Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elzbardico | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that in the past companies tended to have to flock together. You're a financial conglomerate, you had to be on NYC, you are a OEM manufacturer for the automobile industry, well, the idea is that you sort of had to be on detroit. You're a startup founder? you need to be in the bay area.

So, you end up with those giant clusters of activity and people had to somewhere be able to live close to them. As people started making more money, starting families and having kids, they wanted to move into more enjoyable living, not everybody is a fan of living in a rat cage in a soviet urban project like most HN and urbanists seem to love. So, they voted for those freeways, they found the freedom to live in more humane settings in the wheels of a car that allowed them to escape the nightmare of living on Gotham.

I believe we can have both things. We can have cities, but we don't need to have only a couple of giant, nightmarish big cities. We just need to spread the business activity.

> not everybody is a fan of living in a rat cage in a soviet urban project

> more enjoyable living

> freedom to live in more humane settings

> nightmarish big cities

You appear to be arguing as if this was an axiom--cities are this way, and you struggle through it until you can leave. As if the goal is to make bank and leave the city. But this is the cycle, not the cause. It does not have to be this way, and in many places (many European cities, Japanese and Korean cities, and more) it isn't this way. Tokyo is huge, for example, and it is very much not "nightmarish". Nor London, or Paris. Certainly in all these places there are space tradeoffs, but that is very much different than the only reason to be there being to suffer through.

At least in part, cars cause American cities to be this way. Cars are too big for city streets; cars push people out of cities at night making for different concentrations of activity, and so on. This article is a decent enough jumping off point, top of mind because I read it literally today: https://thedeletedscenes.substack.com/p/keep-on-trucking

I believe we can have liveable, walkable cities, and it has nothing to do with "spreading out business activity".

"a rat cage in a soviet urban project", "nightmare of living on Gotham", "giant, nightmarish big cities"

Your words show a huge amount of bias and are pretty uninformed by actual history.

The idea that suburbs are better for families is betrayed by the fact that those suburbs are a pretty recent invention and the fact that housing in cities has much higher demand than suburbs.

>> "a rat cage in a soviet urban project", "nightmare of living on Gotham", "giant, nightmarish big cities"

> Your words show a huge amount of bias and are pretty uninformed by actual history.

So did the ones that they were replying to, making it clear that they believed everything about suburbs is bad.

> The idea that suburbs are better for families is betrayed by the fact that those suburbs are a pretty recent invention and the fact that housing in cities has much higher demand than suburbs.

There are a LOT of people that have no urge to live in a city. And, in fact, there's a lot of people that live in cities because that's where the jobs they want are (I doubt the same is true of people living in the suburbs).

Wrong. Most people used to live in rural zones. Suburbs are just an attempt to replicate this. Maybe not the best way of trying that, but the way that was possible after industrialization moved most people to giant cities.

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