Different strokes for different folks. I’m a very happy single family home dweller. Living in a dense city feels claustrophobic.
I'd never consider living somewhere where I couldn't, at minimum, walk to supermarkets, bars, restaurants, parks, etc.
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 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.
I bike to the.grocery store, it isn't too far, but the trip is not pleasant because everything is setup or driving.
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
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.
Truthfully this is the dream.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)