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Comment by psunavy03 | Hacker News Reader

> I say this as someone who at 40 years old has never learned to drive and who has walked/bicycled/taken the bus virtually everywhere I’ve needed to go.

I say this with no mockery or disrespect, just description . . . you are not normal. I mean in a statistical sense. Not only are you part of (maybe the last) generation who salivated over the thought of getting a driver's license at 16 and getting away from Mom and Dad, for the vast majority of Americans, this is a totally unrealistic ask for day-to-day life. Either because of urban design or else living somewhere rural enough where it's infeasible.

Urban solutions do not always work across a country as vast, huge, and diverse as the US.

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As someone else who is not normal, I have to say I'm a little tired of having my taxes subsidize the roads and sewers for someone who lives in the middle of nowhere and commutes 40 miles each way by car. "But my kids NEED a backyard!" Fair enough, but afford it on your own without a handout from the government.

Too bad. You got outvoted in a democracy. Because most people do not hold this view.

Tyranny of the majority eh.

Also this isn't accurate. Car-dependency in urban environments was fought by the majority of people who lived there. In the beginning, cars were toys for the rich, and they (the rich) pushed for car-friendly design. Since they had influence as elites, they were able to crush the protesting masses and destroy the pre-existing urban fabric.

Then the feds misunderstood the German highway system and thought you were supposed to highway through cities, instead of between them. At this point, the momentum seems to have carried itself forward, spawning the urban design disaster in most US cities.

So I would say it's more that some groups of wealthy industrialists managed to coop urban planning at a critical time, and propaganda their way through the opposition to fuck over the urban masses. They did make a lot of money though, some some would argue it was worth it.

No, most people don't even realize that urban areas tend to subsidize less dense areas.

Usually when they're initially presented with this info, they immediately go into an obvious denial mode where they try to find some logic to explain why it isn't true.

Welcome to democracy. We all subsidize things we don't agree with.

I wouldn’t mind the wealth transfer if the client jurisdictions’ representatives didn’t meddle in their patron jurisdictions’ local politics. But I suppose it leaves them more to expropriate.

Most people in the US live in an urban area, where urban solutions work. Only a small minority live in a rural area, though many living in suburbs like to pretend they are in a rural area.

I agree that the "US is a rural country" thing isn't true, but the way most US cities are built make walking either very inconvenient or outright dangerous.

Posting this channel in this sort of thread is basically a meme, but this take on the topic is pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

>> Most people in the US live in an urban area, where urban solutions work

The word "urban" in the US means different things to different people and in different contexts.

For the US census bureau, you can find their up-to-date list of US urban areas at https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/g..., and it includes areas such as the New York City metro area, at a population of 19,426,449, and Munds Park, Arizona, at a population of 773, and 2,643 other urban areas in between.

By that definition of urban, most people in the US live in an urban area, but that does not mean that the same solutions work for all people in the US living in urban areas. Population densities of 600 people per square mile across a small area require different solutions than population densities of 6,000 people per square mile across a large area.

The wall map version of the list of census bureau urban areas is at https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/DC2020/UA20/UA_2020_WallMap....

Those small towns don't add up to much population. Most Americans live in an urban area of more than 100,000 people.

> many living in suburbs like to pretend they are in a rural area

Suburbs are not rural, but they're not urban either. The population density in most suburbs is too low to support the kind of walk-everywhere infrastructure that a true high density urban area can (and should) provide.

The real issue is that many people fail to realize that there is no problem with that. Having different areas for people to live with vastly different population densities, and different solutions for how people get around, is a feature, not a bug. People have very different preferences, and urban, suburban, and rural areas exist so that people's very different preferences for how they want to live can all be accommodated.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...

There is a huge problem with that. It turns out that offering urban-level services at suburban density isn't sustainable. It turns out urban areas are subsidizing suburbs quite extensively.

Now, if suburbanite were willing to pay their own way, perhaps we could discuss that. But another issue is that car-dependent suburbanites demand access to urban areas. For example, people living in Palo Alto want vehicle access to San Francisco. This degrades the city significantly, far outweighing any benefit from having suburban influx.

Now, non-car-dependent suburbs do seem to work. Street-car suburbs, for example, seem to work reasonably well. They seem to be more dense than car-hell suburbs, but not urban like a city. So I think there is a way forward for people wanting suburban life.

> It turns out that offering urban-level services at suburban density isn't sustainable.

What do you mean by "urban-level services"? If you mean urban-style mass transit, then yes, I agree--and I don't want such services in the suburbs. If I'm going to live in the suburbs, I'm going to own a car and that's how I'm going to expect to get around in the suburbs. If I wanted to live in a place where I could walk or use mass transit to get around for all of my daily activities, I'd live in the city, not the suburbs.

> It turns out urban areas are subsidizing suburbs quite extensively.

No, it turns out that politicians and ideologues who think everybody should live a certain way, are trying to impose that way of living in areas where it makes no sense, and using our tax money to do it. That's not a "subsidy", it's just incompetent leadership. Living in the suburbs, I get zero value from all the public expenditure on mass transit in areas which are too low density for it to make sense. So I would be fine with all those expenditures just stopping altogether.

In fact, such expenditures can have negative value to the very people they are supposed to be helping. In one suburb I lived in, I could drive for about 15 minutes to a commuter parking area and catch a bus that took a half hour to get to a stop within walking distance of my workplace. Then the urban planners decided that it would make more sense to spend public money to extend the subway out to that area and outlaw the bus--meaning that from the same commuter parking area, I would now have an hour's trip to the same stop within walking distance of my workplace, during which I would have to change trains, at a higher per-trip cost than the bus was. Which meant it no longer made sense for me to take mass transit to work.

> car-dependent suburbanites demand access to urban areas

What kind of access? I'm fine with using, say, a train to go into the city if I need to do that. Or parking somewhere on the outskirts of the city and using mass transit to get in further.

> non-car-dependent suburbs do seem to work.

Again, I think this depends on what you call a "suburb". To me, if you're living in an area that has a high enough population density to make street-cars, for example, workable, you're living in a city, not a suburb. If I want more space than such a place can provide me, I'm going to live in a less dense area where mass transit is not workable, and as above, I'm going to own a car.

They mean water, sewage, roads, pavements, street lighting. See link.

I pay for those with property taxes. Plus a portion of the purchase price of a house is the developer recovering these infrastructure costs when a neighborhood is built.

If you read the link you would realize that property taxes don't even cover 25% of the ongoing maintenance cost. The rest comes out of the general tax pool at everyone else's expense, regardless of whether we live there or not.

> If you read the link you would realize that property taxes don't even cover 25% of the ongoing maintenance cost.

I don't see this anywhere in the article.

It's there, but here's more evidence and data to back up the assertion that suburbs are a net drain on city finances, with more cost than tax revenue from properties: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/16/where-did-the-...

This article isn't saying suburbs are a drain on cities. It's saying that cities have overextended themselves because of skewed incentives imposed on them by government policies (the main one being printing money to fund real estate development). The solution to that is not to abolish suburbs. It's for the government to stop imposing skewed incentives.

The article explicitly highlights modern car centric development as not paying for itself.

My man is using a strategy I fondly refer to called "burning the head in the sand"

That general tax pool is funded by people who live in suburbs, so the argument is wrong.

Strongtowns is intersting, but they look at a few outliers and make the case those problems apply to all towns.

And by people who live in urban areas who don't get the benefit, since they also pay property taxes that are sufficient to pay for their infrastructure. It's a subsidy for the suburbs.

How does mandatory single family zoning and parking minimums factor into your "feature?" When people want to live somewhere dense, and that's illegal to build, they're forced into suburban living even though that is not their preference.

> When people want to live somewhere dense, and that's illegal to build

It's not illegal to build everywhere. That should be obvious since there are lots of dense urban areas.

I could just as easily ask why I'm not allowed to build a new single family home in Manhattan. The obvious answer is that Manhattan is not a suburb. The equally obvious answer to why you can't build dense urban housing in a suburb is that it's not a city. Unless you are arguing that everywhere should be a dense urban area, there are going to be different areas with different densities and different kinds of housing. That's just a fact of life that everyone has to deal with.

You can in fact build a new single family home in Manhattan, if you can afford the land to do so.

Meanwhile, regardless of land price, dense housing is illegal to build pretty much everywhere that is not currently dense, due to zoning laws. Why shouldn't someone be able to build dense housing in a suburb?

What it sounds like you advocate for is that everywhere currently dense can stay dense, and everywhere not currently dense must stay not dense. That doesn't make sense unless you want the dense area to continue to skyrocket in price as more people want to live there and we have no new housing to accommodate them.

> You can in fact build a new single family home in Manhattan, if you can afford the land to do so.

Really? Where? Note that I don't mean a townhome or a row house, I mean literally a detached single family home.

> What it sounds like you advocate for is that everywhere currently dense can stay dense, and everywhere not currently dense must stay not dense.

Obviously this won't be the case long term; areas will evolve. Some will become more dense, some will become less dense.

What I am saying is that people have a wide variety of preferences, and that is just a fact of life. Talking as if one particular way of living is "better" does not recognize that.

> That doesn't make sense unless you want the dense area to continue to skyrocket in price as more people want to live there and we have no new housing to accommodate them.

Why would there be no new housing in urban areas? New construction is going on in cities all the time.

People who want to live somewhere “dense” can go live there. The dense parts of most cities don’t have mandatory single zoning or parking minimums as far as I know. I’m not going to stop you from living in or near downtown and neither is anyone else in the suburbs. You do you and let the rest of us do us.

Except for price, because a lot of people want to live in dense areas.

Why exactly do you think you should have a say over how other people live? That's what you claim to oppose, but your support of zoning in order to prevent other people from building density on their own property is exactly that.

> Except for price, because a lot of people want to live in dense areas.

And the way to fix that is for urban areas to allow for more construction of living space. Which, historically, urban areas are very bad at doing, for example by restricting the maximum height of buildings. But how is that the suburbs' fault?

> Why exactly do you think you should have a say over how other people live?

I have said no such thing. I have never said there should not be urban areas. Indeed, I have explicitly said that there should be areas of all different kinds, urban, suburban, and rural, so that everyone's different preferences can be accommodated somewhere. You are the one who keeps talking as if everywhere should be dense urban areas.

> your support of zoning in order to prevent other people from building density on their own property is exactly that.

So you think I should be able to build a single family home in the middle of Manhattan, provided I can buy the land?

Zoning is much more of an issue in urban areas, and in fact, as I noted above, is one of the main reasons why urban housing is overly expensive.

You have explicitly said other people in your suburb should not be able to build dense housing on their property. Why?

And if there are many people who want urban areas and not enough housing to accommodate, would you support expanding them, or is this an attack on your preferences?

> You have explicitly said other people in your suburb should not be able to build dense housing on their property.

I have said no such thing. I have said that in a suburb, most people won't want to do that. But that doesn't mean nobody will. In every suburb I've lived in, there has been a mix of single family homes, townhomes, and apartments. Some suburbs are even evolving to the point where they have a core area that is basically urban, with almost all buildings being high rise. I have already said that such things are to be expected over time.

> if there are many people who want urban areas and not enough housing to accommodate, would you support expanding them

If the urban area is already fully built out, and it acquires the additional land legally on the open market, sure.

But much so-called "urban" area is nowhere near fully built out. For example, much of the city of San Francisco is still fairly low density, with little or no high rise and many lots still being single family homes, and is kept that way by restrictive zoning, even though there are multitudes of people clamoring to live there. Before expanding the city out into the suburbs, I would say the city should first allow more people to live in the land that is already part of the city, and adjust its zoning to make that possible.

The whole point I'm making is that many suburbs are zoned by law to be exclusively single family. That's a problem. Expanding that zoning doesn't mandate density, but it will allow it where it is currently banned.

America being large is irrelevant. China is just as large and you don't see them struggling to figure out how to walk places. The fact is most of the US is practically empty. Connect the major urban hubs with rail and remove the cars (from urban centers) and we'll have fixed this.

> for the vast majority of Americans, this is a totally unrealistic ask for day-to-day life. Either because of urban design or else living somewhere rural enough where it's infeasible.

They can convince themselves it’s infeasible, but it is very feasible. It’s just a matter of wanting it. I wanted it enough to make it work. They don’t.

That’s 100% fine — I lie to myself about plenty of stuff to get through my day. Everybody does.

> (...) salivated over the thought of getting a driver's license at 16 and getting away from Mom and Dad (...)

I'm afraid this mindset needs context. If you find yourself living in a place where everything is located tens of km away, and short drives are assessed in how many hours you spend in a car, and this is further compounded by the utter lack of a public transportation infrastructure, then gaining access to a car is a basic necessary condition for autonomy.

Contrast this with some European urban centers such as the Netherlands' Randstad, where a two hour train ride from your doorstep can get you anywhere everywhere, and can actually be an international trip.

You really don't need a car. Bikes are awesome. You can ride them with backpacks. Friends have trucks. Money pays for delivery.

Source: a normal 38 year old that never had a license

You're not representative of everyone else, though

> Urban solutions do not always work across a country as vast, huge, and diverse as the US.

US is a huge country, but people aren’t travelling across it on a regular basis.

Yes, and the highway system was originally intended as defense infrastructure to more easily move equipment across the country. A great idea, but a design that was not originally intended to plow right through cities. This has been a big contributor to the mess that we are in when it comes to urban / suburban design and the extreme lack of walkability.

Not true. They were definitely intended to plow right through cities. That’s why they built highways/freeways right through urban cores, or planned entire metro regions around them.

Specifically, right through minority neighborhoods in cities. You can't ignore the explicitly racist history of urban "renewal" when discussing freeway planning.

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