5 ms·

I suspect many (perhaps most) of the people reading that article agree that suburbia sucks - the tricky part is fixing it.

• ars 10y ago
  Or maybe don't fix it because there is nothing wrong with it and people actually like it? Have you (or the author) considered that not everyone is like you? People like different things.
• ape4 10y ago
  Making other choices available and not expensive would be a start.
  • jcoffland 10y ago
    Through regulation?
• jacobolus 10y ago
  The fix is hard, requiring decades to reach the necessary policy changes, and decades more for those to play out in built infrastructure. Changes are needed to zoning, road design, price of parking, state and municipal tax allocations, etc. The primary problem is that suburban sprawl is cheap for residents, because it is very heavily subsidized, defers many of its costs to the future, and completely ignores the costs of nasty externalities like pollution and environmental destruction. Based on the required infrastructure per capita, if prices matched costs, living in the city should be dramatically cheaper than living in sprawl. In practice, because well designed cities are old, with limited capacity, and it is illegal to build new ones in many places, living in a nice city ends up being much more expensive than living in sprawl.
  • mooreds 10y ago
    > The fix is hard, requiring decades to reach the necessary policy changes, and decades more for those to play out in built infrastructure. I agree that finding the issued in place would be time consuming, expensive and difficult. However, it is possible we are seeing a different way of fixing the issue: migration back to the urban core with the downtown revitalization of many cities. Or building new areas that have different characteristics: Stapleton here in Colorado is a mixed use neighborhood built in the last decade or so. Not perfect, but a different set of mistakes.
• nathanasmith 10y ago
  >>I suspect many (perhaps most) of the people reading that article agree that suburbia sucks - the tricky part is fixing it. "Fixing" it by doing what? Making it more like the urban core? That place already exists. If you like it then go live there. Obviously many people like the lifestyle of living in the suburbs. There is room in this country for more than one kind of neighborhood.
  • dietrichepp 10y ago
    I live in suburbia right now. I love to walk places—I walk to work, to the store, etc. But my town seems to be built for cars, cars, cars. The exchange with the interstate is huge, and takes forever to cross, by foot, because the signal timing is designed for cars. Then I cross parking lots to get where I want. I like the idea of having stores with parking in back, having more equal streets rather than privileged highway interchanges, etc. But in the meantime, having the forest closer to me is not worth the cost of spending more time in the concrete sprawl.
• jayess 10y ago
  Typical of the nanny staters who think that they know what's best for everyone and their non-preferred lifestyle needs to be "fixed."