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Comment by azdle | Hacker News Reader

There's no official definition of what the "the suburbs" means, but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks. The area you linked looks to me more like an older "streetcar suburb", which I think most people would just call "the city".

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Nobody I know would call that street the city. In my mind, "the city" is, minimally, houses that are a few feet apart, small yard in back/front, pretty much nothing on the side. Frequently, it's 2-3 story buildings, with whole floors rented out as an apartment. That's my "least dense" vision of a city. Anything less than that (ie, full yards) falls into my vision of suburb.

That street is basically identical to most of the city of Chicago. The only difference is fewer 2-flats.

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9301849,-87.7195955,3a,75y,3...

>That street is basically identical to most of the city of Chicago. The only difference is fewer 2-flats.

The front yard space and number of driveways in the Oak Park link also stuck out to me.

This is the Chicago block I grew up on. It's less dense than Oak Park. It's easy find blocks like it elsewhere in Chicago. Jeff Park in Chicago and Oak Park are basically clones of each other.

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.7099143,-87.6801127,3a,75y,1...

This is really what most of Chicago looks like (modulo economic conditions in the different neighborhoods --- they're not all this upscale). It's a city of neighborhoods. Most of the streetscapes that jump to mind about Chicago, if you don't live here, are places people basically don't live.

Wow, you weren't kidding about the relative density between those areas. I'd consider Oak Park dense compared to most suburbs, just not as dense as some neighborhoods in Chicago. I'm most familiar with the north side neighborhoods and had those kind of lots in mind, with their near non-existent front yards, with front steps right off the sidewalk, and virtually no front driveways.

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9405345,-87.6750174,3a,75y,2...

My old stomping grounds. I lived in Lakeview (incl. this block) for a long time.

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.9403868,-87.6590203,3a,75y,3...

Apartment building on Pine Grove in Lakeview for me and then a beautiful old two flat in Ravenswood. My rent in Pine Grove in 1999 was $400 I think for a two room apartment.

Haha my wife lived on Pine Grove and I lived a couple blocks from that spot in Lakeview. Small world.

To compare, a residential neighborhood a fifth the population of oak park, mostly pre-war and what a German would consider as "urban":

wiki, use translator: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichlinghausen-S%C3%BCd Maps overview with borders highlighted: https://maps.app.goo.gl/fvr34T8JbLEVQLAF8 Street view of a normal street there; though I recommend 3D view for a better understanding: https://maps.app.goo.gl/QXEGChFvHciAq8Va8?g_st=ac

This is btw. 2.9x as dense as Oak Park, IL.

Yes, I agree, Oak Park could be a lot denser; that's what I'm working on.

> Most of the streetscapes that jump to mind about Chicago, if you don't live here, are places people basically don't live.

Note that 41k live in the Loop and 27k live in Jefferson Park.

Maybe if you sample by area, places look more suburban than stereotypical cities, but by population, lots of people live in the dense parts.

100k in the Near North Side, which I think is basically a “downtown” streetscape.

And of course many in the in-between density neighborhoods (eg 71k in Logan Square).

Source:

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

Small world, my wife and I literally just moved to Beverly not far from there. This area is a bit of liminal space between city and suburbs (or at least my definition of them) and it can vary quite a bit block to block. I'm walking distance to a grocery store, the Metra, coffee shops, restaurants, parks, etc., which is unfortunately more than many areas of Chicago can say.

I moved from a denser part of Bridgeport, so it definitely has been an adjustment (particularly in variety). But even some areas of Bridgeport, which is much closer to downtown, had pockets that are equivalently walkable to where I'm at now, or maybe even less so. Anyone surprised to see SFHs and front yards in Chicago probably hasn't ventured far out of downtown/a handful of North Side neighborhoods.

Those houses are more densely packed than in what I'd call a suburb. And much more importantly, nothing in that area is more than a few blocks from some sort of commerce. Suburbia (at least in the US) isn't so much about the houses themselves, but what's around them. I'm in one of those "streetcar suburbs" and the nearest store is a mile away and the bus comes every 20 minutes. I could get by without a car but it would be very annoying. You might find a fairly similar set of houses in the nearby city, but they'll be near a lot of stuff and living without a car would be far more practical.

Nothing in Oak Park is more than a few blocks from a commercial zone either.

Yeah, I wouldn't call that a suburb either for practical purposes. It would be one by the definition of "small city near big city," but in terms of how it functions it looks like city to me.

I agree, but if only you could convince all the NIMBY asshats in Seattle who want to live on a half acre lot ten minutes from the center of downtown.

Good luck convincing someone who lives on a half acre 10 minutes from downtown to give that up.

Offering to make them multimillionaires in exchange for the land so you can build apartments should work

Except for the neighbors who will likely block that apartment build-out via any means possible.

Do they actually do that here, or are you just saying that?

They do that everywhere!

It's baked in to the process as part of design review, after getting pass the first wall of zoning.

https://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/public-participation/e...

No clue about Seattle, but they definitely do in Northern VA where I live. Every new development that requires a change of permitted use goes through a lengthy review process with plenty of opportunity for locals to object.

Edit - sibling comment indicates Seattle has something similar.

Indeed, that’s the nimbys

Apartments are banned in about 70% of seattle residential land. Here are the things you are allowed to build: https://www.seattle.gov/documents/Departments/SDCI/Codes/Nei...

Some US cities incorporated their lower-density "streetcar suburbs" over the years and other US cities didn't. This is why "Kansas City" proper has literal farmland [0] within its city limits, while "St. Louis" proper [1] on the other side of the state doesn't even include most of the skyscraper development that's occurred there within the last 40 years.

This is entirely arbitrary and knowing whether a particular place is technically part of "the city" doesn't really tell you anything about it. As you might expect, this causes a ton of unnecessary confusion.

[0] Part of Kansas City proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9B9rhVzAtSykLhUs5

[1] "St. Louis" but not part of St. Louis proper: https://maps.app.goo.gl/xXM7A2fQYY2Kh3vY6

They're pretty clearly not using "the city" to refer to city but instead to a certain density threshold, so pointing out that city limits are arbitrary doesn't really help anything.

What you're describing is called "agreement." I'm very plainly arguing that if the distinction between "city" and "suburb" is to mean anything at all, then it can't just be about what's within municipal boundaries and what isn't.

So you were agreeing with OP's comment, not disagreeing?

> Nobody I know would call that street the city. In my mind, "the city" is, minimally, houses that are a few feet apart, small yard in back/front, pretty much nothing on the side. Frequently, it's 2-3 story buildings, with whole floors rented out as an apartment. That's my "least dense" vision of a city. Anything less than that (ie, full yards) falls into my vision of suburb.

What this back-and-forth, and this thread more generally, demonstrates is that these words are not very useful.

They almost never clarify. What they do is produce silly arguments like this one.

That's why people have been using paragraphs to clarify what they mean. Paragraphs that you seem to have ignored in favor of critiquing the utility that specific words have when taken out of the context the author intentionally put them in.

> but when people say that they usually mean "areas that follow a post-war suburban style of development". Think culdesacs and no sidewalks.

Define people?

When most people I know say suburb they mean this: You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there. Some suburbs are like what you describe, but most are exactly like what OP links to.

I'm not at all sure what the utility is of a using a definition of suburb that excludes most of the not-high-density but not-rural US and only counts the absolute worst-designed spaces. It just means we're all talking past each other, with some of us saying "not all suburbs are terrible" and others insisting that suburbs are by definition terrible and anything that isn't terrible isn't a suburb. It's a bit of a True Scotsman fallacy and doesn't make for very useful dialog.

I mean, you’re making the same sort of NTS argument here, aren’t you?

> Some suburbs are like what you describe, but most are exactly like what OP links to.

Without defining what constitutes a suburb, how can you argue that most are good? Your argument hinges on your own definition of suburb IMHO.

I’m not sure what the right answer is, but in my experience most people mean post-war development patterns when they talk about suburbs, but in any case it probably doesn’t hurt to be more precise about what we are praising or criticizing.

No, I'm not, because I'm not saying that what you are identifying as a suburb isn't a suburb, I'm saying it's not representative of all suburbs. I provide a perfectly valid definition:

> You're far enough the urban core that you probably have to drive to get to shops and jobs, but close enough to the urban core that you don't pass through farmland to get there.

Since my definition is broader it's less susceptible to NTS fallacies. What you identify as a suburb is a suburb but it is not all suburbs.

> but in my experience most people mean post-war development patterns when they talk about suburbs

Even this is too broad to sweepingly say all suburbs are bad. I've lived in 5 different suburban neighborhoods as an adult, 4 of which were developed post-war, and all had sidewalks and plenty of walking around and neighborly interaction.

That is a definition you're making up to suit an argument you're making. It's not the actual definition of the term. Anybody can just look it up and see that! The Oxford Languages dataset that Google uses for the definition literally uses Chicago's suburbs as an example.

And, seriously, who cares? Why would you want your argument to die on this hill? What could it possibly matter?

I'm not sure why you're critiquing my definition, given that I'm trying to emphasize that your specific Chicago suburb very much does meet the typical way that people think of suburbs. So yes, I agree with Google: Chicago's suburbs are suburbs. Oak Park is not within walking distance of anything that most people I know would identify as "the city", which puts it squarely in the suburbs in my book.

Did you read me as disagreeing with you, or did I misunderstand and you were trying to say that Oak Park isn't a suburb? Or is Oak Park actually within walking distance of "the city" as Chicagoans would identify it?

Oh I may just be reading the thread backwards! Sorry. Yes, Oak Park is definitely a suburb. Oak Park is also extremely within walking distance of the city; it's across Austin Blvd from it.

Yes, both the parent and I agree that Oak Park is a suburb (and a lovely one by the way; I hit up Amerikas every time I visit)—I was pointing out that he was making an argument of the same style that he was criticizing (using his own definition of a suburb to advocate for his own definition of a suburb).

In any case, I think there are multiple valid definitions for suburb—one which talks about smaller towns on the periphery of large cities and another which emphasizes postwar design principles/philosophies. I don’t see the point in arguing for a single true definition; language doesn’t work that way.

I believe the colloquial definition has changed substantially over the last ~100 years in the US. As a concrete example, Travis Heights (part of Austin) was initially advertised as "Austin's first suburb", but is very much inside the city core today. In the UK, this is true of places like New Malden or even Wimbledon, which were as-built not part of London and were referred to as "suburbs", but are categorized that way by approximately no-one today.

You're right that people in practice use the word "suburb" to talk about all these different things, but that just reinforces that the word isn't very useful. Oak Park and Naperville are both "suburbs," but this reveals nothing to us. In fact, it mostly obfuscates.

A suburb is outside of the city in low density housing, typically not within walking distance of anything. That reveals plenty for a lot of purposes, and if you want to critique something more specific than that you should use a word that people will recognize as being more specific than that.

Clearly the author of TFA believed that this was the definition of suburb, because they were clearly thinking of a space where people could in fact just hang out in front of their houses and meet neighbors. So for the purpose of this conversation, this definition of suburb is the only one that makes sense.

There is nobody in Chicago who would describe Oak Park and Evanston as anything other than "suburbs". You'd get laughed at if you called them "the city".

Right. I'm not at all sure why some people on here think "suburb" is only meant to refer to a very specific type of housing development, rather than a description of a location's spatial and cultural relationship to "the city".

Agree. Lots of US cities have neighborhoods like this outside of the downtown business districts. Even in NYC, famous for concrete-jungle apartment dwelling, you find this in Staten Island and in parts of Queens.

It's the same if you go west -- Hudson County, NJ, is mostly neighborhoods that were designed as streetcar suburbs if you measure by land area.

Yup. Sacramento has lots of this. LA county. Boise, Salt Lake City. List goes on.

we each can only rely on our own experiences, but mine don't agree with you. suburbs in the US northeast have sidewalks. most of LA looks like a suburb to a nor'easter. No sidewalk? rural.

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