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> that are safe for kids

It’s all about kids.

Without kids in the picture sure, go ahead, make cities look like Coruscant from Star Wars.

The instant you have kids you see how important open spaces safe enough for unstructured minimally supervised play are. Without spaces like this all you have are kids drooling on Roblox and YouTube all day. There’s nothing for kids in an urban core.

Those spaces don’t have to be undeveloped or even outdoor but I have yet to see a city successfully create an environment safe enough that I’d let my small daughters run around.

So while I agree that zoning is dumb and complicated, I also think it’s important to understand where people are coming from.

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I grew up in a Soviet planned city, with courtyard focused developments.

Our playgrounds were(they still are) larger and more accessible, than anything my current neighbours kids get on their 2a of land in rural USA.

Even the new developments in Eastern Europe provide a kid friendly courtyard. Shielded from all traffic and observable by literally the whole community.

Suburbia should be reserved for the insane rich people, that hate their neighbors.

Advantages for real-estate developers triumphed over the community-minded across a lot of the USA. I talked to my elderly Uncle, and he said that these zoning and quality of life issues were discussed quite a bit in the 1950s, but the "sprawl" pattern won in most cases. Shopping mall retail is another example of low-quality results in the USA, but with a different menu of inputs.

exactly - the problem is that House-absessed people do not understand how to build and manage apartments. In their imagination its just stacking towers without courtyards on top of each-other.

When they have coirtyards, they looks lile prisons.

Japan is much more child friendly in terms of that. For example, young children are regularly sent to do errands on their own (see the Old Enough tv show for an exaggerated version of that). So people may believe it to be the case, but I'm not convinced our zoning style achieves that goal.

In theory I agree - however there some differences between Japan and the US/CA.

I think the key with Japan is that they have several big HOA style restrictions at the very front of their property - the border. Immigration and existing cultural norms of being super respectful and following conventions in public places make this possible - the HOA style rules are built in at the country level.

There's also a very strict police presence apparently to ensure HOA compliance. [1]

It'd be awesome if there was experimental urban (or suburban) development in the US/CA that existed that was very high density and had very strict HOA rules and enforcement similar to Japan/Singapore.

[1] Japan, a "heaven for cops" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAri8cD4kN8

This is what every country needs.

Your opinion here seems to come from more a lack of experience or imagination, than from reality. Yes, many US "urban cores" are as you describe. But that is not the norm. The US is severely broken when it comes to city planning, and has been since at least the advent of the automobile.

With suburban sprawl, it's likely the only places within walking distance (i.e. "kid-reachable") are other houses, maybe a park. If managed well, a dense(r) city can have a forest or other semi-natural area nearby to everyone.

Name a single city in walking distance to a forest. And no, Central Park is not a forest.

I have acres of woods _in my backyard_. There are also no homeless people sleeping on the benches.

Freiburg in Germany. The black forest literally starts at the edge of the city. It was a while since I was there, but we definitely walked from the city centre to the forest. Might have been 30 minutes. Would be quick on a bike.

Zaragoza in Spain. Walked from the old city centre to the edge of the city (which was apartment blocks) in a reasonable time. It was mostly agricultural land, but I recall some forest along the river.

San Sebastián, also in Spain. You can walk into the hills, but we went to the beach.

Parks covered in homeless people is a US problem, in my experience. I've been around most of Europe and haven't seen anything like that. The homeless problem in the US is a policy choice, just like the urban development is. It's easily solvable given political will.

Can you walk to a cafe?

> Name a single city in walking distance to a forest.

Offhand, from relatively recent experience:

Singapore and Hong Kong contain forests, and when living there I regularly walked to them. Hong Kong is more than half green space.

The east side of Cologne is around an hour's walk from a proper forest.

Central Salzburg is an easy walk from several forests.

Hiroshima is surrounded by gorgeous forests, easily reached on foot, where you occasionally encountered secluded temples along the paths.

Good for you that you have the money to buy acres of woods (or an exclusive parcel bordering woodland) and a job that can support living in a remote place. For many people that would want that lifestyle it's simply unattainable, and we should give them reasonable alternatives.

I live in Prague, my parents in a nearby town. Walking 10 minutes gets me either to a metro station or an "urban forest"/heavily wooded park called Stromovka. I think it's a very appropriate place for kids to play in nature. My parents have walking/biking access to similar places.

Not every place in Prague is this close to nature, but it's common enough that someone seeking that kind of housing can get it at basically no premium.

+1 for prague, I lived 100 meters from a woodland. Used to find hedgehogs as a kid. Never seen a homeless person withing a square mile of it.

Mah suburbia people do not even grasp the alternatives they are missing

Munich: https://www.google.com/maps/@48.1074216,11.5821497,9196m/dat...

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