5 ms·

Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's t

by treis 5y ago

Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving.

ericmay 5y ago
> Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity from car crashes and deaths (among other things)? Scale can make things cheaper, but is cheapness the goal? And scale in this context also creates centralization which has some fragile properties at times. > You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving. Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. The only reason all of the best neighborhoods you've ever been to are so expensive is because we just don't build mixed-use, medium density development. And also you can look at countries in places like Europe to see how it has been achieved. I'm not sure the premise of 4/3 suburban house is a good one. It's like saying how can you use AWS when you have this server rack in the basement that you have to use. It's just cultural and institutional inertia driving us down bad paths because we don't have a good market mechanic to realize costs.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Small towns in the US already work similarly to European towns, though a bit more straightforward (pun intended). The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc. Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.
  - stan_rogers 5y ago
    ...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      There's plenty of small towns, just takes moving there. I prefer them. Remote work should make them more viable, before you could either just farm or mine. Industrial period nearly killed small towns as people flocked to the city for factory work.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    >but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems Though some starkly do not. Before the pandemic, a friend was living in a San Diego area suburb apartment building that was located on a strip of land between freeways with the complex and a strip mall.
  - howLongHowLong 5y ago
    I've lived in multiple small towns in America and the reality is the nice central amenities are too expensive for most working people, and at least half of the storefronts are boarded up, which means most people end up driving to the Walmart. The majority of people that do use the centrally located boutiques drive in from their homes which aren't in the center. Most new construction doesn't even include sidewalks or crosswalks, making walking dangerous even if you wanted to. There's at least one, but not more than a few, exceptions in each state (Asheville, NC for example) where people move in with their money to larp "small town living" but it depends on outside capital to work and the original residents end up getting priced out.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. Except everyone with a reliable car still drives to the large grocery store and with a wide selection which has lower prices and better selection on basics but makes it up with lower volume, high margin luxuries that the small market c doesn't have floor space for, and the small market, even if it starts as something else, ends up specializing in alcohol, tobacco, and dry goods, and neglecting general grocery items. Unless it's an area with a particular ethnic concentration and the small market survives by focussing on the unique demands of that ethnic community in a way that the larger store with a wider catchment area doesn't have any real incentive to. Its not that there aren't enough small markets opened in areas of single-family homes to see this trend; you can't fix it with zoning, at least not in the manner you describe. (You can by driving density to transport capacity to the point where driving to the large grocery is impractical, of course, but that tends to be beyond allowing medium density, mixed use development.)
  - Retric 5y ago
    Suburban 7-11’s for example get a lot of foot traffic in the US. Much of it is from teens, but where available people end up including a stop while walking their dogs or doing other kinds of exercise. High enough density to have a locals within ~1/2 mile, and or a location where people stop on their way to or from work are how you keep prices reasonable. It’s never directly competitive with Walmart etc but being much closer is a real advantage.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Ironically, my two best counter-examples of your claims above are both within 1 mile of each other. Wiley St. Co-op and Jenifer St. Market are both relatively small grocery stores in the Marquette neighborhood of Madison, WI. The co-op is a bit larger, but less densely stocked and has no alcohol. Jenifer St. is packed to the gills, and sells alcohol. Both are surrounded by primarily single-family homes, with a few apartment buildings within walking distance. Neither are "ethnic" food stores, and neither sell much in the way of junk food, and neither sells tobacco. I've been visiting them both for about 20 years whenever we visit relatives in Madison. I've always found them both remarkable, even given their placement in probably one of the most suitable locations in the USA for this sort of thing. Of course, were I to comment on my own comment, I'd probably say "Yep, the exception(s) that prove the rule".
- treis 5y ago
  People in Europe mostly choose the suburbs too. As for the rest of it, I'm not arguing that the suburbs is a good choice. It's just the one people do choose and they choose it because of space and cost of living.
  - opportune 5y ago
    Do they choose suburbs because it’s preferred or because it’s cheaper? If the urban areas have more expensive housing for a given unit size, that would imply it is actually preferred. It’s like saying nobody drives because there is too much traffic. Or sporting events always sell out so nobody goes.
    - treis 5y ago
      You can't separate preference from cost. Or, in other words, they prefer it because it's cheaper.
      - ericmay 5y ago
        Cost is part of the preference, I agree. I think though that we're not accurately capturing the true cost. The suburbs appear to be cheaper and they very well may be on an individual level, but are they cheaper for civilization? How do we price in your commute, for example? Or the cost of roads or the government building a new power plant? I don't think we have great market mechanics for this which makes the cost comparison a little difficult to do to begin with. But to the point of the person you are replying to, the price of a house in almost any reasonable case I can think of reflects desirability for one reason or another. If you see that suburban homes are cheaper than a mixed-use, medium density neighborhood (the kind that everybody visits and take pictures of) that would indicate that the preference is for that. Though I guess you can argue that due to lack of supply that the cost is increased.
      - opportune 5y ago
        Cost (more accurately price) indicates what is called a revealed preference. Actually a revealed preference is precisely what I am trying to point out here. There is a revealed preference for urban homes which is indicated by the higher price. The broader point I am trying to make is that if the main appeal of suburban living is lower cost (rather than the actual suburban lifestyle) this is addressable not necessarily by expanding suburbs but by addressing the costs of urban living. In fact that would be better if it were really true that urban living is preferred. In practice though I am sure many people would choose suburban living even if costs were equal to an urban environment. But the price difference does indicate that one (urban environments) is in higher demand than the other (suburban environments)
mumblemumble 5y ago
What I have seen in my travels is that those cafés and bakeries are not all that expensive in places where they are the norm. They occupy an environment where they have serious competition from truly comparable businesses, and a larger potential clientele. That brings market forces into play, which means they are more directly incentivized to compete on price and make it up on volume, while keeping quality high. Compare with the Great Harvest Bread location a mile or two down the street from my dad's house. (It's a chain, I believe mostly concentrated in the midwestern USA.) The bread is overpriced and hastily made. The only reason they can command such high prices is that there's nowhere else anywhere nearby that makes bread that doesn't come in a plastic bag is because they can position themselves as a sort of luxury good. But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > The bread is overpriced and hastily made. This is contradicted by this: > But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions. It is not overpriced, it is prices according to its supply and demand.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    Supply and demand is the simplest possible model for pricing, and only applies in certain contexts. The argument I'm trying to make comes close to suggesting that their bread functions as a sort of Veblen good. Which is an example of a kind of product whose pricing dynamics are slightly more complex than can be neatly explained by the econ 101 model.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Supply and demand applies in all contexts. A veblen good simply has a different demand curve, but I would need to see more evidence that bread of all things would be a Veblen good, which are due to their (presumed) utility for displaying status. Or maybe I do not hang out in circles where bread is considered a status symbol.
felixfbecker 5y ago
Bread from a bakery is a luxury? In Germany there is a bakery on every corner and a large, fresh loaf of bread costs under 1€!
watwut 5y ago
> bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries They are not expensive. The price is comparable or the same as any other bread.

by treis 5y ago

ericmay 5y ago

> Because cafes and bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries. Even if it's just $1 more a coffee/loaf that adds up to significant money over a year. That's the thing that I think people miss. Scale makes things cheaper and to have scale at retail you need to pull customers from a large area. I wonder if all those loaves of bread and coffees cost more than tires, having 2 or 3 cars, obesity, and lost productivity from car crashes and deaths (among other things)? Scale can make things cheaper, but is cheapness the goal? And scale in this context also creates centralization which has some fragile properties at times. > You could do the same in a dense area but then you run into housing cost/size problems. I don't see how you get the typical 4/3 suburban house and a low cost of living without driving. Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. The only reason all of the best neighborhoods you've ever been to are so expensive is because we just don't build mixed-use, medium density development. And also you can look at countries in places like Europe to see how it has been achieved. I'm not sure the premise of 4/3 suburban house is a good one. It's like saying how can you use AWS when you have this server rack in the basement that you have to use. It's just cultural and institutional inertia driving us down bad paths because we don't have a good market mechanic to realize costs.

hunterb123 5y ago
Small towns in the US already work similarly to European towns, though a bit more straightforward (pun intended). The town itself is pretty self-sufficient, usually has a co-op, general store, single main road going through downtown, sidewalks, etc. Larger cities do have suburbs like you're describing, but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems near the entrances of the housing developments, the commuting is generally only because of work, which hopefully we can make more remote to ease traffic for physical workers.
- stan_rogers 5y ago
  ...and that's kinda what's missing in the US (and large parts of Southern Ontario) right now: small towns. Instead, you have bedroom communities that depend on an urban centre to make them work at all. No, not everywhere, but in too much of the populous parts of the country. It's gotten to the point that people just expect that that's just how things work. It made a certain basic sense, I suppose, with the GI Bill and the Levittowns it spawned post-WW2, but that should have been a very temporary solution to a baby boom housing crisis, not the permanent state of things. I grew up in a town with a population of about 1500 people, and we had two grocers, each with an actual butcher who not only cut meats, but made their own sausages, etc. Could you get fresh weirdo herbs that only grow halfway up Vesuvius in years that end in a 7? No, but we weren't missing anything anybody would actually miss either. (And if you want a really nice artisanal bread, make it - there are very few things that are easier, and autolysis means you don't have to spend hours working at it, you just wait.)
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    There's plenty of small towns, just takes moving there. I prefer them. Remote work should make them more viable, before you could either just farm or mine. Industrial period nearly killed small towns as people flocked to the city for factory work.
- Talanes 5y ago
  >but generally they do have their own amenities like fast food courts / grocery stores / school systems Though some starkly do not. Before the pandemic, a friend was living in a San Diego area suburb apartment building that was located on a strip of land between freeways with the complex and a strip mall.
- howLongHowLong 5y ago
  I've lived in multiple small towns in America and the reality is the nice central amenities are too expensive for most working people, and at least half of the storefronts are boarded up, which means most people end up driving to the Walmart. The majority of people that do use the centrally located boutiques drive in from their homes which aren't in the center. Most new construction doesn't even include sidewalks or crosswalks, making walking dangerous even if you wanted to. There's at least one, but not more than a few, exceptions in each state (Asheville, NC for example) where people move in with their money to larp "small town living" but it depends on outside capital to work and the original residents end up getting priced out.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Tear down a house in the suburbs and put in a little market/grocery store and you don't need to drive anywhere you just walk over. Except everyone with a reliable car still drives to the large grocery store and with a wide selection which has lower prices and better selection on basics but makes it up with lower volume, high margin luxuries that the small market c doesn't have floor space for, and the small market, even if it starts as something else, ends up specializing in alcohol, tobacco, and dry goods, and neglecting general grocery items. Unless it's an area with a particular ethnic concentration and the small market survives by focussing on the unique demands of that ethnic community in a way that the larger store with a wider catchment area doesn't have any real incentive to. Its not that there aren't enough small markets opened in areas of single-family homes to see this trend; you can't fix it with zoning, at least not in the manner you describe. (You can by driving density to transport capacity to the point where driving to the large grocery is impractical, of course, but that tends to be beyond allowing medium density, mixed use development.)
- Retric 5y ago
  Suburban 7-11’s for example get a lot of foot traffic in the US. Much of it is from teens, but where available people end up including a stop while walking their dogs or doing other kinds of exercise. High enough density to have a locals within ~1/2 mile, and or a location where people stop on their way to or from work are how you keep prices reasonable. It’s never directly competitive with Walmart etc but being much closer is a real advantage.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Ironically, my two best counter-examples of your claims above are both within 1 mile of each other. Wiley St. Co-op and Jenifer St. Market are both relatively small grocery stores in the Marquette neighborhood of Madison, WI. The co-op is a bit larger, but less densely stocked and has no alcohol. Jenifer St. is packed to the gills, and sells alcohol. Both are surrounded by primarily single-family homes, with a few apartment buildings within walking distance. Neither are "ethnic" food stores, and neither sell much in the way of junk food, and neither sells tobacco. I've been visiting them both for about 20 years whenever we visit relatives in Madison. I've always found them both remarkable, even given their placement in probably one of the most suitable locations in the USA for this sort of thing. Of course, were I to comment on my own comment, I'd probably say "Yep, the exception(s) that prove the rule".
treis 5y ago
People in Europe mostly choose the suburbs too. As for the rest of it, I'm not arguing that the suburbs is a good choice. It's just the one people do choose and they choose it because of space and cost of living.
- opportune 5y ago
  Do they choose suburbs because it’s preferred or because it’s cheaper? If the urban areas have more expensive housing for a given unit size, that would imply it is actually preferred. It’s like saying nobody drives because there is too much traffic. Or sporting events always sell out so nobody goes.
  - treis 5y ago
    You can't separate preference from cost. Or, in other words, they prefer it because it's cheaper.
    - ericmay 5y ago
      Cost is part of the preference, I agree. I think though that we're not accurately capturing the true cost. The suburbs appear to be cheaper and they very well may be on an individual level, but are they cheaper for civilization? How do we price in your commute, for example? Or the cost of roads or the government building a new power plant? I don't think we have great market mechanics for this which makes the cost comparison a little difficult to do to begin with. But to the point of the person you are replying to, the price of a house in almost any reasonable case I can think of reflects desirability for one reason or another. If you see that suburban homes are cheaper than a mixed-use, medium density neighborhood (the kind that everybody visits and take pictures of) that would indicate that the preference is for that. Though I guess you can argue that due to lack of supply that the cost is increased.
    - opportune 5y ago
      Cost (more accurately price) indicates what is called a revealed preference. Actually a revealed preference is precisely what I am trying to point out here. There is a revealed preference for urban homes which is indicated by the higher price. The broader point I am trying to make is that if the main appeal of suburban living is lower cost (rather than the actual suburban lifestyle) this is addressable not necessarily by expanding suburbs but by addressing the costs of urban living. In fact that would be better if it were really true that urban living is preferred. In practice though I am sure many people would choose suburban living even if costs were equal to an urban environment. But the price difference does indicate that one (urban environments) is in higher demand than the other (suburban environments)

mumblemumble 5y ago

What I have seen in my travels is that those cafés and bakeries are not all that expensive in places where they are the norm. They occupy an environment where they have serious competition from truly comparable businesses, and a larger potential clientele. That brings market forces into play, which means they are more directly incentivized to compete on price and make it up on volume, while keeping quality high. Compare with the Great Harvest Bread location a mile or two down the street from my dad's house. (It's a chain, I believe mostly concentrated in the midwestern USA.) The bread is overpriced and hastily made. The only reason they can command such high prices is that there's nowhere else anywhere nearby that makes bread that doesn't come in a plastic bag is because they can position themselves as a sort of luxury good. But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lotsofpulp 5y ago
> The bread is overpriced and hastily made. This is contradicted by this: > But they probably also need to have high prices because people only buy bread there for special occasions. It is not overpriced, it is prices according to its supply and demand.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  Supply and demand is the simplest possible model for pricing, and only applies in certain contexts. The argument I'm trying to make comes close to suggesting that their bread functions as a sort of Veblen good. Which is an example of a kind of product whose pricing dynamics are slightly more complex than can be neatly explained by the econ 101 model.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Supply and demand applies in all contexts. A veblen good simply has a different demand curve, but I would need to see more evidence that bread of all things would be a Veblen good, which are due to their (presumed) utility for displaying status. Or maybe I do not hang out in circles where bread is considered a status symbol.

felixfbecker 5y ago

Bread from a bakery is a luxury? In Germany there is a bakery on every corner and a large, fresh loaf of bread costs under 1€!

watwut 5y ago

> bread from bakeries are (relative) luxuries They are not expensive. The price is comparable or the same as any other bread.