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Comment by anon291 | Hacker News Reader

I live in a 20s streetcar suburb and I know my neighbors because we all hang out on our front lawns and all eat at the same restaurants in walking distance.

My friends who live in modern suburbs don't know their neighbors. People complain their kids don't leave the house... Where would the kids even go?

We need to end the tyranny of the non grid suburb..suburbs should be on grids. Most things should be within walking distance so children can be more independent.

Then it's like really easy to know your neighbor. I mean how could you not? You see them everytime you walk your kids to the park, everytime you're at the community pool, everytime you shop.

I grew up in a 50s suburb and even that was a world's away from what my kids get

Sometimes we've already solved our problems if only we're willing to look to the past.

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Well said. Personally, I find modern suburbs to be dystopian. They are full of cookie cutter houses with zero creativity or self expression of the owner, and built with the cheapest materials possible. Their only purpose is to be the dark prison you go back to from your job so you can sit inside and watch TikTok until you fall asleep. Then you wake up, drive to work or sit inside and work remotely, then do it all over again.

On top of that, zoning laws usually mean there's no businesses or community spaces where you might gather to eat or hang out with the people who live around you.

> Then you wake up, drive to work or sit inside and work remotely, then do it all over again.

The mass preponderance of work from home is going to cause major social issues. Most Americans have very little family and social ties, so this just makes things worse. The COVID lockdowns were a huge mistake and have greatly damaged the social fabric of the country

This is gonna upset people on this site but you are 100% right. We already lost the third space, now we are losing the second one as well.

The average person in 20 years might never leave home. Remote education, remote work, home deliveries for food and anything you need. It’ll be an epidemic of Agoraphobia.

Yeah it’s a bit troubling. My hope is that it causes us to look at what we can do to make our cities more encouraging to social interaction. Fill in the missing middle housing, make them more human centric, etc.

It’s going to take at least a generation for that to happen though.

I wish that would happen, but honestly I see it all getting progressively worse. Offices cost lots of money so there is a pressure to reduce them. Universities are getting rid of in person lectures and classes to replace them with cheaper standardized online content. Social media, VR, and gaming is becoming increasingly engaging. And the cost of going out and doing things in person is becoming increasingly prohibitive. Local governments are becoming increasingly poor and unable to sustain unnecessary facilities like libraries and free hang out spaces.

I don't think this is a problem the free market can solve since sense of community and socialization doesn't generate revenue efficiently. We need to start using tax money to build more free public spaces and public transport to get people connected.

There was much more of a sense of community when the government was a lot smaller and the market was much free'er.

Is it just historical correlation or do you imply casuation?

I refer you to the pirates/average global temperature graph.

> We need to start using tax money to build more free public spaces and public transport to get people connected.

All the original public transit projects (including my own streetcar suburb and corresponding streetcar), were privately funded.

What governments need to do is make it clear that they will expedite permits for these projects and not put up roadblocks or attempt to extract profit from the investors.

This comment is being undeservedly downvoted.

In-office work has always been an important way to bootstrap your social graph, as are other in-person group activities such as schooling and college. Of course, some people may not like the commute and prefer in-person work, but any choice has tradeoffs, and the tradeoff in this case is that you usually end up knowing very few people other than your spouse and children which leads to loneliness in mid-life.

Relying on school and college friends doesn’t work as they would have also moved on due to other responsibilities and relocated elsewhere, and due to the lack of shared context that is required to rejuvenate said friendships.

Yeah I figured it would. WFH makes sense for established workers. For those new graduates... It's toxic and a huge set back.

I was a hiring manager during COVID... We just stopped hiring new grads. How would we on board them? How would I provide the guidance they needed? Even if my new hires would be in another office, I'd still be able to get someone there to help them in person.

Remote? Good luck. Established engineers have enough issues with that.

i am in that exact situation right now. i am trying to hire locals in a somewhat remote work location. most candidates want to work remote. even for a senior it took us a few hours of working face to face before i felt comfortable letting them work remotely. for a junior i can't imagine remote work until they are fully onboarded and able to work independently which may take a few weeks to a few months of time.

I think the downvotes are purely from the snipe at COVID restrictions, since it is sadly still a hot button topic. My initial urge was to downvote but I undid it and will keep my input neutral there because it’s just not on topic.

I personally think that the sudden need to accept remote work, delivery services, and isolating at home opened up a mode of living that until now has been inaccessible to those of us who actually like that sort of thing. Before, socializing with strangers simply couldn’t be avoided, because there was no other realistic way to live, besides going off into the wilderness and setting the entirety of civilization aside. We now have more options and that’s great! People who like the old way can still commute into the office, go to their pub, dine out in person, and so on, but now, the option has opened up for people who don’t want to do that, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. One size doesn’t fit all.

I now have the option to stay in my house for a month+ and not see another human being if I want, and still earn a living, enjoy modern life, conveniences, shopping, dining… not really possible as recently as 2019. It’s not for everyone but to me it’s better than the old way.

> who actually like that sort of thing.

The idea of living in a society (a democracy, even!) in which most people kind of dislike their neighbor is horrifying.

There are other ways to do this.

I would much rather spend the commute time engaging in local social activities where I live than being forced into a car or public transport for multiple hours a week, just to spend 40 hours in a grey box which is a worse working environment than the one I have at home.

This way you can build stronger local ties, rather than remote ties which are likely to evaporate next time you move job, or even department.

FYI the downvotes are most likely in reaction to the assertion that COVID lockdowns were a huge mistake.

Whether they have damaged the fabric of society (and I would certainly dispute that), the idea that they were a mistake in totality is at the very least somewhat contentious.

Often the sort of jobs you can do from home are not that social to start with.

While working in software at an office I definitely noticed that working with a PC all day was definitely not social. And some of my co-workers have been anti-social or just not socialised. Some offices were oppressive: just clicks and headphones.

> just clicks and headphones.

As a SW engineer, I'm just going to say that when I read things like this, it explains so much about the anti-socialness of all my colleagues. This is such an easy problem to fix. If your office is not social enough, you stand up, go to your neighbor's desk / cubicle and say 'Good morning, how are you doing today? What are you working on?'.

People love to talk if you let them

> Most Americans have very little family and social ties

citation needed. like, speak for yourself, mon ami.

You are misconstruing creativity of appearance for creativity of experience. Cookie cutter is not an issue. The happiest people are those driving honda civics, buying jeans at Ross and spending most of their energy, money and time on their hobbies, visiting their friends, families and having constant stream of guests over. Some of the best conversations in life happens in the most ordinaries kitchens, at most ordinary tables, on unremarkable front porches, etc.

I love architecture and find it can be very inspiring. But if one’s personal creativity is hamstrung by facade of their home, then I assume they don’t have much of it to begin with.

That is exactly right. In fact, cookie cutter stuff helps to express oneself even more. If the standard stuff serves its utility well, then it spares the energy of having to think and care about it, and leaves more for the rest of the stuff, including self-expression.

at risk of throwing out a beat up cliché, Steve Jobs famously wore the same black shirts as a way of simplifying his life. One less thing to burn brain power on, to have to navigate

Good example, it's the same with Zuckerberg and his wardrobe. And this idea carries over many aspects of life, for example, the meal prep Sunday is a bit similar, but applied to food, and minimalism as a lifestyle also touches on this.

> Cookie cutter is not an issue

It is an issue... not because it's built in a cookie cutter way (that's fine, and our suburb has tons of kit homes). What is an issue is the restrictive HOAs and crazy suburban design standards intended to basically prevent any modification.

Like I said, our suburb started off with lots of kit homes, lots of 'cookie cutter' looks, but over time, due to the lack of regulation during the bulk of the development, the houses have been turned into duplexes; they've been added on to; various owners with different personalities have added decorations, etc. In other words, it becomes less 'cookie cutter' over time until everything looks different.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could keep the art but get rid of those messy, opinionated artists?

> visiting their friends, families and having constant stream of guests over.

Except that these sorts of visitations / gatherings become far less frequent in suburban settings unless you have the good fortune to have many of your friends / family living close to you.

I live in SoCal, which is far denser than many other parts of the US and despite this, the sprawl is immense - far greater than many other large cities of the world. It doesn't help that public transport is a joke as it takes hours and hours to get anywhere using that and you'd still need a car anyway for the last mile or so if you're heading into a suburb somewhere.

Living in a suburb isn't all bad, it has its perks but it 100% takes a significant toll on your social life for most people I know and have known. I've lived in NYC and other "proper" cities before and this is actually one of the things I miss most about life there - it made it way easier to spontaneously get together after work or on the weekends because of the smaller and much easier commutes.

They lack the variety and self-expression of early Levittown?

well, the kids were having fun wrong, so we banned skateboarding, or hanging out at the park or the mall (remember malls?) because it was dangerous, so don't do that, or that, or that, which leaves just being at home, because everything else is wrong.

At the local park, which I pass through regularly on my jogging route, simply never has collections of unsupervised kids hanging out doing kid things. In the local greenbelts there are trails, and the only kids ever on the trails are with their parents.

It's not a dangerous area, either.

When I was a kid, we'd go out looking for other kids to play with.

I know there are other kids around here, as the school bus belches them out regularly, but I never see any otherwise.

I suppose they're all at home playing video games and social media.

I see kids out throwing frisbees, baseballs, and footballs in my neighborhood, shooting hoops where an alley meets the street. I see them skateboarding as well. On Saturday, my wife and I saw a girl of five or six ride her bike along Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park, with no parent visible to us. Now, the closed-off section of Beach Drive is pretty benign, but the apparent independence of this child was interesting.

That sounds quite lovely, but understand that outside your corner of DC, that's not how a lot of places are. To their detriment.

The district of columbia is mostly urban with some old-fashioned suburbs (not the modern ones I criticized), so I don't know what relevance this is supposed to have.

DC and its suburbs are some of the wealthiest places in the US, and many have excellent public transit, old neighborhoods, good schools, and safe communities. I'd let my kids play outside there, too.

SE DC is a different story -- there is a reason they changed the DC basketball team from "Bullets" to the "Wizards" -- but if you're in Northern DC or nearby, like Bethesda, you're straight up posh.

> Most things should be within walking distance so children can be more independent.

But 15 minute cities are a trap designed to prevent you from ever leaving! They're gonna take away your car and make you eat bugs!

Obviously not something I believe, but it is mind-boggling to me that this obvious attempt to improve lives by trying to influence urban planners to make more things walkable and convenient, could be dressed up by reactionary weirdos as an attack on their liberty.

Because it seems like such a no-brainer - have stuff (where stuff includes shops, places of work, schools, facilities etc) within easy reach. There are so many places (here in Australia too) where the housing suburbs of the larger cities are such a deadzone for simple services and facilities, that you have to get in the car to even pick up a coffee and a muffin of a morning.

I mean as a very socially conservative person, I find the conservative opposition to fifteen minute cities extremely baffling.

I'm a unicorn. I often disagree with city dwellers politically, but I just cannot move to a prison suburb to be around people who agrees with me. What's even the point of living in a place with people who see eye to eye on social issues if I never actually see them??

But yeah the depression I had moving back home (briefly) after living abroad for a while really threw me over the edge in terms of knowing where I wanted to live. The car dependence alone is ... Terrifying if you think about it. What happens if your car doesn't start?

Nitpick, from what i've read from you in this thread, you're a societal conservative.

You might be a social conservative (most american are, i think the left of the left of the democrat party isn't, but even then, its clearly a huge minority), but clearly, your position on suburbia and meeting people not from your circle isn't (which is fine, you can be social conservative and still think social mixity is good for conserving the social strucure/status quo).

Liberals are often a lot more socially conservative than they say they are, and hide social issues their economic policies create by being progressive on societal issue, but even then they push their narrative. First and second wave feminism was about emancipation. Third and fourth wave feminism is about this "empowerment", which is fine, i guess, but really does not move the needle socially.

> your position on suburbia and meeting people not from your circle isn't (which is fine, you can be social conservative and still think social mixity is good for conserving the social strucure/status quo).

Given that I belong to many conservative urban clubs, I'm going to say that while urbanism tends to be a 'left-wing' issue, there's quite a lot of urbanism on the right too. More than you'd expect. For example, strong towns leans conservative (I think); the new polity podcast (traditional Catholic) has a bunch of episodes on urbanism; even Tucker carlson has gone on rants about ugly suburbia.

The truth about American politics is that random issues end up getting lumped into 'left' or 'right' and then, due to feedback cycles, become predominantly associated with one or the other. My point in bringing up my politics was (1) to show that I'm approaching this from a perhaps underrepresented viewpoint on this forum, and (2) to express my confusion as to why 15 minute cities are not a conservative issue (and like I said there are some smaller groups that have taken it up).

Finally, the reason I continue to say that I'm a conservative in these discussions is because I basically disagree with the vast majority of liberal urbanists. We agree on the results desired, but their methods are often toxic, unapproachable, and xenophobic in my viewpoint. I've directly butted heads with many at our local transit hearings. I truly don't see eye-to-eye with them on large portions of policy. One of the big issues right now in my city is the prioritization of 'diversity and equity' over actually building transit that works for everyone.

The issue is that you can be conservative or progressive on really different issues, and it does not apply 1:1 to politics (especially US politics). Most green party and ONGs are ecological conservatives (Greenpeace especially :/), despite being broadly at the left of socdems in Europe. Being societally conservative (practicing religious people are, in my experience) is orthogonal to being for closer communities, unlike pushing 'diversity and inclusion', which are an excuse to keep to social status quo, while virtue signaling.

Because as a group the "advocates" who are otherwise intelligent are so inhumanly terrible at communicating ideas that it frankly seems more like they are doing it intentionally to troll.

Fifteen Minute cities "inspired by lockdown" is just flat out leading with the wrong conclusion and emphasis. You'd have to go with 'own nothing and be happy' to do worse. And then there is the concept of "privilege" which takes what should be a simple concept of invisible issues and manages to phrases it in a way that sets out to invalidate the experiences and insult everyone....

I'm not exactly sympathetic to the crowds but it is no wonder they are reactionary and paranoid when their "opposition" is so bad at communicating. I can say without hyperbole that they would obliviously describe a vaccine for all cancers in a way that implies they are going to kill everyone's children.

> Fifteen Minute cities "inspired by lockdown"

Who said that? Who tried to sell that idea that way? Nobody who's in favour of it, and it predates lockdowns by several years, originating in 2016 - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-03/15-minute...

> You'd have to go with 'own nothing and be happy'

Which comes from a discussion piece or thought experiment about the way the world was going at the time (again 2016) with the sharing economy being all the buzz, that was never communicated to anyone as a utopia or something to aim for, let alone forming anybody's policy. It's an inconsequential essay that would have disappeared into obscurity if the forces of outrage hadn't discovered it and whipped up a storm. And again it was years before the pandemic. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...

This is not people on the 'pro' side communicating ideas poorly; the communications you're citing as damning were done by the same reactionaries railing against these issues.

And this is precisely the problem - a nothingburger and the radical idea of having facilities closer to where you live have been spun into outrage fuel, which you seem to have at least partially swallowed.

> And this is precisely the problem - a nothingburger and the radical idea of having facilities closer to where you live have been spun into outrage fuel, which you seem to have at least partially swallowed.

Again for me, as a conservatively-minded person, I also naturally tend to be against anything that seems like central planning. Central planning is the main reason we're in this mess to begin with. Even modern 'urban' developments are so mind-bogglingly awful it's hard to understand what people think they're going to get (California forever comes to mind...). I'm totally behind the idea of convenient cities. Instead of committees to centrally plan it, let's talk about building normal sized roads (a government responsibility) and eliminating permitting and parking requirements so owners get to use their land. That's the way normal cities get built.

So while I absolutely support the idea of 15 minute cities, I find my natural reaction to many of the proponents of the idea to be wariness. I mean, all too often, I've been burnt by agreeing with someone only to then have them pivot immediately into the evils of capitalism, colonialism, etc. There absolutely is a problem with 'activists' in these circles, and they've hindered a lot of progress.

I would actually consider dense urban cul-de-sacs (or just quieter streets with less road noise in general) for knowing neighbors well. My issue with grids is there's generally an arterial street where apartments are crammed and nobody knows each other due to road noise.

References:

- sebastian hunger anecdote on cul de sacs: https://youtu.be/E9K43cXZg2Q?si=4Z5WgE4izKM5A0SF

- don appleyard's livable streets: https://vimeo.com/16399180

Can't find it but recall seeing a map someone made of a city in southeast Asia (Thailand or vietnam) illustrating how theres lots of cul-de-sacs

There's less road noise in my streetcar suburb two miles from downtown than my parents home in the actual suburbs. The 'arterial' street here is four lanes compared to the six lane giant stroads of the modern suburb my parents live in. Cities aren't noisy... Cars are. Walkers and bikers make no noise.

Apartments are great for knowing neighbors and we have lovely apartment buildings and condos that would be perfect for old couples or young ones.

I truly don't understand the logic here. If you want streets with less traffic just build narrower streets. We're lucky that our streets were built before cars (still have the horse rings on the sidewalk)... No one speeds. How could you?

We do have some 'cul de sacs' that are passable by walkers and bikes but not cars. These have their place but a walkable grid is an absolute requirement for sanity in my opinion.

“Walkable” and “grid” are orthogonal concerns.

London and Tokyo are two examples of very walkable non-grids, which I prefer to American grid-based city planning — the random connections fuel serendipity.

I think the problem in modern suburbs is really fortress-like unconnected developments, which also appear in urban form as overscaled block+ monoliths. The Metreon in San Francisco is a good example, or the ugly “italianate” Geoff Palmer apartment blocks around downtown Los Angeles.

Leopold Kohr summed it up: 'Whenever something is wrong, something is too big'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Kohr#The_Breakdown_of_...

Where are you walking to in a suburb? Everything is driving distance.

Older suburbs are slightly different, I live in one from the late 1920s and it’s actually pretty walkable. It’s mostly single family houses but there are corner stores, restaurants, a grocery, barber, etc.

They’re called streetcar suburbs because they were originally developed by real estate speculators who would build a streetcar line and then sell the land to developers at a profit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb

Sounds more like a town/city than a suburb to me.

It’s sub-urban, it was developed as one of the earlier sub-urban expansions of the city. Lots of suburbs predate the Levittown style of suburb we associate with suburbs today but that doesn’t change what it is and how it came to be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown

Well... That's what suburbs used to mean. It was a 'sub'-urban area. These days people use suburb synonymously with high density rural without agriculture, which is not the historic meaning.

TIL. Most of those streetcar suburbs on that list that I'm familiar with are actually pretty dense. They would have been considered neighborhoods in a big city (analogous to say Lincoln Park in Chicago).

Well that's what the suburban book of the 50s and onward should have been about. That was the original meaning of suburb.

But yes... Over time, cities tend to grow out. It's easier when the grid is laid out correctly.

Imagine a new housing development ever becoming like one of those neighborhoods ... They can't without being demolished. The entire infrastructure is wrong.

My suburb is on a grid and I'm two blocks from a main street with restaurants and bars, and now my city's light rail connects to it too so I'm like 15 minutes from downtown.

Most modern people would probably consider this a city itself, but it was developed as a suburb and hasn't changed much in structure since then.

These days people live in 'people prisons' with nothing that any person actually wants anywhere near them.

It's actually really easy to build a suburb like the one I live in. You take a farm, you build a grid of streets. Some streets are bigger. These naturally turn into commercial corridors. You then sell land to people to build homes and stick a frequent service bus line to the city center. Build some parks every few blocks.

Eventually restaurants, bars, cafes, gyms, barbers, stores , etc move in and you have a nice suburb to live in. This is not rocket science. I have no idea why people get so confused on this one.

God forbid one suggest this and you'll have everyone from the pearl clutching conservatives to the equity obsessed progressives all punditsplaining to you why this won't work.

My earliest memories are of Parma, Ohio, just outside Cleveland. We were within three blocks of a grocery store, a bakery, a library, school, a five-and-dime.

Even in unincorporated Jefferson County, Colorado, a block west of Lakewood, one could walk to stores and a library. A mall was something of a hike (one or one and a half miles), but the sight of teenage pedestrians didn't scare anyone

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