15 ms·
For entertainment, I like cities better than suburbs. Hands down. At home, I like parking in a driveway better than parking on the street. At home, I like par
by rhapsodic 8y ago
For entertainment, I like cities better than suburbs. Hands down.
At home, I like parking in a driveway better than parking on the street.
At home, I like parking in a garage better than parking in a driveway or alley.
At home, I like parking in an attached garage better than parking in a detached one.
I like living in my own house better than an apartment.
I like living in a free-standing house better than a duplex or row house.
I like a large yard where my young kids can play with their friends and I can keep an eye on them out the window.
I want to be able to make some noise without disturbing my neighbors, and vice-versa. I don't like living cheek-by-jowl with my neighbors.
I like living in a neighborhood that has virtually no violent crime or burglaries. I don't want to have to run a gauntlet of panhandlers when I go for a walk around the neighborhood.
I prefer to live in a house built since 1978, so I don't have to deal with lead paint, asbestos, knob & tube wiring, wood lath walls, lead (water) service lines, buckling foundations, damp moldy basements, rotting, leaking box gutters, or cheap, chalky aluminum siding that was installed in 1968 over Insulbrick that was installed in 1938. Unfortunately, those houses tend to be relatively rare and exorbitantly expensive in my local city.
I don't know why so many city dwellers seem to obsess over the fact that there are many people who simply prefer living in the suburbs. But there are.
- pikma 8y agoIt is because the suburban lifestyle has some hidden costs, and in the US those costs tend to be paid equally by everyone. For example, air pollution (both local and greenhouse gases), and road maintenance costs.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoOn the other hand, with sufficiently low density, things like stormwater/flooding, drinking water, fire control, and pest control work themselves out naturally without complicated infrastructure to manage them
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoOnly at densities much lower than a typical suburb.
- JonathonW 8y agoExactly this for me, too. There's also an aspect of affordability to why I ended up in the suburbs (in downtown or midtown Nashville, I'd be in a one-bedroom or studio condo for what I paid for my three-bedroom house), but it's mostly because I like living in my own standalone house. I have a yard; I have a garage and a driveway; I don't have upstairs neighbors rolling bowling balls around on their floor at 2 in the morning.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago> I don't know why so many city dwellers seem to obsess over the fact that there are many people who simply prefer living in the suburbs. Tribalism and a desire to see the whole world remade to their own fancy, just like everything else people have strong opinions about
- TheCoelacanth 8y agoI'm fine with people making different lifestyle choices than me. I just want them to: 1. Not outlaw my preferred lifestyle choices. The vast majority of the country makes it illegal to build walkable urban neighborhoods. 2. Don't make me pay for your lifestyle choices. Car use is heavily subsidized in the US via road and parking infrastructure, laws that require private citizens to build parking at their own expense to be able to build buildings and by car users being able to externalize the cost of their environmental damage. You are free to live in your preferred type of neighborhood; just let me do the same.
- rhapsodic 8y agoThis is how democracies work. You don't always get what you want. Sorry to break it to you.
- iamnothere 8y agoThis is sort of an ironic response, given your initial post. "Live and let live" has to go both ways, or the party getting the short end of the stick won't put up with the arrangement for long.
- kraigie 8y agoUrban vs suburbs vs rural have differing land use requirements and viable transport options and resource requirements. So the moral and ethical standards are really proxies for resource use. Compare that to white and black tennis shoes, if one dye used 4x the resources of the other you'd have a point bit otherwise they are not quite the same. Though some of that can be achieved through long and narrow yards (still the same size) and allows higher density