10 ms·

A major problem I see in the US, compared to basically anywhere else in the world I've lived, is sprawl. Seemingly every other developed country has done a much

• ajmurmann 11y ago
  Zoning rules in the US are one thing I will never understand. Especially since it is very anti market and the US seems to believe on a free market more than most countries. I wonder if it has to do with suburbs of American cities being much more planned than most other city areas. Planned residential areas in Europe suffer from the same problems. Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas?
  • iambenrussell 11y ago
    The main reasons for zoning are cultural. For some reason or another, US households and governments have a greater preference for income segregation (keeping apartments away from wealthy neighborhoods) and "quiet" residential areas. The fears are/were that the natural beauty of certain types of development would be spoiled by low-income housing, factories, and commerce. Of course, as you say, it's very any I - market. People already tend to naturally cluster based on income, level of education, desire for public goods, etc, so it shouldn't be necessary to have such restrictions. It inevitably comes down to money, too, where minimum lot size restrictions shut out potential tenants/owners who can afford the per square foot cost in low quantities but not a large property. These restrictions are supposed to ensure a high enough tax yield per dwelling, but it's in the name of beautification. You could say it all goes back to the car. When it suddenly became much cheaper for low income people to move out of the city center and commute from traditionally rich suburban areas, the rich got scared. Some moved further away, but governments also used zoning laws to make sure to poor stayed in the city, where they belonged.
    • jdavis703 11y ago
      A lot of zoning restrictions were an attempt to circumvent anti-segretation laws for schools and housing through policies such as redlining.
      • unclebucknasty 11y ago
        Bingo. A lot of the configuration is rooted in our racial history. Even sans zoning, black people have chased white people to the suburbs, back downtown again, and basically all over the map. You can't understand American city structure without the context of race relations here.
        • michaelbuddy 11y ago
          You also can't say its all about race either because that would be trying to deliberately mislead.
          • unclebucknasty 11y ago
            Hence the phrase "a lot" vs. "all about".
        • srtjstjsj 11y ago
          "chased" is a strange choice of words here.
          • unclebucknasty 11y ago
            Not to be taken literally. A word chosen to parody the ridiculousness of the overall dynamic. Hoping to evoke a Keystone Cops-on-a-map style mental image.
        • GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
          That's an "interesting" phrasing, but I find it less convincing than the usual "white flight" interpretation.
  • dnautics 11y ago
    Planning is an American tradition since before the Constitution. Territories West of Pennsylvania were organized by surveying, the "township" was a square plot of land of fixed size (6mi square). This is reflected also in the square shaped of counties in many Western states, the squares of Chicago's layout, and the presence of many streets called "base line"
  • CalRobert 11y ago
    In addition to zoning, parking minimums mean that US landscape is mostly asphalt with some buildings sprinkled here and there, instead of actual city. Really, look at satellite photos of a modern American city and it's primarily car infrastructure. http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-parking.html http://humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes-par... http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/04/10/parking-craters-arent-just-ugly-theyre-a-cancer-on-your-citys-downtown/ http://usa.streetsblog.org/2014/04/10/parking-craters-arent-...
    • r00fus 11y ago
      Reminds me of the Treansformers comics where the Autobot computer thought vehicles were the dominant lifeform on the planet...
  • api 11y ago
    The US is in almost all things far less free market than the rhetoric would have you believe, and this is a bipartisan thing. The American right throws free markets under the bus as much as the left, but often for different reasons.
    • bobdole1234 11y ago
      You know how Klingons are always talking about honor? But they're the ones that do all the crazy things that are decidedly less than honorable? That's what Americans do with the free market.
  • AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    > Maybe the US just had more planned instead of grown areas? You don't know the half of it. Suburban sprawl was national policy during the Cold War. The idea was to spread out the population to reduce the damage a nuclear weapon could do. They did it on purpose.
    • nyolfen 11y ago
      source? i was under the impression it had more to do with a convergence of car culture and white flight
      • huac 11y ago
        the argument i've heard is that the highway expansion made it possible to live farther away from cities, and the connection with the nuclear scare is that the highways were constructed with transporting nuclear weapons in mind
      • AnthonyMouse 11y ago
        http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerability.pdf http://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly10/Cold.War.Urban.Vulnerab...
    • srtjstjsj 11y ago
      This is silly. USA is sprawled (and has been since before WW II) because the USA has far more territory (and far more territory per person) than any other temperate-region nation. This happened because the native populations of the USA were far less technologically developed and highly-reproductive until ~18th Century when they got displaced.
• dominotw 11y ago
  I live an American city which has many of the benefits of high density living. But I am also envious of ppl who live in the burbs who don't have to put up with noisy neighbors, const traffic outside your home, high crime rate, not having to walk to train stop on below freezing days, a yard for the dog, place for kids to play ect
  • nommm-nommm 11y ago
    You don't have any access at all to any public parks where the kids can play? In my neighborhood (which wasn't nice) the public parks offered much more than a single yard ever could.
  • deelowe 11y ago
    This is the main reason for sprawl. It's not racism, politics, or any other bs agenda. People like having a yard, a garage, quiet neighbors, small schools, etc... As someone who grew up on 5 acres of land, knew every neighbor I had personally, and never heard a single siren wizz by, I can attest to there being some benefit to that lifestyle.
    • beachstartup 11y ago
      you're describing a rural area, not a suburban one.
      • brandonmenc 11y ago
        Depends. Where I grew up (northwestern PA), there are suburbs where you can get a few acres and city water hookup. We don't consider it truly rural until you have double digit acreage and a water well.
    • alsetmusic 11y ago
      > This is the main reason for sprawl. It's not racism, politics, or any other bs agenda. People like having a yard, a garage, quiet neighbors, small schools, etc... West Berekely has (last time I checked) a 45 ft limit on building heights. They also have deliberate dead ends to discourage driving on side streets. Piedmont forbids multi tenant buildings and has a time limit of two or three days before a citation can be issued for a resident's parked car staying in the same spot. My buddy was openly criticized by his neighbor in Piedmont for the way he managed his lawn, which was not neglected. These are absolutely issues of politics and discouraging undesirables to live elsewhere. This is in East Bay, where we tend to consider ourselves progressive, and it's called NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). The Berkeley tactics are a blatant example of, "It's ok when we do it because we're special."
• ams6110 11y ago
  You can have whatever you want in most places in the US. You can live in a high-density urban areas with good public transit and markets withing walking distance, you can live in suburban settings with supermarkets and strip malls, you can live in rural areas where your nearest neighbor is miles away. Note that most experiments here with forced high-density living (the high-rise public housing most big cities built in the "urban renewal" era), were unmitigated disasters.
  • themgt 11y ago
    The US has very little truly mid-density mixed use space. We are not talking about housing projects. Here's Valparaiso Chile[1]. There are very few places in the US with that medium level of density (parts of Boston and SF definitely qualify), and they are almost universally very expensive. https://pixabay.com/static/uploads/photo/2014/03/26/22/21/valparaiso-299087_960_720.jpg https://pixabay.com/static/uploads/photo/2014/03/26/22/21/va...
    • ktRolster 11y ago
      That looks like a place that has all the negatives of the city (small, cramped apartment living spaces) combined with the negatives of the suburbs (too far away from things)
      • themgt 11y ago
        Not at all. Standard living arrangement was e.g. some friends who rented a 3 bedroom, maybe 1000 sq ft house for $500/month (total, plus maybe $40/m for utilities). It was under a minute walk from two little markets with fresh produce, meat, cheese and beer. A few minutes walk to multiple bars, take-out food, larger markets and restaurants. Health care is also far cheaper / fewer barriers to access. So suddenly someone making $8/hr, 30hr a week can live a quite good quality, car-free middle-class life. That is simply impossible basically anywhere in the United States.
        • wcummings 11y ago
• bane 11y ago
  I kinda agree with you. One thing that was striking to me when I started to travel throughout bits of the rest of the world is how abruptly cities just...stop. Outside of that there's farmland, forests and small villages. In the U.S. it seems there's a slow decrease in density from a city core out dozens of miles; from tall density out to suburbs, then individual developments and maybe around then you'll get the kind of farm environment you'd find in Europe. It's not to say that all of Europe/Asia, or all of the U.S. is the same in this way. But it seems to be a pattern. In the U.S. people try to move away from cities once they can, in Europe people seem to gravitate towards historic centers. I think lots of it has to do with livability. In France it might be convenient to take a daily trip to the local market to get some groceries for dinner -- not much more work than going through the pantry. Density might not be too high, and the environments are pleasant, relaxing and convenient. In the U.S. cities built before the car are better, but can still be a grind. Big swaths of NYC are hard to do daily shopping in for example. Cities built after the car are a mess wholesale and people live far from each other and spread very far out, and the things they need to live are similarly spread everywhere. In Korea, my parents-in-law live in a proper house (not an apartment flat), but a grocery store is a 2 minute walk, and a large commercial center with pretty much every other service you might want is about 5 more. I easily triple my walking-time in Korea even on lazy do-nothing days compared to life in the U.S.
  • atom-morgan 11y ago
    > One thing that was striking to me when I started to travel throughout bits of the rest of the world is how abruptly cities just...stop. Seoul is a perfect example. If you take a train going out of the city you feel like you jump back in time 100 years in a matter of a few minutes.
    • bane 11y ago
      Yeah, it's really weird, huge apartment buildings and then just greenery and farms. If you look back at the final row of buildings it looks like a realization of some sort of "the inevitable wave of progress" metaphor.
    • dba7dba 11y ago
• x0054 11y ago
  I don't see how your comment has any relationship to the actual article. That said, as someone who lived in central Kiev (Ukraine), Chicago, LA, San Diego, and now middle of nowhere off the grid next to Joshua Tree, I would have to say, living away from other people is the best. Maybe it's just me, but I am glad that in US I can still do this. I guess it's also possible in Europe, though there you are looked down upon for doing so and judged to be "part of the problem" by people like you.
  • tomphoolery 11y ago
    It's definitely a good thing that one can do that if they so choose in this country, e.g. living far away from "civilization" and totally off-the-grid. But the real problem, in my opinion, is how the US made it not just possible, but actually easier, to live outside of the city after World War II. The combination of the GI Bill, developments in prefabricated housing construction, and the automobile allowed for the development of the sprawling suburbs that dominate the American residential market. But none of this would have been possible without the intimate cooperation of politicians, who used this as a means of benefiting their own careers. These politicians allowed almost every white person to own a brand new house and brand new car, with tax subsidies and kickbacks all the way down. A lot of people took this opportunity to give themselves and their families a better life, and moved out to the suburbs. It continues today in my hometown of Philadelphia, where I still live. My friends and co-workers who are older all consistently move outside of the city, like my parents and their parents did before them, when they have children. This movement to the suburbs today is no longer caused by political intervention, but rather by the terrible school system that continues to be underfunded, which is primarily the effect of the richest Philadelphians moving outside of the city to raise their families (and pay taxes to the surrounding communities). It's no wonder there's such a major divide between people who "have" and people who "have not", or why the schools are so terrible and the transportation infrastructure is outdated by over 50 years. Perhaps if my generation chooses to stay in the city limits when we settle down and raise families, our kids won't have to deal with such dangerous and depressing environments. On the other hand, I genuinely enjoy getting away from people and being out in the wilderness. Being off-grid sounds really interesting, and something I've always wanted to try in my life, just to see if it was feasible and comfortable. I'm not coming down on you for living your life the way you want to live it in any way. I think you would agree with me that if land around you suddenly became very valuable and apartment towers started going up, you'd feel a little unnerved right? Living off-grid, in my opinion, is not the problem. The problem is people who want to take a beautiful place and build it into a haven for human environmental destruction.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• onewaystreet 11y ago
  > Seemingly every other developed country has done a much better job of having the vast majority of people live in at least medium-density areas That's because the US has the most habitable land of any country. Russia, Canada and China are all technically larger but most of their population lives in their small habitable areas. The other European countries are not much larger than most US states.
  • CalRobert 11y ago
    This is a dubious claim - similar to the falsehood trotted out about how America can't do public transport because it's bigger than European countries. The size of the country isn't playing in to people's commute distances. The scale of infrastructure within cities and towns does, though. If your zoning laws mean that the nearest place to buy a box of cereal is 2 miles from your house, and for that matter if density restrictions, height maximums, and parking minimums mean you have relatively few houses per acre, your city (to use the term generously) is not going to achieve anything resembling medium density.
    • onewaystreet 11y ago
      > This is a dubious claim There were other factors as well like car culture and white flight. Until the last decade living in cities was something anyone wealthy enough avoided because of the high crime rates.
      • gozur88 11y ago
        It's starting to head that way again.
• brbsix 11y ago
  Maybe it wasn't the wisest idea for the state to fund an Interstate Highways System and all it's associated infrastructure 50+ years ago. I've always wondered what the U.S. would look like had we not taken that route. I suspect the sprawl would have been massively curtailed and our lives would be much more harmonious. Who knows, maybe we'd be taking cross-country trips in hyperloops instead of automobiles?
  • dinkumthinkum 11y ago
    No, having an Interstate Highway system is a good thing. I don't know if not having one would have led to a communal hippy utopia or not but if it I certainly wouldn't want to live there. :)
  • wcummings 11y ago
    Highways are good for fighting wars.
    • angersock 11y ago
      This. There's a very good reason the system looks and acts like it does.
    • CapitalistCartr 11y ago
      And that is why its named the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
    • tormeh 11y ago
      Exhibit one: The autobahn.
  • alphapapa 11y ago
    I suspect the sprawl would have been massively curtailed and our lives would be much more harmonious. Harmonious? Do you not have neighbors? It's impossible to have a moment's peace in even a suburban environment. Between cars driving around with absurdly powerful subwoofers making their presence literally felt for a quarter-mile everywhere they go, loud truck engines and mufflers made purposefully loud, incessant backup beepers even in the middle of the night, neighbors with no respect for other people, cheaply built apartments, dogs barking...the list goes on and on. Surely ancient Rome was noisy, but they didn't have machines, and they didn't have people roaming around operating devices whose sole purpose is to make enough noise to be heard inside people's homes for hundreds of meters in every direction. It only takes a small percentage of the population doing things like this to make everyone else miserable. And good luck legislating against it when powerful lobbies operate on behalf of companies whose existence depends on the legality of operating said equipment without restriction. People weren't meant to be crammed together and stacked on top of each other. People need room. And if people want room, who are you to say they shouldn't be able to have it?
• dinkumthinkum 11y ago
  I don't really agree with this but consider your examples are tiny countries compared to the US.
• beachstartup 11y ago
  well, yeah. all of that is true. but consider this: america was built by people trying to leave europe and to a lesser extent asia, not rebuild it elsewhere. and it worked great, until it stopped working (recently). i think we'll figure it out eventually, it just won't be for a while. see the resurgence of city centers and farmer's markets, for example. also, for what it's worth, american cities that are forced into small areas because of water or economics (sf, ny, isolated parts of LA and chicago) result in a euro-like end result.
• x5n1 11y ago
  Canada and Mexico are the same and it's the fault of urban planners and real estate developers.
• michaelbuddy 11y ago
  Sprawl is everywhere. Even in Japan
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• mason240 11y ago
  I'll bet you didn't have your own yard in France. Suburban life isn't a "major problem" for the US, it's how we want to live.
  • _benedict 11y ago
    Of course people have their own yards. They might be smaller, and the houses might be smaller, and the roads smaller. But houses have yards literally everywhere in the UK, even London. Of course, in London the number of people who can afford a house is shrinking every day, so many have to settle for an apartment, and many of these do not have yards. But apartments with yards are available, and outside of London a house is the norm, and houses all have yards. And yet the parent comment's experience holds, typically, for somebody living in a house with a yard in a majority of the UK.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • dcposch 11y ago
    He said he moved into an apartment complex, so he probably didnt have his own yard here, either. Also, which of these has the better yard? Houses in Nevada: http://www.newhomeselko.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Homes-for-Sale-Elko-NV-Creekside.jpg http://www.newhomeselko.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Homes... Apartments in France: http://cdn-1.aparisguide.com/montmartre/Paris-montmarte12.jpg http://cdn-1.aparisguide.com/montmartre/Paris-montmarte12.jp... * Density doesnt have to be expensive * Density doesnt mean it cant be green and beautiful * Conversely, a lot of suburban yards are ugly and people dont spend much time in them, they just stay in the big box in the middle and enter and leave thru the garage.
    • learc83 11y ago
      That's the front yard which is most likely substantially smaller than the back. Also those look like cheaply made houses for people who want maximum square footage per dollar. It's easy to find smaller houses with larger yards.
    • sosuke 11y ago
• ap22213 11y ago
  I hate sprawl, too, but I'm missing how this relates to the article. Why would less sprawl somehow solve the problems cited?
• Grishnakh 11y ago
  Where did you move in the US? Try moving to the northeast; you'll find things a bit more similar to France. I used to live in New Jersey and I lived just down the street from a convenience store with a pretty decent selection of stuff, and about a half-mile from a real full-size grocery store (though it closed while I lived there; not enough business). Northern NJ is full of small "townships" that have a downtown section not far away from housing. But remember, these places were mostly built almost a century ago; the house I lived in there was built in 1930. They did things really differently back then.