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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

My argument is fully made in good faith hoping urbanists will confront their own revealed preferences. If you’re an urbanist, why wouldn’t you want to raise a family in a city like Baltimore that spends $21,000 per student annually, where you can afford a 3-4BR townhome near transit and shopping?

I used to live in New Rochelle, NY near the Metro North station. It’s walkable and urban, with great transit. The school district spends $25,000/student, compared to $15,000/student in my Maryland suburb. But housing in New Rochelle is quite affordable considering it’s the NYC Metro area—even cheaper than my suburb. Why don’t the urbanists raise their families there?

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But urbanists do live in cities? San Francisco proper is, like, the origin of the YIMBY movement. Searching for "baltimore yimby" on Google brings up a lot of advocacy, like this: https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/housing/baltimo...

Some of them do. But their premise is that there’s a large, unmet demand for dense, walkable neighborhoods in which to raise families. But there are tons of dense, walkable neighborhoods all over the country where prices and demand are quite low. Why the focus on more building and upzoning when you could buy existing stock?

There’s a big urbanist movement in the DC area, but it’s focused on trying to upzone Northern VA and Montgomery County, MD. Meanwhile, most of the Maryland side of the Metro network is underutilized. Urbanists would rather pay triple to try and turn Tysons Corner, VA into an urban area.

The modal urbanist who lives in the suburbs is usually just someone who wants to be able to have the lifestyle they want without a commute to work. Someone who works at Google in Mountain View but would prefer not to have to drive everywhere, for example. Or, in your example, someone who works at the Pentagon but doesn't want to have to commute from Maryland (or D.C.) in order to live in a walkable area.

The modal urbanist who lives in the suburbs is fine with their commute and is looking to get apartments built on their block for other people.

You don't seem to have an actual argument, instead inventing a straw urbanist to fit your view of what's going on. You of all people should be able to fundamentally understand why people would want to advocate for things they want in areas they live.

It is much much easier to move than to get the laws changed concerning what can be built where you live now. Rayiner is correctly pointing out that the revealed preferences of urbanist advocates differs from their professed preferences, which is a red flag.

This isn't responsive to what I wrote. It simply repeats what you already wrote.

It’s responsive because it addresses the pretext of “disinvestment” and other abstractions urbanists like to use to justify their choices.

A lot of urbanism boils down to wanting dense, walkable cities with transit, parks, and shopping, but not wanting to live in the myriad such cities that are already like that because of who else lives there. They want the layout and infrastructure of downtown baltimore or center city philadelphia, but with the population of Brookline, MA.

Again, you're not engaging with anything I wrote.

You’re not engaging with what I wrote. Why don’t urbanists just move to North Charles in Baltimore instead of trying to turn suburban Maryland into the same thing? It’s not “disinvestment.”

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