Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically
especiales.eldiario.es
especiales.eldiario.es
A massive case of style over substance for me.
Another downside is that it consumes huge amounts of memory.
The charts and graphs are also not very good. You can't search, sort, or filter in any way.
Also no light mode which is also terrible UX. People with astigmatism can have a hard time with dark mode.
https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-access...
I wonder what you mean by this, since homeowners in Spain do pay a property tax with similar rates to the US's (around 1% of assessed value).
... and I think I'm about to throw up, but that's a smaller issue, I take one for the team to encourage creative web development.
https://www.quora.com/What-does-estadounidense-mean-in-Spani...
Great visuals btw.
However, the density of most cities isn’t that high (most/median residential buildings are probably 4-5 floors or less, except Rotterdam). For comparison Mumbai has way more taller buildings than almost any city in the Netherlands except for Rotterdam, and Mumbai hasn’t had a lot of high rises due to FSI limitations.
On the flip-side, the Dutch attitude to their countryside (or let's say, non urban land) is pretty brutal outside of the national parks. There's not the fetishization of "country" living that you get in the UK.
About weight, you can see the strength of the soil in the historic buildings. Like Delft: 3 stories high. Zaandam: 2 stories where one is build from wood. Amsterdam is build on wooden piles allowing for 5 stories.
And you can also see wealth in the height of the building. The Hague is most famous for that (as they say you come from clay or from sand), poor areas were build on clay -> low buildings. Rich areas were build on sand, high ceiling heavy buildings. Living on sand was/is healthier also, another reason why the rich flocked there.
Usually known as terraced houses, townhouses or row houses in English.
Lumber is abundant in North America and cheap so everything is timber-framed, which is awful for noise. I actually do not understand how people can live in two-story houses in the US. Such people complaining about noise seems crazy to me. Only drywall separating rooms. Only a plank between floors pretty much. Awful.
Anyway, a lot of apartments in the US are what's called 5-over-1 construction. That's 1 concrete framed floor, often commercial and then 5 floors of timber-framed apartments above that. Terrible.
Live in a decently built apartment and it's a completely different world. Actual high-rises tend to be decent because they have to be concrete and steel framed (although they may have cheap walls). Any pre-war apartments in NYC are generally amazing.
It's also worth pointing out that complaining about noise and wanting things to be quiet isn't universal. Whenever you hear such complaints, make a mental note of their demographics and see what patterns you notice.
5 over 1 refers to section 1 and section 5 of the building code and not the number of floors built for each. It is coincidence that with section 5, five floors is about the max you can have - but that is an about (sometimes 4 is all, sometimes you can get 6 - see a proper civil engineer for details). Section 1 is a lot more expensive to build, but it is also higher strength (and other features that make is useful for a parking garage)
thick concrete walls might as well be hypothetical, theoretical building material given how much not expensive it is, and thus how much rarer it is.
I lived in a 100+ year old wood framed apartment building. The lifespan of concrete in most climate would mean that building would abandoned and too expensive to repair.
https://www.woodworks.org/resources/code-path-and-requiremen...
I like dumping on American housing standards, but this is completely wrong. Modern US timber framing has fairly thick walls filled with insulation. Some crappy apartments of course skimp on the insulation and you can hear the neighbors, but properly-constructed apartments are quite quiet, because of the insulation between units. In a single-family house, properly-made ones have low-grade noise insulation ("low grade" meaning it has a lower R-value than exterior insulation, because you don't need it between rooms) in the walls between rooms, so kids don't have to hear their parents screwing. "Only a plank between floors"? Please.
>That's 1 concrete framed floor, often commercial and then 5 floors of timber-framed apartments above that. Terrible.
Yeah, try actually spending some time in any decently-constructed modern apartment like this. They're not noisy at all.
Say what you want about the earthquake or fire resistance of buildings like this, but noise is not the problem you think it is.
>Actual high-rises tend to be decent because they have to be concrete and steel framed (although they may have cheap walls).
If they have cheap walls, they're going to have the noise problems you're complaining about. Cheap walls = drywall (on lightweight steel studs) with little or no insulation.
Noise is almost entirely a function of how well insulated the walls in a building are between units, except in places where the units are completely separated by solid concrete. It doesn't matter if it's wood-framed or steel-framed.
IIRC Spain was also one of the first countries during the pandemic to publish research on the importance of keeping rooms well-ventilated, so now I'm wondering if there is a connection to history there (meaning: more likely to look at the importance of ventilation due to cultural history).
What amazed me is how that city manages to be so densely populated but is designed so you never feel packed. My only "complaint" would be that there could be more trees but there were still more than in most French cities (which I’m from) so …
Who knows, maybe one day such a "visual space" inside a browser would be interactive, a Google Earth type of thing as far as navigation goes, but with data queries that allow on the fly to populate various widgets. An expert could livestream a story or "save" it for later publication.
Today I assume a web browser and/or the device it is on could kill me and eat my lunch given the proper input.
I just want to read an article with illustrations, a format that will never cease to be effective.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/28/us/school-sho...
I'm not against safe building, but some friends of ours were actually denied the ability to be eligible to foster a child because their home didn't have 2 points of egress in every room. The US seems particularly stringent about anything fire-related.
3 bedrooms in 100 m^2 is pretty cramped.
There's plenty of 150/200/250 m^2 flats in Italy (Rome and Milan especially), but they are very expensive.
Here's a non comprehensive list of actual apartments above 250m (I didn't filter by flat, but you can see plenty are) and this is only the core center of Rome (what would you call downtown), not the entire city.
https://www.immobiliare.it/vendita-case/roma/?criterio=rilev...
I lived in a 180 m^2 3 bedroom (well 2 bed and 1 office) and it seemed about the right size for a family.
I've also lived in a 60 m^2 2 bedroom and it was cramped.
But with 3 bedroom places under 1,000 sq ft, the rooms are too small for even a Queen sized mattress, let alone a King.
Having 3 smaller bedrooms is way better for a family than US style apartments where it's almost impossible to find 3 bedrooms at all.
[1] caveat is it is not an appartment but a townhouse with a commercial space in the main floor. It give me exclusive use to another 85m2 rooftop space with a washing machine there so I don't have to dry clothes in the living room + exclusive use of the stairway where I store our 8 bicycles and the standup paddle. But I would say that if I didn't have those extra space I would just not have so many bicycles and things and would hang the clothes to dry hanging at the windows like everybody does.
I live in a SFH now, love that I can simply walk 5 feet from my kitchen to the back yard and have no noise and fresh air.
No noisy neighbors above me constantly dropping things on the floor, no smelly hallways, or people leaving garbage in common areas.
I don't have to wait for an elevator, or hope that it doesn't have maintenance issues.
Maintenance takes no hours a month other than a call to a handyman to fix various issues in the house.
I could go on, but to each their own, pursuit what makes you happy!
Vertical navigation should be easier, at least for going down. All you have to do is jump... If they could just come up with a safe and reliable way of getting people from the top of a tall building to the bottom quickly, taller buildings would be easier. Perhaps a spiral slide? Faster elevators would be nice too. If they allowed up to, say, 3gs of acceleration, we could move between floors of tall buildings much more quickly. "Going up. Brace yourself!"
There are also strategies, like setbacks, to make the building massing less imposing and obvious to the person at street level, who at the end of the day is walking with their head straight, not craning up to the sky.
I'm currently in a building from 1990 in Eastern Europe which apparently was inspired by those in Barcelona, because it's the same shape and we have a common area with greenery and trees, but the latitude is 51° N and we used to have -30°C winters as recently as the late 90s, so I wouldn't call the climate (at least back then) moderate.
Snow happens every year, and it is often pushed away by mini-tractors, into giant heaps, that the children love to climb and play on.
Some parts of the ground are just left covered in ice/show for a few months though.
It's not like you have a lot of snow blowing in there in an urban environment anyway.
You grab a shovel and clear out a bit of snow in front of the doorway to it, and then do whatever you want outside in the snow. Snowball fights, build snowmen, even bring out a bbq if you want.
I could see how people would imagine that things like this wouldnt work well in a wintery climate, but overall Ive found that people just make do. They live with snow everywhere else outside, so why wouldnt they do the same in a courtyard?
* Climate: a shaded courtyard is pretty much necessary given the weather, for instance;
* History: not only most city centers in Spain were built in the Middle Ages, but they were also built in the Arabic tradition of having fountains, slated blinds;
* Economic: Spain grew economically a bit later than the US and the rest of Europe: 1980 rather than 1960, they had a similar wave of car adoption, but a decade after rebuilding the country after the Spanish war.
* Ecology: most of the country is pretty arid: there are beautiful vistas, but it’s not the place where one wants to stay out, baking in the sun, as much.
Spaniards want to be outside, but not in a sea of green grass. They much prefer a table in the shade.
If you want to talk about Spain, you need to live in Spain ALL YEAR long, not just the summer.
Almost the entire country but the north(in the north it rains in summer) is arid in Summer, because of the Azores' anticyclone, three or two months, depending on the place, but the rest of the year it rains.
Also the arid place is Murcia and Almería, some part of Alicante and Monegros. There is a lot of rain in Extremadura, or places near the Ocean, like Galicia, Asturias, Pirineos, Huelva.
In august you are going to see anything yellow, but it gets green in Autumn, Winter and Spring.
That is, 9 to 10 months a year it rains. There is sun too and it is a good thing because it is cold, specially inside. Madrid is very sunny and cold in Winter so the sun is great.
I was born in Spain, I live and work in Central Europe but I go to Spain in the Winter as it is a much better Winter there. In Central Europe anything is burned by the cold and then you have snow everywhere.
So it is actually much more green Spain in Winter than in most of Europe.
It seems they're getting the data from the catastral (official goverment data), I wonder how accurate this is? Not sure how it is in other cities around in Spain, but in Barcelona there are a ton of illegal atticos and other addons to buildings, which would add more height to the building in real life compared to the visualization.
After a quick look, I could see at least two buildings I know are taller than what the visualization says (the building next door is the same height in the visualization, but has one more floor when you see the building in real-life).
I lived in Spain for 2.5 years. I have to say, the appartment life there was fantastic. I'm back home living in the 'burbs and I still miss the "15 minute city" keenly.
I know the status-quo in Spain, but the history presented here is kinda fascinating. I keep forgetting how dynamic these things are. Also... is anyone else shocked how little development there is currently? Maybe this is just because it doesn't have e.g. 2010-2023 numbers (the downturn _was_ extremely brutal) but I thought the development sector had rebounded at least somewhat.
At the height of the property bubble around 2005-2007, Spain (pop ~44M) was building more units per year than Germany, France and the UK (combined pop. ~195M).[1]
During the GFC Spain suffered from population shrinkage [2], surfeit of available housing stock, and the economic crunch pushed into the market some of the housing stock that would previously have been kept in reserve, so yeah, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing that building activities slowed down.
[1] I don't have a source, because I learnt this from a bunch of attendees to a conference on concrete (yes, the kind you use for building) in Madrid in 2007. We exchanged impressions on how software conferences (PyCon forever!) are different from the ones in the building industry, and they shared some eye opening statistics.
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ESP/spain/population
What is the hydrological impact of urbanization?
This can both impact hydrological cycles (see millan millan's papers "greening and browning in a climate change hotspot") and possibly subsurface in karst and aquifer life
When I first moved here it was super weird to see "okay in London there are small flats, because it's the big city, they don't build up because they complain it ruins the aesthetic/NIMBY/Grenfell tower fears".
So I go out to a small town here for the first time. Large green fields surrounding this town, plenty of space. It's STILL ALL SMALL FLATS!
I think the core issue is that there's such a long history here, everyone already owned all the land a long time ago. Getting a small slice enough for a flat is the most people can do.
My friend grew up in London in a flat, went to inner city schools and coming from beautiful green NZ I just couldn't imagine what that must be like. His flat all surrounded by concrete and endless streets flat up against flat with no space in between. His schools all built up in the same way, often with a school field "down the road".
I think in the UK it's too late to remedy, but outside of cities houses need more space. Inside cities they need to start building modern high rises.
I'm saying that many people dislike flats because their neighbours make noise, but not many people are saying they dislike flats because they themselves wish to make noise (which they can only politely do in a house).
> Techniques/technologies used:
R, Rstudio, QGIS and Tippecanoe for data compiling and data analysis. D3.js and Javascript for data visualization. Mapbox for mapping buildings footprint. HTML, Javascript and Scrollama for scroll webpage
https://sigmaawards.org/spain-lives-in-flats-why-we-have-bui...
https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/mortgages/articles/this-is-w... https://www.npr.org/2023/01/04/1146960942/how-buying-a-home-...
Spain has lower inequality than the UK and a lot lower than the US. Inequality in the US is rising, but inequality in Spain appears to be rising rapidly. This might be because those buildings are owned by private entities who are building generational wealth.
Work environment have changed so much in the latest years and I feel school remained the same. Last week a young family member asked what does excel do? and she's about to enter college, and we're talking about Ireland that it supposed to have a good school system
As someone up in the dark pre-wintery Sweden, it would have been awesome with some floating photos of each neighborhood too, to convey the feel of each a bit better.
The 3D maps were initially very impressive, but photos would have made the various housing forms come to life even more, at least for me.
This also made distances longer.
Written from a flat :)
So somewhere between 3 and 12 stories is a local optimum, and it's probably about where you need additional "machine floors".
For car oriented locations 1 floor is optimal because the type of building that can handle more than one level of cars is so expensive you want to just build a large parking lot. (In theory the humans could be in taller buildings, but the space used for humans becomes a rounding error, and so you may as well avoid the expensive elevator)
Above 3 floors you need elevators for the disabled, while shorter buildings often cant get by without. (check with a lawyer for what your local law says - I've been told that the 3 floor isn't what the ADA doesn't actually say the highest is, just what most consider it to say). Even without disability laws, people generally want elevators to go higher.
Conventional wood framing is the cheapest, but 5 is about the max floors you can get. Brick framing can apparently get you to about 10 floors. There are lots of other construction methods - check with a proper civil engineer for what the limits and costs of each are.
Somewhere around 6-15 floors your city water will no longer have enough pressure and so your building will need booster pumps. Similarly, drain water needs special care to ensure the falling water doesn't burst the plumbing.
You local fire may code allow for less strict standards if the fire department ladder trucks can just drive up to each window and rescue someone in a burning building. If that cannot happen people need to get down the stairs in case of fire (I've always wondering how the disabled will do this) so you need to ensure those stairs can be used in case of fire.
Floor space per person is also a factor. Richer people tend to be willing to pay for more space than poor people, and poor people tend to have more kids. Thus if you make larger apartments you don't need as much elevator space. This one is tricky though as rich people tend to prefer newer buildings so you might discover that when the building gets old you can't rent some apartments because of the building max occupancy. Still, office buildings tend to have a lot more people per area, and they are more likely to leave at the same time, so I don't think space per person can be a big factor. (but school dorms need to consider all students going to class at the same time)
As the person paying for a building you get to optimize those factors (generally for profit, but you can pick other considerations). Good luck.
Oh well.
Well done.
The downside is often that places of commerce are lacking. They have to be built separately or have first floors repurposed for commerce. I've heard that capital city of Brasilia had this problem too.
no wonder uk property prices are crazy.
but in Spain it's as if the buildings are built with zero soundproofing - you hear every single neighbor in the whole building and their tvs, radios, conversations, footsteps... it's maddening, I don't understand it
I've lived in a few different flats in the UK, all purpose built flats. I already knew flats in converted houses are generally terrible. I've been in some where you can hear everything your neighbour is up to. I'm not sure what's worse: hearing them or knowing they can hear you too.
In two of them I could never hear a peep from the neighbours apart from footsteps on the floor upstairs. But seriously wondered if the neighbours ever made any noise at all, or whether it was just that well soundproofed.
In my most recent flat, though, it's terrible. You can hear conversations through the floor but what's worse is when people make direct contact with walls/ceilings, like closing curtains or closing doors, it's like they are in your room. And this is despite the building having solid concrete floors that appear to be over a foot thick.
I do also wonder if it was really an illusion as the first two flats were in noisier areas. But, whatever the reason, it's so hard to tell what it's going to be like before moving in. I wish there standards so you could guarantee what it's going to be like.
But until then, I will be seeking detached housing because I just can't stand the noise.
The noise is coming in through the holes made to put plumbing - especially district heating.
In my current apartment the owner wanted to conceal the piping, so he hid it behind an enclosure made out of plaster with a service hatch.
The whole thing is currently a resonance chamber that lets me follow my dowstairs neighbour's conversations.
I'm not sure about the problem with direct contact with walls/ceilings, though. I suspect this is more down to the construction and the walls/ceiling being directly attached to the concrete shell, or something.
Co-incidentally, there was an article in the Spanish national press that week detailing all the ways in which noise in Spanish cities was deleterious to health & wellbeing and asking why no-one ever did anything about it. Constant noise just seems to be accepted as being an inevitable part of life, rather than something to be fixed.
Living there you kind of get used to it.
That's my experience as well. Sometimes it's hard to tell apart if there's a bar brawl happening on the pub down the road or if it's a grou having a good time. It also doesn't help that in both cases Spaniards curse like crazy.
corrected for you :)
Other than that though...!
I had to chuckle when reading this, although I would point out that not all neighbourhoods are the same. Still, every spaniard knows that trying to call the local police because there is some idiot throwing a party at 1AM is pointless.
The truck then came crashing down the street a little later...
(I lived in Spain for two years.)
Totally. I think to them it represents and demonstrates liberation, freedom, fun, family and community. Loud means fun to them.
People complaining about noise are seen as serious party-poopers.
Do you (or: do people usually) exclude Madrid from Castilla? That's the only place in Spain I've lived and would not class the people I knew as quiet and calm. But then again it's a melting pot of people from all over Spain, so who knows!
And the calmest and quietest people I met were from the east coast :D
Definitely agree about Andalusia though
It's not the same having to live in a small town in Castile of <2000 people vs doing that the literal capital of Spain.
Or maybe I have a very stereotyped, very local experience that came from going mostly where all the other tourists go. and I'm wildly extrapolating from here about the rest of the country.
Maybe the older houses are the only available places to rent in some cities when you are young, because they are old and creaky, so still affordable. Does this mean that every Spanish family live in old, poorly insulated houses? Hem, not.
Is true that Mediterranean coast and Canary Islands care less about proper insulation. The north and center is different.
Is Madrid louder than London, Athens, new Dehli, Los Angeles or Pekin? I'm very skeptical about it.
It just happens that big cities, sport events, drinking areas and heavy traffic streets are noisy places. Here and in Australia. If you go where the drunkards join; expect to meet a lot of drunkards. But now visit any small village in Castilla; most of the time you could hear an atom crashing against the soil.
Same in small white villages in Andalucía. That is because they are populated mostly by old people that spend their day in front of their TV and barely want to walk anywhere. But once every 30 minutes whole village is woken up by the local teenager, the scream of his moped echoing in all the narrow streets. And if some people are talking you bet they are all shouting at each other.
Costs less to build, sells for the same money, more profit made.
Cities in southern Europe are generally denser than what the communists built and to me this is simply too much.
I remember staying in Bilbao and the garbage truck waking me up on each garbage day because its sound bounced back and forth between the walls and some genius thought it would be a good idea to have it do its run during the night.
Meanwhile back at home if it weren't for a construction site that propped up recently there would have been at least 70 meters to the building next to mine.
Nope, nothing was wrong. That's just how they talk to each other in Spanish. Weird. It also never occurred to me why I didn't notice until whatever age I was, a teenager in high school. It never really occurred to me that they were always 'yelling' while talking to each other until that moment.
There is the possibility that they really were upset and yelling, but my mother didn't often keep things from me (at least not as far as I know). I also noticed the yelling afterwards, so I'm confident that was me simply realizing that's how they talked after years of not noticing.
It is the number one reason I could never see myself living in an apartment, I'm very sensitive to noise and I get disproportionately angry at even low levels of unwanted noise. I'd be too worried about noise from neighbours.
Point being that it depends.
Edit: modern fire safety also dictates a bit how contained each unit should be, I guess.
One example is the original thick wooden beams that was the floor went through the unit walls. So they same piece of wood I was walking on was also being walked on by the neighbors. That was a great transmission of vibrations, especially when their kid were playing on the floor hehe.
Same experience. Most noise comes from people in the hallways because a solid wood door does not insulate sound.
Traffic noise could be improved with triple pane windows, but really it's just un-restricted mufflers that penetrate, and that should be handled by the city.
I'm completely speculating, but maybe in newer construction, they can now use insulation materials with a very high R rating that are still fairly thin, so while you get the good thermal insulation, sound transmission is increased because there's less material in the way now. Older buildings that made up for the materials not being as high R-rated tended to do so via volume, which also helped with sound deadening. I think in a lot of places, you also need to have firewalls between units so that fire in one unit doesn't easily spread to others, but I expect those materials have also improved over the decades to where they still provide the same fire protection, but no longer have the mass to offer as much sound deadening.
The worst in my experience has been units originally designed for rich quiet people that now are being rented by families.
In other words, the problem is politics. Cities need to want to make multi-family development appealing to encourage their residents to live there. There's a bit of deliberate neglect going on for multi-family housing specifically to encourage single-family living.
Why am I not surprised? This is why we need more city council members who rent. Renter issues are completely invisible to those holding political power.
My wife and I lived in a top floor flat in Drammen for two years. We swore we would never, ever, live that close to neighbours again. In the summer it's nice to have the windows open until your divorcée neighbour downstairs comes home and argues with her umpteenth boyfriend and her sulky teenage daughter and then the three of them each try to drown out the others with loud music and television.
It didn't matter that I couldn't hear them through the floor.
I recently walked about 20 miles back in SF again. It was comparatively pleasant. Road traffic was slower. The materials they use to make the roads reflect less of the sound than here in Nevada. I wasn’t triggered by vehicles or traffic or trucks. I stayed in the Panhandle and could sleep with the bedroom window open.
There’s a way to make heaven or hell in both cities and rural areas.
- They didn't opt for the place, someone else in their family did
- This is where the jobs were
- What matters to them changed over time
- The place changed over time
- A lot of things matter to them, this is just one, and the place delivers on the others
- When they were looking for a place, this was what was available
- etc.
What an expression. I love that
I had one set of neighbors who fell into this range for about a year. I suspect their place was sparse, I could even hear them push their chair out from dining table. I felt happy when they moved out!
Edit: we lived in two flats for a total of nearly 25 years!
Shitty construction hurts.
I also suffer from this problem. Is there a name for this?
It's a real shame this bias exists in Ireland it really does little to help the housing crisis or the egregious amount of one off housing in rural Ireland does little to help infrastructure connections.
This really poisoned the well in Ireland towards apartment living.
I have lived/stayed in places in the middle of dense urban areas where you essentially never hear anything (occasionally sirens if the windows are open, that sort of thing), and others where you can tell when your neighbor is stirring tea.
One of the factors is cost, yes, but also age of the building and materials/techniques matter. I suppose it also matters if any of your neighbors are 23 and like powerful stereos - but that holds pretty much anywhere that isn't very rural.
Oh, and in dense urban/busy areas, height matters too. Living on the first 5 floors is far different than say 15+, in terms of how much street noise etc. you will hear with an open window (or even without).
I don’t mind visiting cities, but I certainly would never live in one.
Unfortunately just bought a house in a rush hour high noise area. wife loved in the house, I loved the visible sky, and we both loved the yard/garden. we saw it on a Sunday (very quiet day. :) Now I have a hard time being outside or taking my scope out for observing.
Waiting for a stroke or kidney failure from the high BP.
Cars are loud.[0]
I live in Malmö on the southern edge of Sweden opposite Copenhagen, it's quieter here (pop: 350,000~) than my friends home village in Northamptonshire (Thrapston; pop: 6,239 as of 2011).
This was largely because of the sheer volume of cars on the road, because you essentially have to drive to get anywhere. London is similar, despite not everyone needing a car there is traffic everywhere, you can notice that there's back streets and they tend to be very quiet until there are lots and lots of people, think >200 in a 100sqm area.
Having the ability to escape noise is the most important part of noise management. Cities like London have almost no respite from the noise and thus it can be physically draining for many people to experience it. Including myself.
Wheels rolling are loud. Also motorbikes. Combustion engines are even louder, and they are also put on bikes.
Disillusioned young pedal-metalling in residential neighborhoods are the f*king worst.
I lived in a downtown area in a high-rise. 2am in the morning, no cars running but the hummming of all the equipment necessary to operate a city is noise pollution.
Next, light pollution.
It is like people who complain about public teansports who are usually the ones actively participating in ruining it for everyone.
Perhaps row houses are best? Good density, and with a solid concrete wall seperating units to stop sound and fire from spreading?
Unlike North American condos, in France they own their windows and can replace them.
They also built out a “frame” to install noise insulation on top of the shared walls, losing a bit of interior space (and a huge free bonus to the neighbours). Can’t remember if they did the ceiling too.
Unfortunately, no flooring standards are an issue. In my Canadian condo, if you redo the floors, there’s some noise insulating requirement for your choice of flooring as it’s against concrete.
UN article on it here: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf...
The population explosion isn't happening very much, quite the opposite.
It's not like Japan deteriorated into some extreme poverty because of it, right?
So maybe it's not that bad, "to be in decline" (in population number, or related GDP), as we are meant to believe?
I think it's a little too early to draw conclusions. Japan reached their peak population in about 2010, and the decline since has been mild.
> ...pretty painful.
How will the subjected population notice that you reckon? Prices change, sure, but many of us on earth also live in a lot more luxury than 200 years ago: so we have some fat on our bones.
If an economic system works so poorly for people they have to be imported (I.e. locals who want to form families can’t) it should be dismantled.
I care about “global capital” far less than I care about my compatriots ability to form strong families. We should absolutely be worried by terrible birth rates.
Interesting thought. The notion that GDPpopulation has to grow comes comes from that economic system. The problem is that the economic system dictates policy to such a large extend that democracy is a farce.
> I care about “global capital” far less than I care about my compatriots ability to form strong families.
+1
> We should absolutely be worried by terrible birth rates.
Why? What's the daily life/ human problem with becoming less humans? (I know the economic GDPpopulation reason, and I know why militarily that IS very important)
Most of developed countries have bad fertility rate, some developing and/or poor countries have good fertility rate. People in rich countries don't have children not because they can't afford to, but because they don't want to.
It’s that people stopped wanting kids. How silly of me. We undid all the evolutionary programming of our species to play XBox and rent.
…or it’s that the system is broken and we should cease importing people because the only people that “win” in that situation are those connected to global capital.
Did you somehow miss word "Spain" in the title and immediately proceeded with US-specific rant?
Additional info from Wikipedia[0]:
> As of 2020, according to the World Economic Forum and to Bloomberg, Spain has the most efficient health system in Europe, and also ranks at the top worldwide along with Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore.
> Due to universal health care coverage, inequality is reduced substantially. Inequality in Spain is even further reduced in that co-payments do not usually apply, limited to special medicines and services that are not covered by the National Health System.
And yet socialist Spain has fertility rate of 1.3 compared to 1.7 of dystopian capitalist-driver privatized-healthcare-only US [1]. I'm sure everyone buying a house every year and enjoying even better health care in such countries as Niger, Chad and Somalia that somehow on top of the fertility list though.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Spain
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
your solution requires a dismantling of the entire global system of governments and economies and the implementation of something new and poorly tested. which may be in our future regardless, and may be necessary at some point. but massive change on that scale only happens in response to horrifying levels of war or unpredictable changes in technology(changes on the scale of a power positive fusion revolution). You either dont want or cannot force those things.
the immigration solution is a stop-gap and still a big change for most, but one that buys nations 40+ years and is no harder than simply opening the door that millions are banging on right now, and billions will be banging on as climate disaster grows.
So the system we currently have, which we already agree is failing people here, but we’re worried changing the system is bad?
Why take 40 more years if it’s already failing?
Letting millions of people in is NOT GOOD for the people already here. I say we just don’t do that.
The only people benefitting are part of a global capital class and not regular workers. We were sold that it would bring worldwide peace and better living conditions. It was a lie and we know it - why continue?
I have the same sentiment. Though I take that "reflection" means that it was the economic model we live in/under is what gave rise to the "population growth concerns".
That's part of why it's so hard to think of alternatives from within this model.
Anyway, the problem is not the current decline in population, it is a fertility rate that remains far below a replacement rate. That means there is no bottom to the population decline. The immigration solution would need to be applied again and again.
The only reason I still don't have a kid is expensive housing (i.e. too many people for too little space). My partner is more or less tied to the capital because of her job and our apartment literally (and I mean literally) can't fit one more desk, much less one more person.
A population decline (with the society kept running by more automation) should make things a bit easier, shouldn't it?
For the global liberal capitalism, the only way it can maintain its egalitarian promise is for it to rely on infinite growth. You can promise to the exploited that they will have even more people to exploit in the future if they keep their head down and stick with the status quo for long enough. It’s starting to hit external limits given by the environment, and available space only recently.
Meanwhile, some societies are aging and doing fine. The economy can be fine tuned to prioritize basic needs, and sustainably supply the people regardless of their age. For example automation in agriculture means that we’ll need less and less people to produce food. UBI is just one tool that could be useful here.
Immigrants (at the scale Spain needs) don’t want to move to a shrinking economy. Spaniards themselves are leaving the country to look for work. As an example, Central American immigrants will immigrate through multiple low growth countries specifically to get to the U.S. for work.
To GP’s point though, I think Spain’s population problems aren’t all that related to dense apartments and more tied to economic opportunities.
Also, the healthcare options, the lack of violence even at night (relatively, every city has its 'bad zones' but even with that it's far safer) and the welfare state makes their lives a paradise compared to, for instance, a hell zone in the Dominican Republic or narcozones in Mexico.
importing large groups of people sometimes works; we did it pretty well in America because we had so much room to grow. transportation and communication were also much harder, so it was less easy for people to maintain ties to their former country and family there; they adapted a little more, though ethnic ghettos were still a problem.
it's not an intractable problem but saying "just get immigrants bro" isn't really a good solution. we are sometimes biased in the US because we are selective (too much so, I think). we bring in the best from high-population areas like Africa and India and we see benefits for that. on the other hand, while migrant working and a moderate level of illegal immigration are fine and even economically beneficial, it would be silly to deny that the current levels are causing severe problems. when you lose that selectivity and control, things don't turn out so well. and to import enough people to make up for falling birthrates we would have to broaden our horizons beyond skilled workers.
I am not, i am acting like immigrating literally anybody is going to be massively better than a declining population. If they live in a country, they are paying for housing, food, and services, and almost certainly have a job. taxes on top of all of that. I think the attitude of being picky is fine and wise, right now, but eventually you are really going to just want anyone instead of going inverted.
High-skill immigrants are almost always a big win for the host country because of the things you cite, and more (they bring innovation, start businesses, etc). Low-skill/low-education ones are a crapshoot. It's better to have an inverted population pyramid than deal with all the social ills that come from immigrants that cause too many problems.
Europe's struggles seem to be caused more by a culture clash. Immigrants will always bring their way of life with them, and group together - it's a constant of human nature, this is how we preserve identity. Moving to a different country is a traumatic experience when done voluntarily; imagine having to permanently leave home under duress and on short notice.
As an immigrant myself, what always struck me as paradoxical is the nationalist / cultural pride that a lot of immigrants tend to display. I'd sum up my knee-jerk reaction to it as "Bro, if X is so great, why did you leave?" -- again, this is spoken as a person who left their homeland, with first-hand experience of some of the complex issues that surround all that. I still don't quite understand what drives that "flag-waving", but I hope to one day.
Having said all that, I would encourage my adoptive country to be proactive in their immigration policies. Putting it harshly, "get the good ones before they go somewhere else". The geopolitics of the world will only become more chaotic as the impacts of climate change cause hardship in the less habitable areas of the planet -- big migrations are inevitable. If you want your country to arrive in the 22nd century while preserving most of your way of life, you can't be clinging to outmoded ideas.
I'd love to hear some examples where this has caused technological stagnation and blocked skilled migration -- US and Canada provide solid counter-examples to these claims. Both countries take in immigrants at both ends of the economic spectrum, from coveted H1B high-paying tech jobs, to seasonal farm workers who exist in slavery-like circumstances. Both countries show significant, sustained technological innovation.
I agree this is destructive to the social fabric, and it separates us into strata. But I have a hard time believing that immigration is the cause; a simpler explanation would interpret it as one of the symptoms, with the underlying causes being closely related to the relentless transfer of wealth to an ever-shrinking "elite".
A better example might be the low price of labour-intensive hand-picked fruit (particularly berries) in the US and the correspondingly low agricultural automation. It's not that machines don't exist, or that berry picking is going to prevent the next Facebook, it's that they aren't cost effective in the short to mid term even when longer term investment would eventually improve the whole industry. This is really hard to measure and I don't have any good sources for either side of the argument right now.
I also want to make a distinction between skilled and unskilled migration. I don't think skilled migration is harmful to the social fabric in an enduring way, nor migration with the same proportion of skilled and unskilled labour as the host country.
Also an immigrant, and I have observed that some immigrants tend to be become more conservative when they move. Or perhaps they have stopped evolving when their peers in the home country have moved on. I think this might be partly due to dealing with the trauma of displacement, and partly due to lack of diversity in thinking. I have mainly noticed this in a generation older than mine.
The population of prospective immigrants who completed 12 years of education or more is already largely gone, because the fertility rates in countries with this level of development are either already below replacement or on the way to it at a rapid pace.
And you need at least that to contribute to an advanced economy.
Since the early days of humanity, we've relied on children taking care of us in our old age. I haven't seen a solution for that.
Nursing homes are not a solution. I listened to some grim statistics from my state recently. In many nursing homes, the ratio of staff to patients is 6:1. It takes 6 full time employees to take care of 1 patient. Now I'll grant that these numbers were outliers, because the population was challenging - many/most of these patients had dementia, etc. And they were handling rural areas - you'd get better scaling in the city. Still, I'm sure in a major metropolitan area it's at least 2:1.
And that doesn't account for the poor existence in those places (abuse by employees, abuse by fellow residents - you're screwed if you don't have family members advocating for you).
And that's for patients who get to go. Many elderly will have chronic conditions which are bad enough that you can't live alone, but generally not bad enough for Medicare or health insurance to pay for assisted living. Examples are things like mobility issues - only long term health care insurance covers this, and it's way too expensive. I don't own such a policy and likely won't ever be able to afford it.
Maybe we should invent more on robotics and healthcare so elderly people could live as independent as if they were in their 40's.
It's not as if no one thought of what you're saying. I think you don't appreciate how unfeasible it is currently. First off you have economics. Can we make it cheaply enough so that it's available to everyone, and not just white collar folks?
Even putting aside the economics of it, once you start itemizing all the possible ways one would need help, you'll realize you're effectively asking for the equivalent of an intelligent android.
It's way way easier to deal with neutral/slight growth than shrinking. Like take teachers as an example. In an ideal world the demand for them is the same year in year out. Every year X of them will retire and Y new graduates will be hired. In a declining world you need 3% fewer teachers every year so when 3% retire you don't hire new ones. Multiply that across every industry and you have a youth unemployment crisis.
Look in the US? Pressie is near senile, senate is full grey. Not all countries are this bad, but where I live it's similar.
But culturally oldies need more respect?
Your first paragraph is most relevant. The thing about the pressie and senators is only relevant to the miniscule minority of the most powerful people.
now "old folks" in question are demanding a lavish retirement at the expense of me and those who are currently young despite the fact that when they funded something similar for their grandparents, the proportional burden was radically lower. a society that would significantly burden the future of its young (and therefore its own future) to cash out the olds smacks of a ponzi scheme and is hideously distorted.
what's more, elder care sucks dollars from investing in interesting industries (colonizing space, growing our industrial base, new computing technologies) to mindless nonsense. instead, those dollars will go to building bingo halls.
(But: it might be pretty “urban” for that matter since some countries have a lot of empty spaces which bring down the population density.)
Spain's economy is very screwed up. Unemployment rate tends to hover above 20% and I think it has the highest rate of students dropping out of basic education.
To top things off, cost of living in urban centers is way way above the median income, specially nowadays. Young families have to make do with either sharing apartments/renting rooms or living way outside city centers in small apartments. In some cases the only affordable option is renting rooms way outside the urban centers.
So the average Spanish couple has to make very hard decisions on if/when to start a family. Quite often the decision tends towards "not right now, we can't afford it."
Marketing brochures tend to emphasize Spain's "terraza" lifestyle, as in people hanging out in cafes/bars/restaurants in the afternoon, evening, and even night, and brag about the fantastic social life that sprouts from there, but the ugly truth is that one important factor of that pattern is the fact that housing is very expensive and very low-quality to the point that staying indoors in one of those flats can have a huge detrimental impact on your mental health, and the only way to avoid that is to minimize the amount of time you spend indoors.
The first claim is true, but there's a lot of under-reported economic activity, and a lot of fraud (people claiming they don't work when they actually do), so the unemployment rate figure can't be trusted.
Your second claim around the highest rate of students dropping out of basic education needs a citation.
I'm sorry, but that's just hand-waving over the problem to pretend it isn't there.
> Your second claim around the highest rate of students dropping out of basic education needs a citation.
I learned that fact because the Spanish Government posts tv ad campaigns on how Spain has the highest rate if students dropping out of basic education, and how they should instead explore options such as pursuing trade education.
If you really are interested on the topic, you could start by checking what OECD has to say about Spain's education problem, including how 27% of its 25-34 yo cohort (i.e., the latest generation entering the workforce) did not complete basic studies and does not have postsecondary education. Spain also boasts a NEET rate of 17%.
https://www.oecd.org/education/education-at-a-glance/
Spain's astronomical dropout rate is not a secret. The issue was even reported in Swedish news outlets.
https://www.thelocal.es/20221003/spain-has-the-eus-highest-r...
It's also noteworthy that Spain's horeca industry started to rely on heavy influxes of immigrants from South America to meet their demand, in spite of Spain having one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe.
I... have doubts.
(Looks like they're only looking at OECD countries, so Singapore and HK, the most obvious counter-examples, are excluded.)
Also by OECD standards it definetly tracks.
Mumbai India pop. 23,355,000 density 24,740
Hong Kong Hong Kong pop. 7,347,000 density 25,254
Dhaka Bangladesh pop. 15,443,000 density 33,852
Density is almost a pun "dense city"
Edit: I am aware green spain has places where forested mountains meet the sea, so I guess it could be a really short spatial warp, but there is something about standing somewhere you can sing as loud as you can, and knowing no one could hear you but the squirrels.
Bikes, not cars, please.
Amsterdam, for example, happens to have weather that's relatively compatible with biking, all throughout the year.
On the other hand, for four to six months of the year, most areas of Canada, and even a good portion of the US, definitely don't.
While a very small handful of people can handle biking when it's consistently -10 °C (14 °F) or colder out, possibly through 10 cm (4") or more of uncleared snow/slush, and possibly on ice, the vast majority of people can't and won't.
The summer isn't necessarily any better. The cities in southern Ontario, for example, where many Canadians live, can become surprisingly hot and humid for weeks at a time, and biking isn't pleasant then.
Given those conditions, people will definitely try to drive instead of biking.
Distances are more difficult, you can't bring someone with you, your carrying capacity is much smaller for shopping trips. It also just plain takes longer to get anywhere and people just don't like spending more time than they have to on errands.
- You can have someone ride on the backseat or in the cargo space of a cargo bike. [1]
- You'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike. [1]
Then there's the cost vs a car [2], which will likely make up for any inconvenience.
Of course, you do need at least decent bike infrastructure for this to be realistic.
You're talking about convincing people to buy worse cars.
Motorbikes and mopeds and scooters already exist and people largely don't choose them over cars. Changing it to "electric scooter" or ebike doesn't suddenly make it more appealing.
And you certainly lose the "it's better for physical fitness and health" aspect once you're talking about motorized vehicles.
> Because electric bikes are less physically demanding on joints and muscles, they not only bring in riders who might otherwise be inactive, but they also offer the opportunity for people to ride longer periods of time and go greater distances. That leads to more folks using e-bikes as an option for commuting or running errands. Although users won’t find themselves doing the sort of vigorous physical activity uphill mountain biking or even hot yoga entails, e-bike use has been shown to deliver the sort of moderate physical activity most doctors recommend.
https://www.peopleforbikes.org/news/the-health-benefits-of-e...
The exercise provided by ebikes when all things are equal is lower than regular bikes, but all things are not equal as people with ebikes tend to ride more day to day (on aggregate).
In any case, I only brought up ebikes in the context of arduous journeys. Most people will not travel by ebike, they're too expensive.
It's not about trying to persuade people in car-dependent places to go against the grain and bike everywhere. Rather, a network of bike infrastructure should be built, making biking a viable choice. In time biking would become normalized, nobody would need to be explicitly persuaded. After all, Americans don't drive everywhere because they've been convinced to, they do it because the ever-present car infrastructure makes it the most convenient option.
There's a side effect of car prevalence and land use in the US: everyone can be "expected" to have a car, so grocery shops tend to locate in places further away with cheaper land, which make it more convenient to make big shops, which require a car...
I find that most Americans are not comfortable or even familiar with "I'll pop into the shop to buy milk a block away". Some neighborhoods in cities don't have local grocery shops. So if you're used to that built environment your first thought is "I can't fit a month's worth of food in a cargo bike, let alone ride for 10 miles!?"
But if you propose letting a grocery shop in the neighborhood people think "parking, traffic and noise are gonna be terrible!"
And that's an abnormal trip for me, I usually just pop into a grocery store on my walk home from work. If all I wanted to buy was milk, the overhead would be 5 mins.
Not because I'm lazy, but because the nearby grocery store often cost more than double for the same items.
And it was a grocery store, not a convenience store. Convenience stores were even worse.
Myth.
Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Things would be a lot easier for people on bikes here in Milan, Italy where I live... except that they are not.
It's not so safe during rush hour, and it's full of people who would rather take their stupid car instead of walking half a mile.
Distances are larger in North America, but climate-wise people cycle more in NYC or in Minneapolis than they do in Atlanta or in Dallas.
To sum it up: make cycling as safe as possible, and discourage car use, and especially car abuse -- picking up kids from school with an SUV, for example.
The noise problem isn't limited to loud music and parties, just the noise of kids playing loudly and running around in communal areas can become infuriating to neighbours.
Even if you've got good neighbours, there's other downsides with flats - a lack of parking/EV charging, often nowhere to safely store a bicycle even. No space to install personal 'green tech' such as solar or a heat pump. No garage/shed to store tools/bikes/hobby equipment.
how much piss and shit and trash and grafitti do they have in their public transit system
It's a nice stabilizing mechanism because nobody wants to move every year just to get the best rent, but most people can handle a move every 5 years.
For example, consider a paved rural road into farmland. In dollar terms paving that road is a subsidy from the nearest city to the people living in that rural area. However, in part the road is paved rather than gravel only to support heavier trucks to more efficiently transport agricultural products destined for the city. It is also paved in part to support larger, faster, heavier agricultural equipment which brings economies of scale to agriculture and reduces the per-unit price of the result -- again destined mostly for the city.
Residents themselves don't need the more expensive paved and it isn't their relatively light private vehicles causing most of the wear on the road in the first place.
Considered this way, a not insubstantial fraction of the cost of non-city areas is the city indirectly subsidizing itself. The full costs could be incorporated directly into the goods sourced from the supposedly subsidized areas, but that would be less efficient overall. For example, good roads reduces the cost of agricultural products for, say, three months a year. Instead of directly paying capital costs to pave the rural road the city could pay operational costs in higher food prices while missing the other cost advantages of the paved road the rest of the year in reduced recreational costs, policing costs, education costs, etc. If those other costs were higher there would be less of them and people would be less willing to live in those areas, increasing wage and commuting costs.
For example, the fructose corn syrup subsidies exist, as far as I can tell, in order to on-shore agricultural profits and ensure sufficient slack in the domestic agricultural system to ensure that restrictions on imports of food, such as in the case of war, would not seriously affect the USA. That is, it's a subsidy towards food security.
I'd never consider living somewhere where I couldn't, at minimum, walk to supermarkets, bars, restaurants, parks, etc.
I imagine people who own single family homes in nice suburbs are pretty happy about it, especially if they bought it when prices were half of what they are currently and are paying <3% interest.
Probably the opposite effect for SFHs in the urban areas. People usually prefer living in a detached house, especially when raising a family, and those are gradually being replaced by these multi-family dwellings, so the supply of them is actually going down.
That's why they are urban areas, not suburban or rural.
> People usually prefer living in a detached house, especially when raising a family
I also think this is kind of a US-centric experience, or at least doesn't take pricing and location into account. I suppose most people would prefer a single family home in central Manhattan but that doesn't exist, and if it did it would be unaffordable.
Now a single family detached home with a convenient transit commute into the city would be great. The US isn't great at building those either.
I don't think it's that simple. I mean, everyone would love a big house on a big yard that is close to everything, but approximately nobody gets to do that. In reality there are always tradeoffs, and the the tradeoffs build in incentives - sometimes intentionally, sometimes not, that people respond to. In a lot of the US those incentives have skewed pretty hard recently to exurban singles but that's not universal.
These sorts of things are hugely affected by infrastructure planning and subsidies, etc. At the end of the day people choose between the options they have, not the ones they wish they had.
That seems highly unlikely. Let's look at how SFH have become very affordable in the densest area in the US, Manhattan. Or the second densest, SF.
There's also a pretty big variance between a European city for example which usually doesn't have very tall high rises, and living in midtown Manhattan.
I spent 6 months in Sweden and have traveled to a handful of other European countries.
The quiet suburban/rural life is for me. After growing up in LA, bouncing around SF, DC and HNL I have settled in Michigan and really enjoy it here. Plenty of room, not very congested, progressive policies. Life is good (albeit sometimes very cold)
The US is a big place. Lots of different suburbs.
> everything you might want to go to is still at least a moderate car ride away, there's no people out and about because there's no reason for them to be there
Can you point at specific places like this? Google street view links?
Every suburb I've lived in the US I can walk to just about everything I need, kids walk to playground and parks, friends houses, etc.
I'm curious to see these suburbs where one can't walk anywhere.
Here's a suburb: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.107277,-80.6508196,3a,75y,25...
Here's another: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3137771,-121.9844666,3a,75y,...
In the latter it _may_ be theoretically feasible to walk to a couple restaurants, if you don't mind a fairly unpleasant trip. In practice I guarantee you almost no one does this.
But those are just a couple arbitrary choices; in my experience they're pretty much all like that.
On the other hand, by being selective about where I live (walkable neighborhoods are scarce in the US), I've been able to live in several places where a great grocery store, a gym, multiple great restaurants, a bar or two, and other interesting destinations were within a 5 minute walk - in some cases literally right next door. If most of the land around you is taken up by single family homes with pointlessly large lots, it's completely infeasible for anything more than a tiny percentage of people to live close to these things, short of building a grocery store for every 100 people or something absurd.
Same, but that's why I say the US is a big place. There isn't a standard US suburb.
> They definitely don't walk to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bar, to the gym, to work, etc.
That is alien to my experience. I can walk to all of those, with multiple instances of each one, from a suburban SFH.
On the first link near Charlotte, I have two comments: First one is that it stretches the definition of suburb. Switch to satellite view and zoom out until you see Charlotte. Those houses are in the midst of vast stretches of green, far away from the nearest urban area (Charlotte) a half hour away. That seems semi-rural to me. Are we calling that a suburb?
Even so, there is a supermarket, gym, tavern and a few other stores within 1 mile. A very easy bike ride.
The second link is definitely suburban, smack in the middle of built-up areas. Also more familiar to me since I have lived in various spots not far from there. You can easily walk to Saratoga Ave which is full of businesses.
In your view then... what in the world is this about? If suburbs are perfectly walkable, why does anyone care about urbanism? Why does this channel https://www.youtube.com/c/notjustbikes have over a million subscribers?
Moreover, why is the suburb such a post-automobile phenomenon? If it's viable to get everywhere from a suburb without a car, why were people in 1000 BCE or 1000 CE or 1800 CE not living in suburbs?
I just find this perspective so weird... I've definitely met plenty of people who are very pro-suburb, but it's because they consider it natural and acceptable to need a car for any trip, not because they think they can get places without a car.
I bike to the.grocery store, it isn't too far, but the trip is not pleasant because everything is setup or driving.
I don't entirely know, that's why I ask questions and links to concrete places.
> If suburbs are perfectly walkable, why does anyone care about urbanism?
I think there are different reasons for wanting to live in a dense downtown.
20-something me wanted to live in Manhattan so I could walk to hundreds of bars and clubs. For young people looking for this scene, an ultra-dense downtown is the only way to go.
So that is one reason, and for this one I completely understand and agree that no suburb ever will be able to offer the same experience.
But I feel other reasons are based on misconceptions. I see it repeated in every housing thread on HN, that it is impossible to walk anywhere when living in a suburb. Just on this article discussion you can find multiple people making variants of that claim. Sometimes people here on HN go even more outlandish and claim that people in suburbs must drive 30 minutes to get to a supermarket.
Those are misconceptions, so I think it's worth pointing that out. I'm sure there are occasional suburbs (not rural) where you truly can't walk anywhere, but that seems like a rare exception.
In my very suburban neighborhood, we can easily walk to 3 supermarkets, many restaurants, two bars, misc services (haircuts, locksmiths, etc), assorted other stores, hardware store, movies, library, theater, post office, bike shops, car repair, multiple playgrounds, sports fields, friends houses (for adults and kids) and I can go on.
> I've definitely met plenty of people who are very pro-suburb, but it's because they consider it natural and acceptable to need a car for any trip, not because they think they can get places without a car.
I don't think I can go places without a car in my suburb, I can and I do. See list above. Unless it's freezing and raining (not so common here in NorCal), I mostly walk or bike to all of the above. I prefer to bike but the lack of secure bike parking makes me walk more often than bike. My pre-teen kid can bike or scooter or walk to these places as well, mostly friends houses. I'm not imagining this, this is how we live out here in the suburbs.
That’s another thing I found a bit odd - it would never have occurred to me that anyone would not have considered that area a suburb.
It's true that there is no agreed definition to "suburb" which confuses these discussions.
Suburbs comes from sub (under, although here basically means around) urbs (city).
To me a suburb must be connected to its city. The city center has dense tall buildings and as you move away from the center the height and density decrease and then you are in the sub-urbs but it's all still built-up area. Once you move even further away and move into forested areas, you're out of the suburbs and into the rural surroundings.
If you have 30 minutes of highway driving through mostly forested areas (very green on google satellite view) between a house and the "urbs" (Charlotte, here) I think that's quite a stretch to call that a suburb.
Yeah, well that's just not the case at all here. The drive from Stallings to downtown Charlotte is almost entirely on Independence Boulevard, which is very much a stroad ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroad ), very much developed with lots of pointless strip malls and office parks and little visible nature, and certainly not a foresty experience. The fact that you can see green nearby on satellite view has little to do with people's actual experience driving on these roads.
This is always repeated, but could you point to studies documenting in which cities it is illegal? All around I see townhouses, apartment buildings, 2/4/6-plexes and other variants being built, none of which are single family homes. Maybe it takes a bunch of paperwork (I don't know) but clearly it isn't illegal.
> Wouldn't it be better if people had access to a walkable grocery store, coffee shop or park? Or if kids could safely walk or bike to school?
This is a false dichotomy. One can also live in a SFH and walk/bike to all of these things and more. I do, and I do, so does my kid.
You don’t need to look at a study, you can just look at zoning and land use maps for basically any city in America. Areas zoned single-family are not allowed to build anything else. There are multiple articles on Wikipedia[0][1][2] about this topic with literally hundreds of citations to primary and secondary sources. What a frustrating question.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-family_zoning
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning_in_the_United_States
Truthfully this is the dream.
This sounds like a cartoon version of suburbs! Can you point at actual suburbs (google map links) where you might be surrounded by endless nothingness and can't walk anywhere?
I've lived most of my life in suburbs in the US and have never experienced this. The only time I lived in a place I couldn't walk to any destination was when I lived in a quite rural area. But that was rural, not suburban.
Not the OP but when I lived in the US as an exchange student I lived in a suburb that looked exactly like the one in this video[1], which seems to be a fairly typical middle class neighborhood.
Like him I had the same experience of barely being able to walk anywhere, given how little space there even is for pedestrians.
So I'm not sure how this is an example of suburbs where one can't walk anywhere.
Car free zones, shops, restaurants and pedestrians taking up 90% of the space, mixed. Not one lonely sad mall. It's not an exgaratation to say when you pull up an aerial google map shot of a US suburb, there's more asphalt than people or buildings.
Ok but that's changing the goalposts of the discussion.
I totally agree it's more cute to walk in Heidelberg than the suburban area shown in that video (wherever it was). I've spent some time there and it was nice.
But the claim in the top of the thread was that in a suburb you are forced to stay home because it is basically impossible to walk anywhere, nothing is reachable on foot within reasonable distance. In my experience that's not true and I question whether it is true in most areas. Whenever I've lived in suburbs in the US (which is most of my life) I've always been able to walk to nearly everything I need within a reasonable & convenient walk. I often do because it's nice to walk.
If you change the discussion to be whether it's prettier and nicer to walk in a pedestrian street like in the video, then sure, I agree.
The same thing happened in other countries like the US, UK and France, yet the outcome was negative rather than positive. What was different about Spain that it worked out well?
(side point: I would rather have read an article with figures than a movie-like feature like this).
There were failures in ensuring the new high rising estates don't become ghettos due to lack of opportunities and self-reinforcing vicious cycles, which have been in large part corrected and have been taken into account for any new high rise / housing (re)developments. And there has been a lack of enough developments in the big cities for a variety of reasons. But overall I wouldn't say the outcome wss negative. Millions of people have somewhere to live which is more often than not with decent quality and availability of opportunities.
Your point is good: I have friends in some developments around Paris and they are perfectly fine. But the hostile banlieus are pretty bad, and such hostile environments have developed in the UK and USA to the point where they are being torn down.
Is the same true in Spain?
Saved for later as I had no idea how long it will take to read it ...
Why do I need GPU to access the information - that's the question. What did they do so the website works worse than a 3D video game? Obviously I am missing something.
I think you just have some hardware-software conflict issue.
Apartments are not inherently bad. They allow for density which, if you went through the tour this site provides, you know allows for cheaper public services. I've lived in many great apartments and a few bad ones. It's not the style of building that's bad, it's the owners and the laws they are forced to or not forced to follow.
Suburbs are _heavily_ subsidized. They require a ton of money from taxpayers to sustain their existence. So much so that many North American cities are essentially permanently in a state of insolvency because they can't sustain the infrastructure needed for suburbs. Think about this, for a suburb you have inherently more roads and more distance to cover for things like sewers, power/cable lines, water mains, etc. Plus you just take up more space so suburbs don't tend to be walkable in terms of productive travel. You can walk your dog in a suburb, but if you need groceries you'll be driving. So you pay more for suburbs even if you don't live in them AND they require you to pay for a car which depending on circumstances can total a few thousand dollars a year, especially if you don't have the money to drop on a car that doesn't require a lot of maintenence.
As mentioned in this website, suburbs should always be considered a luxury. The vast majority of people should live in more dense areas. It's better for the environment, personal finances, city economies, physical and social health (ever wonder why Europeans live longer?), etc. If you want to live in a suburb, good for you! But I believe we should fully stop subsidizing them. Start making suburb communities compensate cities financially for the imbalance they impose on our systems.
Anyway I have never lived in NA and while I understand your concerns I dont think they are valid.
I am not a cattle that you need to optimize.
In Europe we subsidize many, many things and I dont see a reason why living like a human should not be one of them.
I also don't want _anyone_ to feel like cattle. When I talk about apartments I want to be clear, I'm not talking about shacks with thin walls, 50 stories, and no greenspace. The ideal apartment has almost all the benefits of living in a suburb (good amount of space for yourself and others, greenery, privacy, sturdiness and soundproofing, cleanliness etc.) with the added benefit of allowing you to potentially not own a car, and without the extreme requirement of subsidies from any level of government.
These ideas are growing in popularity, in part led by content creators like Not Just Bikes, City Beautiful, Climate Town, and thought leaders like those at Strong Towns. If you have a chance, please check any of those out. I think you'll find what I found after learning about this stuff which is that no way of living is inherently evil, but some ways of living such as suburban sprawl are just more expensive in many ways. We just haven't done a good job at making those costs clear to those who live in suburbs, because governments absorb the cost and collect increased taxes from all to make up the difference. And as is so common worldwide, people tend to hate taxes, so that isn't even enough and it leads to cities with budgets that will never be healthy and simply cannot provide the services everyone wants such as regular cleaning, better education, solid public transportation, etc.
That's highly relative. Urban areas have high maintenance costs as well, precisely because of the higher density. The infrastructure requires more maintenance, higher sanitation costs, law enforcement, etc. Not to mention that cramming hundreds of people per km², surrounded by concrete and no vegetation, in small and dimly lit apartments, is awful for mental health. I know where I would prefer to live during the next pandemic.
> It's better for the environment
How is it better for the environment, exactly? Cities destroy the environment just by existing, and they hardly have enough green areas to sustain wild life.
> physical and social health (ever wonder why Europeans live longer?)
This has nothing to do with the urban lifestyle. Europeans live longer on average because of less socioeconomic inequality, healthier diets, and better healthcare systems.
Urban areas cost more in total, but less per capita. If you don't take that per capita measurement into account, it's pointless to claim things like this.
Here's a good infographic on this: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
See specifically the massive (4-10x) increase in costs for things like roads, sidewalks, water, sewers, transportation, etc. when we talk about suburban environments.
> Cities destroy the environment just by existing, and they hardly have enough green areas to sustain wild life.
Do you have a source for this? Living closer to the things you need in life such as energy, food, water, friends, family obviously leads to less waste of energy in getting to those things or having them come to you. Around wildlife, guess where they could and used to live before suburban sprawl? Right where the suburbs popped up. Your solution to increasing wildlife is continuing suburban sprawl? I highly recommend you research and provide sources before making claims like that.
Though I still think the urban lifestyle comes at the expense of quality of life. It's wrong to optimize for lower cost, which often means that other factors important for wellbeing are neglected. Being surrounded by concrete instead of nature has a detrimental effect to our psychological and physical health, with urban runoff being one problem[1]. The amount of air and noise pollution is usually higher in cities than in rural areas[2]. All urban conveniences aren't enough to make this worthwhile, though this is a personal stance, and others may disagree.
And, yes, the suburban sprawl is also damaging to the environment. But we know much more today about sustainable infrastructure than we did in the 1950s. The same is true for cities, but it's a much larger effort to bring cities in balance with nature than rural areas. It's not just a matter of planting trees, and electrifying transportation. These are decade-long projects with enormous cost[3], and governments tend to drag their feet. In contrast, the environmental impact of suburbs can be lowered by relatively minor personal changes[4], which is much more manageable.
I'm not claiming to be an expert in any of this, and ultimately my position is driven by a dislike of cities in general. But thanks for clarifying some of my misconceptions. This research was eye opening.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-022-00853-4
[2]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/ss/ss6613a1.htm
[3]: https://unhabitat.org/news/27-apr-2020/the-cost-of-making-a-...
[4]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/04/how-to-be-more-sustai...
I don't know which one becomes more expensive per capita, but "more distance" is very simplistic metric.
Think of how much money and time and coordination it requires to dig a 200ft trench somewhere in Manhattan. Street closures, permits with multiple organizations, coordinate with tons of utilities and other underground facilities, engineering surveys if you're digging near high rises, etc.
Meanwhile in the suburbs one guy in a pickup shows up with a digger and gets it done before lunch.
Density also bring in enormous complexity, so it's not that simple.
> You can walk your dog in a suburb, but if you need groceries you'll be driving.
I live in a suburb and I walk to one of three nearby (< 10 min walk) grocery stores.
That is an outlier, though. Not only are suburbs less dense and, obviously, services are not as close, but county and/or city regulations across the US are notoriously anti mixed use developments, which make things even worse.
Can you point me at data?
This is always stated as truth but I always question it and have not seen anything conclusive yet.
Personally I've never lived in a suburb where I couldn't walk to supermarkets and other stores (and I've nearly always lived in suburbs).
I think the outlier is the suburb from where one can't walk anywhere. Would love to see comprehensive data on this.
The National walkability index guide [0] gives suburbs a "below average" walkability score.
Informally, there's also a website called Walkscore [1], where users rate walkability in many cities and towns across the US. Even most cities rank lower than 60 out of 100, and suburbs, given the almost nation-wide aversion to mixed use buildings, do not rank higher.
Coming from Europe, it was a huge shock when I knew that I would have to walk 15 minutes to reach the closest grocery store. That, and the fact that in the US, sidewalks seem to disappear at random intervals for whatever reason.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2021-06/documents/na...
The blocks are a bit weird. For example zooming into my neighborhood there is a house with a score of 93 but the house next door (no more than 50ft away) has a score of 70 just because it falls in a different map block. Although in reality people from both houses can walk to the same things with same ease.
Found an even more extreme case in Mountain View. Houses on one side of Shoreline Blvd have a score of 90 and houses on the other side a score of 10! Shoreline has pedestrian crossings, so houses on each side should logically have the same score.
So while interesting at a big scale view, the data is flawed.
The walkscore site I was familiar with and I think it's quite bad, does not reflect reality.
Here's the Oxford dictionary's definition: an outlying district of a city, especially a residential one.
There are always outliers and exceptions to the rule but modern suburbs are a pretty simple yet flawed idea. They allow residential single-family zoned lots with very few exceptions and they look like clusters of anywhere from 1 to hundreds of housing development projects connected together by roads.
Can you physically walk from your suburb to a grocery store? Absolutely! But for hundreds of millions of Americans, almost none of which would ever take on that task by choice, this looks like walking a few miles at least round trip and crossing at least a couple of highly-dangerous multi-lane roads around the stores they are heading to. This is just how things work in suburbs, everything is so spread out that cars turn out to be the only feasible transportation method. If cars are the only way to get around, roads need to be made wider and faster especially around those areas people are trying to get to--like stores.
This is all part of why there's growing concern around building practices that promote suburb-like development.
That's like half of UK housing.
The people who would rather live in an old 50 sqm house than a modern apartment must be abusing some serious substances
Love how they’ve included only advanced western/westernized countries there and not third world hellholes or post-soviet dumps.
* More things to do.
* More people to meet.
* More restaurants, which leads to the best restaurants being better.
* More mom and pop businesses. I didn't know independent shoe stores were a thing until I moved here.
* Live entertainment everywhere, both to enjoy and to participate in.
* Walking to get coffee is very nice. Walking to get groceries is super nice.
* Huge freedom of movement on a bike. OK, rural rail trails are cool, but they're lines. In a good city, I have trails but also the entire street grid.
* Access to trains and buses which will take me to places I can drink without worrying about DUI.
* Watching the innocent shenanigans that go on around makes life more interesting.
The peace of mind of knowing that my living arrangements are reasonably sustainable, both environmentally and economically, is also nice.
FWIW, I could afford to life in suburbia or the country, but I like the city better. I do love taking weekend backpacking trips in the mountains, so I'm not some nature-phobe.
They live in apartments not because they are so conscious about urban planning, but because they can't afford to do otherwise. Give people money and they want to move to single-family houses in suburbs.
People want to live near the city center. They want to be able to walk and get anywhere easily and that's means they want to live in an apartment in a city.
Actually, nowadays is cheaper to buy a house with a garden than an apartment and guess what people are trying to buy?
Also, as they stated owning a flat in the center of your city or town it's expensive as fuck, while owning a 'villa' in the outskirts in the middle of nowhere in Ye Olde Farmtown it's dirt cheap.
Do we consider this abomination a luxury now?