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Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

This is off-topic, but I just wanted to say as a European how crazy it is to keep finding out the US is so large that even some third-tier city I ± never heard of is big enough to have a downtown full of outright skyscrapers[0]! It reminds me of reading about some minor Indian city and then looking it up in Wikipedia and seeing it has a population in the millions.

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/79/Ka...

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A city doesn't need to be big to have skyscrapers. It's just a policy choice, like how wide roads are or public transportation. Many Americans are surprised that small European towns are big enough to justify a train station.

Small American towns used to have train stations, even in the middle of nowhere. They enabled factories and other industrial work. Then the trains would go away, and the factories would die, or it would happen the other way around. Then teenagers would go out to abandoned tressels to have bonfires and drink near the scenic decay every weekend, until the cops showed up to scatter them running into the woods.

True, but only in the east coast and Midwest. Even at the peak of US rail (1916) the west coast was only sparsely connected.

… it was also only sparsely populated

Have you ever looked at a rail map?

California and Indiana both had a population of about 2.7 million in 1916. Indiana had a dense rail network and California didn't. Indiana is only ~5x smaller than California.

This is what the rail network looked like in 1916:

https://etc.usf.edu/maps/pages/4400/4401/4401.htm

The less dense areas are impassable mountains or inhospitable desert

Thinking of "too small for a station", whenever I passed through Dovey Junction I was only able to see one building, on the other side of a river, and it appears that there is literally no road or path to that building.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wx98GRYpPaRbrcRg6?g_st=ic

"junction" is pulling the heavy weight here. The station is right before the tracks branch, so the purpose of the station is probably to let riders transfer from service on the one branch to service on the other.

Well Europe and the EU both have larger populations than the US and quite a bit higher population densities (even though the continent of Europe is slightly larger) so wouldn't you expect Europe to have more skyscrapers than the US?

Europe just seems to go for much more mid-rise high-density neighborhoods compared to the US with skyscrapers in the city center and then sprawling suburbs that are so low-density you can barely get out of them without a car.

What I found most surprising about a lot of US city "downtowns" is how utterly dead they are in the evenings and at weekends.

They are also dangerous and that’s also a big reason why nobody hangs out there after a certain time. European downtowns are family friendly and actually nice and safe, unlike the US.

I think the comment about Kansas City shows that the big reason nobody hangs out there is that nobody actually lives there. And so since after 18:00 everybody these huge, built-up areas are suddenly available, you create excellent conditions for things that'll keep people from going there.

The 'secret' of European downtowns is that they are not uninhabited.

The answer is crime. It's always crime.

This is why you hear about a housing affordability problem in Washington DC despite a quick search showing dozens of recent sales for 2-3 bedroom apartments for under $100,000.

There never was a housing shortage, there’s just a shortage of people willing to live in vibrant urban neighborhoods.

I think you might need to look closer because the HOA or coop fees are insane.

You say vibrant. I would say crime-ridden and politically charged.

Houses that are in bad areas where no one wants to live willingly isn't part of acceptable housing inventory.

> vibrant urban neighborhoods.

is that a euphemism? DC used to lead the nation in murder rate for decades -- the DC basketball team used to be the Washington Bullets, which stopped being ironic and funny after a couple years. There are still DC neighborhoods where the police won't send cops without 3+ cars of backup.

DC has gotten much better but is still like #12 or #13 in the US, and it's bad areas are still very bad. The rest of the Fed-Gov areas in the city are locked down hard, but no one lives there, and nearby areas Georgetown or Tenleytown are expensive. Source: from the area, went to AU, had to do background investigations on dudes in SE DC.

I guess one man's "vibrant" is another man's "violent".

With remote work they are dead all the time now

The death of the third place is far more important than any impact remote work has had.

Third place is a specific term for those who have not been familiarized:

"In sociology, the third place refers to the social surroundings that are separate from the two usual social environments of home ("first place") and the workplace ("second place")."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

Not sure i get your point

If all that existed in those now dead downtown neighbourhoods were offices then of course they’d be dead with a significant disruption to work. What’s missing are still third places, and probably first places too.

A lot of it is about zoning laws. The downtown Helsinki area has 0 skyscrapers, and the closest ones are the Redi buildings about 5km away.

A fairly common US city plan seems to be: small ultra-high-density core with a bunch of skyscrapers, fading almost immediately to rather low-density, and then shortly afterwards to virtually no-density. European cities tend to be generally higher-density (no large US city is as dense as Paris, say, though Manhattan taken alone would be somewhat more dense than Paris), but with fewer skyscrapers.

> no large US city is as dense as Paris, say, though Manhattan taken alone would be somewhat more dense than Paris

This seems off. If you consult this map and chart [0] Paris seems to do something very similar to NYC with regard to density. There's the city of Paris proper (75 on the map) which has a slightly higher population than Manhattan but a much lower density (52k/sq mi in Paris vs 74k). Then as soon as you get out of that 40 sq mi (about the size of the Bronx) into the the petite couronne density drops to well below that of any one of the five boroughs besides Staten Island.

So, yeah, if you take an area the size of a single NYC borough in the Paris region that's drawn specifically around the densest population zone then it has a higher density than NYC taken as a whole. But if you compare most-dense-zone to most-dense-zone then NYC is denser by a fairly wide margin, and if you compare areas that are of a similar size rather than only including the City of Paris proper then NYC wins again.

It seems like what you're describing is more an artifact of where we choose to draw city boundaries than that Paris actually is denser in practical terms as experienced on the ground.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris

> It seems like what you're describing is more an artifact of where we choose to draw city boundaries than that Paris actually is denser in practical terms as experienced on the ground.

I mostly agree, but it's important to note that Paris is a lot smaller than NYC, so comparisons between NYC boroughs (which are each almost as big as the city of Paris) and Paris' surrounding departments are clearly favorable for NYC.

If you compare cities of similar size, i.e. Paris with Los Angeles (which is still bigger, both city and metro area), then the european capital is significantly ahead in density (and I did not cherry pick Los Angeles specifically, it's the same for Chicago, Houston, etc.), and the difference is very significant: Even the core of those US cities (excepting NYC) is less dense than the 3 inner Parisian suburb departments (!!).

> I mostly agree, but it's important to note that Paris is a lot smaller than NYC

Isn't that just another way of saying that they drew the city boundaries differently than they did in NYC? If you extend the boundaries out to the 814 km^2 of Greater Paris, that gives it a fairly similar population to NYC (7m compared to 8.8m) with a very similar area (814 km^2 to 778 km^2).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Paris

My point is that the conditions at those boundaries are not comparable: Greater Paris is pretty much a whole metropolitan area, which is "non-urban"-ish at the boundaries. If you take a slice out of NYC with the same population/area, then that is still only a part of a (bigger than Greater Paris) metro area of like 20M people...

East of the Mississippi river has similar population densities to Europe (still less, but not by much). However US population density is skewed downward by the large amount nearly uninhabited land in "the west" and Alaska.

Wait until you see China. There are multiple cities bigger than NYC or London that most people have never heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop...

Many of those cities are compromised of enormously large areas though. Chongqing is larger than the country of Austria and has a population density of 390 people per square km. London has a population density of 15000 people per square km.

There are still a lot of big cities and huge city centres but the Chinese meaning of city often includes the metropolitan area plus rural hinterland.

It sounds like you may be comparing the population density of a large, diluted area and not the downtown areas alone.

It doesn't get much denser than downtown Chinese cities, they have specialized in high-density mega-sized apartment buildings.

Even large US downtowns are dwarfed by the average Chinese city downtown flush with LED skyscrapers. They have way more people and manufacturing than other countries so it shouldn't be too surprising.

Europe seems to do a better job at constructing buildings that can be used in various use cases, though. So when the office use case goes away, making the building into apartments is fairly simple.

This is unlike the office towers mentioned in the article, which don’t really lend themselves naturally to being apartments.

The history of Kansas City is very interesting - it was well poised to be the size of Chicago until rail travel became less popular. So during the 20's & 30's it was a major landmark for Art Deco architecture.

All things considered, I wouldn't be surprised if a non-zero number of people have only heard of Kansas City because of Taylor Swift.

Wouldn't be that Nashville? IDK that much about Taylor Swift, but that's the only city that comes in mind.

Lucky you. Search for Travis Kelce unless you prefer to keep your exposure to useless information under control.

Similarly it was strange to me when visiting Athens that there were essentially no skyscrapers!

European cities didn't have skyscrapers until recently because of "muh monuments muh medieval skyline".

It's changing though I'm seeing 40 story (luxury) apartment complexes go up all over Dutch cities.

Yeah, the US is big. Movies and TV shows usually only show like 2 or 3 cities which makes everything seem like it's close together. For instance I live on the east coast, and I've never been to LA California, which might seem weird but it's over 2500 miles away. Different regions have basically different sub-cultures that emerge because we're so spread out.

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