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Comment by mcjiggerlog | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has lived in the UK, France and Spain - the whole concept of it being normal that "downtown" is grim is really strange. Over here the city centre is typically the nicest (and most expensive) part of the city to live in.

I guess it stems from the relative ages of cities in North America vs Europe. A typical city centre in Europe would have been the entirety of the city at some point and is therefore where the most historic buildings, oldest businesses etc. are located. Whereas in NA, cities are a lot younger and grew much faster meaning that is not so much the case.

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cities are a lot younger and grew much faster meaning that is not so much the case.

Melbourne, in Australia, is a counter example. It started in 1835, it was the centre of the fastest land grab in history, then the population doubled in ten years during the 1850s gold rush. And today the city centre is world famous.

The local wisdom tends to support the conclusion of the article. The Premier in the early 1990s (who would be called the Governor in the US) committed to making the city a place for people to live, and started changing the laws about planning, business hours and so on that were preventing that. He quickly lost office, because the rural parts of the state viewed him as "the Premier of Melbourne", but the city kept improving.

This is most definitely not a counter example. Melbourne is almost 200 years old, it is very young compared to the European cities being cited. You also point out how the city was rough until someone decided to do something about it 20 years ago.

The OP I assume would refer to NYC as a 'fast growing city' (around 400 years old) compared to somewhere like London or Madrid which have both been there for over 2,000 years.

NA cities actually did grow much faster. Melbourne's "doubling in ten years" during the 1850's doesn't even come close. Chicago, for example, grew 6x in the 1840s, almost 4x in the 1850s, and 2.5x in the 1860s.

Well, Boston, NYC, amongst others in the USA have nice downtowns. Not to mention Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa and other cities in Canada.

Native New Yorkers absolutely looooooove Time Square...

Times Square is not downtown new york.

Union Square is the heart of NYC. Almost all lines intersect there, (the L from Brooklyn as well), and it is next to (within 10mins walk) of East Village, West Village, Lower East Side, Chelsea, FlatIron, Kips Bay, etc, which are the most interesting parts of NYC and have both commercial and residential buildings

It used to be a dangerous dump 20 years ago, and now it is awesome.

Ehhhh, that area is a bit B&T at night...

Really? I lived close by and never got a B&T vibe from Union Square.

>> "...the Union Square area."

The Union Squarea?

For anyone else that didn't know: a bridge-and-tunnel (B&T) person is one who lives in the suburbs and is perceived as unsophisticated.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_and_tunnel

I'm perpetually amazed at what people can be condescending about.

It's interesting that this idea seems to be somewhat pervasive though. The north shore / North Sydney for example is often seen as pompous and never wanting to 'head across the bridge' to attend events etc. Again with the same separation that you need to be on trains/tunnels/bridges to cross the harbour.

Same in many places. "South of the river" in Londen, "Noord" in Amsterdam.

Maybe B&T was an insult 30 years ago but since some of the most trendy neighborhoods in NYC today are in Brooklyn....yeah not so much.

Toronto downtown is nice but it is the only exciting, interesting party of the city. I wish some of the surrounding areas had their own centres that didn't revolve around a mall or a Wal-Mart (Scarborough, Etobicoke, Mississauga, Vaughan)

Vancouver. Even some of our smaller cities have pretty OK downtowns (Kingston, Nanaimo...)

Liveable downtowns are definitely a matter of policy, not history.

> A typical city centre in Europe would have been the entirety of the city at some point and is therefore where the most historic buildings, oldest businesses etc. are located.

Well, the same is true in NA in lots of places, but I think the difference is something else: historic buildings imply that you can't just tear them down and build something nicer, and the oldest buildings in cities I've lived in, here in the US, are not the nicest ones; rather the reverse.

As someone who spent most of my formative years in the southern US, my expectation is that the nicest part of town is the one that was just built, and older streets and buildings are literally the ones where people have to be if they don't have the money to scrub that away and build shiny new things, or just move to newer places. This is quite a difference even from the northeastern US, so I can only imagine how stark the difference must be from the US to Europe. Oddly, while I spent a few days in Dublin a few years back for an interview, I don't remember noticing everything looking old and run down there.

Interesting, here in London for example, the older the house the more money it's worth generally. Actually, it's kind of a reverse bell curve, with the lowest point falling for buildings built during the 50s/60s.

The most desirable houses are typically Georgian / Victorian town houses.

Europe never had the white flight that a lot of American cities had.

Who would the white Europeans be running away from?

Nowdays they might flee from muslim immigrants, just suppose.

Yes, but they mostly live in the suburbs of cities like Paris, while the inner city remains affluent and white. Do Europeans just do a more effective job of keeping poor people and ethnic minorities from moving into the inner cities in the first place?

The suburbs didn't exist when people started immigrating to cities like Detroit.

A lot of continental inner-cities (Paris, most Italian towns) were already too expensive way before "immigration waves" were even possible. In that sense, newcomers never got a chance. Any town that has existed since Roman times has had two thousand years in which to solidify the link between location and social status, to a point that will likely survive anything bar catastrophic events.

No one, which I believe is his point?

It's not a coincidence that curry is so popular in Britain.

It might still happen for a variety of reasons. I live in London, and not all boroughs/districts are equal. Compare posh Kensington on the western edge of the London Underground Zone 1 with Whitechapel and Hackney at the eastern edge and you'll see a massive difference. Interestingly both areas are seeing a huge increase in ethnic diversity, but in Kensington it's the ultra-wealthy.

Europe is not a country.

Many Western European countries like the Netherlands we have seen the same pattern of the white middle classes fleeing to new suburbs whilst the old city neighborhoods got taken over by newcomers.

And it is still how things are in many cities. Whilst the city center may have been revived and gentrified and looking all lovely and touristy, the surrounding neighborhoods are often dominated by poor immigrants, whilst the original lower middle class and working class lives in the suburbs.

The only options in the city for the ordinary "white" families are neighborhoods they can't afford and neighborhoods they don't want to live in. Sounds familiar?

Except that that is not entirely true. Although not as abandoned as many American city centers, the downtown areas of many a European city was pretty awful during the 80s.

I personally live in a nice picturesque gentrified part of the center of Amsterdam. The building I live in still has the front they added to the original porch to keep out the junkies and homeless in the 80s...

Taking back the city center is a process of the last few decades. The main difference is that there was something worth taking back.

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