7 ms·

This is a big deal, unfortunately. I am super onboard with the urbanization movement, but cost of a 3-4 bedroom living space is not cheap in an urban area. I re

by pnathan 11y ago

This is a big deal, unfortunately. I am super onboard with the urbanization movement, but cost of a 3-4 bedroom living space is not cheap in an urban area. I really don't want to raise my kids in a suburb - my wife and I grew up in that environment and it was unpleasant. But we may be forced that direction just to afford to have enough space for 1-2 children. :-( edit to add some color commentary: I would mostly like to sell my car and not buy another one; I would like to use public transit everywhere; I would like to live in a high-density area with 6+ story residences. Many benefits accrue in these situations; I don't understand the pleasure or enjoyment of living outside of that kind of environment - having done so myself, the more urban the area, the better living it is.

keehun 11y ago
Just curious, what did you and your wife find unpleasant about growing up in the suburbs? I grew up in a suburb and loved it very much.
- pnathan 11y ago
  We were dependant on our parents to do anything or go anywhere that was more than a few blocks away. No infrastructure for biking existed worth talking about. Sidewalks were sketchy; no one expected pedestrians. Visiting friends was hard, and depended on parental coordination. Any sort of outing was a Big Deal; kids had to be wrapped up and put in the car, then we all had to trundle off somewhere, then the reverse had to be put into motion. A transit system in a dense urban area makes these issues go away. Slightly location dependant - there were no museums of quality[0] within hundreds of miles; same for zoos, libraries[1], symphonies, operas, plays, etc. Density drives tax base and demand; any reasonable urban area has all of the above. Suburbs, as a common rule of thumb, strive for conformity and blandness. This has held true since the white flight era in the US[2]. So you wind up with really crappy aesthetics, and uninteresting options for engagement. A very common result is the alienated suburban teenager bored out of their skull. We were, to greater and lesser degrees. Now, as adults, we both recognize several serious problems with the suburb/exurb system in the US. 1. It's not sustainable economically. You have a huge infrastructure system on a low density population; hard choices start coming out to play because of the cost of maintenance, which generally was capitalized by developers, but the opex is borne by the government; local politics in the US has evidently generally shifted to anti-tax Republican demographics; with fewer people supporting the burden, issues come out to play. So the net result is life is getting worse there. 2. It's not environmentally sustainable. Efficiency rises significantly as you start densifying the region; new services become possible at critical masses - one of the big ones is transit. This drives pollution down, decreases oil use, etc, etc. 3. It promotes closed-mindedness; without having to deal with the breadth of humanity, you don't have to cope with all of the reality involved, leading to really terrible policy decisions. Forcing contact with The Other and humanizing them tends to work out better in the long run. Referencing current politics: https://twitter.com/nycjim/status/687997269258407937 https://twitter.com/nycjim/status/687997269258407937 . NYC's great strength is having to deal with other people. Anyway, if you take some time to look carefully at the "new urbanist" movement, these themes are repeated over and over again. It's not democrat, republican, libertarian, or green; but it recognizes many of the issues those viewpoints present. I'm not ashamed to say that I'd rather live in Manhattan, NYC than in any arbitrary suburb I know of (Now, if I could afford that in a residence I could raise kids in... :( ). [0] Local History Museum is what was available. [1] Less of a problem as a young child, much more of a problem as a teen. [2] Note that "urban" is often an appellation on something meaning "black people". I wouldn't actually call suburbs racist by design, but I would invite quiet contemplation of race and environment in the US.
- ACow_Adonis 11y ago
  Not American (aus), and not op, but I grew up and moved between semi-rural, suburban, and now am in a city. Now, the human being is a pretty adaptable creature that normalises what they experience every day, so a lot of these are things I only noticed after moving from environment to environment. I think I got just as much additional activity time in the rural setting as I did growing up in suburbia, because trips to playground or ovals or swimming pools or tennis courts all involved car trips. Ditto shopping, movies, etc. Of course, now I'm an adult, I know commute times need to be added as a downside. Where the suburbs turned into "hell on earth" was during the teen years, when you're struggling for independence/stimulation, but you're stuck in the teenage equivalent of solitary confinement. The internet came just in time for me. As I've said before, it all just seemed normal then, but as I moved around, I learnt that there were places in the world you could walk to the supermarket/movies/library. Where buses came more than once every 2 hours and didn't involve a half hour wait to get what was notionally a few km's down the road. Where your friends actually lived close enough for you to visit. And those facilities where you had to get into the car? Well now they are just down the road too and you can walk, or catch the sub-15 minute public transport straight there. We're definitely going to give the urban child thing a go if we have children. Though part of that will necessarily mean a change of attitude. We no longer want a 4 bedroom house with a backyard for kids, primarily because large parts of what we would of tried to have gained by having such space can instead be outsourced to community facilities instead.
- matwood 11y ago
  After reading many replies it sounds like many people lived in horrible places, not just that they were suburbs. I live in what would be considered suburb now and would have loved to be here as a kid. A river with docks is only a block or so away. There are multiple fields and parks. There are tennis courts and a pool. Sidewalks also blanket the whole neighborhood which you can follow up to the closest grocery store. If I wanted to go to the city I have to drive, that is a downside. But, when I was working from home full time I was debating on getting a golf cart and seeing how long I would go without driving my car.
  - akgerber 11y ago
    America has been building suburbs for 100 years so there's a lot of variation— I grew up in a walkable streetcar suburb of Milwaukee that was right next to the city and looked like many urban neighborhoods, with narrow streets and sidewalks and a decent mix of multifamily housing. Most people still drove for transportation, but it wasn't nearly as mandatory as in many post-1970 suburbs.
  - Grishnakh 11y ago
    As the other poster said, there's a lot of variation in "suburbs" in America. I recently lived a township in northern NJ, which effectively was a "suburb" in the NYC metro area. There was a convenience store just down the street (a 1-minute walk away), a high school right next door, a small river and a park a few minutes away, a "downtown" area less than 10 minutes' walk away, etc. A bug stop at the end of my little street took me to Manhattan in less than 60 minutes. If I wanted to go to other nearby towns, however, I needed a car because the buses were too slow, though a fair number of (poorer) people did use them for that. The houses were really close together and typically quite old; mine was built in 1930. Heating costs were high though because those old houses aren't well-insulated (and that house had been renovated with new windows so it wasn't too horrible, unlike some others). There were lots of sidewalks everywhere, though they tended to be in rough shape in places because of all the salt in the winter; they had to replace them a lot. I also lived in the Phoenix metro area for quite a while. That was totally different. No shopping within walking distance at all, if you were lucky there might be some kind of park near your development, but older neighborhoods usually didn't have that. HOAs were commonplace and horribly run. There were sidewalks everywhere, but they were only good for walking around the neighborhood to get some exercise, not for actually going anywhere. Any place you might want to go required a car, and public transit was really awful. There were buses, but they tended to go to major destinations, and suburban housing developments weren't among them. Honestly, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we had much higher-density housing with mixed commercial/residential areas so it was easy to walk to nearby eateries and convenience stores. The problem is the rent prices are always much too high, and I'd like to see some kind of political action to deal with that. I suspect the culprit is a combination of real estate speculation and insufficient supply caused by zoning laws.
rayiner 11y ago
I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house with a four person family. My downtown Baltimore apartment is larger.
- soylentcola 11y ago
  OT: /waves from Patterson Park
mdorazio 11y ago
What about suburban family life was unpleasant? I'm curious what you think the upsides are for raising kids in a city, which I personally think is a bad idea. Kids need an environment where they can go outside and be kids without all the difficulties a city adds.
- techsupporter 11y ago
  I'm not pnathan, but I grew up in the suburbs and am never going back; my spouse and I have raised our kid in the city for several years now. Why didn't I like it? - The sameness. Every house on the streets where I grew up looked virtually identical, as did the neighborhood where I bought my first house. It took owning a house in the 'burbs to remember how much I didn't like the cookie-cutter aspect. Doubly so for the fact that virtually every suburban neighborhood built in the past 20 years has an HOA, which I detest. - The distance. Going to anything, even just a Wal-Mart to get groceries, meant a minimum of 10 minutes just to get out of the "residential area" and make it to the "commercial area." The one corner store we had was usually under pressure from the city government and nearby residents to close down because of, allegedly, too much traffic. - Minimal cultural differences. Yes, my hometown had a Western Days Weekend and an Old Town District but that was it. The town where I bought my first house (this was a bad idea, in retrospect) didn't even bother with that. Everything else in both places was strip shopping centers or Wal-Mart or paved six-lane roadways to get people out of town to the big city for work and then back into town to get to sleep at night. Going to do anything, like a zoo or museum or a baseball game, meant a half-hour minimum drive. There are lots of suburbs in north Texas, let's say, that exist solely for zoning authority. You mentioned being outside and being kids. The city where I live now, Seattle, has a massive parks system. My tiny house on a tiny lot in the city still has about 1,600sqft of outdoor area to play in and a huge tree. Even the apartments we've rented have a courtyard and are near to parks and sidewalks and places to play. It's great for people whose kids are outdoor types; mine prefers to be inside with books and puzzles and computers. What I like about raising our kid in the city: Exposure to new and different ideas; most cities aren't self-selected to be the same as each other. A varying cityscape that isn't just the same houses feeding to the same street and to the same businesses. More cultural and entertainment options are close at hand. Being able to live in a more environmentally sensitive way (my kid doesn't want to learn how to drive and prefers to take transit and has made compost and recycle separating into a game).
bcook 11y ago
Deriving that the suburbs (or anywhere) are "unpleasant" from such little information is illogical and presumptuous. Although it's just as anecdotally short-sighted as your conclusion, I have found that it is not where you are, but who you are with that majoritively affects your emotional perspective. Edit: I have lived in the "woods" my entire life, so I have no dog in this fight. Do we seriously support shitty logic like the OP mentions? Anecdatae is not data.
- pnathan 11y ago
  > : I have lived in the "woods" my entire life, so I have no dog in this fight. Do we seriously support shitty logic like the OP mentions? Anecdatae is not data. If you've lived in the woods, you have no anecdata to support your conclusion either. However, there have been a raft of papers and other material related to governance in the past 15 years that describe the benefits of urban living and how to make it better. Further, the historical reality is that seeing Nature as better in the West is a strictly post-1800 phenomenon, being based out of the Romantic philosophical movement ( http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness... ). Historically, nature was untamed; the proper place for man was in the cities. Look: we have n billion people on this planet. Do you want them all up in the woods, paving it over, adding gas stations, walmarts, and so forth - polluting it with french fries, used condoms, and the detrius of modern society? Or would it be better for us to build a sustainable world only in the cities, and leave the woods to go walking in for refreshment and experience? I choose the second.
  - bcook 11y ago
    Did you miss the part where I acknowledged that relying on my anecdatae was as fallacious as your conclusion that "the suburbs are unpleasant"? Our limited data set is not enough to make any useful conclusions. My only gripe is making decisions with obviously shitty data. Blanket statements are ignorant. Stop being so absolutist.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - 11y ago
rplst8 11y ago
Not everyone feels this way though. I had a fairly rural upbringing in the northeast and I long for a less dense, no traffic, laid back way of life. Unfortunately, our culture has chosen to forget that way of life. However, one aspect of living a rural lifestyle is that life without a car is almost impossible in this day in age. I personally think urbanization brings with it more problems that it solves. While they are more social perhaps, cities are anything but sustainable and aren't a natural way for humans to live with nature. Cities are a breeding ground for man made disaster and are IMHO one of the reason the fear of terrorism is winning out over personal freedom.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  I'm not sure why you'd say that cities are unsustainable. All the folks who research this stuff seem to agree that urban living is more sustainable; urbanites tend to use less resources every way you cut it. They drive less, their houses are smaller, their houses leak less energy because they typically have fewer surfaces exposed to the outside environment, they can rely more on common infrastructure for moving resources around instead of having to have everything moved around by truck, etc etc. I'm also not convinced you can really blame urbanites for the fear of terrorism. Cities might be the preferred target for terrorist attacks, but at least in the USA people it's rural folks who tend to be more worried about terrorism while urbanites tend to take a more balanced view of the subject.
  - abalashov 11y ago
    Suburbs also make kids totally dependent on their parents to get to activities, friends, etc. [Highly urban-oriented personality here, decidedly with you in general ...] Here, a purely rationalistic and quantitative analysis might not back this up. It's not necessarily clear that there are fewer vehicle-miles travelled and fossil fuels expended in stocking every corner grocery in a dense urban metropolis vs. one 3000-mile salad backhauled to a Walmart SuperCenter to which everyone within a 10 mi radius has to drive. Pound for pound, the latter approach might actually be more cost and resource-efficient in a lot of cases. But of course, there's more to life than robotic efficiency.
abalashov 11y ago
As a native Eastern European (who has been in the US most of his life), I'm still occasionally flabbergasted at the paucity of 3+ bedroom apartment options in US cities, as well as how crappy the <= 2 BR options are. It seems there's a cultural expectation that once there's more than two of you, you move out to the suburbs and buy a freestanding house. Like you, I have absolutely zero intention of following that script. Central/Eastern European apartments often had a small foyer, a narrow hall way, and doors along the perimeter into ~2-3 rooms--sometimes more. The hallway usually had closet space. One room was generally somewhat bigger than the others and understood to be a "living room". Kitchens were separate rooms and often had a door of their own, which effectively meant they were an additional room, since one could work, study and socialise at the kitchen table. Overall, there was much more compartmentalisation and walls, which I think is essential if you have children, but even if you don't. Interestingly, I wouldn't say their area was much bigger than 1-2 BR apartments typically found in America--the floor plan was just configured much more rationally. Such apartments were fairly close to table stakes in former socialist bloc countries, as well as elsewhere in central Europe. For instance, my wife and I live with our three young children in a 2 BR ~1200 sq ft. unit in downtown Atlanta--definitely against the grain. It's the typical American apartment layout, a poor and awkward imitation of a house; front door that opens into an "open plan" consolidated living room and kitchen environment, and two bedrooms where "private life" is said to take place. What would make far more sense to me would be to take that same 1200 sq ft. and dump the second bathroom and the unnecessarily large walk-in closet in the master bedroom. That would certainly provide for a third--if small--room that could be used as a study, which would literally make all the difference for allowing me to get at least some work done at home. And we don't need a giant "TV room"; what we need are walls, noooks and crannies. It's wasteful and pointless; it leaves us with two bedrooms that are really only good for sleeping, and one common area in which all five of us have to coexist much of the time. Might as well just get a large studio at that point. As I see it, much of the problem with "open plan" offices carries over into "open plan" floor plans. I don't understand Americans' obsession with and preference for this design. It's perfectly possible for families to live comfortably in a central urban place with relatively little square footage--if it were designed more sensibly and with some of the virtues that otherwise can be found only in a freestanding house.
- 11y ago
Pxtl 11y ago
They made much smaller 3/4 bedroom homes before Ww2 and the ascent of the car. Many of them lacked driveways. You can pack a lot of homes like that into a small space and then get good LRT service to a nearby corner. Cities were built for that before - look at old industrial towns like Pittsburgh and Flint. If we can salvage those old industrial cities, there's great opportunity there for transit-oriented living without giving up single-family homes. I live in Hamilton, which is the Pittsburgh of Canada, and there is great promise here for the "have it all" urban lifestyle.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  You don't even have to give up driveways and garages; it's entirely possible to build townhouses (row houses) with a 1-car garage on the ground floor. I lived in one of those years ago: the "main floor" (as seen from the front) was really the 2nd floor, and the basement floor had a 1-car garage which opened out to the back. It's entirely possible to build lots of these in cities and get a good amount of living space plus room for a car. Just look at the "brownstones" in Manhattan NYC; those things had tons of room in them, but were narrow so you could pack a lot in a given space. They had so much room that these days most of them are split up into 2-4 separate units and rented out.

by pnathan 11y ago

keehun 11y ago

Just curious, what did you and your wife find unpleasant about growing up in the suburbs? I grew up in a suburb and loved it very much.

pnathan 11y ago
We were dependant on our parents to do anything or go anywhere that was more than a few blocks away. No infrastructure for biking existed worth talking about. Sidewalks were sketchy; no one expected pedestrians. Visiting friends was hard, and depended on parental coordination. Any sort of outing was a Big Deal; kids had to be wrapped up and put in the car, then we all had to trundle off somewhere, then the reverse had to be put into motion. A transit system in a dense urban area makes these issues go away. Slightly location dependant - there were no museums of quality[0] within hundreds of miles; same for zoos, libraries[1], symphonies, operas, plays, etc. Density drives tax base and demand; any reasonable urban area has all of the above. Suburbs, as a common rule of thumb, strive for conformity and blandness. This has held true since the white flight era in the US[2]. So you wind up with really crappy aesthetics, and uninteresting options for engagement. A very common result is the alienated suburban teenager bored out of their skull. We were, to greater and lesser degrees. Now, as adults, we both recognize several serious problems with the suburb/exurb system in the US. 1. It's not sustainable economically. You have a huge infrastructure system on a low density population; hard choices start coming out to play because of the cost of maintenance, which generally was capitalized by developers, but the opex is borne by the government; local politics in the US has evidently generally shifted to anti-tax Republican demographics; with fewer people supporting the burden, issues come out to play. So the net result is life is getting worse there. 2. It's not environmentally sustainable. Efficiency rises significantly as you start densifying the region; new services become possible at critical masses - one of the big ones is transit. This drives pollution down, decreases oil use, etc, etc. 3. It promotes closed-mindedness; without having to deal with the breadth of humanity, you don't have to cope with all of the reality involved, leading to really terrible policy decisions. Forcing contact with The Other and humanizing them tends to work out better in the long run. Referencing current politics: https://twitter.com/nycjim/status/687997269258407937 https://twitter.com/nycjim/status/687997269258407937 . NYC's great strength is having to deal with other people. Anyway, if you take some time to look carefully at the "new urbanist" movement, these themes are repeated over and over again. It's not democrat, republican, libertarian, or green; but it recognizes many of the issues those viewpoints present. I'm not ashamed to say that I'd rather live in Manhattan, NYC than in any arbitrary suburb I know of (Now, if I could afford that in a residence I could raise kids in... :( ). [0] Local History Museum is what was available. [1] Less of a problem as a young child, much more of a problem as a teen. [2] Note that "urban" is often an appellation on something meaning "black people". I wouldn't actually call suburbs racist by design, but I would invite quiet contemplation of race and environment in the US.
ACow_Adonis 11y ago
Not American (aus), and not op, but I grew up and moved between semi-rural, suburban, and now am in a city. Now, the human being is a pretty adaptable creature that normalises what they experience every day, so a lot of these are things I only noticed after moving from environment to environment. I think I got just as much additional activity time in the rural setting as I did growing up in suburbia, because trips to playground or ovals or swimming pools or tennis courts all involved car trips. Ditto shopping, movies, etc. Of course, now I'm an adult, I know commute times need to be added as a downside. Where the suburbs turned into "hell on earth" was during the teen years, when you're struggling for independence/stimulation, but you're stuck in the teenage equivalent of solitary confinement. The internet came just in time for me. As I've said before, it all just seemed normal then, but as I moved around, I learnt that there were places in the world you could walk to the supermarket/movies/library. Where buses came more than once every 2 hours and didn't involve a half hour wait to get what was notionally a few km's down the road. Where your friends actually lived close enough for you to visit. And those facilities where you had to get into the car? Well now they are just down the road too and you can walk, or catch the sub-15 minute public transport straight there. We're definitely going to give the urban child thing a go if we have children. Though part of that will necessarily mean a change of attitude. We no longer want a 4 bedroom house with a backyard for kids, primarily because large parts of what we would of tried to have gained by having such space can instead be outsourced to community facilities instead.
matwood 11y ago
After reading many replies it sounds like many people lived in horrible places, not just that they were suburbs. I live in what would be considered suburb now and would have loved to be here as a kid. A river with docks is only a block or so away. There are multiple fields and parks. There are tennis courts and a pool. Sidewalks also blanket the whole neighborhood which you can follow up to the closest grocery store. If I wanted to go to the city I have to drive, that is a downside. But, when I was working from home full time I was debating on getting a golf cart and seeing how long I would go without driving my car.
- akgerber 11y ago
  America has been building suburbs for 100 years so there's a lot of variation— I grew up in a walkable streetcar suburb of Milwaukee that was right next to the city and looked like many urban neighborhoods, with narrow streets and sidewalks and a decent mix of multifamily housing. Most people still drove for transportation, but it wasn't nearly as mandatory as in many post-1970 suburbs.
- Grishnakh 11y ago
  As the other poster said, there's a lot of variation in "suburbs" in America. I recently lived a township in northern NJ, which effectively was a "suburb" in the NYC metro area. There was a convenience store just down the street (a 1-minute walk away), a high school right next door, a small river and a park a few minutes away, a "downtown" area less than 10 minutes' walk away, etc. A bug stop at the end of my little street took me to Manhattan in less than 60 minutes. If I wanted to go to other nearby towns, however, I needed a car because the buses were too slow, though a fair number of (poorer) people did use them for that. The houses were really close together and typically quite old; mine was built in 1930. Heating costs were high though because those old houses aren't well-insulated (and that house had been renovated with new windows so it wasn't too horrible, unlike some others). There were lots of sidewalks everywhere, though they tended to be in rough shape in places because of all the salt in the winter; they had to replace them a lot. I also lived in the Phoenix metro area for quite a while. That was totally different. No shopping within walking distance at all, if you were lucky there might be some kind of park near your development, but older neighborhoods usually didn't have that. HOAs were commonplace and horribly run. There were sidewalks everywhere, but they were only good for walking around the neighborhood to get some exercise, not for actually going anywhere. Any place you might want to go required a car, and public transit was really awful. There were buses, but they tended to go to major destinations, and suburban housing developments weren't among them. Honestly, I think we'd all be a lot better off if we had much higher-density housing with mixed commercial/residential areas so it was easy to walk to nearby eateries and convenience stores. The problem is the rent prices are always much too high, and I'd like to see some kind of political action to deal with that. I suspect the culprit is a combination of real estate speculation and insufficient supply caused by zoning laws.

rayiner 11y ago

I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house with a four person family. My downtown Baltimore apartment is larger.

soylentcola 11y ago
OT: /waves from Patterson Park

mdorazio 11y ago

What about suburban family life was unpleasant? I'm curious what you think the upsides are for raising kids in a city, which I personally think is a bad idea. Kids need an environment where they can go outside and be kids without all the difficulties a city adds.

techsupporter 11y ago
I'm not pnathan, but I grew up in the suburbs and am never going back; my spouse and I have raised our kid in the city for several years now. Why didn't I like it? - The sameness. Every house on the streets where I grew up looked virtually identical, as did the neighborhood where I bought my first house. It took owning a house in the 'burbs to remember how much I didn't like the cookie-cutter aspect. Doubly so for the fact that virtually every suburban neighborhood built in the past 20 years has an HOA, which I detest. - The distance. Going to anything, even just a Wal-Mart to get groceries, meant a minimum of 10 minutes just to get out of the "residential area" and make it to the "commercial area." The one corner store we had was usually under pressure from the city government and nearby residents to close down because of, allegedly, too much traffic. - Minimal cultural differences. Yes, my hometown had a Western Days Weekend and an Old Town District but that was it. The town where I bought my first house (this was a bad idea, in retrospect) didn't even bother with that. Everything else in both places was strip shopping centers or Wal-Mart or paved six-lane roadways to get people out of town to the big city for work and then back into town to get to sleep at night. Going to do anything, like a zoo or museum or a baseball game, meant a half-hour minimum drive. There are lots of suburbs in north Texas, let's say, that exist solely for zoning authority. You mentioned being outside and being kids. The city where I live now, Seattle, has a massive parks system. My tiny house on a tiny lot in the city still has about 1,600sqft of outdoor area to play in and a huge tree. Even the apartments we've rented have a courtyard and are near to parks and sidewalks and places to play. It's great for people whose kids are outdoor types; mine prefers to be inside with books and puzzles and computers. What I like about raising our kid in the city: Exposure to new and different ideas; most cities aren't self-selected to be the same as each other. A varying cityscape that isn't just the same houses feeding to the same street and to the same businesses. More cultural and entertainment options are close at hand. Being able to live in a more environmentally sensitive way (my kid doesn't want to learn how to drive and prefers to take transit and has made compost and recycle separating into a game).

bcook 11y ago

Deriving that the suburbs (or anywhere) are "unpleasant" from such little information is illogical and presumptuous. Although it's just as anecdotally short-sighted as your conclusion, I have found that it is not where you are, but who you are with that majoritively affects your emotional perspective. Edit: I have lived in the "woods" my entire life, so I have no dog in this fight. Do we seriously support shitty logic like the OP mentions? Anecdatae is not data.

pnathan 11y ago
> : I have lived in the "woods" my entire life, so I have no dog in this fight. Do we seriously support shitty logic like the OP mentions? Anecdatae is not data. If you've lived in the woods, you have no anecdata to support your conclusion either. However, there have been a raft of papers and other material related to governance in the past 15 years that describe the benefits of urban living and how to make it better. Further, the historical reality is that seeing Nature as better in the West is a strictly post-1800 phenomenon, being based out of the Romantic philosophical movement ( http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness... ). Historically, nature was untamed; the proper place for man was in the cities. Look: we have n billion people on this planet. Do you want them all up in the woods, paving it over, adding gas stations, walmarts, and so forth - polluting it with french fries, used condoms, and the detrius of modern society? Or would it be better for us to build a sustainable world only in the cities, and leave the woods to go walking in for refreshment and experience? I choose the second.
- bcook 11y ago
  Did you miss the part where I acknowledged that relying on my anecdatae was as fallacious as your conclusion that "the suburbs are unpleasant"? Our limited data set is not enough to make any useful conclusions. My only gripe is making decisions with obviously shitty data. Blanket statements are ignorant. Stop being so absolutist.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- 11y ago

rplst8 11y ago

Not everyone feels this way though. I had a fairly rural upbringing in the northeast and I long for a less dense, no traffic, laid back way of life. Unfortunately, our culture has chosen to forget that way of life. However, one aspect of living a rural lifestyle is that life without a car is almost impossible in this day in age. I personally think urbanization brings with it more problems that it solves. While they are more social perhaps, cities are anything but sustainable and aren't a natural way for humans to live with nature. Cities are a breeding ground for man made disaster and are IMHO one of the reason the fear of terrorism is winning out over personal freedom.

bunderbunder 11y ago
I'm not sure why you'd say that cities are unsustainable. All the folks who research this stuff seem to agree that urban living is more sustainable; urbanites tend to use less resources every way you cut it. They drive less, their houses are smaller, their houses leak less energy because they typically have fewer surfaces exposed to the outside environment, they can rely more on common infrastructure for moving resources around instead of having to have everything moved around by truck, etc etc. I'm also not convinced you can really blame urbanites for the fear of terrorism. Cities might be the preferred target for terrorist attacks, but at least in the USA people it's rural folks who tend to be more worried about terrorism while urbanites tend to take a more balanced view of the subject.
- abalashov 11y ago
  Suburbs also make kids totally dependent on their parents to get to activities, friends, etc. [Highly urban-oriented personality here, decidedly with you in general ...] Here, a purely rationalistic and quantitative analysis might not back this up. It's not necessarily clear that there are fewer vehicle-miles travelled and fossil fuels expended in stocking every corner grocery in a dense urban metropolis vs. one 3000-mile salad backhauled to a Walmart SuperCenter to which everyone within a 10 mi radius has to drive. Pound for pound, the latter approach might actually be more cost and resource-efficient in a lot of cases. But of course, there's more to life than robotic efficiency.

abalashov 11y ago

As a native Eastern European (who has been in the US most of his life), I'm still occasionally flabbergasted at the paucity of 3+ bedroom apartment options in US cities, as well as how crappy the <= 2 BR options are. It seems there's a cultural expectation that once there's more than two of you, you move out to the suburbs and buy a freestanding house. Like you, I have absolutely zero intention of following that script. Central/Eastern European apartments often had a small foyer, a narrow hall way, and doors along the perimeter into ~2-3 rooms--sometimes more. The hallway usually had closet space. One room was generally somewhat bigger than the others and understood to be a "living room". Kitchens were separate rooms and often had a door of their own, which effectively meant they were an additional room, since one could work, study and socialise at the kitchen table. Overall, there was much more compartmentalisation and walls, which I think is essential if you have children, but even if you don't. Interestingly, I wouldn't say their area was much bigger than 1-2 BR apartments typically found in America--the floor plan was just configured much more rationally. Such apartments were fairly close to table stakes in former socialist bloc countries, as well as elsewhere in central Europe. For instance, my wife and I live with our three young children in a 2 BR ~1200 sq ft. unit in downtown Atlanta--definitely against the grain. It's the typical American apartment layout, a poor and awkward imitation of a house; front door that opens into an "open plan" consolidated living room and kitchen environment, and two bedrooms where "private life" is said to take place. What would make far more sense to me would be to take that same 1200 sq ft. and dump the second bathroom and the unnecessarily large walk-in closet in the master bedroom. That would certainly provide for a third--if small--room that could be used as a study, which would literally make all the difference for allowing me to get at least some work done at home. And we don't need a giant "TV room"; what we need are walls, noooks and crannies. It's wasteful and pointless; it leaves us with two bedrooms that are really only good for sleeping, and one common area in which all five of us have to coexist much of the time. Might as well just get a large studio at that point. As I see it, much of the problem with "open plan" offices carries over into "open plan" floor plans. I don't understand Americans' obsession with and preference for this design. It's perfectly possible for families to live comfortably in a central urban place with relatively little square footage--if it were designed more sensibly and with some of the virtues that otherwise can be found only in a freestanding house.

11y ago

Pxtl 11y ago

They made much smaller 3/4 bedroom homes before Ww2 and the ascent of the car. Many of them lacked driveways. You can pack a lot of homes like that into a small space and then get good LRT service to a nearby corner. Cities were built for that before - look at old industrial towns like Pittsburgh and Flint. If we can salvage those old industrial cities, there's great opportunity there for transit-oriented living without giving up single-family homes. I live in Hamilton, which is the Pittsburgh of Canada, and there is great promise here for the "have it all" urban lifestyle.

Grishnakh 11y ago
You don't even have to give up driveways and garages; it's entirely possible to build townhouses (row houses) with a 1-car garage on the ground floor. I lived in one of those years ago: the "main floor" (as seen from the front) was really the 2nd floor, and the basement floor had a 1-car garage which opened out to the back. It's entirely possible to build lots of these in cities and get a good amount of living space plus room for a car. Just look at the "brownstones" in Manhattan NYC; those things had tons of room in them, but were narrow so you could pack a lot in a given space. They had so much room that these days most of them are split up into 2-4 separate units and rented out.