I wonder... It's absolutely clear that many hate their long commute. Do they, at some point, start to wonder what went so wrong that many (most?) have such an awfully long commute?
I had a summer internship in the suburbs of boston and drove out from the city every day in the early 2010s. Practically door to door traffic, stressful unprotected left turns, masshole drivers abound, the works.
After that summer I swore off car commuting. I ended up with the same commute after graduating but by public transit. Since transit to the suburbs is awful, it was a 3 seat ride - train to the commuter rail station, commuter rail to the suburbs, then bus to the workplace, about 1-1.5 hr each way.
After quitting that job for a job in the city (with about 20-30 min commute by train each day) i swore off the suburbs altogether. Life is too short for that nonsense.
I’ve only had one really bad one - about 90 minutes way into the city but not every day.
But when I was going into an office-which I haven’t regularly for a long time a 30 to 45 minute was pretty normal once I bought a house that wasn’t basically next door to the office.
There basically weren’t tech jobs in Boston proper in my memory though that’s changed quite a bit.
Everyone was sold the dream of their own little tenth acre in the exurbs. The end result was a life spent in the car.
- too dense, yes you read it correctly
- too zoned
Too dense in dense cities means too costly to evolve, that's most an EU problem, but is a USA problem as well in certain areas. Too zoned means to much space between work and living places.
The modern ideal density IMVHO is homes, not apartments, mixed with small (one to three stories max) buildings, shops and so on to allow short-commute (also in bike/feet range) for findings small services (grocery, perhaps a nearby dentist, a gym and so on) and just for some also for work, plus the slice of remote workers (who are perceptually a significant slice of population in developed countries at least) etc.
That's the "dense enough, but not too much" density for a modern economy of scale. We need to mix works and homes, at least for most productive activities, leaving districts just for things we can't do otherwise like certain manufacturing industries, automotive and so on.
As an apartment-dwelling European, maybe GP's point about density is based on the fact that having neighbors sucks big time. Sure, you can build apartment buildings that are well insulated, but most stock in my neck of the woods isn't built that way. You can hear your neighbor taking a piss at night. Of course, this doesn't help people making the median salary in the city actually afford those places.
So, given my environment, if I want peace and quiet without having to try out living in multiple apartments until I can find the rare one built with care, it's much easier to just go live in a detached house in the suburbs.
Also, despite dense public transport and "walkability", the traffic is still ridiculous so pollution is very high, too.
> And that’s exactly why folks in the US are so dead set on keeping WFH, their cities are just not designed to allow everyone to reach any arbitrary point in 30 minutes or less.
I only have a sample size of one, but the Paris region is clearly not great for that, either. And from what I hear, other major French cities aren't any better. And we do have public transit that seems somewhat better than the average US metro (from what I read here on HN, I've never lived in the US). But there are still miles and miles of traffic jams in the mornings and evenings. Trains are still filled to the brim with commuters.
That is true, I hear the flushing when it's silent, but I don't notice it when I am watching some video, nor does it wake me up. Occasionally the neighbors have a party and I wouldn't be able to sleep, but after 22:00 it's quiet (there are laws about it).
By far the worst source of noise is traffic. I hear vehicles on a nearby street. But even that is better than my parents' detached house with bedroom windows right in the street.
When some tech change there is space to change. Let's say there is room for a water-water geothermal heat pump instead of a previous methane combustion based heating, there is room for p.v., domestic charging for cars and so on. Something that can't be done in a dense city.
I think that all the talk about modifying city design etc is just unrealistic in the US. You'd need to change regulations, change economic centralization, and most importantly kill the dream of SFH.
In many European cities you can see single family homes next to apartment buildings, offices and shopping malls and it works just fine.
I'm glad that we don't have the same zoning nonsense as in the USA.
Let's say you have a 7 story building, it's typically composed by a certain number of different families (20-30?) with different ideas, agendas etc. Let's say the building start to be aged, time to improve it. It's possible? Hint: no in the mean, just because of it's original design. Let's say remote work became common, but apartments are not large enough to spare a "home office room" per adult inside. What you can do? Buy a room from an old age neighbor who do not need it? A building done in the age where no on-line retail exists, but now we all use it and so we need large external storage to get amazon packages, how can you made it in an already designed building? What about p.v.? Oh, sure the building have a roof, maybe even good for p.v. but it's not enough for ALL apartment self-consumption, so it's just a system to sell electricity not an interesting things technically and in most countries also economically and so on. The point is simple: if you own the land and a light building on it, single owner, a single family inside, it's "easy" change it to adapt to modern needs, a multi-family building is a nightmare.
As a results in certain point in time an apartment is cheaper to buy and run than a home, BUT at another point in time became a nightmare economically and practically. A home can change, so you can keep it up potentially forever.
Since we all need services well, we can't live well in large areas without stores, and that's why US suburbs fails. But in some areas of the EU there are home and small buildings intermixed and they works very well for their residents and in general. I see no reasons why they can't scale. Personally I've left big dense cities for a mounting place in the Alps, a good enough connection (2Gbps/860Mbps FTTH), good roads, enough stores around, a living economical tissue and WFH. It can't scale for let's say automotive industry, but it scale for many kind of other activities.
- Rich, young, childless - Less affluent but still young and childless and able/willing to live with roommates
Once you fall out of those two groups, the benefits of living in an American city do a huge nosedive, and so it's no surprise that people move to the suburbs or more rural areas.
I lived in Japan for several years, and I may be overly harsh in judgements due to the fact that Japanese cities are possibly in contention for the best, most functional, livable cities in the world. But in my opinion American urban development has been an unmitigated disaster that will take decades to heal, if it ever does.
If you’re in even a medium COL area, housing has sky rocketed. Even the old boomer middle managers worth their salt know this.
I quit a job in biotech earlier this year bc I would always be paid less for my skills and cannot afford it anymore. Great boss, great director, they know. They can’t just magically pay me more when tons of people (H1B’s included) will do my job for the same or cheaper…it would make them bad at their job.