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Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. I didn't realize this until I had children myself. I remember reac

Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. I didn't realize this until I had children myself. I remember reaching my teenage years and cursing the dull, boring, culturally bankrupt suburbian neighborhood I grew up in. I left the minute it became feasible. Fast forward to now, and I'm right back in the 'burbs, in a house where my kids have access to safe streets, parks, and decent schools. I realize now that it was never my parents' responsibility to raise me in a place I would find interesting, but to give me the best possible start in life they could. If I can give my kids a similar start, I hope they can safely reach the age where they can go off and experience the adventure of the big cities and abroad when they're ready, just like I did.

ricardobeat 10y ago
You are mistaken to believe that only a suburb fits the quiet & safe criteria (or even is the best fit). A traditional european city apartment, with a central courtyard, parking in the back, mixed use zone, is likely safer and just as quiet, yet you are within walking distance of shops, schools and public transport and are still in contact with other humans. I can't imagine a better environment for raising a child (except maybe some kind of dense rural community).
- patrickburke 10y ago
  This might be true but the option for Americans is the American city or the American suburb. A lot of bloggers who rail against the suburbs juxtapose it against some beautiful European city. I think there's a handful of American cities with good urbanism, where as Europe has presumably thousands.
YuriNiyazov 10y ago
The safety that someone under 12 requires is very different than the safety that someone over 12 requires. Seems like the teenage you were content with just cursing your dull suburban neighborhood, rather than setting your neighbors' houses and cars on fire for shits and giggles. Yes, it is part of parental responsibility to provide an environment stimulating enough that vandalism, arson, or drugs aren't an attractive option.
55acdda48ab5 10y ago
> where my kids have access to safe streets, parks, and decent schools This all used to be easily achievable in urban neighborhoods. The elephant in the room people don't want to acknowledge is that suburbia has mostly been a way to flee from and exclude social decay. This is why people freak out about public transit to a lot of neighborhoods. The requirement of multiple car ownership in an area is a deliberately constructed mechanism for excluding lower socio-economic people. If you shut down the public school systems and made all schools private with total freedom to deny any student entry, and you empowered a very aggressive police force (lots of stop and frisk, aggressively enforced vagrancy laws), then you'd see far more urban gentrification.
- fiatmoney 10y ago
  Bingo. Look at the re-conquest of New York City, which follows pretty exactly the pattern you mentioned. "All private schools" isn't even necessary de jure if you can do it de facto via magnet or charter schools and theoretically open neighborhood schools targeted at particular areas.
  - Retric 10y ago
    'Reconquest' of city's has far more components than most people assume. Gay community who mostly don't need good schools. Bad traffic to make suburbs less appealing. Video Games to keep young people entertained and not out damaging the community. Vastly reduced Lead levels to reduce violence. Reduced pollution to make city's livable. etc etc. Even the loss of manufacturing and retail jobs has been a net gain for city's. It's far from any one thing. PS: And if you want to go far afield reduced threat of nuclear war making city's a viable place for your population.
    - bardworx 10y ago
      > Vastly reduced Lead levels to reduce violence Can you expand on that statement? Do you imply bullets (as in higher prices and gun control) when you refer to Lead or literally the reduction of the metal Lead in paint, etc. And how is it linked to violence?
rayiner 10y ago
I doubt the suburbs are actually safer. I once did the math. If you add up shooting deaths and driving deaths, the rich suburb where I grew up is about as risky as one of the north side Chicago neighborhoods. And of course upper middle class white teens are going to be at lower than average risk of getting shot in the city, but at higher than average risk of wrapping themselves around a tree in the suburbs. As for safe streets and good schools, it's a product of segregationist urban planning, not any intrinsic qualities of cities versus suburbs. We don't build public housing out in the suburbs, we do it in the cities. Our lack of transit makes it impossible for poor people to drive around in the suburbs. So our city schools are 90% low-income and have the problems that come with concentrated poverty. Note that in places like Paris, the situation is reversed. Rich people live in the city (or out in the country). The suburbs are where the poor are herded into ghettos.
- kingkawn 10y ago
  Lol at calling the north side risky
  - cowsandmilk 10y ago
    the point is that the same demographics of middle class and wealthy people in the city are just as safe as they are in the suburbs. That is the north side vs. Chicago suburbs. Nothing about the south side of Chicago being "risky" is an inherent result of being in a city.
    - kingkawn 10y ago
      You're right, making the entire comparison pretty pointless from the start, hence my original point, lol at calling the north side risky.
- ef4 10y ago
  > I doubt the suburbs are actually safer. You are correct. The average American city dweller now experiences a lower crime rate than in suburbia. (That is an average, obviously some cities are dangerous and some suburbs are very safe.) > Rich people live in the city Yes, this is the long-run, natural state of cities. It's why they exist in the first place. They are where economic activity is most concentrated. American has had a weird 60 years where we inverted that situation, but it is already beginning to revert back to historically normal.
jayess 10y ago
There are many people, usually in so-called "urban planing" positions in cities, that believe that suburbs are something that shouldn't exist. They detest the option of suburbs.
- TulliusCicero 10y ago
  No, they detest what suburbs are in the US. Which, besides all the problems mentioned in the article, are often funded via a Ponzi scheme of development: http://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ http://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
  - jayess 10y ago
    Your completely un-sourced article has nothing to do with the OP article, which detests the option of people living in suburbs. Do suburbs pay for themselves? Maybe, maybe not. But you can't also then turn around and argue for cities that have massively subsidized transit systems that themselves, despite the massive subsidies, are breaking down and crappy.
    - TulliusCicero 10y ago
      > Your completely un-sourced article has nothing to do with the OP article Yes, you noticed that I was addressing something in your comment rather than the OP, good job on noticing the obvious. > which detests the option of people living in suburbs. He does not, in fact, detest the option of people living in suburbs. He detests American suburban design. I'm sure he would love to live in a more European-style suburb, but in most of America (and especially somewhere like Atlanta) they don't even exist. > But you can't also then turn around and argue for cities that have massively subsidized transit systems that themselves, despite the massive subsidies, are breaking down and crappy. Wow, way to completely misunderstand both transit and sprawly American suburbs. Here, let me explain it to you: Transit is subsidized, yes. So are roads built for cars, so are sidewalks and bike lanes. Every form of transport is paid for by taxes. Property taxes are ostensibly designed to support the extra services and infrastructure that more people and businesses require. If the replacement cost of infrastructure for a new suburban development is greater than the amount of tax revenue those suburbs bring in, when it comes time to replace that stuff, the city will go into the red. Meaning, either it draws the revenue from somewhere else, likely the more economically productive urban core (or even more development, furthering the problem), or it goes bankrupt. That's not good!
throwawaybookst 10y ago
The choice between "dense urban core" and "suburb" is distinctly American. Especially in Europe, city (in the sense of "not suburb or rural" != center of a large (1M+) population. In America, any region with a population the order of 100k or less is basically a shopping area surrounded by suburbs. The same is not true in Europe. In Europe, you can definitely find walkable, breathable, friendly cities while still living in an area that is safer than (and has a smaller population than) the typical Chicago suburban area.
- vasilipupkin 10y ago
  I disagree. Typical Chicago suburban area is safer than Europe. If you exclude homicides, most of which happen on the south side of Chicago, Europe has a lot more crime
- abalashov 10y ago
  Indeed; in Europe, you can find the same reproduced at the village and hamlet level, too. It's a density issue, at heart. Any US "city" (if it should be called that) of 100K-500K occupies 10x-20x the surface area that it would in most parts of the world, removing much of the cohesion that leads us to call places cities or towns in the first place.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    I think you're going to get in trouble with generalizations like "any US city", or even "any US city of 100k-500k". Can you be more specific about the faux-cities you're referring to, rather than nerd-baiting me to come up with a list of cities that defy your criteria?
    - abalashov 10y ago
      I should know better than to use words like "any" with programmers, it's true. In response, I started compiling a list, but then I realised I can't think of a counterexample. "Any" might be just about right. Do you know of one? I'm thinking of places like Indianapolis, Fairfax, Macon (GA), almost all college towns I've been to...
TulliusCicero 10y ago
> Fast forward to now, and I'm right back in the 'burbs, in a house where my kids have access to safe streets, parks, and decent schools. You seem to be confused. The article is saying that American suburbs are particularly poorly designed, not that suburbs as a general rule are terrible. Here is Gröbenzell, a suburb just west of Munich that's surrounded by farmland: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gr%C3%B6benzell,+Germany/@48.1926563,11.3669814,4157m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x479e78d7a145c0ff:0x27c53129098974e6!8m2!3d48.1932704!4d11.375227 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gr%C3%B6benzell,+Germany/@... In the states, such a suburb would be super-low-density and car-dominated, with all the negative features the author describes. There in Germany, Gröbenzell actually has a population density 30% higher than Seattle, and the whole town is within easy walking or biking distance of an S-Bahn station that gets you to the center of Munich in 20 minutes. It's possible to have suburban towns that are still walkable, that still allow kids some measure of independence, that do not kill any sense of place. In the US, we've just chosen not to create them.
- unethical_ban 10y ago
  I believe it is the fault of bureaucrats over-zoning. I would love to have a pub and a market next to every neighborhood. I love the idea of the Post Office providing basic financial services such as checking and money transfers. Let's make it as easy as possible to have peaceful neighborhoods AND retail/business in the same area. Dangerous or loud industrial businesses still need away from residence, but other than that... loosen up!
  - matwood 10y ago
    This is exactly the kind of neighborhood (suburb?) I live in. I can walk/drive/bicycle to the nearby grocery/pub/cleaners. The city is ~1/2 hour drive though.
  - Apocryphon 10y ago
    Amazing, isn't it? In a country where we are told is all about choice and having it our way, we're put in so many situations where we have diametrically opposite and equally unappealing choices, the tyranny of OR, instead of room for compromise.
SN76477 10y ago
This exactly... my friends live in the city and make the same amount of money as me. Pay 50% more for a house and pay for private school, an additional 20K a year. Just to be closer to some nice restaurants? No thanks. my suburban life is quite and close to starbucks, Im satisfied.
- cloudjacker 10y ago
  You miss the idea, no fact, that the people in the city scoff at the idea of considering Olive Garden a fancy meal
  - MisterBastahrd 10y ago
    Then people in the city are assholes for scoffing at the poor, because nobody in middle-class and up suburbia thinks that Olive Garden is fancy.
    - brightball 10y ago
      Funny story. I'm from a smallish town with an average income of about 40k / year and it was MAJOR news when they finally got an Olive Garden. Apparently there is some strict criteria that Olive Garden uses to place their restaurants and whenever the city finally qualified it was a huge thing for economic planners, all over the paper. My dad called to tell me about it.
      - MisterBastahrd 10y ago
        Yeah, and they do the same thing when a McDonald's opens in a town for the first time. It doesn't mean they think it's "fancy."
gaur 10y ago
> I hope they can safely reach the age where they can go off and experience the adventure of the big cities Conversely, I feel grateful that my parents chose to raise me in a dense urban area, instead of moving out to some suburban hellhole in an attempt to give me a bubble-wrapped existence. I mostly took care of my own transportation to and from public school from the age of 10 onward (walking or public transit), and was never robbed, assaulted, kidnapped, conscripted into a gang, or whatever it is that suburbanites imagine happens to children in urban environments. I'm not a drug addict, I don't have a criminal record, and I'm gainfully employed. I would never, ever raise a child in a suburb unless I had to for financial reasons.
- criddell 10y ago
  If you let a ten year old use transit themselves today, there's a decent chance parents will get a visit from the police. I think it's ridiculous, but that's how it seems to be.
  - abalashov 10y ago
    Indeed; we learned this the hard way when I was growing up, in a graduate student housing complex consisting mainly of foreigners. The one thing that dozens of nationalities could all agree on was their presumption that their ten year-olds can get home from school and fend for themselves for a few hours. Everybody knew everybody (quite literally), there were always adults out in the enclosed backyard, and there were periodic security patrols. I could think of few safer places to leave a child home alone. Until the harassment from the police started, it would have never occurred to any of us that this constitutes child neglect.
JPKab 10y ago
I grew up in two different environments: A small, late 1800's built, pedestrian friendly town in a rural county, and later after moving to another house, in the countryside in the same county. In both places, there was a lot of economic diversity. Kids who lived in trailers socialized and spent the nights out with kids who lived in old houses, and vice versa. Something I've noticed about people like you whose entire childhood was spent in the typical suburbs of the USA: You associate these awful places and their awful traits with "safety". "Safe" streets, "safe" parks, "decent" schools: As a person whose raised my kids in an urban environment, the idea that these weren't available (without driving) in our location is a myth that only burbs raised people buy into. Two years ago I moved to a part of the country (for a job) that has no urban center nearby. I now live in a subdivision. Never again. The neighbors don't interact with, let alone socialize with each other. The streets are vacant, because nobody walks because why would you walk to nowhere. Vacant streets means kids by themselves have no eyeballs on them, so parents don't feel comfortable letting them explore. The most evil part of it all is the economic segregation. My kids currently go to school with other upper middle class kids. Nobody lives in trailers in their school, or even apartments. No economic diversity translates to minimal racial diversity. It's terrible. I'm moving away from here in a few months, and I'll never live in one of these shitholes ever again. You can find nice suburbs that aren't laid out in pedestrian hateful designs like the typical ones you see these days.
- Zach_the_Lizard 10y ago
  >The most evil part of it all is the economic segregation. My kids currently go to school with other upper middle class kids. Nobody lives in trailers in their school, or even apartments. No economic diversity translates to minimal racial diversity. It's terrible. That's by design. The suburbs have many laws built to enforce 1950s racial segregation without mentioning race. E.g. your house must be large by law, meaning the poor are entirely excluded. Streets must be built for cars first, then people, because the poor can't afford cars.
  - abalashov 10y ago
    The irony, at least here in Atlanta, is that crappy car-only suburbs have become considerably more affordable than the re-gentrifying inner city. For what I'm paying here in Midtown, I could get myself a palace 30 minutes out, if I wanted to live the way I described in my article.
mahyarm 10y ago
Quiet safe urban areas actually exists in large amounts of Germany, while the only real urban areas that exist in the USA are in SF and NYC. SF & NYC have a sizable homeless population, poop on the streets and similar with large amounts of traffic. Suburban city centers attract the homeless and have a large amount of traffic because everyone has to drive in. German urban areas tend to barely have any road traffic for the density since almost nobody owns a car, a quiet train that passes by once in a while and most things closing at 8pm latest. Need some medicine? The pharmacy is a 5 minute walk away. Board the metro in another 5 minute walk, get to work in 20m. There are barely any homeless or poop on the streets for the most part because they are actually put in social housing and programs (or jail) if the police find them doing that. You tend to have about 10 square miles of urban area, with 7 story buildings as far as the eye can see and then a sudden drop off into small villages that are everywhere. You can rent or buy large 5 room 2000sqft apartments in these places and actually raise the typical 2.5 kid household in them. In the center of the block there are little common parks with a playground for small kids to play. If you want your car and SFH lifestyle, the entire city is then surrounded by wooded areas with small villages that are everywhere. You can live in a small village and drive into work into the city about 30m away for fairly cheap. The villages themselves have small urban centers you can then walk into. And some of them have trains, so you can just take the train into the city if you want. My experience is only with Germany, but I'm guessing there are many other places such as Barcelona, Italy or the UK that is designed like this.
- lsc 10y ago
  >German urban areas tend to barely have any road traffic for the density since almost nobody owns a car, a quiet train that passes by once in a while and most things closing at 8pm latest. Everything closes at 8pm? Jesus, I thought that silicon valley was bad, just 'cause it is hard to get a decent meal after 10pm.
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    Not everything, there are still a bunch of restaurants and bars and some 24/hr liquor / 7-11 type shops. The noise level although has never been a problem when those are open. Experience: Living in a place that was right above a bar, a 7-11 and in front of a train. Also the sidewalks are huge, they are as big as a lane of traffic. As a result cafes and such can easily have comfortable outdoor seating. And because everything is first floor businesses, there are a ton of cafes in a 10 minute radius. You could probably visit a new one every day. Compared to my current place in the usa where I have to walk a few blocks to get to the 'business road', where there is no apartments above the businesses. Not all places are as business dense, but there isn't as much stopping it than the USA lets say. But yes, things close earlier in europe in general.
Zach_the_Lizard 10y ago
>Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. No, that's not why modern sprawling suburbia exists. For most of American history, cities have been home to the middle class and wealthy. Not having to travel far for work or entertainment is a luxury, and middle class and wealthy Americans took advantage of it just like their world counterparts. The Bronx, for instance, was full of middle class families. However, unlike many parts of the world, America had a terrible race problem. What do you do if you're a racist white American who holds that blacks are inferior, criminals, and going to rape your daughters after smoking the devil's weed? You enact legal prohibitions against them, of course. Squeeze them into one part of the city full of concentrated poverty. But then courts started overturning legal prohibitions against minorities as attitudes against them improved. Schools were integrated. You even might have to work along side them. That's scary to racists who believed they were all criminals. It's clear that racist covenants were on their way out, so directly mentioning race wasn't a good enough solution. But you still want race-based results. What do we do? Incomes amongst whites are higher today, and that was true back in the day. We can exploit that to keep blacks out, and as a bonus we can keep out the poor in general. But we can't just slap up a 'no poors allowed' sign; that would be bad PR. What can we do? Wait, I know! We can make it illegal to build housing that would be affordable for the poor. Since the poor are less likely to drive, we can also legally force all houses and businesses to cater to cars. If we couple that with laws that make it so our yards are big, and that houses, businesses, schools, etc. are all not near each other, then we can make it so that the poor can never afford these areas. The beauty of this strategy is it allows co-opting non-racists. You're building the city of the future, as utopian 1950s urban planners thought. A world where no one has to walk because magical cars will save us from all social ills. Good schools, magically no traffic on the way to work, more space, who would be against that? All we have to do is demolish large portions of urban neighborhoods, enact very restrictive zoning laws that exclude the poor and minorities, and then spend trillions (in current dollars) to build the interstates to make it all work. Yeah, we'll wreck the environment, kill off passenger rail and public transit, cause urban blight, reduce economic growth, and drastically increase the price of housing (although that would take a generation or two to make it so the young couldn't afford housing, by which time we'll own housing anyways so that we can profit from that explosive housing price growth), but we'll finally never have to see a person with more melanin than us. It'll be great! And that's how sprawling suburbs in America came about. There are harsh laws that enforce it, as otherwise it is not economical. Even just the laws that require free parking to be provided greatly increase the cost of construction and make many areas impossible to build in. Yes, even Houston, the magical land without zoning (but many laws that are part of other cities' zoning codes, like minimum lot sizes, setbacks, parking requirements, etc.) has this. Even big cities like NYC, SF, Chicago, and DC got in on the utopian 50s vision. You name your American city or town, and I will find the laws the force sprawling if they are online (not all towns have their zoning codes online). I can discuss at length the various enforcement mechanisms.
ef4 10y ago
> Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. Yes, but people are making their decision based on out-of-date facts. Because in the United States in 2016, mortality risk goes down as population density goes up, and city kids are statistically safer. The #1 killer of children in US is car accidents. Guess who gets in dramatically less car accidents? City kids who don't need to ride in cars so much. The #2 killer of children in the US is guns, and child gun deaths are higher outside the cities, on average. People often don't believe this, but it should be obvious when you pause and consider where American gun culture is centered. It's not in the big cities. Suicide and substance abuse rates are also lower in the cities. This may be caused by the many small towns with major meth and opioid epidemics pulling down the statistics. (All of this depends on comparing apples-to-apples: being poor makes a bigger difference than the urban vs rural split, so you need to consider people at the same socioeconomic level.)
- brightball 10y ago
  Ummm...guns are nowhere near the #2 killer of children in the US. Where did you even find get a stat like that? I'm looking and can't find anything that even resembles it anywhere. Here are the top 3 by age group: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001915.htm https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001915.htm
  - ef4 10y ago
    I should have qualified with "#2 cause of accidental death." And as your link shows, "accidental death" is the #1 overall cause of death for children. So it's the #2 category of the #1 category of risk.
    - brightball 10y ago
      Could you point me to that? I still can't find it.
      - ef4 10y ago
maxsilver 10y ago
> Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. And because it's the only thing affordable. Which does not get mentioned enough. I would love to put my family in a walkable urban environment. But I don't have a $500k+ housing budget, so anything even remotely urban is completely out of the question, unless it's in the heart of some gangland territory somewhere.
- abalashov 10y ago
  It does get a lot of mention. If the overwhelming majority of housing development in the US is of the suburban sprawl type, it stands to reason that the few pockets of non-dilapidated dense urbanism will be expensive. Amusingly, this is often cited as evidence of suburbia's unique capacity to provide "affordable housing". Scarce things are unaffordable. Who knew!
  - jandrese 10y ago
    Yes, but it is annoying to get these mildly scolding articles about how I'm a terrible person for living in a suburb, when the only places in the city I could afford on my budget are classified as ghettos. They don't even have good transit access because the crushing poverty in that part of the city allowed the transit to crumble.
    - abalashov 10y ago
      If anyone deserves a scolding, it's governments for their insane 50s-60s zoning laws and perverse incentives offered to developers of sprawl, and whoever else is responsible for the fact that suburbia is the only option you've got.
antisthenes 10y ago
The entirety of Europe and many countries with colder climates, where suburbia would be unsustainable due to heating costs manage to raise children in safe environments just fine. Unless you're citing studies that explicitly show suburbia results in better outcomes for children than being raised in urban environments ceteris paribus, it seems like the only argument you're producing here is your own lack of perspective and being unable to venture outside of personal anecdotal experience. Suburbs are extremely exclusionary (to the point of being outright xenophobic), inefficient, and in most cases outright ugly, populated by cheap, run of the mill outdated construction from the pre 1977 era, when people burned tons of oil to heat the cardboard boxes that are most of the American 'burbs.
- wmoxam 10y ago
  > many countries with colder climates, where suburbia would be unsustainable due to heating costs Which countries are these?
  - CM30 10y ago
    I'd be interested to know this as well. The UK has plenty of suburbs, and it's both got a fairly unpredictable climate and much smaller amount of usable land. Does Russia not have them or something?

ricardobeat 10y ago

You are mistaken to believe that only a suburb fits the quiet & safe criteria (or even is the best fit). A traditional european city apartment, with a central courtyard, parking in the back, mixed use zone, is likely safer and just as quiet, yet you are within walking distance of shops, schools and public transport and are still in contact with other humans. I can't imagine a better environment for raising a child (except maybe some kind of dense rural community).

patrickburke 10y ago
This might be true but the option for Americans is the American city or the American suburb. A lot of bloggers who rail against the suburbs juxtapose it against some beautiful European city. I think there's a handful of American cities with good urbanism, where as Europe has presumably thousands.

YuriNiyazov 10y ago

The safety that someone under 12 requires is very different than the safety that someone over 12 requires. Seems like the teenage you were content with just cursing your dull suburban neighborhood, rather than setting your neighbors' houses and cars on fire for shits and giggles. Yes, it is part of parental responsibility to provide an environment stimulating enough that vandalism, arson, or drugs aren't an attractive option.

55acdda48ab5 10y ago

> where my kids have access to safe streets, parks, and decent schools This all used to be easily achievable in urban neighborhoods. The elephant in the room people don't want to acknowledge is that suburbia has mostly been a way to flee from and exclude social decay. This is why people freak out about public transit to a lot of neighborhoods. The requirement of multiple car ownership in an area is a deliberately constructed mechanism for excluding lower socio-economic people. If you shut down the public school systems and made all schools private with total freedom to deny any student entry, and you empowered a very aggressive police force (lots of stop and frisk, aggressively enforced vagrancy laws), then you'd see far more urban gentrification.

fiatmoney 10y ago
Bingo. Look at the re-conquest of New York City, which follows pretty exactly the pattern you mentioned. "All private schools" isn't even necessary de jure if you can do it de facto via magnet or charter schools and theoretically open neighborhood schools targeted at particular areas.
- Retric 10y ago
  'Reconquest' of city's has far more components than most people assume. Gay community who mostly don't need good schools. Bad traffic to make suburbs less appealing. Video Games to keep young people entertained and not out damaging the community. Vastly reduced Lead levels to reduce violence. Reduced pollution to make city's livable. etc etc. Even the loss of manufacturing and retail jobs has been a net gain for city's. It's far from any one thing. PS: And if you want to go far afield reduced threat of nuclear war making city's a viable place for your population.
  - bardworx 10y ago
    > Vastly reduced Lead levels to reduce violence Can you expand on that statement? Do you imply bullets (as in higher prices and gun control) when you refer to Lead or literally the reduction of the metal Lead in paint, etc. And how is it linked to violence?

rayiner 10y ago

I doubt the suburbs are actually safer. I once did the math. If you add up shooting deaths and driving deaths, the rich suburb where I grew up is about as risky as one of the north side Chicago neighborhoods. And of course upper middle class white teens are going to be at lower than average risk of getting shot in the city, but at higher than average risk of wrapping themselves around a tree in the suburbs. As for safe streets and good schools, it's a product of segregationist urban planning, not any intrinsic qualities of cities versus suburbs. We don't build public housing out in the suburbs, we do it in the cities. Our lack of transit makes it impossible for poor people to drive around in the suburbs. So our city schools are 90% low-income and have the problems that come with concentrated poverty. Note that in places like Paris, the situation is reversed. Rich people live in the city (or out in the country). The suburbs are where the poor are herded into ghettos.

kingkawn 10y ago
Lol at calling the north side risky
- cowsandmilk 10y ago
  the point is that the same demographics of middle class and wealthy people in the city are just as safe as they are in the suburbs. That is the north side vs. Chicago suburbs. Nothing about the south side of Chicago being "risky" is an inherent result of being in a city.
  - kingkawn 10y ago
    You're right, making the entire comparison pretty pointless from the start, hence my original point, lol at calling the north side risky.
ef4 10y ago
> I doubt the suburbs are actually safer. You are correct. The average American city dweller now experiences a lower crime rate than in suburbia. (That is an average, obviously some cities are dangerous and some suburbs are very safe.) > Rich people live in the city Yes, this is the long-run, natural state of cities. It's why they exist in the first place. They are where economic activity is most concentrated. American has had a weird 60 years where we inverted that situation, but it is already beginning to revert back to historically normal.

jayess 10y ago

There are many people, usually in so-called "urban planing" positions in cities, that believe that suburbs are something that shouldn't exist. They detest the option of suburbs.

TulliusCicero 10y ago
No, they detest what suburbs are in the US. Which, besides all the problems mentioned in the article, are often funded via a Ponzi scheme of development: http://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/ http://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme/
- jayess 10y ago
  Your completely un-sourced article has nothing to do with the OP article, which detests the option of people living in suburbs. Do suburbs pay for themselves? Maybe, maybe not. But you can't also then turn around and argue for cities that have massively subsidized transit systems that themselves, despite the massive subsidies, are breaking down and crappy.
  - TulliusCicero 10y ago
    > Your completely un-sourced article has nothing to do with the OP article Yes, you noticed that I was addressing something in your comment rather than the OP, good job on noticing the obvious. > which detests the option of people living in suburbs. He does not, in fact, detest the option of people living in suburbs. He detests American suburban design. I'm sure he would love to live in a more European-style suburb, but in most of America (and especially somewhere like Atlanta) they don't even exist. > But you can't also then turn around and argue for cities that have massively subsidized transit systems that themselves, despite the massive subsidies, are breaking down and crappy. Wow, way to completely misunderstand both transit and sprawly American suburbs. Here, let me explain it to you: Transit is subsidized, yes. So are roads built for cars, so are sidewalks and bike lanes. Every form of transport is paid for by taxes. Property taxes are ostensibly designed to support the extra services and infrastructure that more people and businesses require. If the replacement cost of infrastructure for a new suburban development is greater than the amount of tax revenue those suburbs bring in, when it comes time to replace that stuff, the city will go into the red. Meaning, either it draws the revenue from somewhere else, likely the more economically productive urban core (or even more development, furthering the problem), or it goes bankrupt. That's not good!

throwawaybookst 10y ago

The choice between "dense urban core" and "suburb" is distinctly American. Especially in Europe, city (in the sense of "not suburb or rural" != center of a large (1M+) population. In America, any region with a population the order of 100k or less is basically a shopping area surrounded by suburbs. The same is not true in Europe. In Europe, you can definitely find walkable, breathable, friendly cities while still living in an area that is safer than (and has a smaller population than) the typical Chicago suburban area.

vasilipupkin 10y ago
I disagree. Typical Chicago suburban area is safer than Europe. If you exclude homicides, most of which happen on the south side of Chicago, Europe has a lot more crime
abalashov 10y ago
Indeed; in Europe, you can find the same reproduced at the village and hamlet level, too. It's a density issue, at heart. Any US "city" (if it should be called that) of 100K-500K occupies 10x-20x the surface area that it would in most parts of the world, removing much of the cohesion that leads us to call places cities or towns in the first place.
- tptacek 10y ago
  I think you're going to get in trouble with generalizations like "any US city", or even "any US city of 100k-500k". Can you be more specific about the faux-cities you're referring to, rather than nerd-baiting me to come up with a list of cities that defy your criteria?
  - abalashov 10y ago
    I should know better than to use words like "any" with programmers, it's true. In response, I started compiling a list, but then I realised I can't think of a counterexample. "Any" might be just about right. Do you know of one? I'm thinking of places like Indianapolis, Fairfax, Macon (GA), almost all college towns I've been to...

TulliusCicero 10y ago

> Fast forward to now, and I'm right back in the 'burbs, in a house where my kids have access to safe streets, parks, and decent schools. You seem to be confused. The article is saying that American suburbs are particularly poorly designed, not that suburbs as a general rule are terrible. Here is Gröbenzell, a suburb just west of Munich that's surrounded by farmland: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gr%C3%B6benzell,+Germany/@48.1926563,11.3669814,4157m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x479e78d7a145c0ff:0x27c53129098974e6!8m2!3d48.1932704!4d11.375227 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gr%C3%B6benzell,+Germany/@... In the states, such a suburb would be super-low-density and car-dominated, with all the negative features the author describes. There in Germany, Gröbenzell actually has a population density 30% higher than Seattle, and the whole town is within easy walking or biking distance of an S-Bahn station that gets you to the center of Munich in 20 minutes. It's possible to have suburban towns that are still walkable, that still allow kids some measure of independence, that do not kill any sense of place. In the US, we've just chosen not to create them.

unethical_ban 10y ago
I believe it is the fault of bureaucrats over-zoning. I would love to have a pub and a market next to every neighborhood. I love the idea of the Post Office providing basic financial services such as checking and money transfers. Let's make it as easy as possible to have peaceful neighborhoods AND retail/business in the same area. Dangerous or loud industrial businesses still need away from residence, but other than that... loosen up!
- matwood 10y ago
  This is exactly the kind of neighborhood (suburb?) I live in. I can walk/drive/bicycle to the nearby grocery/pub/cleaners. The city is ~1/2 hour drive though.
- Apocryphon 10y ago
  Amazing, isn't it? In a country where we are told is all about choice and having it our way, we're put in so many situations where we have diametrically opposite and equally unappealing choices, the tyranny of OR, instead of room for compromise.

SN76477 10y ago

This exactly... my friends live in the city and make the same amount of money as me. Pay 50% more for a house and pay for private school, an additional 20K a year. Just to be closer to some nice restaurants? No thanks. my suburban life is quite and close to starbucks, Im satisfied.

cloudjacker 10y ago
You miss the idea, no fact, that the people in the city scoff at the idea of considering Olive Garden a fancy meal
- MisterBastahrd 10y ago
  Then people in the city are assholes for scoffing at the poor, because nobody in middle-class and up suburbia thinks that Olive Garden is fancy.
  - brightball 10y ago
    Funny story. I'm from a smallish town with an average income of about 40k / year and it was MAJOR news when they finally got an Olive Garden. Apparently there is some strict criteria that Olive Garden uses to place their restaurants and whenever the city finally qualified it was a huge thing for economic planners, all over the paper. My dad called to tell me about it.
    - MisterBastahrd 10y ago
      Yeah, and they do the same thing when a McDonald's opens in a town for the first time. It doesn't mean they think it's "fancy."

gaur 10y ago

> I hope they can safely reach the age where they can go off and experience the adventure of the big cities Conversely, I feel grateful that my parents chose to raise me in a dense urban area, instead of moving out to some suburban hellhole in an attempt to give me a bubble-wrapped existence. I mostly took care of my own transportation to and from public school from the age of 10 onward (walking or public transit), and was never robbed, assaulted, kidnapped, conscripted into a gang, or whatever it is that suburbanites imagine happens to children in urban environments. I'm not a drug addict, I don't have a criminal record, and I'm gainfully employed. I would never, ever raise a child in a suburb unless I had to for financial reasons.

criddell 10y ago
If you let a ten year old use transit themselves today, there's a decent chance parents will get a visit from the police. I think it's ridiculous, but that's how it seems to be.
- abalashov 10y ago
  Indeed; we learned this the hard way when I was growing up, in a graduate student housing complex consisting mainly of foreigners. The one thing that dozens of nationalities could all agree on was their presumption that their ten year-olds can get home from school and fend for themselves for a few hours. Everybody knew everybody (quite literally), there were always adults out in the enclosed backyard, and there were periodic security patrols. I could think of few safer places to leave a child home alone. Until the harassment from the police started, it would have never occurred to any of us that this constitutes child neglect.

JPKab 10y ago

I grew up in two different environments: A small, late 1800's built, pedestrian friendly town in a rural county, and later after moving to another house, in the countryside in the same county. In both places, there was a lot of economic diversity. Kids who lived in trailers socialized and spent the nights out with kids who lived in old houses, and vice versa. Something I've noticed about people like you whose entire childhood was spent in the typical suburbs of the USA: You associate these awful places and their awful traits with "safety". "Safe" streets, "safe" parks, "decent" schools: As a person whose raised my kids in an urban environment, the idea that these weren't available (without driving) in our location is a myth that only burbs raised people buy into. Two years ago I moved to a part of the country (for a job) that has no urban center nearby. I now live in a subdivision. Never again. The neighbors don't interact with, let alone socialize with each other. The streets are vacant, because nobody walks because why would you walk to nowhere. Vacant streets means kids by themselves have no eyeballs on them, so parents don't feel comfortable letting them explore. The most evil part of it all is the economic segregation. My kids currently go to school with other upper middle class kids. Nobody lives in trailers in their school, or even apartments. No economic diversity translates to minimal racial diversity. It's terrible. I'm moving away from here in a few months, and I'll never live in one of these shitholes ever again. You can find nice suburbs that aren't laid out in pedestrian hateful designs like the typical ones you see these days.

Zach_the_Lizard 10y ago
>The most evil part of it all is the economic segregation. My kids currently go to school with other upper middle class kids. Nobody lives in trailers in their school, or even apartments. No economic diversity translates to minimal racial diversity. It's terrible. That's by design. The suburbs have many laws built to enforce 1950s racial segregation without mentioning race. E.g. your house must be large by law, meaning the poor are entirely excluded. Streets must be built for cars first, then people, because the poor can't afford cars.
- abalashov 10y ago
  The irony, at least here in Atlanta, is that crappy car-only suburbs have become considerably more affordable than the re-gentrifying inner city. For what I'm paying here in Midtown, I could get myself a palace 30 minutes out, if I wanted to live the way I described in my article.

mahyarm 10y ago

Quiet safe urban areas actually exists in large amounts of Germany, while the only real urban areas that exist in the USA are in SF and NYC. SF & NYC have a sizable homeless population, poop on the streets and similar with large amounts of traffic. Suburban city centers attract the homeless and have a large amount of traffic because everyone has to drive in. German urban areas tend to barely have any road traffic for the density since almost nobody owns a car, a quiet train that passes by once in a while and most things closing at 8pm latest. Need some medicine? The pharmacy is a 5 minute walk away. Board the metro in another 5 minute walk, get to work in 20m. There are barely any homeless or poop on the streets for the most part because they are actually put in social housing and programs (or jail) if the police find them doing that. You tend to have about 10 square miles of urban area, with 7 story buildings as far as the eye can see and then a sudden drop off into small villages that are everywhere. You can rent or buy large 5 room 2000sqft apartments in these places and actually raise the typical 2.5 kid household in them. In the center of the block there are little common parks with a playground for small kids to play. If you want your car and SFH lifestyle, the entire city is then surrounded by wooded areas with small villages that are everywhere. You can live in a small village and drive into work into the city about 30m away for fairly cheap. The villages themselves have small urban centers you can then walk into. And some of them have trains, so you can just take the train into the city if you want. My experience is only with Germany, but I'm guessing there are many other places such as Barcelona, Italy or the UK that is designed like this.

lsc 10y ago
>German urban areas tend to barely have any road traffic for the density since almost nobody owns a car, a quiet train that passes by once in a while and most things closing at 8pm latest. Everything closes at 8pm? Jesus, I thought that silicon valley was bad, just 'cause it is hard to get a decent meal after 10pm.
- mahyarm 10y ago
  Not everything, there are still a bunch of restaurants and bars and some 24/hr liquor / 7-11 type shops. The noise level although has never been a problem when those are open. Experience: Living in a place that was right above a bar, a 7-11 and in front of a train. Also the sidewalks are huge, they are as big as a lane of traffic. As a result cafes and such can easily have comfortable outdoor seating. And because everything is first floor businesses, there are a ton of cafes in a 10 minute radius. You could probably visit a new one every day. Compared to my current place in the usa where I have to walk a few blocks to get to the 'business road', where there is no apartments above the businesses. Not all places are as business dense, but there isn't as much stopping it than the USA lets say. But yes, things close earlier in europe in general.

Zach_the_Lizard 10y ago

>Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. No, that's not why modern sprawling suburbia exists. For most of American history, cities have been home to the middle class and wealthy. Not having to travel far for work or entertainment is a luxury, and middle class and wealthy Americans took advantage of it just like their world counterparts. The Bronx, for instance, was full of middle class families. However, unlike many parts of the world, America had a terrible race problem. What do you do if you're a racist white American who holds that blacks are inferior, criminals, and going to rape your daughters after smoking the devil's weed? You enact legal prohibitions against them, of course. Squeeze them into one part of the city full of concentrated poverty. But then courts started overturning legal prohibitions against minorities as attitudes against them improved. Schools were integrated. You even might have to work along side them. That's scary to racists who believed they were all criminals. It's clear that racist covenants were on their way out, so directly mentioning race wasn't a good enough solution. But you still want race-based results. What do we do? Incomes amongst whites are higher today, and that was true back in the day. We can exploit that to keep blacks out, and as a bonus we can keep out the poor in general. But we can't just slap up a 'no poors allowed' sign; that would be bad PR. What can we do? Wait, I know! We can make it illegal to build housing that would be affordable for the poor. Since the poor are less likely to drive, we can also legally force all houses and businesses to cater to cars. If we couple that with laws that make it so our yards are big, and that houses, businesses, schools, etc. are all not near each other, then we can make it so that the poor can never afford these areas. The beauty of this strategy is it allows co-opting non-racists. You're building the city of the future, as utopian 1950s urban planners thought. A world where no one has to walk because magical cars will save us from all social ills. Good schools, magically no traffic on the way to work, more space, who would be against that? All we have to do is demolish large portions of urban neighborhoods, enact very restrictive zoning laws that exclude the poor and minorities, and then spend trillions (in current dollars) to build the interstates to make it all work. Yeah, we'll wreck the environment, kill off passenger rail and public transit, cause urban blight, reduce economic growth, and drastically increase the price of housing (although that would take a generation or two to make it so the young couldn't afford housing, by which time we'll own housing anyways so that we can profit from that explosive housing price growth), but we'll finally never have to see a person with more melanin than us. It'll be great! And that's how sprawling suburbs in America came about. There are harsh laws that enforce it, as otherwise it is not economical. Even just the laws that require free parking to be provided greatly increase the cost of construction and make many areas impossible to build in. Yes, even Houston, the magical land without zoning (but many laws that are part of other cities' zoning codes, like minimum lot sizes, setbacks, parking requirements, etc.) has this. Even big cities like NYC, SF, Chicago, and DC got in on the utopian 50s vision. You name your American city or town, and I will find the laws the force sprawling if they are online (not all towns have their zoning codes online). I can discuss at length the various enforcement mechanisms.

ef4 10y ago

> Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. Yes, but people are making their decision based on out-of-date facts. Because in the United States in 2016, mortality risk goes down as population density goes up, and city kids are statistically safer. The #1 killer of children in US is car accidents. Guess who gets in dramatically less car accidents? City kids who don't need to ride in cars so much. The #2 killer of children in the US is guns, and child gun deaths are higher outside the cities, on average. People often don't believe this, but it should be obvious when you pause and consider where American gun culture is centered. It's not in the big cities. Suicide and substance abuse rates are also lower in the cities. This may be caused by the many small towns with major meth and opioid epidemics pulling down the statistics. (All of this depends on comparing apples-to-apples: being poor makes a bigger difference than the urban vs rural split, so you need to consider people at the same socioeconomic level.)

brightball 10y ago
Ummm...guns are nowhere near the #2 killer of children in the US. Where did you even find get a stat like that? I'm looking and can't find anything that even resembles it anywhere. Here are the top 3 by age group: https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001915.htm https://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001915.htm
- ef4 10y ago
  I should have qualified with "#2 cause of accidental death." And as your link shows, "accidental death" is the #1 overall cause of death for children. So it's the #2 category of the #1 category of risk.
  - brightball 10y ago
    Could you point me to that? I still can't find it.
    - ef4 10y ago

maxsilver 10y ago

> Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. And because it's the only thing affordable. Which does not get mentioned enough. I would love to put my family in a walkable urban environment. But I don't have a $500k+ housing budget, so anything even remotely urban is completely out of the question, unless it's in the heart of some gangland territory somewhere.

abalashov 10y ago
It does get a lot of mention. If the overwhelming majority of housing development in the US is of the suburban sprawl type, it stands to reason that the few pockets of non-dilapidated dense urbanism will be expensive. Amusingly, this is often cited as evidence of suburbia's unique capacity to provide "affordable housing". Scarce things are unaffordable. Who knew!
- jandrese 10y ago
  Yes, but it is annoying to get these mildly scolding articles about how I'm a terrible person for living in a suburb, when the only places in the city I could afford on my budget are classified as ghettos. They don't even have good transit access because the crushing poverty in that part of the city allowed the transit to crumble.
  - abalashov 10y ago
    If anyone deserves a scolding, it's governments for their insane 50s-60s zoning laws and perverse incentives offered to developers of sprawl, and whoever else is responsible for the fact that suburbia is the only option you've got.

antisthenes 10y ago

The entirety of Europe and many countries with colder climates, where suburbia would be unsustainable due to heating costs manage to raise children in safe environments just fine. Unless you're citing studies that explicitly show suburbia results in better outcomes for children than being raised in urban environments ceteris paribus, it seems like the only argument you're producing here is your own lack of perspective and being unable to venture outside of personal anecdotal experience. Suburbs are extremely exclusionary (to the point of being outright xenophobic), inefficient, and in most cases outright ugly, populated by cheap, run of the mill outdated construction from the pre 1977 era, when people burned tons of oil to heat the cardboard boxes that are most of the American 'burbs.

wmoxam 10y ago
> many countries with colder climates, where suburbia would be unsustainable due to heating costs Which countries are these?
- CM30 10y ago
  I'd be interested to know this as well. The UK has plenty of suburbs, and it's both got a fairly unpredictable climate and much smaller amount of usable land. Does Russia not have them or something?