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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

> much of the US GDP is tied to their suburb-living car-dependent lifestyle. [...] , but it doesn't create value.

The "value" is for the citizens that prefer suburbs style living.

People who prefer dense city living with mass-transportation and walkable errands like European cities or downtown NYC/Chicago are missing the fact that there's another group of people (possibly the majority) that actually prefer the suburbs. Yes, I know it seems illogical.

But don't suburbs have the dependency on cars, and those ugly "stroads", and the "parking lot deserts", and "soulless cookie-cutter housing", etc, etc?!? Yes, all of that is true and detractors can keep piling on more derogatory labels but it still doesn't change the fact that many people really like the suburbs. A lot of USA college kids living in dorms in the middle of a "walkable city" have aspirations of buying a nice house out in the suburbs and hope they can land a high-paying job so they can afford that dream. Why do so many of these young people who have actual experience of living in the city want to get away from that and live in the suburbs?

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> People who prefer dense city living with mass-transportation and walkable errands like European cities or downtown NYC/Chicago are missing the fact that there's another group of people (possibly the majority) that actually prefer the suburbs. Yes, I know it seems illogical.

Of course. There are also people who enjoy walkable pedestrian and bike friendly places with lots of small local businesses to patronize.

That doesn't require living in a "big dirty city", it really just means making actual towns with dense downtown centers where people can work, live, shop, and dine.

Based on my experience with real estate prices, where townhomes near such thriving downtown developments can cost easily double of one in a suburban neighborhood a 15 minute drive away, the demand for that kind of living currently exceeds supply in many places.

The answer isn't to remove all suburbia and replace it with dense walkability, the answer is to stop preventing the dense walkable development with strict single-family-detached zoning laws, parking minimums, etc. and let the supply of such places increase to meet demand. Nobody will come take your suburban house away from you, they just want to have as much freedom in choosing what they want as you get to choose what you want.

And those that do prefer to live in big cities are just advocating for making those places better. The US has a lot of places that are definitely "city" but are still also car-dependent or at least not as friendly to walking, cycling, and mass transit as they should be. We can improve those without changing your suburban life one bit.

it's and/and. Suburbanites impose their values on the city (free parking, highways, vote against bikelanes, ...). I don't care if they'd be in their suburbs and just live there. go live in the burbs, be happy, but don't degrade my neighborhood with your cars.

we really can have our cake and eat it, nice cities for the people who prefer them, suburbs for the others, so much room.

Absolutely this. Every time someone suggests dense urban living or asking for people to pay for their car-dependent life, suburbanites come out of the woodwork and scream and holler that their rights are being taken away. As if the majority of the country isn't suburban sprawl catering to car dependent life. We only have a handful of dense, walkable cities with public transit in the entire country. Suburbanites have plenty of places to choose from, literally anywhere else outside of NYC, Chicago, SF, and Boston.

As a New Yorker, I'm totally fine with people choosing a suburban life. Do you, I don't care. But don't kill congestion pricing and think you're entitled to drive into the densest part of the United States and park for free in my neighborhood just because. Don't block funding for public transit for 40 years and then complain you need your car because the train is scary to you the two times a year you use it.

congestion pricing in manhattan is the best example. unreal this got shot down by intervention from the governor.

Do non-residents get to vote in your city elections? If not, how are suburbanites imposing their values on your city?

I recall the state of Indiana was banning dedicated bus lanes. Many of the impositions come from the county and state level.

The political strategy in Ontario was to force amalgamate the cities with the suburbs so that the suburbs could politicaly dominate the cities.

Gross stuff.

You can see at the voting district maps the city of Ottawa for example will 100% vote for a different candidate that all the distant suburbs attached to their municipality and the suburb candidate wins.

My city (Seattle) is part of a large county that includes suburbs. My city is also part of a state with a mix of many types of areas. Legislation and budgets happen at all three levels, and because the city is a primary economic engine of the state, others have an interest in dictating what happens in the city.

When your state or county mandates free parking or any of the other complaints the parent poster had, let me know.

Province of Ontario literally just passed a bill (212) to rip up already-installed bike lanes in City of Toronto at an estimated taxpayer cost of ~$50MCAD, despite opposition from city residents AND city officials, which is unheard of because municipal infrastructure is outside the scope of the province.

Sounds like the city will appeal and win then.

yeah luckily seattle (and other cities like tacoma etc) aren't like that.

seattle is always a poster child for this stuff but it really isn't that bad for the upper middle class (anyone with a software job).

it's probably tougher now. but i started my career in seattle proper 10y ago and 2020 was a giant boon. low interest rates, 3k sqft house outside seattle (but still easily drivable to it thanks to reverse commute) for sub-$600k (went under asking) and sub-3% (-> inflation proof)..what a way to spend that salary the 2010s gave me to save up and enjoy the remote career I'd long established.

preparation meets opportunity isn't gonna stop being true even in a "bad" economy.

There’s drain effect where as the city gets defunded, people with money and an interest in civic engagement move to the suburbs, and start voting accordingly.

Having kids is a pivotal moment. Suddenly that rich urban life looks like danger for your little ones.

I was an urban kid and we stayed in the city when we had kids, so my kids got to go to a school where the janitor had to arrive early and remove the needles and broken beer bottles from the playground.

Yes, city life is objectively worse for families in most regards.

That's not the fault of the suburbs.

Nope, it's not. But urban hellscapes happen somehow.

I grew up in my city when it was smaller, safer, and more economically varied. Now the middle has hollowed out and we're headed toward Manhattan, where hedge fund managers step over the homeless to get to their penthouse.

It pains me to think that this is inevitable. I don't begrudge anyone moving out of the city. I personally cannot stand the thought of getting in a car to do absolutely anything, but I know lots of people who live that way and are happy.

my city has consolidated with the burbs. so anything that benefits the core areas gets no traction because it doesn't immediately benefit the burbs. vice versa, other cities haven't consolidated, and they do have better city amenities.

Those people are your fellow city dwellers then, and deserve to be heard just as much as people in the urban core.

they're not my fellow city dwellers. they've turned their back on city life, live 15-30miles away, rarely if ever visit. it's just an administrative, historical quirk that they have a claim on the city and local politics. other cities have different administrative boundaries, that hug the city proper much closer. Those cities have much better urban amenities (traffic calming, light rail, bikelanes, ...) than mine, because they don't have people who loathe city life have a voice in city matters.

Suburbs efficiently filter out poor people. To live in suburbs, you have to sustain a particular burn rate. You (or your parents) also have to have had enough money to get and keep paying the mortgage.

College kids hope to make it big, or at least big enough to afford a pampered expensive living among other such people. It's not an unreasonable hope to have. Some of course dream to live in a penthouse on top of a skyscraper, but that's much less realistic.

(Of course there are poor suburban areas with rundown houses and clunker cars, but it's not where the college kids aspire to go.)

Dense walkable cities are few in the US; they predate the advent of the car, and accepted a lot of immigrants when Ellis Island was still open for "the wretched refuse" [1]. After WWII, a lot of better-off families moved to suburbs, but the worse-off had to stay.

It does not help that some cities, in a misguided attempt to not trample on the rights of the destitute, or maybe out of incompetence, don't keep their streets clean, and even don't enforce the law. The authorities of San Francisco are, of course, way ahead of the pack; what they have done to their once-beautiful city tarnishes the reputation of cities as the form of living.

(Disclaimer: I live in NYC, take subway and/or buses every day, walk for my grocery shopping, don't own a car, etc, and love it. Politically not left-wing though.)

[1]: https://www.statueofliberty.org/new-colossus/

The people advocating to replace suburban homes in the Bay Area with multiplexes, low rises, etc., do seem to want to ‘come take your suburban house away’?

It’s been mentioned many times on HN in regards to Palo Alto, Atherton, Cupertino, etc… and often times not for altruistic motives either.

If zoning allows a multiplex to be built on your lot, and you decide to sell it because the market values redeveloping it more than you value staying, then I think that's your decision.

In the big picture, if you want single-family suburbs to continue to exist and be affordable it makes sense to allow at least some places to become dense. The more people who want density and can choose it, the less competition there will be for farther-out suburban houses.

Homeowners in the Bay Area can predict the second and third order consequences of a zoning change?

And predict the actual ulterior motives of anyone advocating for such a change before it occurs?

They’re not automatons that can be fooled so easily.

If redevelopment is the assumed outcome of the zoning change, then that means the single-family suburb is existing in spite of market demands, held back only by such zoning laws preventing denser development.

I don't know the specific situation there, and I'm not saying that shouldn't ever exist, but it's worth considering why we are using zoning to preserve artificial anti-density in a place that has grown to demand higher housing density, and what the effects are of doing so on a widespread basis.

The immediate first order consequence would be higher housing prices, which seems to be the case across the US, with the cost of housing increasing much more rapidly than overall inflation or wages.

How does this relate to the fact that there are people want to ‘come take your suburban house away’? Who do indeed have such motives?

Could you be a bit clearer about what you're talking about here? This is like a vague hint, and I can't tell what you're actually trying to say.

I think it’s very clear and spelled out?

So I absolutely deplore the "what's your point?" attempt to try to pretend that somebody you disagree with didn't actually have a point. In fact, I downvote it when I see it - if the point was clear, and someone asks "what's your point?", I downvote.

I'm not doing that. I really can't tell. Who are these people who want to ‘come take your suburban house away’, and how do they attempt to do so?

You seem to be referring to specific people in the Bay Area. I'm not in the Bay Area, and I don't really know the politics there as it relates to real estate. So, who specifically wants this, and what are they doing?

How does your opinion on what is to be ‘deplored’, or not, outweigh my opinion?

So this seems like a non sequitor…?

If you believe I, or anyone else, is making false pretenses one way or the other, on any subject, then list out the arguments for the case directly.

I am not accusing you of false pretenses. I am asking for the specifics of what you are talking about. You won't answer (or at least, so far you haven't).

I will ask one more time: What, specifically, are you talking about?

Indeed, many people prefer living in the suburbs, but a big reason for this is the hidden subsidies the US provides for suburban development.

When housing units are close together (town-homes, multi-unit buildings) the cost of infrastructure (sewer, water, roads, sidewalks, etc.) are shared by more units, and thus by more taxpayers. If the houses are farther apart, the cost per unit goes up.

So its fine if you want to live in the suburbs, be we should have an honest accounting of the costs so suburban households are paying the full price of their spacious lifestyle.

See this StrongTowns post about this issue: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/7/6/stop-subsidizin...

Many suburbs are accounting for this in other ways already, by foisting ownership of that local infrastructure onto the HOA instead of handling them centrally through taxes or direct billing.

I'm grateful that I was able to afford a home for my family. I am the sole provider and it costs half my income per month to live in a townhouse in the suburbs an hour away from a major city. It's hard enough as is.

The trouble is that if suburbs weren't subsidized, there would be little reason to live there, seeing its residents move further out into more rural areas. The cities are willing to subsidize them as it is net beneficial to the city to have people who won't live in the city proper to still be nearby, improving economic activity in the "downtown" with access to more workers and consumers.

This comes up a lot but infrastructure is not the expensive part of government. It's schools, criminal justice, and other labor intensive services. All of which are more expensive per capita in cities than suburbs.

That’s because American cities do their best to make themselves as car-dependent and unpleasant in downtown areas as possible. Of course American college kids want to move out to the suburbs, because American downtowns are not nice places to live. Offer people the choice to live in nice central walkable neighbourhoods like in Europe and they tend to take it.

How much of this preference is genuine, versus just taught or forced?

I live in Brussels and every time I welcome new American friends here and show them around, their mind is blown that it’s even possible to live in a city center at an affordable rate within walking distance to groceries, restaurants and activities.

Ditto Dublin. Incredibly walkable, with light rail and light tram services as well as a very mature (albeit expensive) taxi infrastructure and rentable bicycles for last-mile stuff.

Even in the very heart of the city centre you have full sized German discount supermarkets like Aldi/Lidl, or Asian/E.European foodmarekts. A far cry from the food deserts and bodega pricing endemic in American cities.

Even in the midst of a generational defining housing crisis, in what most people in Ireland would deem unfathomable HCOL, you can buy a 2 bed apartment around 70-80m2 in the CBD for less than €500,000.

https://www.daft.ie/property-for-sale/ireland/apartments?loc...

This is in the middle of the Silicon Docks for example, @ 90m2 with dedicated parking space underground, and a concierge service open 7 days a week. 10 minutes walk to Meta/Google/AirBnB/LinkedIn HQ.

https://www.daft.ie/for-sale/apartment-13-hill-of-down-spenc...

Taught or forced? That’s ridiculous.

My kids like to play in our yard. I do woodwork as a hobby. My neighbors spend summer by their pool. I like my privacy. I like quiet and space. I like strong community.

I spent 15 years apartment living all over the world, and couldn’t be happier moving to the suburbs.

Suburbs and detached houses are available in Europe as well, often with good public transport access (although there are plenty where you need a bicycle to get to a train station).

It is just apartments are much cheaper and you can often not have a car if you live in an apartment.

>It is just apartments are much cheaper

Where? Appartements in downtown Munich cost as much as in San Jose but salaries are one third of that.

I said suburbs in Europe, not downtown. Downtown is unaffordable EVERYWHERE in the world, even in 3rd world countries.

Suburbs are cheap where? On what salary? Munich suburbs are equally unaffordable to buy something on a Munich wage, unless you're talking about buying in the boonies where you need to drive everywhere but that's no longer the suburbs but a whole different city/village, or you're a high roller at a FAANG, but that excludes 95% of working class people.

My ex originally is from there and I used to work there and my colleagues from the Texas office had more purchasing power at local real-estate than their counterparts from the Munich office.

you said Munich. Go look at Berlin.

It seems like it might be taught. I live in a Chicago neighborhood and have all of these things (a yard with a garden, space for woodworking, neighbors with pools, privacy, quiet space, strong community).

Not everyone who lives in a city is in a highrise downtown, most aren't. Not everyone that lives in a city is in an apartment. You wouldn't know that by reading this thread. The two options seem to be a large house in the suburbs or a highrise downtown.

All of these things have magnitudes. Have you ever built a cedar strip canoe, or are you making wooden spoons?

It would cost double what I pay for me to live with 1/4 of the space in a city.

I made a pretty intentional decision about what I wanted, and actually have far more space than where I grew up. I was actually taught to live on less, but have gone in the far opposite direction.

I live in Chicago. I have 350sqft garage and a partially-finished conditioned 280sqft attic room that functions as a studio space. I have more "workshop" space than most of my friends in the suburbs who mostly just treat their garages as a storage space with a little workbench in the corner. My home is over a century old, although the garage is only 25 years old.

Now, can suburban homes offer you MORE space? Absolutely! And if I had the kind of hobbies that merited that additional space I'd probably want to live there. However, as someone who grew up in the suburbs, has friends in the suburbs, etc - the number of friends I have who actually use that space for enjoyment and not junk storage is literally just 1 guy who has a sweet CNC and metal working space in his garage and basement. Everyone else has a garage used for cars + storage and a basement rumpus room with maybe a tiny 8x8 workshop somewhere near the mechanicals (HVAC and Water heater)

Perhaps I’m simply not normal, and hence frustrated that someone suggested my desires are forced or taught.

I do tend to be the one neighbor out in the yard the most by an order of magnitude.

I also have a 60 acre rural property because even a quarter acre in the suburbs doesn’t give me enough space to play.

The thing is in the United States there's an abundance of properties and communities available that give you lots of personal living and working space. In fact, it's pretty much the default. The frustration is that there's a shrinking pool of available higher-density living spaces that are all astronomically priced because of high demand and low supply, and any attempt to grow this pool of higher density space is met with stiff opposition.

==Have you ever built a cedar strip canoe, or are you making wooden spoons==

No, I haven't built a cedar strip canoe (nice flex), but I do have the room in my 2.5 car garage if I wanted to. Partly because we only need one car in the city for a 4-person family (which is also part of the "cost" calculation). I could also use my basement, if I was inclined.

==It would cost double what I pay for me to live with 1/4 of the space in a city.==

This is impossible to say without knowing how much you pay and how much space you have.

It’s likely linked to my non-trivial ADHD that I need the space to work on whatever thing I go into a rabbit hole on any given year. Even in the suburbs I’ve had the fire department called; I probably would’ve been arrested had I been in a townhouse.

I moved from Brooklyn NYC to NJ suburbs and my 15 year mortgage on 4 bed 2 bath decent yard was about the same as a 1 bed 1 bath 3rd floor walk up that was pretty snug once you had two people and two cats.

I agree. I wouldn't move to city center no matter how affordable or cheap it was. Living in an apartment block severely limits the way I can spend my free time compared to an actual house with a yard.

So get a house with a yard in Europe and get the best of both worlds. You know this exists here, too?

Or just come visit a bit and be another name on the list of Americans who had their mind blown.

> Or just come visit a bit and be another name on the list of Americans who had their mind blown.

I’m not American (but live here), and have lived in Europe and traveled most of it.

This HN hivemind if believing there is one type of person and one type of lifestyle is absolute lazy nonsense. I’m guessing you already know why I don’t need to drive a large pickup truck too?

I was talking about city centers. Good luck finding a house with a yard from city center of a major European city, for a price that you can afford without being a millionaire.

Just like in America, living in a proper house in Europe does usually mean moving further away from city center into suburbs. The main difference is that those suburbs do have better public transportation.

Is housing Brussels city center actually affordable like you claim? Why do I feel like you're living in a bubble?

I have friends who left Brussels city and moved out to avoid the high housing CoL, crime and drunk/homeless/junkies.

I feel like you're overselling it.

European cities have suburbs as well. In fact most people live in them, not in the city center. They are just VERY different from US ones.

Mostly 4-6 story tall buildings clustered around a major transportation hub like a metro or train station (which also hosts shops, restaurants and groceries), with row-homes or single-home detached houses farther away.

>European cities have suburbs as well. In fact most people live in them, not in the city center.

You happen to have a source for this? This is definitely not the case in many place I lived.

I live at the heart of Brussels, 2BR, 1250 eur a month. It’s not the cheapest of the city but it’s also not the most expensive; in fact the most expensive side of the city is one of its suburbs.

And living in the suburbs here doesn’t mean you have to use your car to buy milk, unlike the US. Stuff is still walking distance there.

Cost of life is average. Belgium is actually pretty great for that. It’s just the weather that’s shit.

>I live at the heart of Brussels, 2BR, 1250 eur a month

Current market price or grandfathered contract?

Wow, center of Brussels for 1250 EUR is a steal.

Maybe the high housing CoL is a change in recent years compared to the time period before that?

Indeed. Look at the most expensive places to live in the Bay Area - it’s not the urban centers, it’s the suburbs.

Americans like space. They like big houses. They like not hearing their neighbors. They like to live on a street that is quiet.

Even the ones that don’t like driving are willing to do it as a trade off for all those things.

Most of the young people I knew in SF who lived there in their 20’s - about 90% moved to the suburbs when they got older. Being close to bars or restaurants doesn’t matter much for most older people. What matters is low crime, space and good schools. They can drive to the city if they need to.

    > Look at the most expensive places to live in the Bay Area - it’s not the urban centers, it’s the suburbs.

Price per sq.m. in San Francisco for the top neighbourhoods is way higher than the suburbs, e.g., Nob Hill or Russian Hill or Pacific Heights. Getting a townhouse in those neighbourhoods is crazy expensive.

A small plot of land in a desirable location is $4M in Palo Alto.

Sure the mansions in Pacific Heights are more, but they are mansions.

Compare like for like.

    > A small plot of land in a desirable location is $4M in Palo Alto.

What do you think this would cost in Pac Heights?

Also, my comparison spoke of price per sq.m. Is there a better way to compare housing costs in different locations?

Are you talking about like-for-like? Or Pac Heights with a view of the Bay? Or a view of the city?

Are you talking about land only? Or land and house?

If you look at the most expensive sales in SF or the Peninsula, they aren't all that different - just shy of $50M.

Regardless, my comment was more directed to middle to upper-middle class housing, not the $20M mansions in SF or 1,000 acres estates in the Peninsula.

Compare a large single family home in SF to a large, single family home in Peninsula.

What proportion of DINKs versus Families live in the suburbs vs the cities?

The simple answer relates to raising kids - both in terms of safety/enrichment and in terms of basic things like school catchment areas, distance to young peoples amenities, and distance to the average friends house based on school catchment.

You're watching people respond to price pressures and calling it their unforced preferences. This is like saying "obviously people prefer to be childless", or, possibly soon, "apparently people prefer to eat only rice and beans". The outcome arises from a coordination failure that individual actors cannot resolve just by making best-responses within a market.

Except there's not really a choice right?

Family homes in city centers (in the US) are either very expensive or bad neighborhoods

Family homes in the best suburbs are also very expensive, even after being subsidize by the broader tax base. There are lots of places to live in cities that aren't the "city center" just like there are types of family homes that aren't single-family-homes.

This line about suburbs being subsidized is a lie that keeps getting repeated. If I live in a suburb and commute downtown to work my income counts towards the city GDP and tax base but I would be receiving government services from the suburbs. This isn’t a subsidy it’s providing people the services they need where they live instead of where they work.

> my income counts towards the city GDP and tax base

You pay taxes were you work instead of were you live? That is very unusual, typically you pay income taxes where you live. I don't see how paying taxes were you work could even work, what pays for your school or roads if all the money goes to another area?

> typically you pay income taxes where you live

Some bigger US cities have a city income tax which is applied regardless of where you live.

I had family living in NJ and working in NYC. They paid NYC income taxes, NY income taxes, NJ income taxes, and federal income taxes.

You had me until NY State taxes were included. As I understand, only NY City taxes are required if you work in the City, but live in New Jersey.

    > Some bigger US cities have a city income tax

As I know, there is only one in the US that has city specific income tax: NY City. Are there others?

https://www.tax.ny.gov/pit/file/nonresidents.htm

> If you are a New York State nonresident you must file Form IT-203, Nonresident and Part-Year Resident Income Tax Return, if you meet any of the following conditions:

> . You are a nonresident with New York source income and your New York adjusted gross income Federal amount column (Form IT-203, line 31) exceeds your New York standard deduction.

IANAL, this isn't tax advice, I'm going by what I'm reading and what I was told by people who lived and worked there, but looking at this if you have an income made from working a job in the state of NY and ended up with more than $21k of income you need to file for NY state income taxes.

There are a number of cities with income taxes. Detroit, Baltimore, Columbus, Cleveland, Louisville, Toledo, and many more. Of those I bothered looking in to, they apply if you work in that city regardless of wherever you live.

==Some bigger US cities have a city income tax==

The vast majority do not.

It isn't about where you live or work, it is about the cost of providing services. When homes are farther apart, the infrastructure is physically more spread out. This creates higher costs to build and (especially) maintain roads, electricity, water, sewage, etc.

I am going off of the study described here [0]. I'm happy to view anything you have to provide which proves it is a lie.

[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/7/6/stop-subsidizin...

It isn't illogical. Americans move to suburbs because there aren't enough affordable cities. Then they complain about the cost of gas, energy, housing and taxes which are inherently worse with lower density.

Suburbs aren't for standard of living, but affordability. You take the most available labour, the most available construction, and connect it with the most available transportation and you get suburbs. All without the need for much effective planning, organization or innovation.

But eventually someone else does those things. And then suburbs are expensive in comparison.

Suburbs are for standard of living, for me.

I want more space, both in my home and in my yard, than I can get in the city. I want a 2+ car garage where I can build and drive a go-kart with my kids, fix my own car and have a little workshop to do woodworking.

I want a garden that isn't blanketed by city air, and room for some fruit trees. I want room for a fire pit, and enough trees that I don't have line of sight into my neighbors windows.

I don't want a farm. I don't need country living. Somewhere between 0.25 and 0.5 acres is about right for what I want to do, and that means the suburbs.

I live in a Cologne, Germany right now. I have lived in Sao Paulo in the past. Big cities with lots to offer. I know big cities and their conveniences, and they're fine. But for the life I want to live, suburbs offer a better standard of living.

That is the thing many young people don’t see until they have a kid and realize how much more difficult urban living is with kids unless you have a lot of money. Cities eat your time when you have kids.

Seems like you would spend an inordinate amount of time chaperoning kids around. Unless of course you can afford a driver.

That is still affordability. When cities are expensive you get more for you money in a suburb. A hobby room, home office or cooking space. But the cost of suburbs are inherently expensive. So when cities are affordable you get more for your money in a city. Because you get some space but also better access to things like offices, makerspaces or restaurants.

I don't want to rant to much, but most people don't like woodworking. They even less like doing woodworking on their own. It is something they conclude they should do because they can and don't have many alternatives. I'm sure it is covered somewhere online.

The first point is reasonable enough, but the point still stands you can't find the same size house in the city for the suburb price. Most cities simply don't have more than a handful of spacious houses with big yards.

Your second point is invalid, as you're arguing against his assumptions. It's only possible to argue againt someone's logic, arguing someones assuptions is the same as calling names. I like woodwork and have alternatives.

You don't need the same space. That is the point. Yes, if I lived in a suburb I would also want more space because everything else would be harder to do.

I'm not arguing against their assumption. I said most, that isn't them. This is exactly why I didn't want to elaborate, so I won't.

what if I want the same space? that's the assumption

A house with a big yard in the suburbs is the epitome of “standard of living” as far as I’m concerned. I’d take that over a walkable city block any day (personal choice, of course, I’ve lived in both).

Yeah, I live in a rural area and cities make my skin crawl. I'll take my quiet space with lots of room for my kids to play, explore, and to garden and grow food. Where I know everyone and we all have each others backs. Where the vegetation is natural, and there's plenty of bugs and birds, amphibians and mammals. Clean air and clean water. Surrounded by miles and miles of forests.

So many of the things people love about cities are the things I want to get away from, and would sacrifice a huge amount of income to do so.

The suburbs offer people a little taste of that magic and it's no suprise people want that.

You don't have to ban cities to get all that though, there are such areas all over Europe as well just that people prefer the density more until they have kids, and then they move further out to get a house with a yard and need a car.

I've lived in a rural area for 20 years, and I still miss the city

  I've lived in both and prefer the suburb. Inner city has all sorts of issues, from very little space, smokers puffing away as you try to enter/exit buildings, endless harmful noise & smells. 

 Actually I prefer rural over either of these..

> there's another group of people (possibly the majority) that actually prefer the suburbs

With regard to the United States, you’re not even close. 80% of the US population live in cities. [0]

[0] https://pac.org/impact/rural-americans-vs-urban-americans#:~....

>With regard to the United States, you’re not even close. 80% of the US population live in cities. [0]

For purposes of this discussion thread, we're just using "living in the cities" as shorthand for "high-density living with convenient mass-transit and walkable amenities". E.g. downtowns or multi-family housing near the city center where people can walk to the grocery store.

The majority of USA citizens do not live in that arrangement. Instead, most Americans live in areas that depend on cars.

The web page you're citing is using "cities" as shorthand for "downtowns + suburbs i.e. metroplexes" - vs - "rural farms".

Have you ever been to the US? Sure, 80% live in cities but the majority of that number are suburban cities. LA, DFW, Miami...all cities with large populations but all requiring a car.

> According to the Census Bureau, 80% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas. The remaining 20% lives in areas classified as rural. *There isn’t a specific category for suburban areas*

Sounds like the suburbs are counted as urban wrt the census.

That statistic is defined as “urban” vs “rural”. By that definition, all American suburbs are counted as cities/urban areas. So the statistic doesn’t disprove their assertion.

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