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Can't blame American families for choosing suburbia. US cities are a mess -- too many crazies, needles and trash everywhere, traffic congestion and poor public
by eecsninja 8y ago
Can't blame American families for choosing suburbia. US cities are a mess -- too many crazies, needles and trash everywhere, traffic congestion and poor public transit, expensive housing, and so forth.
And there's no political will anywhere in the USA, suburban or urban areas, to change any of this.
- closeparen 8y agoUS cities are a mess because middle class families abandoned them for the newly built suburbs in a coordinated, subsidized, and regulated movement. Individual families were not expected to walk out into the fields and personally make them habitable. They certainly weren’t turned away by policies designed to preserve the status quo, compensate/empower those adversely affected by a proposed change, etc. Highway construction, planning codes, development and mortgage finance, public debt, subsidized infrastructure, etc. were all assembled and optimized to make it as easy as possible for suburbia to happen precisely as it did. That was a choice. We could make the same choice about urbanism. (Imagine an Interstate Highway System-level investment in urban subways). We don’t.
- Tempest1981 8y agoWe’re funding mass transit at a fraction of the rate necessary, and I don’t see that changing - along as governments are considered incompetent and taxes are considered evil.
- eecsninja 8y agoWe're also building transit at 5x the cost per unit of distance. Compare the costs of NYC second avenue versus recent Tokyo and Paris lines.
- closeparen 8y agoThat can’t really be the philosophy - even red states love their highways.