I m somewhat surprised that big cities still exist and people aren't killing each other or run away
I grew up in the suburbs, and I've lived in big cities, urban areas in medium sized cities, and exurbs as well.
The cities aren't as different as non-urban people think. But also, they're better in a lot of the ways that most people would expect: more things to do, better food, better shopping. The only real downsides in my mind are less affordable real estate and higher local particle pollution.
By far my least favorite lifestyle of those choices was in the exurbs/rural areas. Incredibly boring, isolated, and it's not as quiet and tranquil as one might expect (you're probably near a highway where jake brakes are allowed or a 55 MPH country road).
Believe it or not, city areas seem to have better quality park space (because what most people who aren't into hardcore nature consider to be "a nice park" is usually quite heavily designed and built).
And, oh yeah, cities are where the jobs are.
We can and should change this as much as possible.
This isn't 1800's America where most families are on rural subsistence farms.
People can choose to stay wherever they want, but the networks that make up the economy have to physically exist. Factories, warehouses, etc...look at a satellite view of the Chicago River from Goose Island down to Midway airport. It's a bunch of physical industrial infrastructure: warehouses, factories, railyards, etc. Do you propose these all instead spread out and get located in random middle-of-nowhere places where there are no employees, shops, restaurants, schools, etc?
Even data centers need to be near population centers. Why put us-east-1 near Roanoke and Lynchburg, VA instead of Roy, New Mexico?
We can't all just become remote knowledge worker hermits. Heck, we all saw how terrible remote learning is for children with the pandemic. [1]
[1] https://apnews.com/article/online-school-covid-learning-loss...
The kind of take you have isn't unusual for HN though. Most people from HN have spent their entire lives in cities or suburbs, so their empathy is short.
I am going to go back to your original comment: you think we should change the fact that most jobs are in cities and suburbs.
I’m just being realistic here: that is not possible. The human population dispersing from cities and suburbs doesn’t make physical sense. You wouldn’t live in a rural area anymore if Manhattan decided to move out and go out to towns like yours. Your town would turn into a city in its own right.
Mumbai has 54,000 people per square mile. Texas has about 110 people per square mile. If Mumbai has a similar density to Texas, it would be roughly the size of Arizona, just for one city that only represents 1% of the population of India.
The fact that most people concentrate themselves into denser areas makes your rural lifestyle possible in the first place.
I am not sure what I’m supposed to have empathy for here. I never said that rural people are dumb or bad or that nobody should live in rural areas. I have plenty of empathy for humans in general. I personally don’t prefer rural life but I also don’t have any negative feelings toward anyone who wants to live that way.
I’m just being realistic: concentrated areas where humans live in communities has been our reality since nomadic hunter-gathering was replaced by agriculture.
Good that you can read between the lines. That is the goal. Bring prosperity to these areas rather than extracting from them so regularly.
> The fact that most people concentrate themselves into denser areas makes your rural lifestyle possible in the first place.
Again, another HN fallacy. Rural is not a "lifestyle". Most people don't just move to a place where there's no ambulance services out of a "lifestyle choice". That line of thinking on HN as a default needs a swift and sharp death. Usually it's economic situations. If you start to drift away from the federal definition of rural, which is incredibly specific and not accurate to the average Americans definition, it includes a lot of small towns and cities. There's a lot of overlap as to why people live in those places and, again, it's generally not lifestyle.
> I am not sure what I’m supposed to have empathy for here. I never said that rural people are dumb or bad or that nobody should live in rural areas. I have plenty of empathy for humans in general. I personally don’t prefer rural life but I also don’t have any negative feelings toward anyone who wants to live that way.
Empathy isn't just a trait you have or don't have. Not only are there different kinds of empathy, but humans practice empathy selectively based on experience (largely). I'm saying it sounds like you lack perspective based on the things you've said, which often equates to a lack of empathy. Now, if you were raised in a city or suburb and have never left then that explains it. That doesn't make you awful or anything bad, at least in my view, if that's what you need to hear.
> I’m just being realistic: concentrated areas where humans live in communities has been our reality since nomadic hunter-gathering was replaced by agriculture.
Those tribes were how big? Nowhere near the density of tech cities or any city with the appropriate concentration of jobs I referenced. My idea is to spread the population out more and make better use of land and resources.
The ones I can point most directly to are service, retail, and healthcare. These need population densities in order to be efficient.
Unless you are looking at the classic old general store (or in the midwest - you do all your grocery shopping at Kwik Trip - the gas station), it is difficult to have a grocery store outside a city or town of sufficient size. Note that the prices and variety in the smaller stores are more than if you are able to go to a large store in a city.
Likewise, if you want to eat at a restaurant - sure, there are some that are in the "this is a restaurant located a 10 minute drive away from where you can see the window of your neighbor from your window". The norm for this, however, is in a town or city.
And then there's healthcare. Rural hospitals are failing. You don't find dentists on country roads.
These things (and more) 'conspire' to make it so that the services they offer are more efficiently done in a city and the ones in a city can out compete the ones that are located further away from others.
We can then bring up the carbon footprint of living outside a city. If you drive into a city to get goods ( https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/default/files/library/public/Dimit... ) that can be a hefty footprint that is exacerbated by not being able to use public transportation. Another look at it - https://www.treehugger.com/urban-or-rural-which-is-more-ener... :
> But a different picture emerges when you look at per capita consumption rates — cities have the lowest annual energy use per household (85.3 million Btu) and household member (33.7 million Btu) of all four categories. Rural areas consume about 95 million Btu per household each year, followed by towns (102 million) and suburbs (109 million).
And this then leads to that the jobs for the sectors of the economy where you need to physically be present somewhere (and that is a significant portion of them) are more efficient in a city. Coupled with the more efficent use of land and power with the city, this brings down the costs and maximizes the amount that a person makes... if they live in a city (all other things being equal).
Rural areas are failing because we continue to extract wealth out of them. You actually get right up against talking about it in your wall of text but then just abruptly lose the thought.
Of course, crime, housing costs and traffic (caused in large part by bad urban design) are real issues in American cities to varying degrees. But it's not as if all cities are lawless slums without any way to move about.
I shouldn't exert myself pointing out that the average cost of a vehicle is about $5000 per year [3], which costs a lot more than the unlimited miles you can travel with a $75/month bus/train pass in Chicago. [4]
It would probably blow the minds of car-dwellers to find out that it only takes 20 minutes to walk a mile. [5]
[1] https://realestate.usnews.com/places/new-york/new-york-city/...
[2] https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/obesity.pa...
[3] https://www.move.org/average-cost-owning-a-car/
[4] https://www.transitchicago.com/fares/
[5] https://www.nike.com/a/how-long-does-it-take-to-walk-a-mile
Which means you have massive delays between stops, and can’t do much if you don’t have hours available.
Especially in a city like NYC, essentially everything you need is within a mile. I live in Tokyo right now, and everything I need for daily life is within a quarter of a mile. I can get basically anywhere in the city in 30 minutes.
You know cities aren’t all like that?
I lived without a car in SF for 10 years and I think it covers that city as well. A lot of international cities work the same way.
Personal vehicles scale up to their passenger count. The single person with a car in the suburbs or rural effectively pays 4x more for the car than the family of four.
How do you get rid of the car? Live somewhere where public transportation or walking is the more efficient means of transportation - larger cities do this better than smaller ones.
Many aspects of managing a house are best done with more people. I've got a list of repairs that need at least three hands to do - but get put off because I've only got two. It would be much easier to live in a nice apartment closer to the urban center of the city.