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Comment by SubiculumCode | Hacker News Reader

I'll keep my house, yard, and garden, thanks. Many people are miserable in apartments, hidden from the sun and living things.

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I love my apartment complex. We’ve got a pool and a balcony with great sun exposure. There’s a great community of neighbors, many children for my kids to play with, quick access to parks and I can get to work in 20 minutes. To each their own.

That sounds like me, except for the apartment bit. Big comfortable house with a nice sized yard (and a pool, even), really excellent neighborhood community, children everywhere, parks within easy walking distance, and I can get to the urban core in 20 minutes.

Best part is I share no walls with anyone, and if I want to be alone I can achieve that. I love my neighbors, but everyone is happier not to be scrunched into a single building.

In modern buildings, shared walls are no issue. There may as well be the void of space on the other side of those walls, I wouldn't notice the difference.

Could I play drums at 3 in the morning in such buildings? I've never seen anything with that level of sound insulation where I live.

“Hell is other people” — Jean-Paul Sartre

A variety of density for some (urban, suburban), rolling hills, mountains, or forests for others. Build what and where people want.

> Build what and where people want.

The attitude of some density advocates preclude building what people want, on the basis that what people want is evil (due to carbon emissions, environmental impact, and what have you).

Yes, many seem to forget that this is what many people actually want. “Life has to suck” seems to be a prevailing view.

How about trying to solve the problem? Instead of driving the big pickup truck to the acreage, drive an EV. If infrastructure is expensive to build, find ways to make it cheaper.

Everyone driving EVs still has very large infrastructure costs of building and maintaining roads, parking, garages, etc versus if people lived in walkable and bikeable areas. Less wear and tear on roads by orders of magnitude when not using a car reduces maintenance, less roads have to be built, less wasted space for parking. The idea of making things more walkable and dense is to reduce maintenance costs for society and reduce things that just aren't fun like driving between 2 destinations. "Life has to suck" would be living far from everything and having to maintain a house that's way too big.

Europe is full of charming little walkable towns that bleed people every single year, because the majority of economic opportunities are in a small number of big concrete jungle cities that may be walkable in part but are on the whole full of cars, pollution, and the assorted unpleasantries of big city life.

Different people enjoy different things. I'd say policy should try and make things cost more or less what they should cost, and let people express their preferences by paying for what they want.

This is a cultural issue. As someone who grew up in a Soviet megacity, and visited American suburbia on couple of occasion, I felt miserable in suburbs, like dying from boredom.

You went to a very particular kind of suburb. There are lots of good sized suburban cities in the US, especially in the west, which aren't boring in the slightest.

Suburbs = low density. To me even Chicago is a lower than desirable density city, let alone suburbs.

I grew up in some of the densest Asian megacities. Chicago isn't like that, sure, but if you think that makes Chicago a boring place to be, I'm afraid you have very peculiar tastes that won't translate for the majority of the population.

Yes it is boring, compared to say NYC or even Philadelphia.

you were not in the right spot.

Your side lost for a reason though. It's a dehumanizing way to live and your people eventually figured that out and rebelled against it.

Agree some suburbs are deserts but we have a lot of towns that are walkable while also giving the very human experience of having living space and personal space and nature and access to a city and all the things that make life nice.

Lost? no.

Ah yes. The wonderful suburbs. The home of miserable suburbanites, cheaply and poorly built houses, HoAs and neverending sound of lawn mowers, leaf blowers, etc. The suburbs brings the worst of the rural living without any of its benefits and the worst of city living without any of its benefits together. A match made in hell. It's the worst kind of environmentally damaging dystopian existence filled with the worst kind of people.

There should only be rural and city living. If you want the sun and 'living things', go find a small homestead in a nice rural area with actual living things. No place is more anti-'living things' than a suburb. In order to build sprawling suburbs, we had to wipe out 'living things'.

Some people have different preferences than you so therefore they must be miserable and the worse kind of people? Ok sure

My suburban location is great. It’s quiet and peaceful with no annoying neighbors keeping me up at 2am playing electric guitar (this happened in a previous apartment). And yet I can still walk to dozens of shops and restaurants, unlike a rural area.

the most hilarious kinds of arguments on HN occur when someone like you gets into a heated argument with someone who i.e. thinks that F150's shouldn't be allowed to exist and people should only be allowed to ride bicycles.

I suspect a lot of the urbanites are the millennials and gen y/z's.

Gen X and older were the last generation to see getting a driver's license as a milestone of gaining freedom from parents.

Urbanites were raised by helicopter parents that chauffeured them around and urbanites stayed indoors a lot more since they were raised on the internet and mobile devices.

Why would they like personal forms of transportation, when it was not part of their growing up?

> I suspect a lot of the urbanites are the millennials and gen y/z's.

While there has been a slight adjustment to housing preferences due to a couple housing price bubbles, millenials are largely following the exact footsteps of their parents and buying into suburban neighborhoods. It's always been true that urban living appeals more to young people, and they tend to want something different as they mature.

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