Hacker News Reader

Comment by antiframe | Hacker News Reader

The best way is to change our communities, even if that takes time and money.

It is difficult for me to admit I'm an idiot but when I was younger and living in an apartment, I loved the idea of a single family home. And now that I'm living in a single family home, I feel like I was wrong all along. Not that I want to go back to the apartment I was in before. Dear lord no but the idea of a mixed use building not too tall only like first floor with high ceilings for business or shops with two or at the most three floors above for residential units feels like the ideal sweet spot. Ideally with a lot of these close together to have everything I need within a walking distance but also a subway station within a walking distance if I need to go farther.

Do you have kids? I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.

Most kids are only into playing in the yard for a couple years really. Before long they are preteens living in their room, probably seething at the fact they need a ride from a parent to hang out with any of their friends.

Apartments can also have stuff you could never afford that a kid would like, such as a massive pool (try pricing out a new build pool these days).

Community shared parks can serve the purpose that a SFH yard serves for kids, but you have to interact with other people and we can't have that.

Lmao what? Everything about this comment is nuts.

> I feel like apartment living as a family is worse than a spacious single family home and yard and all that. I suspect that preference holds true for most people.

And families do it in NYC, and Hong Kong, and Germany, and Spain (AFAICT, 65%), and…

They manage, but it's not a good experience. The apartments are usually too small for families and the ones that are big enough are too expensive. This is solvable, but has not been solved.

Think about having to share a bedroom with your child, and when they're old enough to need their own one, putting up a partition wall and having each be less than half the size of a normal bedroom, very cramped. And you don't get a living room. (If you did have a living room, now it's your bedroom while the child gets the actual bedroom)

I wasted a decade trying to live in single family homes. Now at 40 my wife and I are living in a small city in a condo and couldn't be happier. Neither of us enjoyed the workload of managing a SFH. Dont force yourself to stay if you aren't happy, you'll wish you moved sooner (I do).

People also change and want different things at different parts of their life. Young and single - living in an apartment is amazing. Once someone is coupled up, has kids, and some animals, a SFH also looks much more appealing. Once the kids are gone, then an apartment/condo starts to look pretty attractive again.

Never in my life has living in an apartment seemed appealing. But I suppose that depends on the apartments you can afford.

Depending on where you are, there are nice middle class apartments that can be family friendly. I have friends not in tech in my same neighborhood with a three bedroom place for 1500. Granted this is the midwest and not SF but their place is near the train to get downtown for work and surrounded with a lot of parks for baseball, soccer etc for kids

A not top tall building doesn't have enough people to be mixed use. Cities often cheat their with several side streets of residential (it might be zoned mix use but it isn't) only for every street of mixed use. People on the non mixed use streets travel to the mixed use one.

There is little hope for that as long as driving is heavily subsidized.

How is driving subsidized?

One example is the requirement to have parking spaces.

Massive ongoing investment into roads. EV incentives that would pay for 3-4 ebikes outright. Big 3 bailout. Cash for clunkers. Impact fees from developers towards roads. As others said parking requirements. There is so much beyond that too.

> Massive ongoing investment into roads

Okay, let's stop spending money on roads then.

How are you at riding your bike through mud? Pretty good? Got nice chunky tyres?

Road wear increases with the fourth power of axle weight iirc. Bike paths are orders of magnitude cheaper and need a lot less space.

> Road wear increases with the fourth power of axle weight iirc

That's not actually true, and the paper that describes the "fourth power" thing even says that right up front.

If you massively oversimplify the model so that you've got all vehicles fitted with infinitely hard bicycle tyres on a perfectly smooth surface, it kind of works out, but not quite.

Interesting! Nevertheless I believe it is true that bike and pedestrian paths are much cheaper to construct and maintain than roads for cars and trucks.

Probably.

How do you plan on getting food?

Most roads are not used for delivering goods, so if we'd just reduce private car use that would already be a great improvement. If you want to go even further, rail has a lot of potential left.

Interesting, can you give an example of why you think that?

How does food get to the shop at the end of your street?

> How are you at riding your bike through mud? Pretty good? Got nice chunky tyres?

Bicyclists were the ones to first push for paved roads:

* https://www.history.com/articles/good-roads-movement-bicycli...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_American_Bicyclists#...

By providing free or cheap parking for people that don't live there. Urban land is extremely expensive and parking generally doesn't cost what it should, other land uses would provide a lot more revenue. Parking in US cities is greatly over provisioned to make life easy for suburbanites, destroying urban fabric.

Like everything else community construction responds to incentives. So we need to structurally incentivise short distance commute communities. Congestion pricing seems like a reasonable first step.

What if you don't want to live in a dense community?

Well just live somewhere that is so lacking in density there is no congestion.

Or a small town that is surrounded by farms.

Just avoid suburban housing as far as the eye can see with a limited number of roads everyone gets funneled on to.

I’ve done that and those areas change over time. A town becomes more like a small city. A small city becomes more dense. Etc. Then all the urbanists move the goal posts and ask why you didn’t live somewhere else.

Very case dependent of course. There are loads of small towns that have stagnant or shrinking populations all across the US.

Just move to the rust belt. If you are going to move to a growing job market don’t be surprised when the job market grows and triggers demand for development.

You don't have to be surprised to disagree with it. What's the limiting principle here? Every city should grow to the size of Tokyo?

God forbid society grows around you. How dare all those productive aspiring people build things near you. Did they not know you had exclusive right of refusal on nearby development?

Landlords...productive...okay then.

Consider the following; the creation of the building is the productive part, not the rent seeking parasite afterwards.

Then you don't. But don't expect people who live in urban centers to cater to your needs when you don't live there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com