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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

American style suburbs are worse for raising a family than living in a city. Long commutes practically remove one or more parents from the equation 5 days a week. Long bus rides compromise sleep and exercise etc.

All for a back yard that’s rarely used and worse in just about every way than a nice park.

What they are is a cheap imitation of the wealthy enclaves near cities that only work because so few people can afford to live in them. You can imitate such buildings cheaply, what you can’t do is build or maintain the support structures which made such places so appealing.

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From the perspective of the child, it's much worse. You are basically arrested until you are 16-18. No independence whatsoever. Want to meet a friend? Ask your parents to drive. They're busy? Too bad.

Parents and society can be unreasonably restrictive in any environment. People call social services on parents for letting kids walk around alone in suburbs. The freedom you can get as a young teen without a car is however vastly higher in cities due to public transportation.

Social norms also vary widely, first graders in Tokyo take public transportation to school alone. This isn’t inherently unsafe or unreasonable.

My children love it. There are so many friends within walking & biking distance of my house. The roads are slow, traffic sparse, with wide open spaces to play and ride bikes, etc. None of the kids seemed bored, there's so much to do. And little of the unpleasant stuff that makes living in the city more exciting.

Why can't they just walk or bike to their friends? 2-3 km walking distance is perfectly fine, bike extends that range significantly (10 km at least). This was the case for me.

Sorry if the question is naive, I don't live in USA.

Because your friends can easily be 10-30 miles away and only accessible via shared roadways with 55mph road traffic. There are no cross country bike routes here.

Building around roads results in everything being pushed farther away and that includes other people’s homes too.

Fair point about shared roadways that probably split communities.

Do kids attending the same school really live that far apart? Seems like a very long distance, especially in a suburbian neighbourhood.

That is my experience in the East coast US. Here, the suburbs are very spread out, with amenities 15-20 minutes away by car. There are older suburbs where that is not true, but that's more of an exception. Housing in those older suburbs costs more than the newer more spread out developments and there are fewer of them than the newer more spread out ones.

Typically, those old suburbs were originally built around train stations or street car lines, which influenced their design. The newer ones were designed around access by car and zoning prevents any non residential land uses nearby.

I see, thank you for explaining!

it's incredibly ironic but I've lucked into a very bikeable community in a rust-belt state, we have extensive rails-to-trails here and in this situation the rails followed the main state (2-lane) highway, or vice versa. so I actually can bike to some things specifically thanks to rails to trails.

My superior air quality, lower crime rate, and better schools disagree with your assessment.

Don’t confuse socioeconomics for inherent advantages. Adjusted for income people live longer in cities, they are thus objectively safer.

Wealthy parts of cities have vastly better schools and less crime than the average suburbs, but the American middle class abandoned cities. Air pollution again can go either way, suburbs often have surprisingly terrible air quality made worse by long commutes.

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