are rounding error.

Will happily pay for atmospheric carbon recapture, which covers the biggest externality.

Also, like most other commenters from the west coast, I'd live in one of the cities if they weren't littered with human waste, and if they had reasonable public schools.

How is paying property tax free-ride?

They are referring to sprawl externalities. Strong Towns delves into this (and they have some points, but are also overly pessimistic about suburban and rural costs).

https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme

I live in a walkable community on the US east coast that is clean, safe, and downright affordable compared to SF. Every student in town can walk to school, we walk to stores, restaurants, bars, and a train that takes us into the city center.

No fights, no filth. There are plenty of places that fit the bill.

Pretty much. For some reason people see the suburbs as some forced development decision when in fact it's pretty much housing consumers choosing what they want.

To be clear: I don't see them as a forced development decision. It's clear that they're extremely preferable for many people, in a large part because the economic envelope for suburbs includes massive externalities. Unsustainable road and utility networks are the standard example.

Put another way: consumers are choosing the best option for them, because they don't have to pay the true cost of their living environment. If the economic envelope matched the underlying reality, suburban development would be mostly an economic dead end.

the American style of suburb is quite unusual compared to e.g. Europe though, and AFAIK is driven by zoning laws and car-centric infrastructure more so than by consumer choice. Markets don't necessarily offer people what they want, people's imaginations are often constrained by what's available on the market. Something something, "faster horses".

I don't buy it based on my own experience living around the world. I lived in Asia for a while where an apartment was the norm and public transit meant you didn't need a car (and most didn't have one).

What would the majority do if they had the money? What was their "dream lifestyle"? Buy a single family home, with it's own land and a car.

Sure, not everyone likes that lifestyle, but a hell of a lot of people do like it.

I was thinking the infrastructure and amenities state of US suburbs, where they're basically stamped down in blocks off a highway. I live in a single family home and drive a car in the UK, but there are tons of amenities within walking distance (and I can walk anywhere), community events and green spaces, etc. I can drive, get a bus or cycle into the nearest city, which my town is clustered near to, so opportunities are aplenty. I know my neighbours, family are nearby, and so on. The vibe I get from American suburbs is that they're much more like isolated house-units and if you want to do anything you have to drive to somewhere totally different.

I dunno. The most expensive are houses near center of city usually. People pay a lot for that. Then second most are apartments near center of city. The houses further away are cheaper. Some people definitely prefers them, but I dont think buying patterns show them being majority.

The houses with no stores around, with no busses around where you and your kids needs driving everywhere are comparatively cheap. Even people living in houses with yards seem to prefer them if they are either walking distance from forest, walking distance from stores/community centers and ideally both.

The most expensive are houses near center of city usually.

The houses in the suburbs of Bay Area peninsula are more expensive than the houses inside SF city limits. Of course there many factors like schools that influence that, but I wouldn't argue your observation is always correct.

And price is due to supply/demand. If the supply of single family homes in the middle of cities was high enough to keep costs down, sure, plenty of families would choose those. But they aren't, so people trade off living close to a city center with a lower cost single family home.

> But they aren't, so people trade off living close to a city center with a lower cost single family home.

Yes, but I dont see majority of people doing that worldwide. And where they do that, they prefer houses in near villages where there are stores and community centers nearby. And those houses have small businesses in them.

The local stores or walkable infrastructure are not exclusive feature of cities. That is something that does not exists only where it is illegal to open local store near the houses.

What do you mean "worldwide"? When I lived in Asia people lived in small concrete boxes with no windows so they could work in big cities and not pay a lot for rent.

With the exception of wealthy countries, I'd argue most people don't have the choice of living in an apartment in the city or a big house in the country.

I don't see anything that would suggest majority of people anywhere prefers to live in houses in locations with no transport other then car and no stores etc nearby.

In wealthy countries, people live in remote houses like that because it is cheaper. Houses in walkable places are way more expensive. You have to be at the level of "shopping and everything is done by somebody else and kids are driven by nanny" rich to get to demographic where it is opposite.

Asia has rich people btw.

Whoa, we just went from "single family home" to "single family home...in locations with no transport other than car and no stores etc nearby".

I never said people prefer that.

I said people prefer a single family home, a yard and a car. That's not actually achievable in most city centers (unless wealthy) so many people give up location in exchange for a single family home, a yard and car.

Thus, suburbs aren't forced on anyone. Many people chose a single family home, in the suburbs, over an apartment in the city. The cost of that is not being able to walk everywhere, and people are willing to pay that price.

This is what the thread starts with: the American style of suburb is quite unusual compared to e.g. Europe though, and AFAIK is driven by zoning laws and car-centric infrastructure more so than by consumer choice. Markets don't necessarily offer people what they want, people's imaginations are often constrained by what's available on the market. Something something, "faster horses".

You specifically said "I don't buy it" to the above comment that was about car oriented suburbs specifically.

Nowhere you specified you are changing topic from the above (suburbs) to "house anywhere".

I said “i don’t buy that people are forced to choose suburbs and don’t actually want them”.

I mean, people leave SF to move to the suburbs south of the city. They need a car, but they can also walk to their Main Street.

Based on the fact the price of that housing is more, I’d argue people want to live in the burbs over an apartment in a city.

I would totally want to live in a single family home with a garden in a city - all the benefits of city living, with space.

But single family homes set in the suburbs, amongst endless other single family homes? It's nowhere near as good. You have to drive everywhere and there's not enough density to support local shops.

I think it's a mistake to assume that because almost everyone would, with enough money, want their own home and land, that they'd also want it in the suburbs. You just need to look at property values to see that isn't the case - houses and apartments in the city are worth more.

I could trade my terraced house in the city for a much larger one in the distant suburbs. But that would mean driving everywhere, living by busy fast roads, not having a huge range of shops nearby, having to commute further into work, not being able to cycle - all things that make it not worth it. Clearly a lot of my neighbours feel the same way.

I think that biggest killer is kids once they are beyond toddler stage. Kids ability to go independently to sports club, visit friend or go to school ads a lot of comfort to both kid and parent. And kids occasional ability to fetch something from local store is a neat addition too.

I live in a suburban single-family home in the US with a yard and garden in a small town just outside a small city. I use my car once a week at most (but normally not at all), usually just to enjoy a day trip into the city. From home we walk or bike to restaurants, groceries, coffee, library, parks, breweries, boutique stores, etc. I think this is the ideal, and if someone gave me all the money in the world I’d honestly be hard pressed to find a place I’d rather live. But even money isn’t an issue, because cost of living is fairly low here.

I think it’s a mistake to assume that outside the cities it’s all highways and endless suburbs.

>What would the majority do if they had the money? What was their "dream lifestyle"? Buy a single family home, with it's own land and a car.

> Sure, not everyone likes that lifestyle, but a hell of a lot of people do like it.

Nope, dream ofmost of the people would be to "buy a single family home, with it's own land within the city without doing taxi driver for your kids".

But since this is completely scifi since houses in city are the most expensive people have to settle either for city apartments or house outside city and becoming taxi driver.

Sounds like you might want to live in the Netherlands.

Or Toronto.

Most people think they want to live in Toronto until they actually live in Toronto...

I hate how some people are determined to make all cities sound like hellholes full of junkies. This is just not true.

> I used to love the concept of relatively high density living.

Have you been to Japan? High density is not the problem.

Unless you can (and want to) replicate the monoculture of Japan in the US, this will remain an unhelpful comparison.

“Make it nicer and we'll come back.” Oh boy, there’s so much wrong in that attitude!

Anyhow, some advice from Amsterdam, NL (yes, the country of decriminalized marijuana and legal prostitution): we pay taxes and a significant portion of it — less so as the conservative government tries to shore up waning consensus with spending cuts to sustain windfalls for its constituency — goes to social programs aimed at housing homeless, supporting the addicted (often by addressing the underlying mental illness or trauma), managing dysfunctional families (which in several cases can be a bit paternalistic, but it also helps contain spillover to the previous problem class), helping sustainable employment.

Now, conservatives have systematically eroded all this societal infrastructure, but most of it is still here and it does help avoiding the situations you strawmanned.

Society is not a zero-sum game, it’s a force multiplier.

Maybe if the middle class suburban whites hadn't spent seventy years pushing crack into black neighborhoods, systematically breaking up families, demolishing communities to replace them with highways, extracting tax money and spending it on services for suburban middle class neighborhoods, arresting people for feeding the homeless, guarding discarded food so it doesn't get eaten, undermining education in poor neighborhoods, and straight up killing them when they request help from the authorities, some of those problems would not be as bad.

Ah yes. Racism really is the cause of all the world's problems, isn't it?

> without having to dodge heroin needles or human excrement or have abuse hurled it us or be assaulted.

What a failure of imagination for what civic policy could be.

The idea is to build a social net in society such that you take care of people so that they never need to fall low enough to be shitting in the street or using hard drugs to get through a miserable existence.

This is expensive, requires compassion, and extremely socialist policies. The Hackernews crowd wouldn't love it.

But the money is there in society, it just requires a few less billionaires, and a few less multi-mansion lifestyles.

Where did the meme that this would work originate?

Work backwards from cities that are actually clean & safe. Is Singapore this way because of their "extremely socialist policies"?

Is the goal a clean and safe city at all costs no matter what the cost? Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

The Singapore way is easier, no doubt. But I don't think it's that ludicrous to believe we could have a free AND a socialist society.

Concussions?! Which city were you living in?!

He's riding a bike so when he crashes he probably sometimes gets a concussion. Riding a bike anywhere is kinda scary though, not just big cities.

Ah, that makes more sense. I was imagining them getting in to multiple random fights across the city!

Until the pandemic I commuted through London by bike for about 7 years - ranging from 5 to 12 miles a day. I fell off maybe a couple of times, never hitting my head. If the OP is sustaining multiple concussions from bike riding, they're either riding a lot (bike messenger?) or riding very recklessly (or perhaps both).

There are different attitudes,congestion and interactions for cyclists in different cities. NYC drivers seems particularly antagonistic towards cyclists, I have seen many examples of what seemed like intentional strikes to me by taxis and commercial drivers who are likely to be more time crunched and build up a frustration towards cyclists. But cyclists also seem to be of a more daring rugged stock there too.

Granted, my only personal comparison would be to Buffalo, Albany, Poughkeepsie and San Diego, all which have much less congested city centers.

The only east coast city that matched the "needles and feces" attitudes I have seen was Philadelphia. As soon as you start driving into the city it is impossible to notice how much trash and car debris is in the road. The moment I parked, we saw needles on the ground and as a result I was more likely to notice I imagine. But, it was truly a filthy city.

Buffalo city centers do have a high rate of panhandling and street scams, you just learn coping skills.

As I learned from YT channels like Not Just Bikes, it must not be universally scary. Places just not organize traffic well enough.

Went over it a bit here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31362410

Actually never had a traffic accident on my bicycle.

> Make it nicer and we'll come back.

The people that live there are what make it nicer. You can help and be part of the solution, or you can continue to live in your 1500 sqft kingdom and let Queen Karen out every so often to harass the local teenage serfs, er, service workers.

"Savage Department, Randy speaking."

For serious though you hit the nail square. Pearl-clutching suburban types are actually moving back into the city where I'm at (to my neighborhood, among others), and it sucks in every way except my house's value is shooting up.

> 1500 sqft kingdom

it’s sad that you think this is a kingdom. I live in a single bedroom apartment with 1/2 this square footage.

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