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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

There is bias here though. They mention that cities with good downtowns have stories histories that people come up with about the planning that went into it. That will happen with every single successful thing. Conversely, nobody wants to take credit for a failure so people are happy to say that a downtown got crappy because of a lack of planning.

Downtowns die because money flows out of the city due to the economy or because the culture transitions to one based on suburbs. There are many people that have no interest in living in an expensive downtown apartment. If you start to lose the small percentage of the population that desires and can afford the downtown lifestyle, it will either on the vine regardless of the amount of planning that goes into them.

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>Downtowns die because money flows out of the city due to the economy

this is true not just of the downtown. Cities die because the money stops. The suburbs don't keep on thriving after the industry collapses

> or because the culture transitions to one based on suburbs

Not enough investment in downtown and urban spaces can be a contributing factor to this. People move to the suburbs because the suburbs are nicer than the urban core, which causes a cascading effect as the urban core empties and becomes even less desirable. If you make downtown a desirable place, you'll stem some of the shift to suburbia.

Culture doesn't just "change", forces shape it. Culture moves towards a suburban, car oriented culture when the local governments pay (at great taxpayer expense) for an overbuilt highway system to quickly get people in and out of it.

The attraction of suburban life vs dense urban downtown would be mostly the same if public transit routes were just as available. (Although I would imagine the availability of easier transportation would certainly increase restaurant & entertainment offerings from outside commuters who don't normally have car access)

Some people prefer their peaceful cookie cut house and desire nothing much to do with the big cities. More often then not it's zoning, job availability, and affordability.

I'd wager what people actually prefer would be wide open fields where everything you see in front of you is yours but they can't afford that, hence they settle on a suburban lawn. Economics drive suburbanization, not any sort of actual human desire. If the economics skew away from the heavy subsidies for suburbs, people stop expanding them.

That's not really true, at least with many people that desire suburbia that I talk to. They want a house in a nice neighborhood with decent restaurants and shopping within a reasonable driving distance.

It's not that common to want wide open fields in front of you. On top of that, it's not that expensive to get a big chunk of land in the middle of nowhere.

Consider what you just said. People clearly aren't that interested in being downtown if all it takes is a better Highway system to let them move out.

What you are describing is a culture that already dislikes being downtown but is only there because the transit sucks. That's not a sign of a healthy downtown.

All it takes is a taxpayer subsidized highway to move out. How much do people want to live in the suburbs? Enough to pay their own way to do so? Including the highways as well as the efficiency cost of eg, electricity and plumbing?

Highways are bidirectional, so they only pull people out of downtowns if they already wanted out, whether it be for financial or personal reasons.

Highways occupy startling amounts of space. For instance, the entire city of Florence takes up the same amount of space as a single cloverleaf interchange in Atlanta: http://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-sid...

The very presence of freeways drives people away because they are noisy eyesores and impediments to local travel. In Seattle, I-5 cuts across the street grid and separates downtown from Capital Hill and First Hill, while the Alaskan Way Viaduct cuts downtown off from the waterfront. If both of these were removed (I-5 could take a bypass route around the Seattle city center using what is now I-405), downtown Seattle would be much more livable and would have better traffic on account of being able to reconnect the street grid.

You don't put a cloverleaf interchange downtown so that comparison is dumb. An international airport takes up way more space and cities still seem to have them. See why that's stupid?

The presence of freeways does not drive away people. If that were true there would be no freeways in any populated location.

If you remove all freeways it would impede people's ability to visit and make the downtown less crowded. Perhaps that's your intention.

You're being extremely reductive here, frankly to a dishonest degree. For regional and national transportation networks, freeways are necessary. Freeways are unnecessary in the city center and do not belong there, just like international airports don't belong in the city center. New York City and San Francisco are completely bypassed by the major interstate freeways, and they are more livable and desirable for that very reason. By way of contrast, Seattle suffers from the presence of I-5 throughout the city center, or the I-5/I-90 interchange in the city center.

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