The Suburbs Will Die: One Man's Fight to Fix the American Dream
time.com
time.com
Why?
- I don't like the constant driving to get anywhere.
- I don't like the malls, the big box stores, the "clone" button that seems applied across the landscape.
- I don't like the giant roads carving their way around, splitting communities.
- I don't like the squandering of resources on lawns! individual houses! low-density housing!
I can say, with confidence, I'd like to live in a place where I own my house, where I have some property to do with as I please, where children can play nearby on grass, and where I don't sweat getting rent raised. On the other hand, I can easily see own a very small piece of land and having access to some neighborhood commons as part of a community.
I do like "Ferris Beuler's Day Off" style suburbs.
I do not like "Edward Scissorhands" style suburbs.
I grew up in the former, and given the opportunity, I'd like my future kids to do the same.
Bueller's suburb is decades older, much closer to the "urban" it's a "sub" of, Chicago, which grew over time. Much bigger houses, all two-story, with bigger plots of land and plenty of trees providing shade and privacy. The houses are more varied because they were built over a longer span of time by different people.
Both had sidewalks but there are ones like the Scissorhands suburb that don't.
Neither has much economic or ethnic diversity. Because it developed over time, Bueller's suburb may have more integrated retail and services while Scissorhands' is strictly a bedroom community.
Edit: I guess my point was that from my experience visiting New York that's a city where public transit is so good that a car really seems unnecessary. Someone from NYC might be surprised to learn (or be reminded) that it's the exception, and that in most other places in the country it's a hassle not to own a car -- that's not a problem just in LA.
I'm in Seattle myself (Capitol Hill) and while I could get by day-to-day without a car, it would make my commute to the east side almost twice as long depending on traffic and bus timing, which isn't worth it for me. And while Uber / Lyft are a good alternative, a car is still the most convenient way to visit other parts of the city.
I even did so myself in Tucson for a year, though I'll grant that that was pretty annoying.
Because those are all significantly (hours more) to take mass transit than to drive.
Instacart does my groceries and it's only about an hour or so going from the North side to the West side on the "L". Pretty great.
It's very doable to not do cars in Seattle, however. Particularly if you have a car2go or zipcar account!
There are a few decent neighborhoods where one could make due without an automobile but they're pretty expensive (by Pittsburgh standards) to live in. Shadyside and Oakland are two such places. There are a few Hipster enclaves where a fair number of people do it but they're not very common. Outside of neighborhoods like these and especially outside of The City proper, it's a nightmare to try getting around without a car.
Also, we don't have great public transit through high-traffic areas from where people are to where they want to go, because we've got this weird kind of medium density continuous sprawl. There just aren't that many of the good high-density locations at which to place Metro stops, although that seems to be changing more because people go "Hey, let's get a stop here, and then we'll /become/ a destination location."
Also, I don't know of any city I've been in where the "Buses suck, subway rocks" relationship isn't true. I don't think it's just a "buses for poor people" thing, but I don't know what's going on to cause this anecdotally widely observed phenomenon.
Taking the Bus + Train from SF to LA area takes longer than driving, and has more stress. Can I stop to use the bathroom, or will I miss the bus? Not an issue if I am the driver. I realize that's not the same as city driving issues, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Line_(Los_Angeles_Metro)
They run on dedicated right-of-way. Not just their own lane, but their own road. Not as nice as a subway, but approaching it.
If you're into NYC comparatives, its isolation and ethos compares to Staten Island. Lots of cops and firefighters.
I enjoy the malls, the big box stores, and the clones. Why? I know that pretty much anywhere I go I can get a consistent experience. I can go the local mall and almost anything I can want or imagine is available, which at some level is fascinating. What's more, as cliche as all these places ares, there is a bit of a shared experience for almost everyone.
I enjoy driving on the giant roads, or strolling through the quiet suburbs with headphones on without fear of some incident. I like not hearing people and cars all the time.
I like the city for other reasons; I enjoy the history, the character, the feeling of life, but the suburbs have their place, there is a reason they exist. They aren't perfect and they are the harbingers of some negative social trends, but they aren't as horrible as HN likes to act.
I don't understand this. That is not because you're not lucidly explaining it. It simply does not fit into my head how this is desirable. :) But that's ok. I think Different places should look and feel and act different. I think that making a consistent experience absolutely destroys the unique culture and history of places, replaced by "the style from headquarters", and "the history of Walgreenmartsafewayco". It really repels me.
For really getting away from people/cars, I believe that the forests are appropriate. Ideally, no paths, no trails, just.... away.
Anyway. My anti-suburb rant over for the day. :)
To be fair, the unique culture of the place used to be "industrial farming corn field" is most cases. It's not like anyone is tearing down 100 year old neighborhoods to build big boxes to serve suburbs (actually, the suburbs are far more likely to save those places than destroy them).
Ha, yes. But - thought experiment. What if, instead of another 'burb with winding streets, it started out by defining a downtown core kind of setup: 4-6 story buildings with retail storefronts and apartments above. Put the 'extra' space into a commons area, plus maybe a mini-park possibly with original area flora and fauna. So your 1/4 mile x 1/4 mile place gets a lot more dense and has a lot more to offer within an easy 10-minute walk. Bonus points if you figure out how to build a "tool shed" local workshop to replace the ubiquitous garages. :)
It makes me want to throw up. Every time the council pushes for a Historic Overlay, it turns into a revolt with Tea Party style propaganda.
It seems that much of the suburb vs. city debate comes down to culture and personal preference.
One of the reasons for the economic dominance of big box stores over quaint mom and pop shops is simple economics. Small store usually don't offer the best prices or selection. It's only at the weird long end of the tail can they exist, selling stuff that's not of a big enough general interest for the big stores.
The point of the article is that suburbs are fundamentally flawed in that the tax base cannot keep up with the costs of the infrastructure once that patch of suburbia has gone past the growth phase. There simply isn't the density of tax payers to pay the bills. Raising taxes is not an option as people are mobile and will move to a more sensible city arrangement if the dream of suburbia is out of their price bracket. The developers will move to the city too.
Not mentioned in the article is the eventual problem of serious resource depletion, i.e. when every bit of America has been fracked, every Arctic wildlife refuge plundered for oil and the Red Sea pumped into the Saudi desert to get the last gasp of light, sweet crude. We no longer talk about 'Peak Oil' any more (wasn't that just grey propaganda put out by the oil companies to make their product worthy of a high price or am I being over cynical there?), however, there is no denying that suburbia can only exist so long as there is cheap and affordable motoring. When motoring starts to get much more expensive that is going to dent those wallets that pay the taxes to maintain suburbia so a lot of America is going to face the same problems of diminishing tax base that Detroit is famous for. I would not be one to bet that everyone will be driving a Tesla in between their teleconferences on the i-glasses by the time we get to that stage of the game.
Anyway, enjoy the suburbs by all means, along with millions of others including myself, but do appreciate that they are not entirely economically viable as the situation stands and, if there is a serious problem with ye-olde-petroleum-reserves, then suburbs will be very different to how they are now.
I regularly want things I can't find at a suburban mall.
That probably sums up the whole suburban experience to me. Comfortable, safe, predictable, beige. As someone who craves adventure (fwiw, I'm edging closer to 40) I just crave the authenticity a city or even a great small town provides. Suburbs really are just a bad compromise between those two things, the worst of all possible worlds.
Or maybe the places I'm thinking of are "great small towns"? What would you call Pleasanton? (I think it's pretty clearly a suburb, and not terribly much more, though certainly it didn't start out that way...).
People tend to think of "urban" as "City of San Francisco (Manhattan, Chicago, etc...)" To me urban is much of a characteristic. Many suburbs have a relatively urban component at their core. If you live on an actual city grid (no windy streets) with strong mixed uses (that you can walk to) throughout your neighborhood then you're living an urban existence in my book. Or at least non-suburban.
I can definitely identify with people living in central Pleasanton, but you don't have to get far outside the center city before it falls off the rails.
http://cohousing.org is the movement of people looking for exactly what you are looking for.
- Complete dependence on car ownership to get anywhere interesting or useful.
- So much time wasted in cars. I'd happily commute for twice as long on a train if I got to read. (Yes, self-driving cars could change this in a few decades, but living in the city could change it now.)
- The more you drive, the more you are contributing to distasteful regimes in the Middle East and the distasteful US foreign policy intended to secure our oil interests. If you drive an electric vehicle (and aren't covered by nuclear power), you've simply replaced oil with coal.
- Children can't get anywhere other than maybe some friends' houses without you driving them. This is maybe a feature for a 5-year-old, but a soul-crushing bug when a 15-year-old still can't go anywhere without you. The "chauffeur" aspect of parenthood is something that you choose by living in sprawl.
- Teenagers can't realistically hold jobs without having their own cars, either, and at minimum wage, owning a car that starts and might not kill you in a collision will wipe out a good portion of your earnings. (Exception would be if one parent doesn't work or telecommutes but still has a car. I was fortunate enough to be in this situation, but it could have evaporated any day.)
- There is just very little to do as a kid/teenager other than consume media and/or drugs (although I guess that doesn't matter for the hacker types, since all you need is a laptop anyway). If going downtown wasn't a special event, you could have access to a wealth of libraries, bookstores, restaurants, museums, theater, symphony, opera, etc. which often give extremely sweet discounts to K12 students as well as college kids. You're going to experience these things less often if getting to them is onerous (and requires parking at $10+/hour). Instead, social life revolves around the mall and finished basements.
- DUI seems to be more of an issue, not less, since everyone is by default driving everywhere.
- I just get this visceral feeling of isolation. It's like living in a snowglobe. I've seen everything there is to see. I've met everyone (in my age group) there is to meet. I've been through every inch of every building I have access to. There is nothing left to explore. It's horrifying, and not what I want my kids to be experiencing at 15-16-17. In a decent-sized city, there's always more. There's always something you haven't seen or been to or been to in a while. There's something incredibly comforting about knowing you can never exhaust all your options. High school was fine, my parents were fine, but I just couldn't wait to get out of suburbia and never come back. (It seems lots of kids feel this way... the word for it is "ungrateful.")
The big-box stores, cookie-cutter houses, etc. are a matter of aesthetics, and people have different tastes. I personally can't sleep in silence. But the environmental impact and the suffocation of non-drivers is real.
I like cars. I'd love to own a 3-series or a Tesla or something and go drive it fast out in the country, but owning and driving a car shouldn't be a prerequisite for being a functioning member of society.
There might come a time when I want to own rather than rent, but it will be within walking distance of an electric train.
Build a suburban "gated community" for safety, give everyone a huge lawn that they're obligated to constantly maintain, don't allow any commercial buildings in because they're considered ugly, and you get an environment where it's pretty tough to get anywhere without a car. Add in the poor pedestrian infrastructure, intimidating high-speed traffic, and some irrational fear of how anybody under 18 out of eyesight of a parent for a second is about to be kidnapped, and you get a neighborhood where everyone seems actively discouraged from knowing anything about their neighbors. Seems to me that this is what creates the unsafe environment that everyone was trying so hard to get away from.
It's interesting to read that many suburbs may also be logistically unsustainable.
I'm not saying suburbs are perfect, but you've basically thrown up a stack of strawmen here.
I live in a city, and it's kind of ugly, kind of dangerous in many places, there are random shootings of strangers. The air, thankfully, is good. The rats in the streets would be kind of awesome! :)
edit: It's easy to know your neighbors in suburbia if you're outgoing, and things vary from street to street. But there generally is way less interaction than if you were to have a neighborhood pub at the end of your street, or side-to-side porches everyone lounges on during summer nights.
It tends to be that you know the neighbors you get along with and ignore everyone else. In city environments, it's more like you interact with everyone because, well, no choice.
I don't like to talk to everyone I meet or even be in a city for too long as it overstimulates my senses. It is the same reason why I don't like large crowds and prefer living in the suburbs.
The far more likely scenario is that you find you have some common background, and waste an evening relating stories that you would probably never dredge up again otherwise. The world really is a surprisingly tiny place.
> I don't like to talk to everyone I meet or even be in a city for too long as it overstimulates my senses.
It takes all kinds :-)
The super-outgoing will always know their neighbors, and the super-quiet never will. A little proximity and shared interests/spaces tends to help those in the middle along some.
Also, while prediction is a dangerous game, I foresee the combination of increased investment in public transit, and the advent of affordable driverless cars, adding up to helping suburbs remain a terrific place to grow up. As my hometown (Arlington, MA) was in the 70's and 80's, and as my new adopted town (Duxbury MA) is today.
Related tangent: IMHO quality of life is less about urban/suburban(/rural), than it is about neighborhoods. I posted about this topic earlier this year: http://www.chrisweekly.org/2014/01/22/neighborhoods-matter-h...
I'm incredibly thankful for my privileged upbringing in a similar suburban community, but none of my peers could leave fast enough.
I find the other problems more ambiguous, though. High median income is almost axiomatic: people with means will choose the nicest places to live. That doesn't bother me much at all. It correlates strongly with lower crime and a stronger focus on education. And maybe "nothing to offer young adults" is actually a feature. I think young adults as a rule should leave their hometowns, travel the world, explore and experiment and do brave and foolish things, learn from their mistakes and get some perspective.
I'm not sure any one [kind of] place can be great for families with young children, and for young adults, and be economically and culturally diverse. Absent the option of such a utopia, as the father of two young girls I'm always -- and unapologetically -- going to optimize for proximity to other families with kids, safely walkable/bikeable streets, and excellent schools.
Respectfully, Chris
We jokingly referred to it as "the suburban cultural wasteland", because you had to walk 2-3 miles to find anything that wasn't more houses, a grocery store with corporate specialty stores attached (Starbucks coffee, various automotive places, etc), or a school.
Most of what you could find in that radius was a mall, which was just a bigger version of the grocery store thing or various pieces of civil infrastructure (parks, community center, etc).
You had to go 4-5 miles to find anything that was even slightly not cookie-cutter, which put it at a fairly impossible distance to walk routinely.
I'm contrasting this with the city I now live in that the suburbs were around, and I'm pretty sure I could hit an oddball business with a baseball from my window.
Of course, I wouldn't have felt comfortable riding a bike on the road there, so it somewhat mitigates how useful a bike actually is.
Suburbs frequently have wide roads that make bike riding quite easy. They are also usually flat.
I don't know what you are doing to annoy car drivers, but I've biked a lot and have never been yelled at. (Or heard others yelling.)
One of my friends has been shouted at several times cycling down a mile-road (i.e. 12-mile), that he should get out of the road.
Main roads being 3+ lanes and with huge parking lots on each side and little to no sidewalks or pedestrian lights on traffic lights. Residential roads are wide and have the houses, trees, mailboxes, etc set way back, have no street parking, and also often have no sidewalks, or sidewalks that do strange things like start and end randomly. All of this creates kind of a feedback loop where the wide spaces encourage driving fast, and the usual lack of obstacles and good bike lanes and sidewalks discourages walking and cycling. The feedback is that the faster drivers and fewer other non-drivers tends to discourage anybody else from getting around any other way. Make it so that it feels nerve-wracking to cross the street or cycle a few blocks, and virtually nobody will do it.
The point is, not all suburbs are the same. Some are a lot nicer to live in than others.
The kinds of suburbs people are lambasting here are almost by definition places where the only things in non-driving distance are houses and some basic amenities (schools, big box/grocery stores, maybe a library). Once you're to the point of having more than a couple of restaurants in walking distance (that aren't Perkins) that's not really what we're thinking of when we blast "suburbs."
Yes, I need a car. I love cars/motorcycles. I love driving. I always owned at least one vehicle even when I lived in the city and didn't have to. So this isn't a bad thing for me at all. Having a garage to safely park and work on my vehicles is a huge bonus.
I am far less isolated from my neighbors and community than I was when I lived in the city. Living in apartments I had essentially zero contact/communication with my neighbors other than uncomfortable elevator rides. Living in the suburbs I know all my neighbors well. We help each other clear driveways after a big snow. We BBQ together. We watch each others houses when we travel. We talk.
I love having a huge lawn. It's not a burden, it's wonderful. I love having a nice hammock, green grass to lay in, a big space for my dog to run around in, a place to put the raised garden beds I built for my wife, etc...
I enjoy not having ugly/loud/smelly commercial buildings hemming me in.
We have good pedestrian infrastructure. Wide sidewalks that let me run, walk the dog, walk into the town forrest for a hike, or stroll into town for lunch or to grab ice cream with my wife on a hot summers day. There's no high speed traffic, and no irrational fears about kids getting kidnapped.
When I have a party, everyone can easily park in my driveway if they also live outside easy public transportation. I can play music and have 20 people over for a bonfire without bothering my neighbors.
There's a lot of things I miss about living in the city, likewise there's a lot of things I miss about living in the country. But honestly, right now, my current neighborhood and home are a great spot for me.
I abhor personal motor vehicles, refused to even get my license at 16 and have managed exceptionally well over the last 7 years. I've put several thousand miles on my bike(s) over the years as my main mode of transportation, though I do also use public transit quite often. Living near SLC, Utah our transit is fair, but stupidly expensive.
I grew up in the suburbs, and felt approximately 0 connection to those around me. Living in an apartment building I have conversations with people sitting on their porch/balcony quite often. I don't even particularly enjoy people either.
I have no opinion on the lawn to be honest, at the moment there is more than enough land for those who want it to enjoy.
I actually enjoy the close proximity of various buildings, which very very rarely can be called loud, ugly, or smelly. I don't live next to a manufacturing plant, so yeah..
Pedestrian infrastructure is necessarily improved due to the greater density of people, but this isn't really an issue that I've found in the suburbs either.
If I have a party there is more than enough parking surrounding my apartment building that it really doesn't matter. Granted I can't have a bonfire or blast music, but I've been there/done that and don't miss it.
I miss basically nothing about the suburbs. Always felt too hostile, too "fuck you, got mine." Maybe it was the people, maybe just the neighborhood, but I'd kneecap myself before I went back.
But a lot of newer suburbs make it somewhere between unpleasant and dangerous to walk anywhere.
Also - most post 1990s suburb growth doesn't use grids, so it becomes grievously difficult to easily walk/bike between areas, since it's never a straight line to achieve your goal.
/long live the grid design
We're a city of neighborhoods. The Loop is the main tourist destination, sure, but few people actually live there. We live in neighborhoods. Some have houses with (small) lots, some have apartments, some have both. There's a nice sprinkling of parks, and most neighborhoods have amenities like a few independent restaurants, maybe some chain restaurants, coffee shops, bars, CVS, and a grocery store or two. Things you might even find in a larger/denser suburb. The difference is that you can usually walk <15 minutes to a train that comes every <15 minutes to take you downtown.
Unlike Manhattan, buses are best for most short-haul trips while the rail system is best for longer rides (we don't do the "trains go north-south, buses go east-west" thing.)
Public transit is often slower than driving, even with traffic, but you can enjoy the time if you bring your smartphone and/or a book.
I find the original description absurdly accurate.
I don't drive/have a car and it is crippling.
Transportation alternates are also highly variable and make a huge difference.
It's pretty obvious to everyone that the nonsensical street layout was designed to keep everyone but residents out.
Every house had huge lawns, and because the houses were all built as part of the same subdivision development, they were all roughly the same age. This created a lot of keeping up with the Joneses, where one neighbor getting a new roof meant a cascade of people getting new roofs. One house got a paint job and suddenly the whole damn fuckin' street is painting houses.
Getting anywhere without a car is nigh impossible. The neighborhood, despite being upscale, lacked sidewalks (I guess they never thought anyone would need 'em, the residents ain't poor after all), and once you leave the neighborhood you face a 5-lane arterial where the unofficial speed limit is 50mph and drivers have no conception of pedestrians. The sidewalks are wide enough for one person - if you're unlucky enough to meet someone coming the other direction you get to do a silly dance around each other so nobody has to step into 50mph traffic.
Crossing this street is also nigh impossible until well after I moved out of that place. There are pedestrian crosswalks painted in, but good luck getting any of the drivers to stop for you. Thankfully as of a few years ago they installed a real honest to God traffic signal. Small victories.
Anyways, long rant, but ufmace's "nightmare" suburb does exist. I grew up in one.
The solution (other than making things way more dense) is to make walking / biking paths at the end of cul-de-sacs to connect the suburbs for pedestrians, while still maintaining the advantages on non-grid street layout.
Obviously, suburbs categorically fail to accomplish the strategic goal behind creating windy streets; it's almost impossible to live in one without a car. Suburban city planners probably were not inspired by Alexander. But they are safer places for kids to play in the streets than Chicago blocks, where residents often lobby for speed bumps to deal with speeding cars.
Suburbs bad. Windy streets? Maybe not so much.
This is completely unfair. I can tell you that from living in my suburban home over the past 10 years that over time I have come to know every single person who lives on my street. You have children that play together, that goto school together (and you may serve on the PTO together with those same neighbors), you have trees that you plant, fences that are built together. You see each other at garage sales. If you have an HOA, you likely maintain a common area together (maybe a pool)
On the other hand, there are those who complain how "up in everybody's business" the neighbors are.
All I can say is that everywhere is different, perspective is everything. I've live in major cities and talked to people who in major cities and "knowing your neighbors" is more reflective of who your neighbors are than it is of the geographical layout. (I also have neighbors who I have little interaction with, and that's just fine)
In Suburbia, you know a lot of your neighbors, but there's almost always some sort of reason or structure. The social network is the same size, but lots of those relationships are somehow not intrinsic (which isn't to devalue them, even comparatively, but imho there is a qualitative difference).
The latter works great for family life because there are so many more structural incentives to interact; the former is probably preferable for younger or non-child-raising people.
I like my suburban "not-gated but has just one entrance" for safety, a good-sized easy-maintained lawn for the kids to play in, no ugly/noisy commercial buildings, and a quick EV drive to a vast array of options that I don't want to actually live right next to. Pedestrian infrastructure is pointless as it's faster to drive to what you actually want to go to than to walk to what you don't, kids ARE monitored despite survivor bias, and anyone can get to know neighbors to whatever degree they like. Seems to me this is a whole lot better than living stacked on other people, walking being near-compulsory because simple parking is hideously expensive, and traffic is prolific and unavoidable - an unsafe environment I'd rather get away from.
I'd rather be in the country (grew up there), and will likely return.
You are talking about liking something that has tax revenues that cover mere fractions of the costs incurred. How much would you like it if your property taxes were 50% higher? 2000% higher?
Really it sounds like the whole article could be sumarised by saying many suburbs have taxes that are too low. The article's author worked in a town with poor planning; there are plenty of large cities with poor planning.
This is really a non-story playing up to many of the prejudices common to HN.
In some areas of Minnesota this could most certainly be the case.
"Here’s what he means. The way suburban development usually works is that a town lays the pipes, plumbing, and infrastructure for housing development—often getting big loans from the government to do so—and soon after a developer appears and offers to build homes on it. Developers usually fund most of the cost of the infrastructure because they make their money back from the sale of the homes. The short-term cost to the city or town, therefore, is very low: it gets a cash infusion from whichever entity fronted the costs, and the city gets to keep all the revenue from property taxes. The thinking is that either taxes will cover the maintenance costs, or the city will keep growing and generate enough future cash flow to cover the obligations. But the tax revenue at low suburban densities isn’t nearly enough to pay the bills; in Marohn’s estimation, property taxes at suburban densities bring in anywhere from 4 cents to 65 cents for every dollar of liability. Most suburban municipalities, he says, are therefore unable to pay the maintenance costs of their infrastructure, let alone replace things when they inevitably wear out after twenty to twenty-five years. The only way to survive is to keep growing or take on more debt, or both. “It is a ridiculously unproductive system,” he says."
Taken in context, the quoted sentence is specifically talking about the development/expansion of a town beyond its current financial means. In other words, the town builds out its infrastructure and is banking on an influx of new homeowners (taxpayers) to help with the maintenance of the infrastructure. When that doesn't happen, that's when the tax revenue/liabilities ratio dips below 1.
Also, if you go to the Strong Towns[1] website that Charles Marohn helped start and read the Mission Statement and their Quantification of a Strong Town, nowhere does it talk about population density or converting suburbs/towns into cities.
You mean like these?
http://www.strongtowns.org/the-cost-of-auto-orientation/
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/1/4/the-lost-opportu...
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/1/11/adding-insult-t...
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2012/1/18/residential-mat...
He absolutely is talking about density. The tax bases of low density suburbs, compared to the maintenance costs that they require, are inherently disparate.
The costs of building greenfield infrastructure is low...low enough that developers willingly pay the infrastructure development fees in exchange for the right to build. But the taxes used to maintain the infrastructure do not cover the costs, and by that time the developer is off the hook. So they bring in new developers, which bring with them new taxes and more deferred maintenance, which brings solvency in the short term and bigger problems in the long term. Suburban-density development is a ponzi scheme, inherently unsustainable, and it is a theme that he refers to extensively in his writing.
As for the last article, that one does talk about residential housing. I will agree that the article does talk about urbanization as the natural progression of town maturation. However, note that the article talks about progressions/increments (i.e. going from a house to a duplex, from a duplex, to a row of houses, from a row of houses to an apartment building) and not skipping those progressions (going straight from a house to an apartment building). In fact, the article specifically outlines that the changes must be natural, be compatible with the neighborhood, and must fit in. Overall, Marohn's more concerned with adding value to properties than increasing population density. He even goes as far as to specifically address our topic of discussion. I quote:
"I am going to pause now before going on to the next step and reiterate something important. I know there are those of you reading this right now, sitting at the kitchen table of your nice single family home, saying, "There is no way on God's green earth that I'm going to allow a set of row houses across the street from me. Who does this Strong Towns guy think he is?" Fair point, and the reality is that most neighborhoods will not grow beyond the single family stage. That's okay too, at least as long as the public infrastructure and services stay scaled to that investment level." Emphasis mine.
He states that what's tantamount is responsible spending.
The article covers sweeping statements & accusations, ignoring local realities. If a particular town made a bad deal with a developer, that's not the same category as those that made a good deal; a big screwup can skew the average when lumped in among several successes. Ranting about sewer maintenance doesn't apply to a neighborhood that doesn't have sewers (mine has backyard septic systems/fields; your offal is your problem), and likewise for public water vs private wells. It's a solvable problem: should taxes be higher? if so, raise them accordingly and look for alternate solutions like encouraging domestic self-sufficiency.
It's a paperwork problem. Much of what the article describes involves carefully negotiated & balanced deals, followed later with absurd & overbearing demands for "improvements" - no surprise the latter are "unsustainable". Build a community with suitable roads and lawns designed to balance them ... then demand a >50% increase in road width, destroying lawns and vastly altering traffic dynamics? Build a suitable sewer system, then vastly raise & over-engineer requirements, then have to accommodate normal repairs to the absurd new requirements? Yeah, that's not going to work. The problem isn't suburbs, it's overbearing overpowered know-it-alls who don't have to deal with consequences of their unilateral declarations.
But most suburbs are entirely unlike that.
Most aren't gated. Only in very wealthy areas are lawns "huge", and most are minutes with an electric mower. There are sidewalks, and indeed most modern suburbs intermix commercial space such that, at my old suburban house, a giant grocery store was a five minute walk.
And where does this "discouraged from knowing about your neighbours" argument keep coming from? In the suburb I knew everyone within several hundred feet of my house. We had street parties, many friendly conversations, and so on. Downtown, in contrast, I knew a couple of people from nodding at them in the lobby.
It's interesting to read that many suburbs may also be logistically unsustainable.
With working at home patterns, suburbs may just be the most sustainable. Heck, I actually live in a rural location now given that I work in my home office 90%+ of the time. The most Earth-friendly commute you can make is no commute at all.
The "people tried before" argument is never convincing. Enormous industry changes have occurred (for instance my home has a rock-solid, 100% reliable, 100/10Mbps internet connection, which is better than many whole office buildings had a few years ago), and work at home practices have been exploding.
I once was a unique butterfly. Now I can name dozens of people who operate just like I do.
As to YCombinator -- I don't know. I am not a startup under the tutelage of Paul Graham. I don't particularly care or need to heed what his opinions on work practices are.
Perhaps, but "it'll happen Real Soon Now" isn't either, really.
> I once was a unique butterfly. Now I can name dozens of people who operate just like I do.
You've grown your network! :)
It is happening for me right now: My commute is to walk down my stairs. A moment ago I finished a teleconference with a group of distributed people thousands of miles away.
Even just looking at tools -- we once went to a central location because it had the tools necessary for work, and even as we computerized we had the desktop on the corporate LAN, etc. Communications was limited and often very expensive.
Now we all roll around with mobiles and laptops, with mobile workability that allows us to work virtually anywhere with equal ease.
It is happening for many other people right now. The "giant office" model is one that some companies still pursue, but many others are going to flexible or work at home models. And for people like me it means that I can live on acres in the countryside.
Yes, but for 90+% of the working population it is not happening right now, nor real soon.
> The "giant office" model is one that some companies still pursue
For values of "some" approaching "vast majority".
It's great that some people are able to work remotely now, and more will be able to do later. It will help the environment and generally be a good thing. But in most companies in most industries, this will not happen any time soon. It just isn't happening. Neither the hippest everything-aaS startups nor the most staid dinosaurs are eschewing coming into a common office en masse. There's no inflection point. Internet connections are faster and more reliable than ever, but so are the traffic jams at rush hour.
We've had more adoption rolling out whole new models of housing with 2.0 "walkable" suburbs than with working remotely.
But as someone who works remotely, and who works with a large number of people who work remotely a good portion of the time, and an increasing number who work remotely the vast majority of the time, I will say that you are simply wrong. I mean, completely wrong. Even staid old corporations like banks and insurance companies are introducing multiple days of working at home policies for all level of employees. This is not some strange new thing, it is simply happening.
It also appears our discussion has ended up as generalizations vs anecdotes. Sorry about that.
I like the city for exactly the opposite reason. In my experience, it is difficult to both ignore others and be ignored in the suburbs. On the other hand, finding privacy in a city is easy. There are too many people in cities to do the small-town/suburbs "everyone knows everyone, and everyone sticks their noses in everyone's business" thing.
After which, I'll probably sell that place in Manhattan for the $30-40 million I can get, buy another house back in my old suburb and a vacation house in Southern Spain and retire/angel fund my choice of startups till I die.
Is it as convenient as a dense city? No, but my standard of living makes the affordable parts of most cities look like tenement housing in comparison.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy cities as much as the next person. But economics is a major problem that cities have to overcome. Equivalent housing in a city is one or two orders of magnitude more expensive. Cities are great for lots of things but I don't use most of those things more than ever once in a while even while living in a city. May as well live someplace nicer the other 90% of the time and take the the easy access public transport in when I really want to see a museum or go to a concert or whatever.
Most people cannot get more than a grocery store from a walk away if they live in a suburb.
I realize of course that I got "lucky" and live in a really especially great suburb. However, I've noticed most of the developments in my area tend to be similar. A central "town center/shopping mall" surrounded by condos and apartments, surrounded by townhouses, surrounded by single family homes.
That's not the kind of suburb at issue. That's a small town.
Nearby towns (major nearby employment centers) are 10-30 minutes away by car and have ample free parking. Two of the bigger towns are also on the same rail line. The big city is about an hour by car outside of rush hour and you have to pay to park, rail and bus are faster and cheaper. However, all of the major tech employment in the area happens in a belt that stretches from my neighborhood into the city, there's negligible tech work actually in the city.
There's 17-23 million square feet of commercial and office space getting zoned right now that will set up a major employment center about 5 minutes away (with a world trade center and all that jazz). And I can almost but not quite see from one of the two coffee shops I'm working at today, the largest collection of new data center construction on the East Coast. Major tech employers range from aerospace to internet companies to government. So it's all fairly future proof.
So yeah, it's sprawl I guess. But it's not the mile after mile of unending prefab houses that defined suburbia from the 40s to the 90s either (though there is some of that out here as well, just not in my immediate area). From my front window I can see homes designed and built by 3 different developers and I think 8 or 9 participated in total. This isn't custom architecture, but if you get bored you can walk a block and see something that looks different at least.
Today for lunch my major conundrum was should I eat Greek, Thai, American style Chinese, Italian, Burgers, Subs or Tex-Mex within walking distance, or head out in my car for a quick 5-minute spin to get Vietnamese, Indian, Taiwanese or Korean. I decided to walk to my local pizza place, get a couple slices of pizza and then walk to one of my two local coffee shops and hang out for the rest of the day.
A slightly longer drive and I can add in Ethiopian, Bolivian, Salvadorian, Mexican, even more Korean, even more Vietnamese...and of course every kind of chain food you can imagine from Taco Bell to TGIF.
2. Zoning laws must change. It is ridiculous the a suburban family has to drive to the Super Walmart for a gallon of milk. When I was young there was a local convenience store just down every street (and not just crappy junk filled 7-11s).
3. Trains. Apparently they are cheap enough to get immigrants to their jobs, but too expensive for middle America? The B.S. around trains needs to end, and a new age of private passenger rail promoted. If you don't beleive me (b/c you'd rather believe political talking points) you best get a'Googling.
4. To go along with the trains, why is my municipal airport all but useless? Is anyone else getting tired of ever bigger airports and ever smaller seats? Who decided airports needed to be malls and that all flights needed to herd people into a handful of national feed lots? I figure at this rate airports will have indoor roller coasters within the next 20 years. What we need to do instead is transition to point-to-point flights on mass produced jets. Currently jets are all hand made. Good grief!
5. And ditch that 9-5 business. It's time we split the work and go 8 to 2 and 2 to 8. More jobs, business are open longer, and yet fewer people on the roads.
My 5 cents. Penny for your thoughts?
Do you think zoning laws prevent 7-11 from selling milk, or do you think 7-11 sells what the market buys?
The Geography of Nowhere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Nowhere
The City in History: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_in_History
I like that I have about 1/6 of an acre of land that my house sits on.
I can grow a garden. My children have a safe yard to play in. I have a nice warm and dry garage in which I can perform my automotive repairs. I can barbecue without choking my neighbors with the smoke from my grill. I can play loud music late at night and not bother everyone nearby. I have trees from which we get organic, pesticide free fruits.
Suburbs will never die, as long as there are still people like me.
The author's epiphany seems to have come from the realization that despite his engineering background and his status as an "expert", he still didn't know as much as the hoi polloi about what was best for their neighborhoods but he still didn't learn the correct lesson.
The problem was caused by other "experts", to whom the state deferred for determining the standards in the first place. Every town is different. Every town has different needs. Forcing them to all use the same plan has consequences, even if he was not able to see them.
Widening those streets and removing those trees only encouraged people to drive faster and caused more accidents and deaths. It was a bad idea to help people drive faster through residential neighborhoods. Were he not so enamored with enforcing external standards, he might have been able to see that.
I don't think anyone really knows how self-driving + electric cars are going to exactly play out in the coming decades, but I fully expect them to make individual car use more attractive, not less.
Self driving cars will relieve downtowns/walkable places from dead parking space. That means more destinations reachable by foot/bike. Why use a car when you can use your feet?
Self driving cars also means that roads will be safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
Congestion won't go away. Now you can read/work/play in your car, but that's about it.
Last but not least, sprawl is still unsustainable in terms of infrastructure.
Here's a simple study that discusses a lot of that: http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc00/professi...
Personally, I found it pretty easy to live in two different college towns (less than 100k pop), not own a car, and enjoy relatively walkable areas. Then I moved to TN for work and got laughs in the interview when I asked about public transportation. I imagine the suburban reflex kicks in strongly for some people once they have a kid or two.
I've never been able to ascertain wether the insistence that suburbs are much safer comes from not understanding the actual risk, or something more sinister (racism - probably unintentional).
If I have a kid in good school, I can spend all that time and effort by something else. As a consequence, good school makes my kid to gain that something else and both of us to have less stressful life. I'm going to be involved too, but we will be both doing something we enjoy or something that adds bonuses on top on what school should be teaching.
That parental involvement can be both difficult and uncomfortable or pleasurable and easy. Which one it is going to be depends a lot on school choice.
I'd add a caveat that many of the side effects of crimes are area dependent--a gunshot will disturb and affect the psychological wellbeing of far more people in very dense areas. That's why many people end up with an overstated impression on how common crime in cities is.
Though I think even per capita, most cities have it worse than the suburbs...
For an example, if you're on a block there's 100% going to be a robbery in the next 5 minutes, if there are also 200 other people on that block, then you still only have a 0.5% chance of being robbed.
Essentially, because so many crimes only involve a single (or relatively few) victim(s), your odds of being involved need to account for how many other people are around you, and not just the odds that it will happen in the same area as you.
Your measure of "per unit area" doesn't account for the fact most people aren't going to be involved with the crime (eg, robbed), but will all be in the same impacted area.
So, essentially, it over-calculates how likely you actually are to be the victim of a crime. Per unit area is only useful if you want to know how close you're likely to be to a crime being committed, and not how likely you are to be the victim.
>...Your measure of "per unit area" doesn't account for the fact most people aren't going to be involved with the crime (eg, robbed), but will all be in the same impacted area.
I think those assumptions are where I disagree. a) I care about (not) being near crime, and b) crime doesn't randomly sample across the set of all people, but makes me have to avoid certain times, places, and activities.
I would rather be around more crime, but victim to less of it. Your analysis trades the potential for being a victim more often to be around less total crime, which is why I think it's somewhat suspect. Perhaps that really is a trade you're willing to make, but I'm dubious.
> crime doesn't randomly sample across the set of all people, but makes me have to avoid certain times, places, and activities
Again, per capita measure is more important for figuring out if you should avoid an area than the crimes per area metric. (Also left out of this discussion is the distribution of offenses committed, which is paramount I'd argue.)
An example from where I live: there's higher crime per unit area at 9pm (it varies by time) at the mall downtown than the gas station/bowling alley/billiards room complex where the gang members loiter in the south end of town. (I looked up police numbers, because you made me curious.) But I know which one I'd rather be at based on the distribution of types of crimes and the per capita numbers. Hint: it's not the gas station.
This is a good example of higher numbers of people hiding a lower rate of victimization per person: there are literally hundreds of times more people downtown than at the gas station, so a marginally higher crime per area rate means I'm actually less likely to be involved in a crime. (Given how little of the mall you can see at once, I likely wouldn't even know it happened.)
So let me ask you: what is it you think that the crime per area figure gives you that crime per capita doesn't?
E.g. NYC (Dense - http://www.city-data.com/city/New-York-New-York.html) vs. Houston (Sprawl - http://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Houston-Texas.html)
Also, why bother spending money to widen streets. Let the streets stay as they were when they were first built. If you're going to go off trying to bring everything up to code as of now, instead of code when it was built, there will be never ending expenses.
I wonder if really the property taxes are just too low in this particular town. I pay 2-2.5% of my homes value in taxes each year, and my town/school district have to budget prudently, but are able to pay their bills and not rack up unsustainable debt.
The only two departments I really care about are sanitation, and highway. Even sanitation can be eliminated with private garbage as many other towns have. I do however expect the town to pave and plow my street. Beyond that, everything could be accomplished with user fees.
The taxpayer foots the bill to have the grid and city services extended for these suburbs.
So the taxpayer loses, nature loses, and the losers who bought these ugly disposable houses are losers. Only the land developers profit.
The taxpayer is who gets the services.
That's far from the optimal design if you're starting from scratch, but it solves a lot of problems without massive changes.
I grew up in American suburbia and hated it. It wasn't even one of the worst examples, but you still literally could not walk to the local LIRR station or to the park, which were just 1-2 miles away. Absurd. Build commercial areas and some more sidewalks, and it would've been much less terrible.
(I used to live in Idaho. Big cities there have 1,000 people)
Traditional neighborhoods are great. It's the isolated, curvy, car-centric suburbs made by developers that are the problem.
Most of the issues discussed in the article don't really apply to true 'small towns', but instead they're applicable to sprawled, growing suburban/exurban development near-ish larger cities. Small towns far from big cities don't tend to have growth in the form of housing developments, and have smaller infrastructure overhead.
In my hometown of 3,000 people, people living in the center of town have public water and sewer services, but everyone living farther out has wells and septic tanks. In a low density, low growth environment like this, the town doesn't need to be responsible for those things, and therefore stays out of debt and doesn't develop massive, unsustainable infrastructure.
>everyone moves to the big city
Sustainable infrastructure can exist at smaller scales as well. There is certainly boom in big cities right now, but smaller cities (25-100k people?), that had a bustling 'urban' core 100 years ago, are starting to come back. I think that these cities (many of which fell into decay after WWII) with walkable 'streetcar suburbs' and dense downtown areas, will become much more popular in the near future.
Obviously such a large tax increase could not happen overnight, but it does seem the obvious solution, or at least part of it.
FWIW I was a bit of a skeptic before reading this, but now I'm pretty convinced that we've been Doing It Wrong for many years now.
This: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brainerd,+MN/@46.3536312,-... instead of this: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brainerd,+MN/@46.3543623,-...
And, in the former, redevelopment of huge block-sized parking lots with a business behind them into multiple small storefronts.
For example, until very recently, San Francisco had a policy of randomized school assignments. The idea was to limit the economic segregation of schools. Such policies are ultimately counter productive, because all they do is drive wealthier families, and their tax dollars, out into the suburbs. Peoples' egalitarian ideas tend to come crashing down when their kids are involved.
San Francisco still does and middle class families continue to move away (not just due to public schools but housing prices) -- the others spend $25k-40k per year per kid on private schools. SFUSD uses a lottery approach and at one elementary school, 1210 children applied for 22 open slots -- a 1.8% acceptance rate. One of the major critiques of the city is how many of the tech workers in the city wouldn't be there today if they had gone through the SF public school system.
Until the US has a tiered system like Germany which allows high-achieving students to be challenged for the university and regular students to go through an extensive apprenticeship program guaranteeing well-paid jobs, people will continue to move to the suburbs for better schools.
If you read a list of all the federal welfare programs, the only one that sticks out as predominantly "urban" is Section 8. Section 8 is a big program, but it's a rounding error compared to Medicaid, SSDI, and the EITC, which all flow equally to rural areas. Even the food stamp program, which benefits rural households, eclipses HUD and Section 8.
As for education benefits: if you break Title 1 grants down per pupil, it's not the case that the urban states uniformly get more money than the rural ones. North Dakota, for instance, appears to get almost twice as much per pupil as California.
New York State has 19.7 million people. New York City has 8.4 million people, or about 43% of the state's population. But it has 61% of the state's total medicaid recipients: https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/health_care/medicaid/el....
I don't know if the ends are all that bad. The means being proposed is just horrific.
To some extent its inevitable, if decades of persuasion and experimentation have had little effect and prove very few people want to live that way, you're going to have to send in cops and lawyers, bankrupt some people, destroy some healthy and stable communities. Otherwise you'll never get the rush of "fixing" them.
I believe a lot of it is jealousy and/or corrupt real estate churn proposals. A couple blocks from company HQ there's a nice slum where I could buy an entire city block of crack houses for the cost of my one suburban house. There's people who aren't happy about that and want to make money off some real estate churn. Have .gov force the sales price of my house down to 10K and they can buy it, while I forcing me to move into the slum and pay $250K to them to buy their $10K house from them. I'm not interested in participating in that business model.
If real estate transaction volume is low and declining, and the purpose of .gov is to enforce the continuation of all dead/dying business models, and people are pretty much living where they want to right now, it makes sense to have .gov start forcing them to move, get some commissions, bust some blocks and redevelop some others (all with .gov funds funneled to the right people of course), etc.
By car, it was a 7 minute drive. On foot, it was a one hour walk. By bus, I think it would have taken about 2 hours. I walked and caught rides and was usually at work in about 15 or 20 minutes.
Our modern concept of suburbs was born just after WW2. We had 4 years of dual income, no kids families saving up to half their income and unable to have kids due to the men being at war overseas. WW2 was immediately preceded by The Great Depression. As their reward for defeating evil, Americans just wanted a house of their own. There wasn't enough housing to meet the demand and the nation came together as a whole to create policies and financing mechanisms whole-clothe and we began throwing up Levittowns all over the place.
Decades later, our demographic has changed and we remain prisoners of policies born overnight to service the preponderance of nuclear families. We have a lot fewer nuclear families with SAHMs and small kids yet our entire world, so to speak, is aimed at creating a dream for a generation that is dying out. (My father fought in WW2 and he died last fall. He was just short of his 89th birthday.)
I now live in San Diego county. Transit and density here make it almost like a little slice of Europe, but with better weather. I think I will eventually be able to get the life I want, without a car.
I wish this man all the best in the world. He has quite the uphill battle ahead of him.
My guess at the reasons Russian cities developed this way is due to central planning and costs to build and maintain roads. Now, I'm not advocating central planning. The reasons suburbs exploded were due to the subsidization of once unaccessible land by the federal government via interstates. Take away the pricing distortions from land and we'll have to build up. A solution to this is market based - sell of the interstate system and let users fund them.
But it can be varying degrees. I live in a gated neighborhood in a private planned subdivision with city water, city sewer, natural gas, cable, electric, and phone. Less than a mile from my house is city planned subdivision (blocks) with well water, septic systems, cable, electric, phone and partially paved streets.
https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...