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Comment by dymk | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this. Vote for representatives that want to build walkable cities, support small businesses, and want to build parks. Suburban sprawl sucks.

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No it doesn't. I live in a planned neighborhood in the suburbs. I can walk to a branch of my local library, a few restaurants, a bar, a bookstore, I even get my haircut in my neighborhood. And even if none of that existed, nothing has stopped me from being friends with my neighbors, or the parents of my kid's friends. The suburbs are a different model with tradeoffs, but they're also useful for periods and phases of life different from the ones served by urban settings.

A planned neighborhood is technically by definition not suburban sprawl, as sprawl requires a lack of planning. On the other hand, I'd argue if you can do all of that (and said walking distance is under a mile[0]) you're not even in a suburb, you're in a dense enough location to be a town or small city. Unfortunately thanks to American zoning and planning it can be very difficult to know what your home area is actually considered and it makes this type of anecdotal evidence not particularly useful[1].

[0] A mile is essentially the farthest the average person will comfortable walk versus driving a car for travel that does not require carrying anything back. Once you add in carrying things (e.g. groceries) it drops to half a mile. Anything less dense than that and people won't want to walk, anything more dense than that and you're into standard city planning.

[1] Assuming you're American of course and obviously I'm not about to ask you to dox yourself, considering this type of thing can vary right down to the neighbourhood level.

Urban environments blunt people's connection to other people too, see

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

If you pack people in too tight they just tune each other out.

I mean, the very first paragraph of your own link says: "However, subsequent investigations revealed that the extent of public apathy was exaggerated." and the second paragraph says, "Researchers have since uncovered major inaccuracies in the Times article, and police interviews revealed that some witnesses had attempted to contact authorities."

That's my neighborhood you're "citing". It's a walking neighborhood--cars are useless with no parking next to stores. I talked to more strangers there than in any other place I've lived. My doctor would stop me on the street to look in my grocery bags.

>I can walk to a branch of my local library, a few restaurants, a bar, a bookstore, I even get my haircut in my neighborhood.

If you can walk to these things, you don't live in the areas the parent comment is talking about. "Suburban sprawl" doesn't mean all suburbs, it's specifically the ones which don't have facilities and community.

Sounds like you like in a “streetcar suburb”, not urban sprawl. I’ve been in real urban sprawl and you can’t walk to anything. Not that you’d want to, since there are no sidewalks. Drop a Google Maps pin anywhere in Texas not in the direct center of a major city to see what it’s really like.

I live in probably the most walkable city in the world, but there are millions of lonely people here as well. From any of my observations, I can’t pinpoint to one single problem.

It might be a composite effect of different things contributing to the easiness of being alone. Cultural skill that overtime gets eroded, and as less time people spend among others, it becomes even harder to go back.

Voting isn't going to fix this problem in our lifetimes.

We need to do things ourselves.

This. I also like the idea of libraries having a cafe, internet access, a place to meet, all non profit and owned by the community. Community is a function of distance, broadly speaking.

I also like the idea of libraries having a cafe, internet access, a place to meet, all non profit and owned by the community.

There are lots of libraries with cafes, maker spaces, and more. Seattle is one.

If yours doesn't, this is your wake-up call to get involved with your local library. Stop waiting for someone else to do things.

I'm willing to bet that the libraries near the person you're talking to have all but maybe a cafe. I mean, I've never seen a library in the US that didn't have internet access and a place to meet and that weren't nonprofit.

Which Seattle library (am assuming you're referring to SPL/Seattle Public Library system) has a maker space?

There is no maker space listed at https://www.spl.org/programs-and-services/a-z-programs-and-s....

Within KCLS, there are two public libraries that have maker spaces (AFAIK): Bellevue, Federal Way.

PS this is not meant to be confrontational, would love it if there were more maker spaces in libraries (when have asked in the past, the usual answer is that they do not have enough space for it).

No, the Seattle reference was for the cafe, not a maker space.

Suburban sprawl is not going to be "fixed" in anyones lifetime. But it doesn't have to be limiting. I grew up in a very typical suburban style neighborhood in the 1970s. Tract homes, lots of cul-de-sac streets. But neighbors talked to one another, kids played together, there were summer gatherings in those cul-de-sacs on the 4th of July or Labor Day.

Don't think you have to live in some idealized fantasy land to go talk to your neighbors.

I live in a suburban neighborhood with a couple bag ends, our neighborhood is pretty social. couple of neighborhood bbqs a year, kids all playing together every day, dinners, etc. It is quiet and not a lot of traffic with long term residents. I am not 100% on what exactly the key is for a town is, I think style matters, but Ive been in walkable neighborhoods without a good community, and non-walkable neighborhoods with one.

I'll say that when I was a kid, the neighborhood was still as it was originally built, no sidewalks. Didn't stop anyone from socializing, didn't stop kids from biking around.

The city added sidewalks there in the '00s or so, but when I go back there I almost never see anyone using them.

I think the trend of isolation and loneliness is not really related to infrastructure or stuff like "walkability." Those things are pretty minor obstacles.

How big were the lots? How far of a walk was the closest bar, grocery store, cafe? Do you have to walk onto someone's property to talk to them if they are sitting on the porch?

I lived in a car dependent burb for 20+ years and would rarely, if ever, run into my neighbors out on the town. Living in a walkable neighborhood in a medium-low density city for under a year and I regularly run into my neighbors.

Standard 0.25 acre suburban lots. No markets, cafes, or anything like that it was a bog-standard subdivision. There was a small park sort of centrally located but that was really the only ammenity. Supermarket was a few miles away. Nobody walked there, cars to go anywhere. Neighbors still knew one another, at least on the same streets. Kids met at school, figured out where each other lived.

> bag ends

Never seen "cul de sac" in English before...

I knew cul de sac was french for bag end, or end of sack or whatever the translation was. One time reading lord of the rings after learning Tolkien explicitly avoided french loan words, I realized Bilbo living at Bag End is kind of a joke. Its just saying Bilbo lives in the cul de sac.

Never heard "bag end" myself.

> idealized fantasy land

For what it's worth, many (most?) countries have most of their people living in places that are not sprawling suburbs. It's worst in the "Anglosphere" countries (US/Canada/Australia) within the last 50-70 years, but it's absolutely not a fantasy land. It's the way things were everywhere before 1940, and most places still are today.

I say that because it is fixable, if we let ourselves fix it...

Your point stands though, even in a fairly antisocial layout of a suburb, you can still usually make friends with a decent number of people nearby.

Most countries pack a large chunk of their population like sardines instead. Not really any better.

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