Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw009 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Living in a city where laundromats (even moderately large professional ones) are nowhere near residential areas is, to say it briefly, stupid.

You want them right near your home so you can drop by any time. Nobody wants to go 45 minutes out of their way just to drop off some clothes.

I think all the people who have washers and dryers in their own homes would disagree that having a laundromat on their street would be a value add. It would just bring traffic from outside of their neighborhood into it.

I'm not making a case for or against, but instead saying this is a matter of perspective based on who's making the judgement call.

You could say the same about restaurants, stores, or streets themselves.

Those people can choose to live in the woods away from society if that’s a problem. The vast majority of people like having things they need within a few minutes of their home—particularly people who aren’t in HOA-governed cookie cutter suburbs.

This is factually incorrect and easily verifiable so. The vast majority - 80% of the US population prefers single family homes. There are 138 Million households in the US and fully half - 68 million - reside in owner occupied single family homes, another ~15% (about 44 million people) live in rented single family homes. This is just the people who have achieved the desired outcome. There are another 15% of people who would prefer to be in one, but just haven't gotten there yet.

Very few people actually want to be stacked on top of each other and packed in like sardines around a bunch of loud shops and offices. Very few people want to walk through dirty city streets stepping over feces and around homeless people or forced to be smushed in with strangers on public transportation to grab their groceries. They want to be 5-10 minutes away from that stuff in a car which they can afford to own. The reason a lot of people are putting up with this anyway is an affordability issue only. They are forced to work in a handful of cities to be paid well and the cost of parking and the congestion in these cities make it impractical to own a car or commute.

I obviously know there is a slice of people who actually do just love the hell out of city life and wouldn't trade NYC or SF for the world, but to claim that this is the vast majority is demonstrably false.

Edit: Adding a source. There are many, but this one is nice in that it breaks it out by age in addition to overall and breaks out actual vs preferred.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/245249/americans-big-idea-livin...

That's all very nice but the calculations would change quite quickly if people had to pay for the upkeep of the roads they use for their cars. Cities for the most part use their productive core to subsidise the unproductive suburbs until they inevitably go bankrupt when the roads build 40 years ago need to be replaced.

This. The preferences are obviously driven by the widespread subsidies provided to suburban living. Take that away and those preferences will shift rapidly.

Looking at your average suburb, there are about 110 houses on quarter acre lots per mile of paved 2 lane road within said suburb, plus an additional bit to connect to an arterial street (which also connects other suburbs) and back out to main drags that have businesses and such.

Starting with the street the houses are actually on, it costs approx $300-$500K to repave 1 mile of residential 2 lane undivided road. Using the upper end we've got $500,000 / 110 houses / 20 year lifespan = $18/mo per household. A rounding error against property taxes.

Now lets assume that per mile of suburb, you also have 3 miles of connecting minor arterial roads those houses also need to account for. These run $400-$800K per mile, and again we'll take the upper limit here. So $800K * 3 / 110 / 20 = $90/mo

So our grand total is $108/mo or $1,306/year. The average American pays $2500/year in property taxes already. I don't think the extra $108/mo is going to change peoples preferences for not being packed in on top of each other. I also don't think that these folks are contributing zero to this now. The gas at the pump is taxed and earmarked for road improvement, some of their property tax goes to it as well.

We can do the same thing for power, water, et cetera. Yes over the lifetime of suburban living a single person probably needs to account for something like $250K of extra infrastructure their sprawl requires, but that's not a lot to pay over a lifetime and a lot of it is already baked into the initial cost of their house (Builders had to pave those suburbs, wire & plumb the neighborhood and that cost is baked into those initial home sales).

I very probably can't make a similar argument for truly rural homes - but a lot of those are farms and I'm sure that complicates things quite a bit - as subsidizing rural farms benefits anyone who eats food from those farms.

It's not just the direct subsidies, it's also the massive amounts of free parking in both suburbs and cities that have distorted the built environment, and things like the mortgage interest deduction + the capital gains tax exemption that have made single-family homeownership cheaper than it would otherwise be.

You’ve made a few massive leaps by assuming a single family home can’t possibly have a shop nearby, and that if it did it’d mean people are dodging feces.

Because you can literally go just about anywhere outside of America and see that people live in homes right next to businesses and… it’s fine. We’re not dodging feces and homeless people. Frankly, most places I’ve been to and lived have been much cleaner than my old US homes despite the fact I’m literally a 2 minute walk from a two separate stores and several restaurants in an area where everyone lives in detached homes.

That rant reads like fearmongering from a person with little outside exposure.

The feces and homeless comments were specifically geared towards the sort of people packing taking place in SF. I think there is some sort of rule about making assumptions about commentors, but as far as exposure, I have it in spades. First I was actually homeless in my teens, second through a combination of some time in the military, and a general wanderlust I've moved about 35 times in the 41 years I've been kicking around for including:

Seattle area (Seattle itself and most of the Puget sound - Olympia, Tacoma, Burien, Keyport, Bremerton, Poulsbo, bla bla too many to count here)

Several stents in California from San Diego to long beach and everything in between

Oregon, Michigan, Texas, Georgia, New Hampshire, Mexico (specifically 6 months in playa del carmen), North Carolina, Indiana

And of course the military bits like Kuwait, Iraq and a few other gnarlies

I'm sure I'm missing some here, but the point is I've lived in many more and varied places than the average joe. The only real assumption I made here is that we were talking about the US. I will grant you if you are talking about places outside of the US it changes the math quite a bit.

Are you sure that its the majority in the districts they have the zoning? If it was the majority, wouldn't the rules change?

Groundwater? It all goes in the same sewer, and the water you drink comes from the same tap. What does it matter if it's 5 miles away or next door, when we don't locally source water or dispose of waste locally?

Large centralized industries are probably going to be more efficient than small ones, but maybe not accounting for customer travel related pollution.

There's air pollution, of course, but few people want to ban wood stoves, and I doubt many medium industries you'd find without zoning pollute as much as 6 if those on one block.

Installation of new wood stoves is generally banned in California. Only certain types of pellet fuel stoves are allowed in new construction. And at times all wood burning is banned in certain regions for air quality reasons (except in homes that have no other source of heat).

Where I live in Los Angeles we have honest to god oil derricks right in the middle of residential neighborhoods and on school campuses.

If zoning can't stop that but is preventing duplexes then it's clearly not doing any of the good its been advertised as.

A brave, throwaway opinion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com