Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by subsubzero | Hacker News Reader

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Your heaven sounds like my hell :) I don't want to live in a super dense metropolis filled to the brim with high rises where I cannot barely see the sky, and people are jammed into streets like cattle and no one has yards. If you do there are a ton of cities in America that are not in California, see New York, Chicago etc. Its funny as everyone who complains about California's high housing costs say the answer is to turn the entire state into Manhattan.

I think a better approach here is to focus on the supply side of things which is completely driven by companies that want people in the office and the offices are in SF or Palo Alto/Mountain View etc. So the answer here is either allow remote work and encourage people to leave California, or break up the head offices and move them across the country into less expensive areas.

Before the tech boom houses would go for $500-600K in San Jose(I should know as I bought a place in 2013 for $550k) so this high housing crisis is totally artificial and recent. It also doesn't help that having a million+ engineers/tech employees making $200k+ a year all crammed into one geographical region which is constrained by water and mountains.

It doesn't have to be a metropolis, the US just needs to fix their damn zoning laws. It's crazy that in most American cities, you have to have a car to get anywhere. Zoning in most places make it impossible to do things like walk to the grocery store or let you kids walk to school.

The only time we think of walkability is in big cities but what if suburbs proposed this radical idea of building services that people use closer to where those people actually live. If your day to day is dropping your kids off at school, going to the grocery store and gym, and then work, why in the hell did we decide that your home, work, grocery store and gym should all be in segregated parts of town where the only way to get from one place to another is an expensive hunk of metal.

> why in the hell did we decide that your home, work, grocery store and gym should all be in segregated parts of town where the only way to get from one place to another is an expensive hunk of metal.

Because we decided to prioritize things like peace and quiet, distance from people and outdoor spaces for play, cooking and recreation above not leaving a tiny bubble for your whole life.

Living in tiny condos sucks and isn't for everyone, this is the tradeoff we've chosen.

That said, I'd much rather have my kids walk to school in a suburb than a dense urban area.

But that's the whole point: having suburbs be livable on their own, with schools, shops, doctor offices all in walking distance. I grew up in a small (2000 people) town in Central Europe, which had all that, plus some factories where majority of the population found employment, and it still felt like quiet, cozy place.

if you think compact walkable cities are hell wait until you see what happens as we continue with the status quo and our way of life is destroyed forever due to climate change.

I missed the part where they said they wanted to live in "a dense metropolis filled to the brim with high rises where I cannot barely see the sky, and people are jammed into streets like cattle and no one has yards". Did you respond to the wrong comment, or did you just invent a strawman to argue against?

Not strawman, but this guy just has Burgerbrain: the only choices he can conceive of are those in the US. Anyone who has been to any suburb in Europe or Japan knows that you can easily build housing that is well between "high rise hellscape" and the extremely large parcels in most US suburbs. It's mostly about allowing those options to be built, which most zoning currently precludes. Any non-SFH-only residential area is so expensive and rare in North America that only high-rises make sense to justify the land cost. Meanwhile, everyone in the burbs will fight tooth and nail against allowing multiplex construction because they think it will lower land value somehow (and is often code for "we don't want the poors moving in here").

Burgerbrain indeed. I wish I could take everyone here strawmanning my comment and thinking I want us all to live in Takyo for a trip to Houten, NL - a not very exciting suburb of Utrecht (though some there would take issue with calling it a suburb instead of a town in its own right!) where you can do everything by bike and public transit.

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