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How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? Cities have worked well this way for hundreds of years. Maybe the industrial revolution made cities

How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? Cities have worked well this way for hundreds of years. Maybe the industrial revolution made cities too unpleasant? Were we too spoiled by the automobile industry and government roads? White flight from cities into the suburbs?

lotsofpulp 6y ago
People wanted their children to be separate from people of other socioeconomic classes (and races), and the way to do that in the US is to move to a school district they others can’t afford.
- chills 6y ago
  This has also been the case for hundreds of years though.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    They might not have had the means to do it though. Cheap fuel, cheap cars, 30 year fixed rate mortgages, widening income/wealth bands, etc.
  - mumblemumble 6y ago
    Not to the same extent. It wasn't until cars became a thing that it became practical for most rich people to live more than a (healthy) walking distance away from working class people. If they lived too far away, then you wouldn't be able to have them work for you.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Not just afford - often time those suburbs specifically barred non-whites from owning property. Additionally red-lining and racist loan practices forced that wealth gap to grow. But I think that's separate from the car issue, mostly. Originally satellite communities had commercial services - local shops and the like. But those were phased out due to a lack of demand, I think due to societal shifts that were egged on by marketing "cool kids have cars" - and the like.
  - tinyhouse 6y ago
    Are you speculating or do you have specific examples? It sounds far fetched. Not to mention that whites are not even a majority in many of the wealthy suburbs. Many of Asian and Indian families.
    - lazyasciiart 6y ago
      They haven't been legal for decades but yes, it's a real thing that had a massive impact, just like redlining. https://www.mappingprejudice.org/what-are-covenants/ https://www.mappingprejudice.org/what-are-covenants/
    - aahhahahaaa 6y ago
      Diversity in suburbs is a very recent development. Look at the historical demographics of the suburb you probably live in. It's great that it's changing but suburbs are not a product of seeking to preserve diversity.
    - egypturnash 6y ago
      https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.php https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.php can give you many examples.
    - madamelic 6y ago
      Levittown, PA St. Louis, MO. Remember Ferguson? That's a 10 minute drive from the richest neighborhood in StL. Look up North and South Delmar in St. Louis; the opposite sides of a single street. That's redlining.
- wincy 6y ago
  Heck yes I want to move away from socioeconomic classes that could potentially put my daughter in harms way. We lived in a lower class neighborhood and while my two year old daughter was playing with a shovel in the front yard a drug deal went bad at the house across from us and the kid (he was maybe 16) started shooting his gun into the air. I’d stopped his mom from strangling him two years before that. Before that, I’d stopped his mother from being assaulted by her boyfriend a few years before. And until my daughter was born, I didn’t really care. But thinking of my daughter getting hit by a stray bullet was terrifying, and we got a mortgage and moved to a house worth 6x the price a few months later. It was sad because our neighbors behind us were Venezuelan refugees with two kids and we got along really well. I’m not ashamed of wanting to keep my children safe, and I’m not going to put them at risk so I can fulfill others vague notions of “inclusiveness”. The police took 45+ minutes to show up any time I called. Funny thing is, the middle class neighborhood I live in now is much MORE diverse, not less. We have Africans, Southern Asians, East Asians, Spaniards, Russians, and all manner of professionals from all over the world. We bought the house from some Pakistanis. Heck, my neighbor is a convicted felon for dealing in his younger days but even him and his wife and six kids are okay.
  - zip1234 6y ago
    There are other options to stark neighborhood socioeconomic divisions. Imagine if everything was averaged out a bit more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/the-design-history-of-athens-iconic-apartments https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/the-desig...
    - jojobas 6y ago
      Yes, this was really effective at defeating murderous criminal gangs in Athens. Except it was never a problem, with violent crime way below European average, let alone US.
didip 6y ago
My first guess would be the car lobbyists doing. They are powerful enough to tear down so many street-car rails all over America.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Indeed - car lobbyists and marketing... and likely that torch was picked up and carried further by oil lobbyists. America has been slowly pushed toward viewing walking places as being abnormal so instead of cars being for trips and vacations they are seen as standard and necessary for commutes and runs to the store. There is only a very small segment of the population that benefits from constantly driving everywhere and they aren't the ones in the cars.
- refurb 6y ago
  Makes for a nice conspiracy theory but from what I’ve read many of them were going under and consumers wanted cars, not street cars.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    They went under because they were not allowed to raise fares to the level needed to support them this wasn't the market, it was the law.
  - madamelic 6y ago
    Not a conspiracy theory. Look up the Koch Brothers. They fund PACs that pretend to be grassroots campaigns to shut down public transit expansion and successfully unfortunately. Also the street cars collapse was very much due to automaker lobbying, like someone else said, you don't need to kill it directly; just make it unsustainable. Basically how Republicans govern; you don't kill it directly, you just choke it to death.
epistasis 6y ago
Yes, basically it comes down to racism and classism, and a bit of the fight against communism. There used to be racial covenants that ensures racial segregation. As soon as those were rendered illegal, people started zoning for "public safety" and such. The original decision (Euclid?) that rendered zoning legal explicitly states concerns about lower income people degrading neighborhoods if multi-family residences are allowed. And as soon as you start allowing such restrictions on what sort of construction is allowed, you start outlawing small business next to residences. And home buyers appreciate these restrictions because there's chance of a business growing and causing more traffic and "outsiders" (those that can't afford to buy a huge parcel of land) coming into their bucolic suburban life. Subsidized FHA loans were also envisioned as a strong anti-communist play; who would fall prey to the temptations of socialism if they own their own home and can use it to keep out non-whites? (Redlining restricted these subsidized mortgages from being used for any home that had a chance of becoming racially integrated.) The rise of the automobile and destruction of commuter rail lead to a ton of land accessible to people who worked in cities. And in conjunction with the exclusionary zoning that was used to protect the capitalistic gains of property values, the idea of mixed-use zoning became antiquated and counter productive to financial and social interests. So a century later, we are finally realizing the massive health costs, societal costs, and economic costs of our unsustainable suburbanization; infrastructure is aging out without the tax base to maintain and rebuild, and the suburbs--filled with wealthy residents paying lower taxes--have drained the economic centers of cities, while those wealthy suburbanites benefit from the commerce that high density cities enable, and which low-density suburbs disallow. We have subsidized an unsustainable style of living for the white middle class, and as white middle class boomers have benefitted, they have declined to allow for basic investments in the future that would extend prosperity to future generation. This, I think, is the story of the decline of the American empire, just as much as mismanagement by a fascist-leaning a factual political party. During the decline of the USSR, even with massive amounts of state propaganda and misinformation, at least they were able to muster state power to clean up Chernobyl. I'm the twilight of the US, we have hollowed our our scientific institutions like the CDC and FDA because they don't serve the political goals of the ruling political class, and we can't even muster a response to a pandemic that countries with widely-regarded corrupt governments such as Italy have dealt with handily. I think this rot comes from our racist segregation which lead to our poor century of city planning. (This, of course, would need several books to fully justify my wild claims, but one book that starts to is The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.
nimish 6y ago
Racism. The roots of zoning are indelibly intertwined with reinforcing white supremacy.
- nitwit005 6y ago
  Even with no zoning laws quite a few areas in the US would be like this. Companies have built giant housing developments with no shops.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - darksaints 6y ago
    There is only one city in the US that doesn't have zoning, but they still have other forms of regulation that effectively serve the same purpose. It is essentially impossible to get mixed use zoning in the vast majority of the US.
smoe 6y ago
Never been to an US residential area and only "know" them from tv shows. Are they really pretty much completely devoid of businesses as this article indicates? No grocery / mom and pop stores, bars, restaurants, hair dressers etc.? That sounds very inconvenient. I always assumed you'd get some basic commercial everywhere.
- tspike 6y ago
  Hugely dependent on the region and age of the city, but yes. It is quite common to have to drive 5-10 minutes to get to the nearest shops, which are all concentrated in strip malls. Take a look at this satellite view of a Denver suburb: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9426077,-104.9504212,3545m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9426077,-104.9504212,3545m/d...
- vidanay 6y ago
  Perfectly normal for there to be a thousand houses with no commercial. Not a good idea, but still normal in many suburbs.
- osdiab 6y ago
  I grew up in a wealthy American suburb, the nearest grocery store was a 40 minute walk from my home, and I would have looked like a madman for simply walking on any street in the entire city because literally only beggars don’t ride cars. I’m glad to be living in Tokyo now!
  - CGamesPlay 6y ago
    I grew up in a lower-middle-class American suburb and it was the same situation.
  - ereyes01 6y ago
    I grew up in South Florida and when I visit my parents, they are horrified when I insist on walking the quarter mile to the Starbucks in the corner. It's definitely a part of the culture here.
srj 6y ago
I have no idea if this has always been the case, but people seem to look at their house as a bank account. They defend it and try and raise prices by blocking new development, keeping residents deemed undesirable out, and enforcing a consistent cookie cutter look with trimmed lawns and just the right number of cars in the driveway. With that mindset a business could bring in outsiders and be bad for their property value.
- digitalsushi 6y ago
  With aggressive reverse mortgage programs, many people use their house as a retirement account. A house is generally the most expensive thing the average person purchases, and is the most obvious source to convert into an income. With a finite amount of land, and lots of increasingly desperate retirees with excellent positions to relax a claim for some temporary relief, someone is always ready to point out their house is their paycheck.
rodgerd 6y ago
> How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? Cities have worked well this way for hundreds of years. Capitalism. Economies of scale. Taxpayer subsidies for car infrastructure. Nowadays Amazon, Uber Eats, etc. Try actually running a local dairy or restaurant or electronics store and see how long it takes for you to be crushed out of existence by people driving to the supermarket 5 km away, or just ordering from VC funded loss-making delivery companies, or the like.
- refurb 6y ago
  Yup. Currently live in a walkable neighborhood and yeah, it’s awesome to walk 2 min to buy some milk or grab a bite to eat. My weekly grocery run? Grab the car and go to Costco, otherwise my grocery budget would double.
jackcosgrove 6y ago
The suburbs grew because of some legitimate reasons. In the mid-20th century cities were very crowded. It's one thing to live alone in a 1000 sq ft condo in a city now. 70 years ago that equivalent space was housing a family of five. More space for less money was enabled by automobiles, and it was a great improvement for many. That said many suburbs botched their expansions with tract housing and poor urban design, because that made the most money for developers and appealed to a now diminishing taste for dispersed living. However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough. Optimizing for individual transport in cars and public transport are not compatible goals. The first reason being that if individual transport is made available to most people, they will opt out of public transport and therefore all political will for maintaining and increasing quality of public transport will disappear. And optimizing for cars means you can't optimizing for walking or other forms of transit.
- madamelic 6y ago
  There is also that whole thing about how suburbs were invented to escape "the city" (read: non-whites). Look up Levittown.
momokoko 6y ago
Because if you moved to a new town you were in a different school district. The great migration to the suburbs happened right after schools were desegregated in the US. White Americans moved to the suburbs to avoid their children from attending school with black children. Milliken v. Bradley was the last nail in the coffin. The return to cities has coincided with white people having less children and children at older ages along with less racist views.
- titzer 6y ago
  This started happening already in the 1950s before desegregation. The rise of suburbs is directly related to the boom years after WWII and how much development happened outside of cities, where throwing up a new subdivision was much cheaper, and the booming auto industry absolutely loved new demand for commuting.
  - bobthepanda 6y ago
    Also, the FHA and the GI Bill provided cheap loans to buy single use housing for veterans, which were a significant chunk of the population. You can't really get an FHA loan to buy an apartment in a mixed-use building. (On paper Black people were also entitled to GI bill benefits, but in practice this didn't really happen.) From Wikipedia: > In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs about 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-white veterans.
  - madamelic 6y ago
    > the rise of suburbs is directly related to the boom years after WWII The idea of suburbs was created by Levitt & Sons when building Levittown, PA post-WWII. A neighborhood that had explicit terms that the owners would not sell or rent to non-white people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York
titzer 6y ago
I could give a long, detailed answer, but basically, the 1950s happened.
csomar 6y ago
No. It's an inferior solution to someone having a car and driving around for shopping. Most people here seems to draw from their experience traveling to a place for a short period of time. The reality is that living near a small business (especially restaurant/cafe/bar) is crappy. You'll have people walking around, being noisy, drunk people, people parking in front of your drive way because the didn't see the signs, garbage, etc...
- dotandgtfo 6y ago
  It's a bit crappy for people living in the immediate vicinity but that's just a tiny fraction of the people who get value from nearby local businesses. The housing prices also reflect that and it's usually cheaper rent if you're above/next to a popular grocery store, bar or restaurant. I am extremely biased as I'm in my mid twenties and don't even have a driver's license as the only time it comes in handy in Oslo is if you're moving furniture.
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  Bars are a problem, but I live in an apartment and there's a bank, a few cafes, a liquor store, multiple drug stores, an optician's, an orthopedic shoe store, a pawn shop, a shop selling kitchen furniture and god knows what else in the same building. The biggest issue is public urination, but these people aren't the customers, but people leaving the subway.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? People got rich enough that the noise from the bar on the other side of the block or the mechanic shop across the street made their list of "big problems" and they complained to local government until government restricted everyone's property rights.

lotsofpulp 6y ago

People wanted their children to be separate from people of other socioeconomic classes (and races), and the way to do that in the US is to move to a school district they others can’t afford.

chills 6y ago
This has also been the case for hundreds of years though.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  They might not have had the means to do it though. Cheap fuel, cheap cars, 30 year fixed rate mortgages, widening income/wealth bands, etc.
- mumblemumble 6y ago
  Not to the same extent. It wasn't until cars became a thing that it became practical for most rich people to live more than a (healthy) walking distance away from working class people. If they lived too far away, then you wouldn't be able to have them work for you.
munk-a 6y ago
Not just afford - often time those suburbs specifically barred non-whites from owning property. Additionally red-lining and racist loan practices forced that wealth gap to grow. But I think that's separate from the car issue, mostly. Originally satellite communities had commercial services - local shops and the like. But those were phased out due to a lack of demand, I think due to societal shifts that were egged on by marketing "cool kids have cars" - and the like.
- tinyhouse 6y ago
  Are you speculating or do you have specific examples? It sounds far fetched. Not to mention that whites are not even a majority in many of the wealthy suburbs. Many of Asian and Indian families.
  - lazyasciiart 6y ago
    They haven't been legal for decades but yes, it's a real thing that had a massive impact, just like redlining. https://www.mappingprejudice.org/what-are-covenants/ https://www.mappingprejudice.org/what-are-covenants/
  - aahhahahaaa 6y ago
    Diversity in suburbs is a very recent development. Look at the historical demographics of the suburb you probably live in. It's great that it's changing but suburbs are not a product of seeking to preserve diversity.
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.php https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.php can give you many examples.
  - madamelic 6y ago
    Levittown, PA St. Louis, MO. Remember Ferguson? That's a 10 minute drive from the richest neighborhood in StL. Look up North and South Delmar in St. Louis; the opposite sides of a single street. That's redlining.
wincy 6y ago
Heck yes I want to move away from socioeconomic classes that could potentially put my daughter in harms way. We lived in a lower class neighborhood and while my two year old daughter was playing with a shovel in the front yard a drug deal went bad at the house across from us and the kid (he was maybe 16) started shooting his gun into the air. I’d stopped his mom from strangling him two years before that. Before that, I’d stopped his mother from being assaulted by her boyfriend a few years before. And until my daughter was born, I didn’t really care. But thinking of my daughter getting hit by a stray bullet was terrifying, and we got a mortgage and moved to a house worth 6x the price a few months later. It was sad because our neighbors behind us were Venezuelan refugees with two kids and we got along really well. I’m not ashamed of wanting to keep my children safe, and I’m not going to put them at risk so I can fulfill others vague notions of “inclusiveness”. The police took 45+ minutes to show up any time I called. Funny thing is, the middle class neighborhood I live in now is much MORE diverse, not less. We have Africans, Southern Asians, East Asians, Spaniards, Russians, and all manner of professionals from all over the world. We bought the house from some Pakistanis. Heck, my neighbor is a convicted felon for dealing in his younger days but even him and his wife and six kids are okay.
- zip1234 6y ago
  There are other options to stark neighborhood socioeconomic divisions. Imagine if everything was averaged out a bit more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/the-design-history-of-athens-iconic-apartments https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-15/the-desig...
  - jojobas 6y ago
    Yes, this was really effective at defeating murderous criminal gangs in Athens. Except it was never a problem, with violent crime way below European average, let alone US.

didip 6y ago

My first guess would be the car lobbyists doing. They are powerful enough to tear down so many street-car rails all over America.

munk-a 6y ago
Indeed - car lobbyists and marketing... and likely that torch was picked up and carried further by oil lobbyists. America has been slowly pushed toward viewing walking places as being abnormal so instead of cars being for trips and vacations they are seen as standard and necessary for commutes and runs to the store. There is only a very small segment of the population that benefits from constantly driving everywhere and they aren't the ones in the cars.
refurb 6y ago
Makes for a nice conspiracy theory but from what I’ve read many of them were going under and consumers wanted cars, not street cars.
- bluGill 6y ago
  They went under because they were not allowed to raise fares to the level needed to support them this wasn't the market, it was the law.
- madamelic 6y ago
  Not a conspiracy theory. Look up the Koch Brothers. They fund PACs that pretend to be grassroots campaigns to shut down public transit expansion and successfully unfortunately. Also the street cars collapse was very much due to automaker lobbying, like someone else said, you don't need to kill it directly; just make it unsustainable. Basically how Republicans govern; you don't kill it directly, you just choke it to death.

epistasis 6y ago

Yes, basically it comes down to racism and classism, and a bit of the fight against communism. There used to be racial covenants that ensures racial segregation. As soon as those were rendered illegal, people started zoning for "public safety" and such. The original decision (Euclid?) that rendered zoning legal explicitly states concerns about lower income people degrading neighborhoods if multi-family residences are allowed. And as soon as you start allowing such restrictions on what sort of construction is allowed, you start outlawing small business next to residences. And home buyers appreciate these restrictions because there's chance of a business growing and causing more traffic and "outsiders" (those that can't afford to buy a huge parcel of land) coming into their bucolic suburban life. Subsidized FHA loans were also envisioned as a strong anti-communist play; who would fall prey to the temptations of socialism if they own their own home and can use it to keep out non-whites? (Redlining restricted these subsidized mortgages from being used for any home that had a chance of becoming racially integrated.) The rise of the automobile and destruction of commuter rail lead to a ton of land accessible to people who worked in cities. And in conjunction with the exclusionary zoning that was used to protect the capitalistic gains of property values, the idea of mixed-use zoning became antiquated and counter productive to financial and social interests. So a century later, we are finally realizing the massive health costs, societal costs, and economic costs of our unsustainable suburbanization; infrastructure is aging out without the tax base to maintain and rebuild, and the suburbs--filled with wealthy residents paying lower taxes--have drained the economic centers of cities, while those wealthy suburbanites benefit from the commerce that high density cities enable, and which low-density suburbs disallow. We have subsidized an unsustainable style of living for the white middle class, and as white middle class boomers have benefitted, they have declined to allow for basic investments in the future that would extend prosperity to future generation. This, I think, is the story of the decline of the American empire, just as much as mismanagement by a fascist-leaning a factual political party. During the decline of the USSR, even with massive amounts of state propaganda and misinformation, at least they were able to muster state power to clean up Chernobyl. I'm the twilight of the US, we have hollowed our our scientific institutions like the CDC and FDA because they don't serve the political goals of the ruling political class, and we can't even muster a response to a pandemic that countries with widely-regarded corrupt governments such as Italy have dealt with handily. I think this rot comes from our racist segregation which lead to our poor century of city planning. (This, of course, would need several books to fully justify my wild claims, but one book that starts to is The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein.

nimish 6y ago

Racism. The roots of zoning are indelibly intertwined with reinforcing white supremacy.

nitwit005 6y ago
Even with no zoning laws quite a few areas in the US would be like this. Companies have built giant housing developments with no shops.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- darksaints 6y ago
  There is only one city in the US that doesn't have zoning, but they still have other forms of regulation that effectively serve the same purpose. It is essentially impossible to get mixed use zoning in the vast majority of the US.

smoe 6y ago

Never been to an US residential area and only "know" them from tv shows. Are they really pretty much completely devoid of businesses as this article indicates? No grocery / mom and pop stores, bars, restaurants, hair dressers etc.? That sounds very inconvenient. I always assumed you'd get some basic commercial everywhere.

tspike 6y ago
Hugely dependent on the region and age of the city, but yes. It is quite common to have to drive 5-10 minutes to get to the nearest shops, which are all concentrated in strip malls. Take a look at this satellite view of a Denver suburb: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9426077,-104.9504212,3545m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@39.9426077,-104.9504212,3545m/d...
vidanay 6y ago
Perfectly normal for there to be a thousand houses with no commercial. Not a good idea, but still normal in many suburbs.
osdiab 6y ago
I grew up in a wealthy American suburb, the nearest grocery store was a 40 minute walk from my home, and I would have looked like a madman for simply walking on any street in the entire city because literally only beggars don’t ride cars. I’m glad to be living in Tokyo now!
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  I grew up in a lower-middle-class American suburb and it was the same situation.
- ereyes01 6y ago
  I grew up in South Florida and when I visit my parents, they are horrified when I insist on walking the quarter mile to the Starbucks in the corner. It's definitely a part of the culture here.

srj 6y ago

I have no idea if this has always been the case, but people seem to look at their house as a bank account. They defend it and try and raise prices by blocking new development, keeping residents deemed undesirable out, and enforcing a consistent cookie cutter look with trimmed lawns and just the right number of cars in the driveway. With that mindset a business could bring in outsiders and be bad for their property value.

digitalsushi 6y ago
With aggressive reverse mortgage programs, many people use their house as a retirement account. A house is generally the most expensive thing the average person purchases, and is the most obvious source to convert into an income. With a finite amount of land, and lots of increasingly desperate retirees with excellent positions to relax a claim for some temporary relief, someone is always ready to point out their house is their paycheck.

rodgerd 6y ago

> How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? Cities have worked well this way for hundreds of years. Capitalism. Economies of scale. Taxpayer subsidies for car infrastructure. Nowadays Amazon, Uber Eats, etc. Try actually running a local dairy or restaurant or electronics store and see how long it takes for you to be crushed out of existence by people driving to the supermarket 5 km away, or just ordering from VC funded loss-making delivery companies, or the like.

refurb 6y ago
Yup. Currently live in a walkable neighborhood and yeah, it’s awesome to walk 2 min to buy some milk or grab a bite to eat. My weekly grocery run? Grab the car and go to Costco, otherwise my grocery budget would double.

jackcosgrove 6y ago

The suburbs grew because of some legitimate reasons. In the mid-20th century cities were very crowded. It's one thing to live alone in a 1000 sq ft condo in a city now. 70 years ago that equivalent space was housing a family of five. More space for less money was enabled by automobiles, and it was a great improvement for many. That said many suburbs botched their expansions with tract housing and poor urban design, because that made the most money for developers and appealed to a now diminishing taste for dispersed living. However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lotsofpulp 6y ago
>However there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a sprawling urban area enabled by cars. You just need to take care to design it well enough. Optimizing for individual transport in cars and public transport are not compatible goals. The first reason being that if individual transport is made available to most people, they will opt out of public transport and therefore all political will for maintaining and increasing quality of public transport will disappear. And optimizing for cars means you can't optimizing for walking or other forms of transit.
madamelic 6y ago
There is also that whole thing about how suburbs were invented to escape "the city" (read: non-whites). Look up Levittown.

momokoko 6y ago

Because if you moved to a new town you were in a different school district. The great migration to the suburbs happened right after schools were desegregated in the US. White Americans moved to the suburbs to avoid their children from attending school with black children. Milliken v. Bradley was the last nail in the coffin. The return to cities has coincided with white people having less children and children at older ages along with less racist views.

titzer 6y ago
This started happening already in the 1950s before desegregation. The rise of suburbs is directly related to the boom years after WWII and how much development happened outside of cities, where throwing up a new subdivision was much cheaper, and the booming auto industry absolutely loved new demand for commuting.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  Also, the FHA and the GI Bill provided cheap loans to buy single use housing for veterans, which were a significant chunk of the population. You can't really get an FHA loan to buy an apartment in a mixed-use building. (On paper Black people were also entitled to GI bill benefits, but in practice this didn't really happen.) From Wikipedia: > In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs about 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-white veterans.
- madamelic 6y ago
  > the rise of suburbs is directly related to the boom years after WWII The idea of suburbs was created by Levitt & Sons when building Levittown, PA post-WWII. A neighborhood that had explicit terms that the owners would not sell or rent to non-white people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown,_New_York

titzer 6y ago

I could give a long, detailed answer, but basically, the 1950s happened.

csomar 6y ago

No. It's an inferior solution to someone having a car and driving around for shopping. Most people here seems to draw from their experience traveling to a place for a short period of time. The reality is that living near a small business (especially restaurant/cafe/bar) is crappy. You'll have people walking around, being noisy, drunk people, people parking in front of your drive way because the didn't see the signs, garbage, etc...

dotandgtfo 6y ago
It's a bit crappy for people living in the immediate vicinity but that's just a tiny fraction of the people who get value from nearby local businesses. The housing prices also reflect that and it's usually cheaper rent if you're above/next to a popular grocery store, bar or restaurant. I am extremely biased as I'm in my mid twenties and don't even have a driver's license as the only time it comes in handy in Oslo is if you're moving furniture.
orthoxerox 6y ago
Bars are a problem, but I live in an apartment and there's a bank, a few cafes, a liquor store, multiple drug stores, an optician's, an orthopedic shoe store, a pawn shop, a shop selling kitchen furniture and god knows what else in the same building. The biggest issue is public urination, but these people aren't the customers, but people leaving the subway.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? People got rich enough that the noise from the bar on the other side of the block or the mechanic shop across the street made their list of "big problems" and they complained to local government until government restricted everyone's property rights.