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Comment by porknubbins | Hacker News Reader

Growing up in Middle America was nowhere near as depressing as you’re describing it. We had bikes to get around, woods and empty lots and big backyards and parks to explore. Not to mention friends on the same block. Of course NYC would be much more exciting once you’re allowed to ride the train on your own.

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I for one had a very isolated childhood because I couldn’t go anywhere on my own, and pretty much nobody in my development ever talked to each other, so I basically didn’t know anyone local. That said I didn’t know any better so I thought that was just normal and didn’t experience it negatively.

Man, it just depends. In my youngest years, it was exactly as you describe. But then we moved to a new state. It was a little bit more suburban (not quite rural, but closer), and houses were a bit more spread out. Populated streets were more spread out, connected by roads I wouldn't feel safe cycling on as an adult, let alone allowing a child to do so. I couldn't wait to get my license to drive so I could actually do something outside the house without requiring permission.

And now those woods are a new suburb, the empty lots a new target.

Maybe on the popular coasts, but most of inner USA is little pockets of development spread out among large wilderness

Hell even the California countryside is like this, once you get far enough away from the big cities

Agreed. I think people on the coasts (or at least the east coast) fail to appreciate the vastness of the rest of the country that they so often look down on.

> once you get far enough away from the big cities

This is the key statement.

Build more SFH suburbs, gonna take you longer and longer to get far away from those cities.

Yes, but it really isn't that far. As soon as you leave the edge of suburba-mega-town you're in wilderness again. Where I live it's much less than a half-hour of driving, from the most interior parts of the city, in most conditions.

Let the haters hate. It gives more outdoors to us.

If you let those people who prefer density have their density, there's more sparsity left over for the rest.

I can’t tell if you intend to agree with the parent or if you are trying to rebut his argument, but this is the parent’s point. Moreover, the US is still not very dense, and there is plenty of sparsity for everyone. People should leave their metropolises a couple of times in their lives and experience the vast expanses. suburbs aren’t threatening nature in most parts of the country (agriculture OTOH…), and I say this as someone who personally dislikes the stereotypical American suburb for many other reasons.

I wasn't trying to rebut the parent's argument (assuming the parent wasn't trying to be ironic or so).

Denser cities make it easier to leave them for a short stint, too, because there's less sprawl.

Yes, it's probably a good idea to live outside a city for a while in your life. Though that's up to individual preferences.

I'm not quite sure whether it makes much sense one way or another to say that the US is 'still not very dense'.

In some literal sense, that is obviously true. In another sense, just because eg Russia has huge empty lands in Siberia bringing down the average density on a federal level, doesn't really make a difference to someone living in the suburbs of Moscow.

Similarly, if Russia lost Siberia tomorrow, the person in the Moscow suburb wouldn't experience density any different either.

I only chose Russia as an extreme case example. You can replace Siberia with Alaska or the flyover states, and Moscow and its suburbs with eg San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

After spending years in quite a few different places around the globe, I'm quite happy to live in Singapore these days, one of the premier global cities.

In the US it is sad that because of building restrictions so many people are excluded from its most productive cities; unnecessarily setting back the economy and thus the prosperity of the people. Including even of those people who wouldn't want to live in those most productive places.

>> there is plenty of sparsity for everyone

This will be my koan for the day.

Fun fact. We could fit the entire world population in a mega city the size of Texas.

Not sure what numbers you used. For comparison, here's a worked example:

Singapore has a size of 728.6 km2, and a population of 5.7 million people. For a density of 8,400 people per km2. (That includes water reservoirs, military bases, an international airport, areas for heavy industry, nature reserves, garbage dumps, power stations, 1.5% of the world's crude oil refining capacity, a few semiconductor fabs, etc.)

There are 7.96 billion people on the planet. That means if you scale up Singapore at the same density, you'd need 952,000 km2 to fit everyone.

Texas has a size of 696,000 km2. So our mega-Singapore would need about 1.37 Texases of area.

That's pretty close to your number.

Wikipedia gives New York City's population density as 11,313.68/km2, but the borders for that calculation will by necessity be drawn a bit arbitrarily. And I assume that doesn't include as much of the support infrastructure as Singapore does.

Human-scale housing means more wilderness for everyone.

I have no idea what “human scale housing” means, but single family housing is not a threat to wilderness in the US. There is a ton of wilderness in the US, and it is far more constrained by agriculture.

It's a geometry problem. SFH takes up too much space.

You're absolutely correct that there's heaps of wilderness in the USA, but the more SFH there is, the more sprawl that is required, which means that that wilderness is further and further away.

I'd rather get to the wilderness faster and not have to drive through hours and hours of sprawling SFH suburbs.

Geometry has a solution! If you want to be closer to nature, move closer to nature. That seems a lot more reasonable than insisting that everyone around you uproot and reorganize. I'm strongly biased toward letting people live how they want so long as they aren't harming people (and I don't think "living between urbanites and nature" constitutes harm).

> I'm strongly biased toward letting people live how they want

Then people shouldn't be allowed to ban their neighbours from building whatever housing they want.

Mixed use development where you can walk or bike to nearly all daily needs (work, grocery, kids school) within 20 or so mins.

Work is usually the kicker, many suburbs are actually quite bikable if you're willing to bike on the street.

What people really want is their work, stores, school of choice within walking/biking distance, which is harder to accomplish.

had.

By the time I graduated college all of the empty fields and forests where I had roamed as a teenager were now developments.

Where? In the midwest fields and forests still dominate, and the west is still vast expanses of wilderness. I don’t think your experience generalizes well (although perhaps it is more common on this forum considering it’s atypical demographics).

Sure, but odds are he lived in some outer suburb that is no longer the outer suburb. That woods might have hung on for a while, but it was always doomed just be the fact that it was near a large growing city where most people live and thus remember. Get out a little farther from the city and the wilderness is going to do just fine, but that isn't what people will remember as a kid just by virtual that they never lived near it.

I don't doubt it's true for him. I'm expressing a doubt that it's indicative of the American landscape broadly, a claim which seems to be implied by his opening "had.".

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