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Unfortunately there is no other way to 'configure' a mass affluence society (where most people live in separate homes usually having ample plots). We don't have

Unfortunately there is no other way to 'configure' a mass affluence society (where most people live in separate homes usually having ample plots). We don't have that awful level of car dependence in Europe, true - but we also force most people to live in apartment blocks similar to those which you can see only in slums in the U.S.

jwr 7y ago
> but we also force most people to live in apartment blocks similar to those which you can see only in slums in the U.S. I vastly prefer living in my apartment in Europe than living in a house, especially a US house. Also, putting every family in a separate free-standing house is ridiculous: there is physically no way to achieve that.
- anovikov 7y ago
  Yet, in the U.S. they mostly achieved that. 60% of the population live in separate houses. And yes, living space per capita is 2x-3x the EU level. Would be a no problem at all to put 100% in them, if some didn't live in large cities where it's impossible. Just the economic and yeah, transportation infrastructure we have in Europe won't support that. It's not even the population density really.
  - jwr 7y ago
    Having lived in the US I know what it means to have "mostly achieved that". Gridlocked highways, unwalkable neighborhoods, the requirement of owning and driving a car (at least one car per family, usually 2 or more), and catastrophic CO2 emissions, both from cars, and from the fact that heating free-standing houses is way more expensive than heating apartments that share walls/floors/ceilings. Until we invent teleportation, putting everyone in their own separate house is unsustainable.
    - specialist 7y ago
      Also, those who can't drive become shut-ins. The elderly, sick, infirm, children.
    - glofish 7y ago
      I got an anecdata as well: Having lived in a European city I was appalled of how bad the air quality was, how noisy the streets were, how annoying trash collection at 5am was, I had to use a wet mop on the hardwood floor almost on a daily basis to and it was black every day. I had to walk a half a mile to a tiny parklet, always packed with kids as it was the only location in the play. Every morning on the packed subway and street buses. It was awful, I couldn't wait to get back home. Back home I live in a green environment, trees everywhere, I got my lawn, there are no fences, I forget to close my garage door at night no problem, nothing is ever missing ... I use a wet mop every other week and it is never dirty. Do you know what generates the CO2 emissions? All that useless junk we buy shipped from all corners of the world. The fix is buying less junk not blaming on someone that happens to want to live in a green environment.
      - jeromegv 7y ago
        The funny thing is that this has all been measured. Shipping emissions are nowhere near what they are for personal vehicle transportation. On top of that, all suburbs still require shipping in an even more unsustainable way (you need a truck to go around the neighbourhood for hours instead of having a single truck that can fulfill a single condo tower). I know it's hard to be criticized for your lifestyle, but please do your research, suburbans lifestyle is nowhere near sustainable. That's not anecdata, that's data.
        glofish 7y ago
        Honestly, it is not so obviously better to have hundreds of tiny stores in each neighborhood, stocked every day rather than going out doing grocery shopping once(!) a week! I am sure there is a tradeoff there - the many delivery trucks suffocating the same space they are supposed to serve. I don't actually live in the suburbs, just a small town that looks like a suburb, and I also lived in European style cities hence I understand the attractiveness of a suburb. It is a different lifestyle and you can't "fix" the suburbs with the wrong kind of arguments - "you my friend suck for wanting to live there" Find a suburb looking place in Europe and check the prices ... now think about it, do Europeans assign value to that? The vast majority of cities do not even remotely look like some of the elite and lucky European cities that are built on the many advantages they got from (not looking for a flamewar here) but exploiting other nations (the behavior is in the past, but the advantages remain and accumulate), all I am saying is that it cannot be a model for <insert eastern european city here>. If anything the clean, quiet, well kept European city is non-sustainable and non-replicate-able as a global model. We need to fix the problems of the suburbs but not by imposing a model that cannot work. The global city model is a far less livable.
    - jeromegv 7y ago
      It's hard to see that perspective when you have never seen it. It's funny because I would think that for someone with some knowledge of IT could understand the argument that it just doesn't scale. For most people, the ideal life is having your yard and be able to drive everywhere with enough lanes on the street to be sure you never hit traffic. Except that ideal situation rarely exists, all the roads are clogged (induced demand!) and having a large house for every person means a big desirable city to work can't scale. Even LA has understood they couldn't keep building highways and needed to densify, it just doesn't scale.
  - fuqmachine 7y ago
    I know this might be a tangent, but separate houses has caused HUGE housing problems. Wealthy homeowners refuse to give up their single family homes near large cities where that space should house 30 families.
adrianN 7y ago
It's pretty offensive to compare average European housing with a slum.
golem14 7y ago
I will throw in here that apartments in Germany I have seen or lived in are mostly nicer and have better construction quality than apartment complexes in even nice and high priced US regions (E.g., Texas, California). Hardly slums.
lemoncucumber 7y ago
The most expensive and desirable locations in the U.S. are mostly apartments/condos, not single family detached homes. Take New York or San Francisco for example -- hardly slums by most measures (yes there is homelessness, but that's partly a byproduct of just how high the cost of living is). There's nothing about affluence that requires single family detached homes, that's just a fantasy that's been marketed to us for the past hundred years, and at a huge cost in terms of walkability, time/money/land wasted on traffic and parking, traffic fatalities, etc.
- anovikov 7y ago
  Expensive and desirable locations - sure, but we are speaking of mass society, of everyone - everyone in the U.S. is dependent on cars, not just people in "expensive and desirable locations". These actually have less of that dependence. This idea have been marketed and for a good reason, it was good way to save U.S. population from Soviet nuclear threat - in a way Coomies could neither counter, nor replicate on their side - when Commies launch their nukes, it's much better if most people find themselves in separate houses with large tracts of land and little combustible materials, and good basements to protect from fallout, and in a few days, can emerge from there and drive their cars in whichever direction civil defense points as safer.
  - itsnevereasy 7y ago
    That’s an interesting claim that I haven’t heard before — do you have any sources discussing this that I can read?
    - anovikov 7y ago
      https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/why-sprawl-was-caused-nuclear-arms-race-and-why-matters-more-ever-today.html https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/why-sprawl-was-cause...
    - sandworm101 7y ago
      A mobile and well-resourced population is a cornerstone of US disaster planning. When a hurricane is comming and an evacuation order given, the assumption is that most americans can drive themselves. Mass transit is cool, but evacuating an entire modern city on busses isnt viable. (Inter-city rail connections cannot be scaled up in such times.)

jwr 7y ago

> but we also force most people to live in apartment blocks similar to those which you can see only in slums in the U.S. I vastly prefer living in my apartment in Europe than living in a house, especially a US house. Also, putting every family in a separate free-standing house is ridiculous: there is physically no way to achieve that.

anovikov 7y ago
Yet, in the U.S. they mostly achieved that. 60% of the population live in separate houses. And yes, living space per capita is 2x-3x the EU level. Would be a no problem at all to put 100% in them, if some didn't live in large cities where it's impossible. Just the economic and yeah, transportation infrastructure we have in Europe won't support that. It's not even the population density really.
- jwr 7y ago
  Having lived in the US I know what it means to have "mostly achieved that". Gridlocked highways, unwalkable neighborhoods, the requirement of owning and driving a car (at least one car per family, usually 2 or more), and catastrophic CO2 emissions, both from cars, and from the fact that heating free-standing houses is way more expensive than heating apartments that share walls/floors/ceilings. Until we invent teleportation, putting everyone in their own separate house is unsustainable.
  - specialist 7y ago
    Also, those who can't drive become shut-ins. The elderly, sick, infirm, children.
  - glofish 7y ago
    I got an anecdata as well: Having lived in a European city I was appalled of how bad the air quality was, how noisy the streets were, how annoying trash collection at 5am was, I had to use a wet mop on the hardwood floor almost on a daily basis to and it was black every day. I had to walk a half a mile to a tiny parklet, always packed with kids as it was the only location in the play. Every morning on the packed subway and street buses. It was awful, I couldn't wait to get back home. Back home I live in a green environment, trees everywhere, I got my lawn, there are no fences, I forget to close my garage door at night no problem, nothing is ever missing ... I use a wet mop every other week and it is never dirty. Do you know what generates the CO2 emissions? All that useless junk we buy shipped from all corners of the world. The fix is buying less junk not blaming on someone that happens to want to live in a green environment.
    - jeromegv 7y ago
      The funny thing is that this has all been measured. Shipping emissions are nowhere near what they are for personal vehicle transportation. On top of that, all suburbs still require shipping in an even more unsustainable way (you need a truck to go around the neighbourhood for hours instead of having a single truck that can fulfill a single condo tower). I know it's hard to be criticized for your lifestyle, but please do your research, suburbans lifestyle is nowhere near sustainable. That's not anecdata, that's data.
      - glofish 7y ago
        Honestly, it is not so obviously better to have hundreds of tiny stores in each neighborhood, stocked every day rather than going out doing grocery shopping once(!) a week! I am sure there is a tradeoff there - the many delivery trucks suffocating the same space they are supposed to serve. I don't actually live in the suburbs, just a small town that looks like a suburb, and I also lived in European style cities hence I understand the attractiveness of a suburb. It is a different lifestyle and you can't "fix" the suburbs with the wrong kind of arguments - "you my friend suck for wanting to live there" Find a suburb looking place in Europe and check the prices ... now think about it, do Europeans assign value to that? The vast majority of cities do not even remotely look like some of the elite and lucky European cities that are built on the many advantages they got from (not looking for a flamewar here) but exploiting other nations (the behavior is in the past, but the advantages remain and accumulate), all I am saying is that it cannot be a model for <insert eastern european city here>. If anything the clean, quiet, well kept European city is non-sustainable and non-replicate-able as a global model. We need to fix the problems of the suburbs but not by imposing a model that cannot work. The global city model is a far less livable.
  - jeromegv 7y ago
    It's hard to see that perspective when you have never seen it. It's funny because I would think that for someone with some knowledge of IT could understand the argument that it just doesn't scale. For most people, the ideal life is having your yard and be able to drive everywhere with enough lanes on the street to be sure you never hit traffic. Except that ideal situation rarely exists, all the roads are clogged (induced demand!) and having a large house for every person means a big desirable city to work can't scale. Even LA has understood they couldn't keep building highways and needed to densify, it just doesn't scale.
- fuqmachine 7y ago
  I know this might be a tangent, but separate houses has caused HUGE housing problems. Wealthy homeowners refuse to give up their single family homes near large cities where that space should house 30 families.

adrianN 7y ago

It's pretty offensive to compare average European housing with a slum.

golem14 7y ago

I will throw in here that apartments in Germany I have seen or lived in are mostly nicer and have better construction quality than apartment complexes in even nice and high priced US regions (E.g., Texas, California). Hardly slums.

lemoncucumber 7y ago

The most expensive and desirable locations in the U.S. are mostly apartments/condos, not single family detached homes. Take New York or San Francisco for example -- hardly slums by most measures (yes there is homelessness, but that's partly a byproduct of just how high the cost of living is). There's nothing about affluence that requires single family detached homes, that's just a fantasy that's been marketed to us for the past hundred years, and at a huge cost in terms of walkability, time/money/land wasted on traffic and parking, traffic fatalities, etc.

anovikov 7y ago
Expensive and desirable locations - sure, but we are speaking of mass society, of everyone - everyone in the U.S. is dependent on cars, not just people in "expensive and desirable locations". These actually have less of that dependence. This idea have been marketed and for a good reason, it was good way to save U.S. population from Soviet nuclear threat - in a way Coomies could neither counter, nor replicate on their side - when Commies launch their nukes, it's much better if most people find themselves in separate houses with large tracts of land and little combustible materials, and good basements to protect from fallout, and in a few days, can emerge from there and drive their cars in whichever direction civil defense points as safer.
- itsnevereasy 7y ago
  That’s an interesting claim that I haven’t heard before — do you have any sources discussing this that I can read?
  - anovikov 7y ago
    https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/why-sprawl-was-caused-nuclear-arms-race-and-why-matters-more-ever-today.html https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/why-sprawl-was-cause...
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    A mobile and well-resourced population is a cornerstone of US disaster planning. When a hurricane is comming and an evacuation order given, the assumption is that most americans can drive themselves. Mass transit is cool, but evacuating an entire modern city on busses isnt viable. (Inter-city rail connections cannot be scaled up in such times.)