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Comment by deegles | Hacker News Reader

I saw a picture of one of those giant suburban developments in Texas... like thousands of cookie cutter homes over a huge area. But I'm sure you could provide the same amount of living space and better amenities in a focused apartment building. There should be schools and restaurants and shops etc spread out over every floor. Or maybe like a 90's shopping mall with a 30 story apartment building on top. It just makes sense to me.

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You’d be surprised. Those homes are surprisingly cheap to throw up and you don’t have to do any additional support/maintenance.

And you’d mainly be missing the yards.

Most of these office buildings they’re talking about should just be knocked down and new purpose-built multi-use buildings built in their place.

How would any store or restaurant survive being on the third floor in the center of an apartment building?

This is how it works in Japan. I thought it was quite nice when I visited. You just enter the elevator at the ground floor, and every button has a store name next to it. You get some pretty nice views when dining on the 15th floor of a building in Akihabara.

If the building's dense enough then you have a built-in set of regular customers. Especially if, say, you're a restaurant in the middle of a building with super-tiny kitchens in the apartments, like the ones described in the link.

Call it a speakeasy. People seem to love overpriced, secret businesses.

A bar that's only an elevator ride away sounds pretty sweet.

They manage it in Asia without a problem. Hong Kong and Seoul are full of such places.

In HK, it probably works because you usually have lots of competing businesses in the same place.

I mean they'd have a built in customer base, and the workers would have an enviable commute, no?

Delivery costs could also be super cheap.

Sharing a wall with a neighbor is something I happily to pay a premium to avoid. Hearing a neighbor beat her son or listening to top volume manufactured R&B beats at 2AM when I needed to be at work at 530AM are not fond memories. It was powerful motivation to take my career more seriously.

Why buy a nice suburban home and invest in your future when you could instead live in a windowless former office building with hundreds of other families?

A home is a really silly investment (i know that goes against the prevailing "wisdom"). the economic opportunities of living in an urban area coupled with investing in things that are actually economically productive are more likely to benefit you in the future. does your suburb's tax base cover the infrastructure maintenance costs? is this why suburban folks are so sensitive to their property values, because any little thing could send the development into a tail spin? sounds like a pretty dodgy investment to me.

A home is considered the new hotness, and if you don't own one, you're not financially smart for some reason. At least this is according to the hivemind at /r/personalfinance. Meanwhile, there are very legitimate reasons not to own a property.

Methinks people buying right before COVID at rock bottom interest rates has clouded the judgement of many. This is not a sure fire road to success right now, I can tell you that much.

> and if you don't own one, you're not financially smart for some reason. At least this is according to the hivemind at /r/personalfinance.

The government will give you a bunch of free money to leverage an investment in real estate. This isn't true of other investments.

And this free money, much like government guarantees for student loans, has only exacerbated the situation between the haves and the have nots.

most investment assets can be financially leveraged. IMO suburb home ownership provides more of an illusion of financial security and leverage than the real thing. being able to buy a house, condo, or apartment in an urban area is a much more significant marker of financial success than doing the same in a heavily subsidized development with limited economic productivity.

> most investment assets can be financially leveraged

Yes, but for most of them you need to convince someone else that giving you the money is a good idea.

I think it's financially smart to attempt to no longer be at the behest of a landlord's whim to raise rent. Home ownership is not even close to being out of reach for young people (like myself), but living in or near a city center absolutely is.

And I agree with you. I've made this point on an earlier thread here on HN... but the prices and interest that goes along with it is absolutely insane in places that are remotely desireable (see Phoenix, AZ) and I'd need to be effectively house poor, when the same place I looked at five years ago I could have afforded with my salary at the time no problem.

Such is the dreaded once-in-a-lifetime catastrophe like COVID and the money printing scam that happened after that that destroyed so much value in money. But others that got in before me at historically low interest and reasonable asset prices just tell me I need to buck up and work harder. I bet you they would be shitting bricks if they were in my shoes. It's like a nightmare I haven't been able to wake up from. :(

I don't disagree with anything you said, but I do think that people would generally be a lot happier if they can find comfort in living a relatively simple life. I know most people can't just uproot themselves instantly, but in my personal opinion, living somewhere more rural is 100% worth it in every single way. Lower cost of living, closer local communities (you GOTTA give a friendly wave when you drive past a stranger on a backroad, them's the rules!), more sunshine, fresh air, wide open fields...

The job market isn't as competitive as the Bay Area, but if you can remote work and/or get a local non-tech job making a livable wage (there's so many lifted trucks out here, these guys make money), it almost doesn't matter what you do for work, it pays the bills and you can spend time with family after that. You have a house, you have a car, you have a family, maybe you even have a camper like many others around you, and you go camping at the lake every month in the summer! Truly, rural living can actually be an idyllic paradise if you do it right!

Rural is a completely different beast and the limited infrastructure makes for a more sustainable setup, the issue is that the low density makes it unobtainable for most people. I also love the countryside, but it doesn't work as a general rule. It would work better if developments were designed with an urban mindset, but in the US you end up with unsustainable suburban sprawl that never aligns with the tax base.

I really appreciate your perspective. We as a society really are too fixated on keeping up with the Jonses, and it really sucks from a mental health standpoint I think. The city life can exacerbate this feeling considerably too.

I don't own, because I think it's best for my children if they grow up in this city, and the city happens to be one where unless you hit the jackpot (literal or parental) or decide not to save for retirement, you aren't owning.

And yet... I wish we could. I know it's not a great investment monetarily, but there are the fringe benefits, like being able to make the place my own or knowing that I'm not going to have to relocate the kids in a couple of years with a few months' notice because the landlord decides he wants the unit back.

> Why buy a nice suburban home and invest in your future

Lots of recently-built suburbia is a money pit [1].

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/4/1/heres-the-real-...

Strong towns is not a good source. They keep stating "facts" that don't check out. Lanes do not need to be replaced every 20 years. On the busy streets they do, but on the not busy streets they can last a lot longer. They make lots of other mistakes like that in other analysis. Pipes last 60-100 years in the ground, but Strong Towns likes to calculate as if they need to be replaced every 20.

One thing I do know is that all these people talk about this "nice place for yourself" instead of "being packed in like sardines" but then the people in the former also will talk about some loneliness epidemic etc etc.

I grew up in various times in a rural place with all sorts of animals where it was just me and my brother for miles and I also grew up later in a city where there were so many kids we would self-organize into all sorts of games and sports.

Personally, the rural place was great and the urban place was great, but the suburban place has neither adventure nor abundance of playmates. Hundreds of nearby families is the absolute dream!

The great thing about the city is that there's also a loneliness epidemic there.

Maybe, but it's a twenty minute subway ride to the nearest hackerspace.

I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but the "with hundreds of other families" is the thing that makes college so fun, cities feel alive, etc. Some people are into that - and suburban life is increasingly feeling the absence of it.

Having a shared space where there are enough families around that there will be 10 kids guaranteed on the playground is nicer in a lot of ways than having 3 kids try to decide whose spacious yard is the gathering spot today.

Because roads and pipes cost money, and you eventually have to pay for it.

Hundreds of other families is my neighborhood, community, connection. I invest in my people not property.

The problem is never the suburban home - which are indeed often perfectly nice. The problem is the suburb itself, and the kind of people it attracts - those who think that walkability isn't a concern, and are content with driving to eat at a chain restaurant in a strip mall by the highway. Sounds like a properly crappy life to me. I for one will never buy property where I don't have a choice of bars to walk to.

Lots and lots of suburban houses are in fact the problem. Many of them are effectively temporary without being priced as such.

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