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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

So many cities/regions in the USA are simply broken by design in terms of having central business locations and urban sprawl living locations. Too many cities optimized around the highway which let greedy developers and poor urban planners dictate the present conditions of impossible congestion and the inability to have an effective mass transit system due to lack of population density.

Simply put, that model doesn't scale and we are now seeing it affect more and more cities. Not to mention that urban sprawl is expensive to maintain in terms of roads, highways, sewers and utilities being consumed by people living so far apart and in low density areas.

I propose we begin building planned cities focused on population density and mass transit that people actually want to use. Build up, not out. Share spaces like parks and have lots of little ones. Essentially, inherit from NYC where you don't have to, or even want to, own a car.

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As much as I like the city I also love being able to play Rockband or Dance Dance Revolution or watch an action movie with the sound up in my house anytime I want. I like that I have a radial saw, lathe, and other power tools in the garage so I can build stuff. I also love the peace of no shared walls or floors.

Well, I actually I used to love that. I haven't lived in a house in ~30 years but I miss that freedom and I can't imagine lots of people giving it up.

..though.. maybe with the right planning ...

How about an apartment complex with party rooms you can book, lan parties and a maker space. Sign me up

Is this a materials issue? I've got a concrete+steel place in Central America that's touching the walls of surrounding houses (packed subdivision). I play concerts in the middle of the night and there doesn't seem to be any problem. I never hear my neighbors to the side, only the open back yard ones. Compare to s townhouse in SF where I can hear stair usage and so on.

every apartment/condo/townhome complex I've seen that is larger than 30 units has a "clubhouse", usually located in the same building as the apartment management. They have a full kitchen, large area with 4+ couches, tables and a huge TV. Tenants can book the clubhouse for parties/meetings for free. As I understand it, they're very rarely used, though.

Lots of families in the US aren't interested in dumping their house with a yard and garage for an apartment. If what you described is what the majority of people really wanted, nobody would live in the suburbs.

And lots of Americans in the 1970s weren't interested in dumping their gas guzzlers. But eventually, people have to adapt to a changing world.

Anyone I've talked to who commutes in rush hour traffic absolutely hates it, yet most of them don't move or change jobs.

I suspect it's mostly fear and not love that keeps people commuting from the suburbs -- fear of other people's judgments, because living in an apartment is often considered a lower status indicator than owning a home.

It's also money. The mortgage and taxes on a suburban house are cheaper than renting an urban apartment.

If we had more supply in the cities, prices could drop.

If we even had more supply in close-in suburbs, this would be improved. The bay is weird in that you have low-density suburb running quite close to SF; you'd think it would be a more gradual shift. I don't necessarily need to live in the absolute middle of the city, but far too often the only options are "city core that existed before cars" and "suburb 15 miles out". Not always, but often.

Hating a commute does not translate into hating the suburbs at all.

The suburban lifestyle is imposed by zoning ordinances. Your house must be set back X feet, you must use half an acre of land at a minimum, must be no more than two stories tall, must provide parking, and have a minimum square footage it has to meet. Commercial buildings have the same restrictions.

Even with a bazillion dollars and an army of laborers, I couldn't build a multistory, mixed-use, urban style apartment building in most suburban districts without changing the law.

To top it all off, cities have also restricted development and enacted rent control or rent subsidization (effectively a newcomer tax) so those of us who want city living no longer can afford it because old cities became too expensive and new cities are not legally possible to build.

Well, with a bazillion dollars, you can often change the law. Or at least the zoning regulations.

You do have a point, of course, but in fact the problem often is that people with a bazillion dollars lobby and coerce politicians to change laws and zoning regulations, so that they could make another bazillion dollars.

> You do have a point, of course, but in fact the problem often is that people with a bazillion dollars lobby and coerce politicians to change laws and zoning regulations, so that they could make another bazillion dollars.

It may not even be the rich who oppose denser development. Here in Arlington, VA, we have a heavy rail system (DC Metro) that runs through two corridors of the county. Housing close the Metro is expensive because of the convenience.

Prior to the arrival of the Metro, Arlington allowed a section of the county called Rosslyn to get high rises, but it was designed initially in a pedestrian hostile way (it's changing nowadays) and was intended as a dumping ground for the GSA. Ugly 1970s and 60s office buildings with no retail sprung up like weeds.

Meanwhile, the Metro was being planned. Arlington saw the wisdom of transit oriented development and wanted the Metro to be built underground along a major thoroughfare, instead of above ground in the median of an interstate. It fought and won that battle and, at great expense, got the Metro to run along Wilson Boulevard. This, over the course of a few decades, drastically changed this corridor. It's now a walkable urban place with high levels of transit use. In my own zipcode, the majority of people commute to work by means other than driving alone. Many households don't own cars, and even many families might only have a single car.

In planning documents about the areas around the new stations, you can see that ordinary folks were opposed to expanding development too far from the stations or too high. They feared becoming Rosslyn, as documented in some of the planning documents Arlington has put online. As a result, you can walk up and down Wilson Boulevard and see very different land uses:

An example in the Ballston neighborhood:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.879883,-77.107849,3a,90y,330...

An example in the Clarendon neighborhood:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.888778,-77.090574,3a,75y,139...

A shot in Rosslyn:

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.896772,-77.072468,3a,75y,178...

As you can see, land use intensity varies greatly despite proximity to the Metro. For added fun, go north or south of these neighborhoods. Notice how within two or so blocks it reverts to single family homes in most places? These could easily be upzoned, sold to developers, and make lots of money for the county and developers. The Metro would love to have additional transit dependent customers as it's going broke. Businesses along Wilson and Clarendon (the main drags) would love extra foot traffic. But they're not zoned for high density. Pure bribery doesn't explain this.

Bribery might explain why it hasn't changed in the modern era though. Modest, 1950s homes sell for over $600,000 or $700,000 regularly depending on the number of bedrooms. $1,000,000 might be a reasonable price if it's got four bedrooms.

Newer construction easily sells for over a million. Depending on the exact location, a one or two bedroom condo will run $400,000 to $500,000. Three or more bedrooms and you're in million dollar territory. We've not yet hit San Francisco prices, but the D.C. area is attempting to get there.

Those neighbourhoods look much nicer than what was my preconception of Washington DC suburbs.

I don't disagree with you at all. There's another contingent, like mine (who doesn't care about a yard), that would be happy to trade my large house for an equivalent sized apartment with 2 guaranteed parking spaces in the middle of a dense city...for the same price.

But cities are ruthlessly expensive, if we were to move even to our nearest city, an apartment of the same size would run 4-5x what our home cost and wouldn't be nearly as nice to live in. Move to Manhattan or SF and we'd be looking at an order of magnitude price difference.

People simply want more personal space, and cities make that expensive.

Fine, but there lifestyle should stop being subsidised.

It would be disingenuous to call the present conditions representative of unfettered market choice. The reality is that the US adopted some market distorting policies in the post WW2 period that gave rise to ubiquitous suburbs. The Home Mortgage Lending Act was one such measure, which granted loans to returning military personnel only in suburban environments.

Then, of course, was the highway building spree to take families further away from the city.

In short, the US manufacturered demand for the suburbs. And now we have a taste for it. So, even though there is clearly demand now, people didn't always prefer the suburbs. Suburban living isn't an intrinsic preference.

People want space, quiet neighbors and good schools. Hence the burbs.

Even in NYC, if you aren't in Manhattan or parts of Brooklyn, you need a car. And unless you're poor and lack options or rich and can throw money at the problems, people clear out of Manhattan when child #1 arrives.

"build up, not out. share spaces like parks ..." This was essentially the idea of Le Corbusier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier

They tried it around Paris and other cities in the mid of the last century, and failed miserably.

How did it fail?

basically they became ghettos. One of the problems is that real estate cost pressure eats away at the green zones.

Singapore seems to work fairly well under that principle. Perhaps you need a certain ruthlessness?

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