Comment by stakkur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stakkur | Hacker News Reader

Nobody seems to stop and ask "are super high density cities what's best for human health?", and that seems rather odd.

No, I'm not talking about 'study x showed people like walkable cities', I'm talking about efforts like making connections between the correlated explosion in mental and physical health issues and the rise of large, dense cities.

Portland covers 145 square miles, is geographically diverse, and has a profoundly hollowed out middle class that comes in part from pandering to failed ideas like those of Richard Florida (who has himself admitted being wrong). Now, 1 in 5 Portland kids live in poverty, Californians and foreign investors buy entire neighborhoods and build block upon block of condo boxes, and the cost of living is through the roof. There is no 'Portlandia' here, just caricatures and deepening poverty and a bizarrely out of touch municipal government elected based on pet ideas.

And the average age of Portland residents? ~37 and rising. The percent of the population that are children (<19 years) has declined over 30% in the last two decades. It's a city for tourists, real estate speculation and arbitrage, and amenities pandering to an ever-older base.

I've thought a lot about this and I think the answer is no. I lived in Paris for almost a decade and my mental health would deteriorate if I didn't make it point to leave the city periodically. Sure, there are many benefits to living in a city...quality of life is not one of them.

Apartment life simply wasn't for me. Being subject to my neighbors noisiness was a huge drain! I understand that being a home owner doesn't automatically shield you from bad neighbors, but it hits much different when they are on top of you. It just felt like a discounted way of living. Having things like a yard (where you can do whatever you want with) are huge quality of life boosters. Having a house on some land I think is ideal. Although that goes against the current narrative. I am very worried about this new push for 'optimizing living spaces'. Where companies are buying up land en masse and constructing condos/apartments. It's not the way to live!

I think being in close quarters to each other goes against our nature. Humans need space. How much? More than you may think.

I'm fine if people think they need space, I just don't think that cities should outlaw other options, and sprawling infrastructure should have its costs tied more closely to the users. It's very expensive and unfortunately it's people living in denser areas that foot a large part of the bill.

> Although that goes against the current narrative. I am very worried about this new push for 'optimizing living spaces'. Where companies are buying up land en masse and constructing condos/apartments. It's not the way to live!

It's important to remember that different people have different preferences. Having a yard to my partner and I has always been yet another maintenance burden, another one of life's incessant worries to upkeep. My favorite part of our local parks is the ability to go to them and not mow the lawn, not make sure the grass is upkept, not make sure the wind blew something over or whatnot. I have a friend with a large suburban home who is constantly fixing some thing or the other and seems to be forever living in a state of partial brokenness. He loves it, every day is a project for him, but this would drive my partner and I insane. Our neighbors are families and while they can be noisy at times the kids go silent around 9 PM and everything is quiet. My sleep is never disturbed.

It's good that you realized space is helpful for your mental health. But not for everyone. Living in an SFH neighborhood made my partner deeply depressed. The sound of neighbors' conversations gave her a sense of connectedness which improved her mental health drastically. When my grandparents from an urban area in a developing country first visited my parents SFH in the US, they found the area to be incredibly isolating and had a hard time sleeping without the background hum of people around them.

People are different. It's important for us to build housing of all types, so those who desire space have their space and for those who desire close connectedness have it as well. Right now the US has a severe lack in dense housing. Hopefully with time we'll have a more even mix.

I agree to a certain extent, but think I would go crazy living in the suburbs on my own, although I'm not in a city like Paris, I'm in one of the major cities of Switzerland.

Cheap apartments with no sound insulation are not good it's true, more modern, or even much older ones than the ones built in the 60s & 70s are much better. But good thick walls is something I would check first before moving to any apartment.

On the plus side of denser living, I can walk into town, there's plenty of places to socialise, (I was very much surprised at how lively it all is), I have 2 bus routes into town with buses at max 10 mins apart, the main station gives me access to much of the rest of the country.

I don't need a car, haven't owned one for 15 years now, there's a car sharing scheme that has many cars nearby. I use one once or twice a year.

People do wonder whether low-density, un-walkable, cites are _bad_ for human health, and studies show that they typically are bad health. I recall some studies on urban form and it's relationship to life expectancy, crime, happiness at certain socioeconomic statuses. Poor people in much of Montreal are able to live in walkable cities with low housing cost and decent transit, and it turns out they live longer, are more economically mobile, and are happier than equivalent SES populations in large cities with car-centric design.

I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that density itself is the cause of higher rates of mental illness. Density is more likely to correlate with exposure to car exhaust, for instance, and programs to care for mentally ill people tend to be located in denser areas. The crushing economic pressures of modern life regardless of location, combined with continued urbanization, seem to me more likely to be the cause than dense urban spaces.

https://www.urbandesignmentalhealth.com/how-the-city-affects...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5374256/

> No, I'm not talking about 'study x showed people like walkable cities', I'm talking about efforts like making connections between the correlated explosion in mental and physical health issues and the rise of large, dense cities.

I would think those health issues correlate a lot more closely with the "white flight" to the suburbs, where city density actually reduced a lot.

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