8 ms·

Pretty much every western nation has systemically failed to recognize or support the insanely high demand for high density living in the 21st century. That is w

by zanny 7y ago

Pretty much every western nation has systemically failed to recognize or support the insanely high demand for high density living in the 21st century. That is where the future of economics is, where the future of humanity in general pretty much is, and every democracy is consistently demonstrating the total inability for legislatures to sacrifice the advantage of those lucky enough to inhabit cities as they exist now for the benefit of all those who would grow the economy and future in the cities tomorrow. Largely because those in the cities have the money and influence to buy the politicians.

jimmaswell 7y ago
I don't buy any of this. Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more countryside-ish living much more pleasant. Consider virtual reality and remote work. I imagine much of the workforce will move to virtual offices in the near to medium-far future when corporations finally come around to realizing they don't have to waste so much money on rent. There's no need for programmers, graphic designers, reporters, and employees of lots of other professions to work in a physical office. So really, as cities become less of a necessity to certain jobs, I expect a moderate exodus to nicer areas, halting growth or even decreasing population in urban centers.
- TremendousJudge 7y ago
  >Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice I assume you grew up in the United States?
  - jotm 7y ago
    Cause European cities are so much better? They're not. Overcrowded, overpriced, just for jobs and getting out asap.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    Yes, upstate NY.
    - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
      Where? I ran screaming from the Albany area first thing I could when I turned 18.
      - jimmaswell 7y ago
        Hudson Valley, somewhere around Hyde Park. I went over some of the features of the area here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218742 What's so bad about the Albany area? I haven't been there since I went as a kid for some medical facility.
- 0xffff2 7y ago
  >Consider virtual reality and remote work. I imagine much of the workforce will move to virtual offices in the near to medium-far future when corporations finally come around to realizing they don't have to waste so much money on rent. There's no need for programmers, graphic designers, reporters, and employees of lots of other professions to work in a physical office. So really, as cities become less of a necessity to certain jobs, I expect a moderate exodus to nicer areas, halting growth or even decreasing population in urban centers. People have been saying this for decades. Personally, I'd like nothing more than for it to be true so that I can ditch my expensive Silicon Valley apartment. But it's not. Lately I've even been seeing a lot of pushback from people who feel more productive in an office setting and don't want to work remotely.
- 2tab 7y ago
  Unfortunately everything points to the effect being the opposite. Remote means you don't have to be in Detroit, but can contract a factory in China from New York or run a data center anywhere from the Bay Area.
- EliRivers 7y ago
  Depends on what you want, I suppose. High density humanity simply makes practical and economically viable gatherings, grouping and other activities that just don't work in low-density populations. Classes, meetups, specialist stores, hobbies, clubs, shows, lectures, institutions and just plain bubbling, embryonic interactions; all of it an order of magnitude more intense in a big city. Travel even fifty miles away from a big city and suddenly so much opportunity vanishes, or necessitates a two hour round trip into the city to take advantage of. For the people who want these things, the city is the only option. I don't work in a city because that's where my job is; I work in (the outskirts of) a city because that's where everything else I want is. I work with people who live in the inner city and commute outwards daily for their job, because their job is just a way to pay for what they actually want, and what they actually want is to be in that city.
  - jotm 7y ago
    15 miles, 2 hours? Hmmm, maybe invest in New roads. But city living is sad, yeah you can have all the social fun, but none of the quiet, peace, living and hobby space. I like living 10 miles from the city, lots of space, quiet and green, can drive 20 minutes to the shity anytime.
    - EliRivers 7y ago
      15 miles, 2 hours? Hmmm, maybe invest in New roads. Maybe invest in new glasses. I didn't say 15. A city that has a boundary defined enough that you can reasonably say you live ten miles from it, and that you can drive into in 20 minutes? You're thinking of a town.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    Almost all that stuff exists just fine outside major cities in my experience. I went over some of the great stuff around where I'm from in NY here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218742
  - skgoa 7y ago
    Yeah, living in the suburbs of or reasonably close to a large metropolis is where it's at. As soon as you want/need a good or service that goes even slightly outside of the local mainstream, it will almost always be available only in a big city. The bigger the more likely that it will be available.
- dgabriel 7y ago
  That's sort of the opposite of my experience, where everyone couldn't wait to get out of the stultifying small town, where there was no work and no future.
- pantalaimon 7y ago
  That's odd because it it's pretty much the polar opposite of what I've experienced. Everyone wants to move to the big cities, especially Berlin, as they provide culture and a sense of freedom. You are able to meet like-minded people and are able to experience culture and infrastructure that simply does not exist in rural areas. This of course makes makes the situation for the villages worse as many young people move away. Who's left are old people and those who are not qualified to find work or education elsewhere. The population decline in those regions also means a decline in infrastructure, economy and cultural events, which makes those regions even more unattractive, perpetuating the cycle. There is a slight trend of dropouts creating alternative living communities in those areas as abandoned houses & property can be had for very cheap. But their isolated nature means that often they will not last as their inhabitants move back to the city were their original peer group is.
  - toper-centage 7y ago
    Young people want to go to Berlin but people with money want to settle away from it.
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  - brightball 7y ago
    And IMO that's also a product of rent freezing. Without rent freezing, rents continue to increase substantially enough that investors either build more housing in/near the urban centers to meet demand OR the price shifts high enough to make the decisions to live in rural areas much more appealing.
  - tomohawk 7y ago
    The problem with cities is that they have really bad failure modes. Consider Baltimore. The city has been run by a single political party for decades, and run right into the ground. Notice the trend in these population stats: https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/baltimore-maryland https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/baltimore-maryland This is a city right next to DC, in an essentially recession proof area with lots of jobs. I've known a number of people who were big proponents of living in cities until either (a) they were robbed, or (b) they had kids and realized there was no decent school there, and (c) they had no chance of impacting the government in any way to affect change. They all ended up moving to the burbs.
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- fzeroracer 7y ago
  Where I grew up it was the exact opposite. I lived in a small suburbanish town which was 50% college students and 50% retirees. Almost all of my friends and fellow graduates left for the larger cities where job opportunities were far more abundant and where there was generally a lot more to do and see. Which also seems to be supported by the general population trends. Rural cities are dying, with the younger generations moving closer to urban centers. Remote work and virtual offices will give you a better choice of city, but people are not likely to move out to places where there's nothing to do, terrible infrastructure and less opportunity in the scenario where you choose to find a new job. And people have been saying that remote work will cause the trends to reverse any day now. So far that hasn't stopped companies even in SV; instead they just build new offices in other cities.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    What do you mean by "nothing to do"? What is there to do only in the city that's supposed to be so attractive, clubs, modern art galleries? I'm genuinely curious because this never resonated with me. Things to do in the Hudson Valley, the example I have in mind of a non-city area: expansive hiking trails for walking/biking, a river for rafting/skiing/boating/fishing, great family-owned restaurants all over, lots of nice historic sites such as the FDR estate and Vanderbelt mansion, a drive-in (unfortunately a rare institution these days, and obviously there are tons of normal movie theaters around), lots of good thrift/antique stores, hunting, tasting the fresh cider/whatever from local orchards (and getting great meat/produce from farmer's markets along with that), some concert halls around that play orchestras, horseback riding. If you want some stuff like classic theater/art galleries/etc you can find those around too, and a lot of stuff done by colleges. I'm sure I've missed a lot but this should be enough to make my point. The city has some good stuff like the Museum of Natural History but not enough for me to want to live there.
    - alisonatwork 7y ago
      I think you are missing the kinds of things that city people consider important. For instance, can you walk from your house to the market, and to the theater, and to the hiking trails? I live in an dense city in Asia and I can do this. Many city dwellers do not drive a car and a significant proportion of those never even learned how. Does your rural area support a dockless shared bike scheme? Can teenagers travel independently or do they need to rely on their parents to drive them around? How much carbon does it cost the average family to get groceries? On entertainment, and specifically in relation to Berlin: do you have a clubbing scene? Where can people go to dance to electronic music? Can they go out Saturday night after 9pm? Is there still public transport to take them home in the wee hours? I live alone and everything I own fits in a backpack. Are there single room apartments available for people who choose to live minimal lifestyles? Is it even possible for people to rent? If not, how far away is the trailer park from the cultural center? And how close is that to the nearest Greyhound stop? Things like walkability, access to rental accommodation, 24 hour entertainment and services... These kinds of things are taken for granted by people who live in cities. Of course this kind of lifestyle is not for everyone, but for those that value it, rural and suburban areas do not even come close.
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- eli_gottlieb 7y ago
  > I don't buy any of this. Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more countryside-ish living much more pleasant. I don't buy any of this. Growing up, everyone around me saw the suburbs as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more urban living much more pleasant. Funny how that works.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    I'm always wondering... Where do those city dwellers put their heavy machinery? What? You don't have heavy machinery? Well, no hardware projects for you then. Do people seriously lift a half a ton lathe to the 10th floor of their apartment building and then just go at it?
    - nemetroid 7y ago
      My (small by international standards) city has several locations where you pay a monthly fee to use a shared workshop.
  - nec4b 7y ago
    He wasn't talking about suburbs which technically are a part of a city and not of the countryside.
    - jimmaswell 7y ago
      Suburban and rural can be blurry. I'm not sure what I'd call some of the areas I grew up around where there are both farms/orchards and a lot of cul-de-sacs/other houses. When it comes to that odd pattern of development where there are a bunch of cookie cutter houses really close together with little yards, I'm not a fan of that.
- jddj 7y ago
  I've heard this change (the definite shift in desirability from suburbs and small towns to cities, which admittedly you seem to have somewhat blinkered out) attributed to the vast improvements in air quality / waste management / crime / public transport in cities, and that explanation seems reasonable to me. Country living can be great, but your experience some number of years ago doesn't speak to the current data.
- v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
  I was living in Berlin in 2015/2016 and believe me in no way at all are people coming here begrudgingly. Pretty much everyone between 20 and 35 wants to live here. And I can't blame them. I wanted to go and I still love the city to bits. There is nothing you can't to there. Tons of very interesting people to collaborate on projects with. Extremely good food and cultural attractions. Pretty much the most progressive place I've ever come across. Easily the best nightlife in the world. This sounds like a love letter I suppose and I realize you were talking about cities in general. But anyway, I can understand why everyone wants go there.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    > Pretty much everyone between 20 and 35 wants to live here. Well, since you were in Berlin, that's probably survivorship bias. I live in Dresden, a city of 500k inhabitants about 200km south of Berlin. To me, Dresden is just the right size. Not as vast as Berlin, where it can easily take over one hour to get to the other side for a meetup, but still large enough to have enough interesting stuff going on in it.
    - dorgo 7y ago
      > that's probably survivorship bias. What? Is every other Berliner dead and can't tell their story?
      - majewsky 7y ago
        Survivorship bias can apply to things other than literal survivors. What I mean is that, since they're in Berlin, they're mostly interacting with other people who live in Berlin. They're not going to hear from people who don't want to live in Berlin, even if those exist.
ng12 7y ago
Agreed. I'm still shocked about how pervasive it is. New York, San Francisco, Denver, Austin, Vancouver, Montreal, London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw. It seems like a complete binary: cities are either dying or in the midst of a "housing crisis".
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Zacharias030 7y ago
>Pretty much every western nation has systemically failed to recognize or support the insanely high demand for high density living in the 21st century. While I agree that we have an unsolved problem here, isn't a city's government mainly responsible to do good by the people who inhabit that city and make up its electorate? That's how western democracies work, so no surprises there. I know of many people all over the world who would like to move to the US and still the 'insanely high demand' has not been supported.
tarsinge 7y ago
Because the root cause is not always high demand, it’s also speculation. Real Estate is now cool again (just look at investing forums or subreddits), and foreign investor money is flowing. Look for example at Portland (OR) how the rent increase correlates with the population increase. The current urban hype alone can not explain these numbers. Also another example since a few years a lot of high earning people in Paris are actively moving to cities with a better quality of life and climate (like Nantes, Bordeaux), in fact as high than 80% would do it if they could [1]. Yet bizarrely this has absolutely no impact on the market. [1] https://www.lepoint.fr/dossiers/economie/bac8-saut-secteur-prive/80-des-cadres-parisiens-veulent-fuir-paris-01-09-2016-2065217_3163.php https://www.lepoint.fr/dossiers/economie/bac8-saut-secteur-p...
- camgunz 7y ago
  I would give you 10 upvotes if I could. The main reason for rent (and housing prices in general) increases is speculation and investment. There is billions of dollars in rentals and mortgages, and it's in everyone's interest that real estate worth goes up... unless you're trying to rent an apartment or buy a house. Someone pretty smart once said you can't have both real estate as an infinitely increasing source of wealth _and_ affordable housing at the same time. You only get to pick one.
- candybar 7y ago
  This doesn't make any sense - real estate speculation would increase the purchase price of real estate but cannot directly impact rental rates. Speculation means people are bidding up prices for real estate beyond what's supportable by current demand, based on expected future demand. This generally doesn't make sense in the rental market - as a tenant, you're not entitled to benefit from any future increase in demand and it doesn't make sense to pay more that what the rental is worth to you now. This means rents, in aggregate, are a relatively accurate measure of the current supply and demand, free of speculative intents. Ironically, certain types of rent control laws could lead to the rental market being influenced by speculation. Rent control laws effectively turn tenants into partial owners - this means, depending on the law, it may make sense to rent at an above-market rate, if that allows you to keep renting the same unit at what would later be a below-market rate. Likewise, from the landlord's perspective, it may not make sense to rent even at a market rate, because to do so may lock you out of getting what would be a higher market rate in the future.
hnick 7y ago
It's so strange - the promise of the "information super-highway" in the 90s was that proximity wouldn't matter as much. But if anything it matters more, since every minute spent idle (e.g. travelling to meet someone) has a higher associated cost due to the opportunity cost of lost productivity. So we tend to clump and cluster.
- thirdsun 7y ago
  > But if anything it matters more, since every minute spent idle (e.g. travelling to meet someone) has a higher associated cost due to the opportunity cost of lost productivity. Which sounds like another vote for remote work instead of clumping and clustering. Why care about proximity and the time it takes to travel when everyone you'd want to meet, regardless of location, is a message, call or video conference away and reachable from your home, favorite coffee shop or local office? And no, I'm not saying that this has to replace all face to face interaction, but I think it should become the default for work environments that are compatible with this approach.
  - hnick 7y ago
    I totally agree. I'm just trying to get my head around why it seems that our promised decentralisation never came to be. Maybe old habits just die hard.
    - hwio 7y ago
      It is decentralized, just family rather than work.
  - majewsky 7y ago
    Speaking as a German, a big part of why this decentralization isn't happening is that Germany's internet infrastructure is a fucking joke. I'm sometimes even having trouble with getting consistent 3G coverage in large city centers. When driving around the countryside, it's frequently 2G or no service at all. And it's looking similarly bad for broadband internet access in homes. My parents don't have any broadband service whatsoever. They use a 4G hotspot to go online, and get an average connection speed of 170 KB/s. This is par for the course in rural Germany.
pergadad 7y ago
Yes and no. Yes your want to make an offer to those arriving, but you also don't want to destroy a city by letting prices go so high that only a certain caste of people is able to afford it - think SF. Not everyone can be rich enough to afford decent living inside a city. And yet you still want cheap burgers and services, as well as public schools and trash collection and police. None of those can afford big city living if you allow the tech & big business crowd to simply price them out of the market.

by zanny 7y ago

jimmaswell 7y ago

I don't buy any of this. Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more countryside-ish living much more pleasant. Consider virtual reality and remote work. I imagine much of the workforce will move to virtual offices in the near to medium-far future when corporations finally come around to realizing they don't have to waste so much money on rent. There's no need for programmers, graphic designers, reporters, and employees of lots of other professions to work in a physical office. So really, as cities become less of a necessity to certain jobs, I expect a moderate exodus to nicer areas, halting growth or even decreasing population in urban centers.

TremendousJudge 7y ago
>Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice I assume you grew up in the United States?
- jotm 7y ago
  Cause European cities are so much better? They're not. Overcrowded, overpriced, just for jobs and getting out asap.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  Yes, upstate NY.
  - eli_gottlieb 7y ago
    Where? I ran screaming from the Albany area first thing I could when I turned 18.
    - jimmaswell 7y ago
      Hudson Valley, somewhere around Hyde Park. I went over some of the features of the area here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218742 What's so bad about the Albany area? I haven't been there since I went as a kid for some medical facility.
0xffff2 7y ago
>Consider virtual reality and remote work. I imagine much of the workforce will move to virtual offices in the near to medium-far future when corporations finally come around to realizing they don't have to waste so much money on rent. There's no need for programmers, graphic designers, reporters, and employees of lots of other professions to work in a physical office. So really, as cities become less of a necessity to certain jobs, I expect a moderate exodus to nicer areas, halting growth or even decreasing population in urban centers. People have been saying this for decades. Personally, I'd like nothing more than for it to be true so that I can ditch my expensive Silicon Valley apartment. But it's not. Lately I've even been seeing a lot of pushback from people who feel more productive in an office setting and don't want to work remotely.
2tab 7y ago
Unfortunately everything points to the effect being the opposite. Remote means you don't have to be in Detroit, but can contract a factory in China from New York or run a data center anywhere from the Bay Area.
EliRivers 7y ago
Depends on what you want, I suppose. High density humanity simply makes practical and economically viable gatherings, grouping and other activities that just don't work in low-density populations. Classes, meetups, specialist stores, hobbies, clubs, shows, lectures, institutions and just plain bubbling, embryonic interactions; all of it an order of magnitude more intense in a big city. Travel even fifty miles away from a big city and suddenly so much opportunity vanishes, or necessitates a two hour round trip into the city to take advantage of. For the people who want these things, the city is the only option. I don't work in a city because that's where my job is; I work in (the outskirts of) a city because that's where everything else I want is. I work with people who live in the inner city and commute outwards daily for their job, because their job is just a way to pay for what they actually want, and what they actually want is to be in that city.
- jotm 7y ago
  15 miles, 2 hours? Hmmm, maybe invest in New roads. But city living is sad, yeah you can have all the social fun, but none of the quiet, peace, living and hobby space. I like living 10 miles from the city, lots of space, quiet and green, can drive 20 minutes to the shity anytime.
  - EliRivers 7y ago
    15 miles, 2 hours? Hmmm, maybe invest in New roads. Maybe invest in new glasses. I didn't say 15. A city that has a boundary defined enough that you can reasonably say you live ten miles from it, and that you can drive into in 20 minutes? You're thinking of a town.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  Almost all that stuff exists just fine outside major cities in my experience. I went over some of the great stuff around where I'm from in NY here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20218742
- skgoa 7y ago
  Yeah, living in the suburbs of or reasonably close to a large metropolis is where it's at. As soon as you want/need a good or service that goes even slightly outside of the local mainstream, it will almost always be available only in a big city. The bigger the more likely that it will be available.
dgabriel 7y ago
That's sort of the opposite of my experience, where everyone couldn't wait to get out of the stultifying small town, where there was no work and no future.
pantalaimon 7y ago
That's odd because it it's pretty much the polar opposite of what I've experienced. Everyone wants to move to the big cities, especially Berlin, as they provide culture and a sense of freedom. You are able to meet like-minded people and are able to experience culture and infrastructure that simply does not exist in rural areas. This of course makes makes the situation for the villages worse as many young people move away. Who's left are old people and those who are not qualified to find work or education elsewhere. The population decline in those regions also means a decline in infrastructure, economy and cultural events, which makes those regions even more unattractive, perpetuating the cycle. There is a slight trend of dropouts creating alternative living communities in those areas as abandoned houses & property can be had for very cheap. But their isolated nature means that often they will not last as their inhabitants move back to the city were their original peer group is.
- toper-centage 7y ago
  Young people want to go to Berlin but people with money want to settle away from it.
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- brightball 7y ago
  And IMO that's also a product of rent freezing. Without rent freezing, rents continue to increase substantially enough that investors either build more housing in/near the urban centers to meet demand OR the price shifts high enough to make the decisions to live in rural areas much more appealing.
- tomohawk 7y ago
  The problem with cities is that they have really bad failure modes. Consider Baltimore. The city has been run by a single political party for decades, and run right into the ground. Notice the trend in these population stats: https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/baltimore-maryland https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/baltimore-maryland This is a city right next to DC, in an essentially recession proof area with lots of jobs. I've known a number of people who were big proponents of living in cities until either (a) they were robbed, or (b) they had kids and realized there was no decent school there, and (c) they had no chance of impacting the government in any way to affect change. They all ended up moving to the burbs.
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fzeroracer 7y ago
Where I grew up it was the exact opposite. I lived in a small suburbanish town which was 50% college students and 50% retirees. Almost all of my friends and fellow graduates left for the larger cities where job opportunities were far more abundant and where there was generally a lot more to do and see. Which also seems to be supported by the general population trends. Rural cities are dying, with the younger generations moving closer to urban centers. Remote work and virtual offices will give you a better choice of city, but people are not likely to move out to places where there's nothing to do, terrible infrastructure and less opportunity in the scenario where you choose to find a new job. And people have been saying that remote work will cause the trends to reverse any day now. So far that hasn't stopped companies even in SV; instead they just build new offices in other cities.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  What do you mean by "nothing to do"? What is there to do only in the city that's supposed to be so attractive, clubs, modern art galleries? I'm genuinely curious because this never resonated with me. Things to do in the Hudson Valley, the example I have in mind of a non-city area: expansive hiking trails for walking/biking, a river for rafting/skiing/boating/fishing, great family-owned restaurants all over, lots of nice historic sites such as the FDR estate and Vanderbelt mansion, a drive-in (unfortunately a rare institution these days, and obviously there are tons of normal movie theaters around), lots of good thrift/antique stores, hunting, tasting the fresh cider/whatever from local orchards (and getting great meat/produce from farmer's markets along with that), some concert halls around that play orchestras, horseback riding. If you want some stuff like classic theater/art galleries/etc you can find those around too, and a lot of stuff done by colleges. I'm sure I've missed a lot but this should be enough to make my point. The city has some good stuff like the Museum of Natural History but not enough for me to want to live there.
  - alisonatwork 7y ago
    I think you are missing the kinds of things that city people consider important. For instance, can you walk from your house to the market, and to the theater, and to the hiking trails? I live in an dense city in Asia and I can do this. Many city dwellers do not drive a car and a significant proportion of those never even learned how. Does your rural area support a dockless shared bike scheme? Can teenagers travel independently or do they need to rely on their parents to drive them around? How much carbon does it cost the average family to get groceries? On entertainment, and specifically in relation to Berlin: do you have a clubbing scene? Where can people go to dance to electronic music? Can they go out Saturday night after 9pm? Is there still public transport to take them home in the wee hours? I live alone and everything I own fits in a backpack. Are there single room apartments available for people who choose to live minimal lifestyles? Is it even possible for people to rent? If not, how far away is the trailer park from the cultural center? And how close is that to the nearest Greyhound stop? Things like walkability, access to rental accommodation, 24 hour entertainment and services... These kinds of things are taken for granted by people who live in cities. Of course this kind of lifestyle is not for everyone, but for those that value it, rural and suburban areas do not even come close.
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eli_gottlieb 7y ago
> I don't buy any of this. Growing up everyone around me saw the city as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more countryside-ish living much more pleasant. I don't buy any of this. Growing up, everyone around me saw the suburbs as somewhere you begrudgingly went out of necessity and only lived there if you had no choice, and I'm inclined to agree. In virtually every aspect I find more urban living much more pleasant. Funny how that works.
- imtringued 7y ago
  I'm always wondering... Where do those city dwellers put their heavy machinery? What? You don't have heavy machinery? Well, no hardware projects for you then. Do people seriously lift a half a ton lathe to the 10th floor of their apartment building and then just go at it?
  - nemetroid 7y ago
    My (small by international standards) city has several locations where you pay a monthly fee to use a shared workshop.
- nec4b 7y ago
  He wasn't talking about suburbs which technically are a part of a city and not of the countryside.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    Suburban and rural can be blurry. I'm not sure what I'd call some of the areas I grew up around where there are both farms/orchards and a lot of cul-de-sacs/other houses. When it comes to that odd pattern of development where there are a bunch of cookie cutter houses really close together with little yards, I'm not a fan of that.
jddj 7y ago
I've heard this change (the definite shift in desirability from suburbs and small towns to cities, which admittedly you seem to have somewhat blinkered out) attributed to the vast improvements in air quality / waste management / crime / public transport in cities, and that explanation seems reasonable to me. Country living can be great, but your experience some number of years ago doesn't speak to the current data.
v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
I was living in Berlin in 2015/2016 and believe me in no way at all are people coming here begrudgingly. Pretty much everyone between 20 and 35 wants to live here. And I can't blame them. I wanted to go and I still love the city to bits. There is nothing you can't to there. Tons of very interesting people to collaborate on projects with. Extremely good food and cultural attractions. Pretty much the most progressive place I've ever come across. Easily the best nightlife in the world. This sounds like a love letter I suppose and I realize you were talking about cities in general. But anyway, I can understand why everyone wants go there.
- majewsky 7y ago
  > Pretty much everyone between 20 and 35 wants to live here. Well, since you were in Berlin, that's probably survivorship bias. I live in Dresden, a city of 500k inhabitants about 200km south of Berlin. To me, Dresden is just the right size. Not as vast as Berlin, where it can easily take over one hour to get to the other side for a meetup, but still large enough to have enough interesting stuff going on in it.
  - dorgo 7y ago
    > that's probably survivorship bias. What? Is every other Berliner dead and can't tell their story?
    - majewsky 7y ago
      Survivorship bias can apply to things other than literal survivors. What I mean is that, since they're in Berlin, they're mostly interacting with other people who live in Berlin. They're not going to hear from people who don't want to live in Berlin, even if those exist.

ng12 7y ago

Agreed. I'm still shocked about how pervasive it is. New York, San Francisco, Denver, Austin, Vancouver, Montreal, London, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw. It seems like a complete binary: cities are either dying or in the midst of a "housing crisis".

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Zacharias030 7y ago

>Pretty much every western nation has systemically failed to recognize or support the insanely high demand for high density living in the 21st century. While I agree that we have an unsolved problem here, isn't a city's government mainly responsible to do good by the people who inhabit that city and make up its electorate? That's how western democracies work, so no surprises there. I know of many people all over the world who would like to move to the US and still the 'insanely high demand' has not been supported.

tarsinge 7y ago

Because the root cause is not always high demand, it’s also speculation. Real Estate is now cool again (just look at investing forums or subreddits), and foreign investor money is flowing. Look for example at Portland (OR) how the rent increase correlates with the population increase. The current urban hype alone can not explain these numbers. Also another example since a few years a lot of high earning people in Paris are actively moving to cities with a better quality of life and climate (like Nantes, Bordeaux), in fact as high than 80% would do it if they could [1]. Yet bizarrely this has absolutely no impact on the market. [1] https://www.lepoint.fr/dossiers/economie/bac8-saut-secteur-prive/80-des-cadres-parisiens-veulent-fuir-paris-01-09-2016-2065217_3163.php https://www.lepoint.fr/dossiers/economie/bac8-saut-secteur-p...

camgunz 7y ago
I would give you 10 upvotes if I could. The main reason for rent (and housing prices in general) increases is speculation and investment. There is billions of dollars in rentals and mortgages, and it's in everyone's interest that real estate worth goes up... unless you're trying to rent an apartment or buy a house. Someone pretty smart once said you can't have both real estate as an infinitely increasing source of wealth _and_ affordable housing at the same time. You only get to pick one.
candybar 7y ago
This doesn't make any sense - real estate speculation would increase the purchase price of real estate but cannot directly impact rental rates. Speculation means people are bidding up prices for real estate beyond what's supportable by current demand, based on expected future demand. This generally doesn't make sense in the rental market - as a tenant, you're not entitled to benefit from any future increase in demand and it doesn't make sense to pay more that what the rental is worth to you now. This means rents, in aggregate, are a relatively accurate measure of the current supply and demand, free of speculative intents. Ironically, certain types of rent control laws could lead to the rental market being influenced by speculation. Rent control laws effectively turn tenants into partial owners - this means, depending on the law, it may make sense to rent at an above-market rate, if that allows you to keep renting the same unit at what would later be a below-market rate. Likewise, from the landlord's perspective, it may not make sense to rent even at a market rate, because to do so may lock you out of getting what would be a higher market rate in the future.

hnick 7y ago

It's so strange - the promise of the "information super-highway" in the 90s was that proximity wouldn't matter as much. But if anything it matters more, since every minute spent idle (e.g. travelling to meet someone) has a higher associated cost due to the opportunity cost of lost productivity. So we tend to clump and cluster.

thirdsun 7y ago
> But if anything it matters more, since every minute spent idle (e.g. travelling to meet someone) has a higher associated cost due to the opportunity cost of lost productivity. Which sounds like another vote for remote work instead of clumping and clustering. Why care about proximity and the time it takes to travel when everyone you'd want to meet, regardless of location, is a message, call or video conference away and reachable from your home, favorite coffee shop or local office? And no, I'm not saying that this has to replace all face to face interaction, but I think it should become the default for work environments that are compatible with this approach.
- hnick 7y ago
  I totally agree. I'm just trying to get my head around why it seems that our promised decentralisation never came to be. Maybe old habits just die hard.
  - hwio 7y ago
    It is decentralized, just family rather than work.
- majewsky 7y ago
  Speaking as a German, a big part of why this decentralization isn't happening is that Germany's internet infrastructure is a fucking joke. I'm sometimes even having trouble with getting consistent 3G coverage in large city centers. When driving around the countryside, it's frequently 2G or no service at all. And it's looking similarly bad for broadband internet access in homes. My parents don't have any broadband service whatsoever. They use a 4G hotspot to go online, and get an average connection speed of 170 KB/s. This is par for the course in rural Germany.

pergadad 7y ago

Yes and no. Yes your want to make an offer to those arriving, but you also don't want to destroy a city by letting prices go so high that only a certain caste of people is able to afford it - think SF. Not everyone can be rich enough to afford decent living inside a city. And yet you still want cheap burgers and services, as well as public schools and trash collection and police. None of those can afford big city living if you allow the tech & big business crowd to simply price them out of the market.