5 ms·

Believe it or not, big cities have pretty good quality of life and people who live there do actually have friends and social lives. I grew up in the suburbs, a

by dangus 4y ago

Believe it or not, big cities have pretty good quality of life and people who live there do actually have friends and social lives. I grew up in the suburbs, and I've lived in big cities, urban areas in medium sized cities, and exurbs as well. The cities aren't as different as non-urban people think. But also, they're better in a lot of the ways that most people would expect: more things to do, better food, better shopping. The only real downsides in my mind are less affordable real estate and higher local particle pollution. By far my least favorite lifestyle of those choices was in the exurbs/rural areas. Incredibly boring, isolated, and it's not as quiet and tranquil as one might expect (you're probably near a highway where jake brakes are allowed or a 55 MPH country road). Believe it or not, city areas seem to have better quality park space (because what most people who aren't into hardcore nature consider to be "a nice park" is usually quite heavily designed and built). And, oh yeah, cities are where the jobs are.

kodah 4y ago
> And, oh yeah, cities are where the jobs are. We can and should change this as much as possible.
- 1270018080 4y ago
  Why?
  - _ktx2 4y ago
    In short, equity. In longer form, a lot of people don't have the chance to leave their towns and that is in part due to opportunity, another way of looking at it is that extracting people out of their communities and consolidating them in cities isn't very equitable. Historically we've relied on colleges to give people a ticket out of where they come from. In the long term that does real damage to those communities. Instead of building them up, using that newly found prosperity, that wealth gets consolidated in cities. If we let people stay near their families, or wherever they prefer to stay, it gives people choice and creates a much more sustainable economic environment.
    - dangus 4y ago
      I think you misunderstand. Their families are already in cities. (And "cities" includes suburban areas) This isn't 1800's America where most families are on rural subsistence farms. People can choose to stay wherever they want, but the networks that make up the economy have to physically exist. Factories, warehouses, etc...look at a satellite view of the Chicago River from Goose Island down to Midway airport. It's a bunch of physical industrial infrastructure: warehouses, factories, railyards, etc. Do you propose these all instead spread out and get located in random middle-of-nowhere places where there are no employees, shops, restaurants, schools, etc? Even data centers need to be near population centers. Why put us-east-1 near Roanoke and Lynchburg, VA instead of Roy, New Mexico? We can't all just become remote knowledge worker hermits. Heck, we all saw how terrible remote learning is for children with the pandemic. [1] [1] https://apnews.com/article/online-school-covid-learning-loss-7c162ec1b4ce4d5219d5210aaac8f1ae https://apnews.com/article/online-school-covid-learning-loss...
      - kodah 4y ago
        My family is not in a city, I do not misunderstand. A lot more than farmers live in rural areas. The kind of take you have isn't unusual for HN though. Most people from HN have spent their entire lives in cities or suburbs, so their empathy is short.
        dangus 4y ago
        As a numerical fact, over 80% of people in the US live in cities and suburbs. I am going to go back to your original comment: you think we should change the fact that most jobs are in cities and suburbs. I’m just being realistic here: that is not possible. The human population dispersing from cities and suburbs doesn’t make physical sense. You wouldn’t live in a rural area anymore if Manhattan decided to move out and go out to towns like yours. Your town would turn into a city in its own right. Mumbai has 54,000 people per square mile. Texas has about 110 people per square mile. If Mumbai has a similar density to Texas, it would be roughly the size of Arizona, just for one city that only represents 1% of the population of India. The fact that most people concentrate themselves into denser areas makes your rural lifestyle possible in the first place. I am not sure what I’m supposed to have empathy for here. I never said that rural people are dumb or bad or that nobody should live in rural areas. I have plenty of empathy for humans in general. I personally don’t prefer rural life but I also don’t have any negative feelings toward anyone who wants to live that way. I’m just being realistic: concentrated areas where humans live in communities has been our reality since nomadic hunter-gathering was replaced by agriculture.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Society, and especially the tech business, has been trying. Computers, internet, broadband internet, conference calls, video calls, group video calls.
- shagie 4y ago
  There are certain job occupations that only work when done at scale. The ones I can point most directly to are service, retail, and healthcare. These need population densities in order to be efficient. Unless you are looking at the classic old general store (or in the midwest - you do all your grocery shopping at Kwik Trip - the gas station), it is difficult to have a grocery store outside a city or town of sufficient size. Note that the prices and variety in the smaller stores are more than if you are able to go to a large store in a city. Likewise, if you want to eat at a restaurant - sure, there are some that are in the "this is a restaurant located a 10 minute drive away from where you can see the window of your neighbor from your window". The norm for this, however, is in a town or city. And then there's healthcare. Rural hospitals are failing. You don't find dentists on country roads. These things (and more) 'conspire' to make it so that the services they offer are more efficiently done in a city and the ones in a city can out compete the ones that are located further away from others. We can then bring up the carbon footprint of living outside a city. If you drive into a city to get goods ( https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/default/files/library/public/Dimitri-Weideli-Environmental-Analysis-of-US-Online-Shopping_0.pdf https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/default/files/library/public/Dimit... ) that can be a hefty footprint that is exacerbated by not being able to use public transportation. Another look at it - https://www.treehugger.com/urban-or-rural-which-is-more-energy-efficient-4863586 https://www.treehugger.com/urban-or-rural-which-is-more-ener... : > But a different picture emerges when you look at per capita consumption rates — cities have the lowest annual energy use per household (85.3 million Btu) and household member (33.7 million Btu) of all four categories. Rural areas consume about 95 million Btu per household each year, followed by towns (102 million) and suburbs (109 million). And this then leads to that the jobs for the sectors of the economy where you need to physically be present somewhere (and that is a significant portion of them) are more efficient in a city. Coupled with the more efficent use of land and power with the city, this brings down the costs and maximizes the amount that a person makes... if they live in a city (all other things being equal).
  - kodah 4y ago
    The vaste majority of high paying jobs can be done remotely. I'm referring to lawyers, programmers, accountants, etc... Rural areas are failing because we continue to extract wealth out of them. You actually get right up against talking about it in your wall of text but then just abruptly lose the thought.
midhhhthrow 4y ago
Cities have much lower standard of living because no one can afford shelter. There’s too much traffic which means you can’t go anywhere except walking range. So there may actually be equal or less to do in the city simply because your range is so short. And crime is huge problem too, now more than ever
- gsk22 4y ago
  I know you're not making those statements in good faith, but I'll still push back against the absurd generalizations. Of the top 20 biggest cities in America, what you said only applies to a couple of them at most. Of course, crime, housing costs and traffic (caused in large part by bad urban design) are real issues in American cities to varying degrees. But it's not as if all cities are lawless slums without any way to move about.
- majormajor 4y ago
  "Nobody goes there, it's too crowded"
- howinteresting 4y ago
  Cities have much better hospitals than rural areas, and that's not going to change until super advanced robots are developed.
- novok 4y ago
  This is an american problem and an american choice that started with white flight in the 50s and a lack of investment into public transit to make it you don't need a car in the city. Many other countries do cities correctly, for cheaper, and far more social order. Most american cities are also not cities, except maybe the grandfathered in choice of NYC and SF somewhat.
- SCUSKU 4y ago
  I used to think the same think having lived in the suburbs my whole life, but once I moved to a city (San Francisco), I came to see that while there was certainly truth to the media hooplah, a lot of it was just hype designed to polarize us.

by dangus 4y ago

kodah 4y ago

> And, oh yeah, cities are where the jobs are. We can and should change this as much as possible.

1270018080 4y ago
Why?
- _ktx2 4y ago
  In short, equity. In longer form, a lot of people don't have the chance to leave their towns and that is in part due to opportunity, another way of looking at it is that extracting people out of their communities and consolidating them in cities isn't very equitable. Historically we've relied on colleges to give people a ticket out of where they come from. In the long term that does real damage to those communities. Instead of building them up, using that newly found prosperity, that wealth gets consolidated in cities. If we let people stay near their families, or wherever they prefer to stay, it gives people choice and creates a much more sustainable economic environment.
  - dangus 4y ago
    I think you misunderstand. Their families are already in cities. (And "cities" includes suburban areas) This isn't 1800's America where most families are on rural subsistence farms. People can choose to stay wherever they want, but the networks that make up the economy have to physically exist. Factories, warehouses, etc...look at a satellite view of the Chicago River from Goose Island down to Midway airport. It's a bunch of physical industrial infrastructure: warehouses, factories, railyards, etc. Do you propose these all instead spread out and get located in random middle-of-nowhere places where there are no employees, shops, restaurants, schools, etc? Even data centers need to be near population centers. Why put us-east-1 near Roanoke and Lynchburg, VA instead of Roy, New Mexico? We can't all just become remote knowledge worker hermits. Heck, we all saw how terrible remote learning is for children with the pandemic. [1] [1] https://apnews.com/article/online-school-covid-learning-loss-7c162ec1b4ce4d5219d5210aaac8f1ae https://apnews.com/article/online-school-covid-learning-loss...
    - kodah 4y ago
      My family is not in a city, I do not misunderstand. A lot more than farmers live in rural areas. The kind of take you have isn't unusual for HN though. Most people from HN have spent their entire lives in cities or suburbs, so their empathy is short.
      - dangus 4y ago
        As a numerical fact, over 80% of people in the US live in cities and suburbs. I am going to go back to your original comment: you think we should change the fact that most jobs are in cities and suburbs. I’m just being realistic here: that is not possible. The human population dispersing from cities and suburbs doesn’t make physical sense. You wouldn’t live in a rural area anymore if Manhattan decided to move out and go out to towns like yours. Your town would turn into a city in its own right. Mumbai has 54,000 people per square mile. Texas has about 110 people per square mile. If Mumbai has a similar density to Texas, it would be roughly the size of Arizona, just for one city that only represents 1% of the population of India. The fact that most people concentrate themselves into denser areas makes your rural lifestyle possible in the first place. I am not sure what I’m supposed to have empathy for here. I never said that rural people are dumb or bad or that nobody should live in rural areas. I have plenty of empathy for humans in general. I personally don’t prefer rural life but I also don’t have any negative feelings toward anyone who wants to live that way. I’m just being realistic: concentrated areas where humans live in communities has been our reality since nomadic hunter-gathering was replaced by agriculture.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
Society, and especially the tech business, has been trying. Computers, internet, broadband internet, conference calls, video calls, group video calls.
shagie 4y ago
There are certain job occupations that only work when done at scale. The ones I can point most directly to are service, retail, and healthcare. These need population densities in order to be efficient. Unless you are looking at the classic old general store (or in the midwest - you do all your grocery shopping at Kwik Trip - the gas station), it is difficult to have a grocery store outside a city or town of sufficient size. Note that the prices and variety in the smaller stores are more than if you are able to go to a large store in a city. Likewise, if you want to eat at a restaurant - sure, there are some that are in the "this is a restaurant located a 10 minute drive away from where you can see the window of your neighbor from your window". The norm for this, however, is in a town or city. And then there's healthcare. Rural hospitals are failing. You don't find dentists on country roads. These things (and more) 'conspire' to make it so that the services they offer are more efficiently done in a city and the ones in a city can out compete the ones that are located further away from others. We can then bring up the carbon footprint of living outside a city. If you drive into a city to get goods ( https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/default/files/library/public/Dimitri-Weideli-Environmental-Analysis-of-US-Online-Shopping_0.pdf https://ctl.mit.edu/sites/default/files/library/public/Dimit... ) that can be a hefty footprint that is exacerbated by not being able to use public transportation. Another look at it - https://www.treehugger.com/urban-or-rural-which-is-more-energy-efficient-4863586 https://www.treehugger.com/urban-or-rural-which-is-more-ener... : > But a different picture emerges when you look at per capita consumption rates — cities have the lowest annual energy use per household (85.3 million Btu) and household member (33.7 million Btu) of all four categories. Rural areas consume about 95 million Btu per household each year, followed by towns (102 million) and suburbs (109 million). And this then leads to that the jobs for the sectors of the economy where you need to physically be present somewhere (and that is a significant portion of them) are more efficient in a city. Coupled with the more efficent use of land and power with the city, this brings down the costs and maximizes the amount that a person makes... if they live in a city (all other things being equal).
- kodah 4y ago
  The vaste majority of high paying jobs can be done remotely. I'm referring to lawyers, programmers, accountants, etc... Rural areas are failing because we continue to extract wealth out of them. You actually get right up against talking about it in your wall of text but then just abruptly lose the thought.

midhhhthrow 4y ago

Cities have much lower standard of living because no one can afford shelter. There’s too much traffic which means you can’t go anywhere except walking range. So there may actually be equal or less to do in the city simply because your range is so short. And crime is huge problem too, now more than ever

gsk22 4y ago
I know you're not making those statements in good faith, but I'll still push back against the absurd generalizations. Of the top 20 biggest cities in America, what you said only applies to a couple of them at most. Of course, crime, housing costs and traffic (caused in large part by bad urban design) are real issues in American cities to varying degrees. But it's not as if all cities are lawless slums without any way to move about.
majormajor 4y ago
"Nobody goes there, it's too crowded"
howinteresting 4y ago
Cities have much better hospitals than rural areas, and that's not going to change until super advanced robots are developed.
novok 4y ago
This is an american problem and an american choice that started with white flight in the 50s and a lack of investment into public transit to make it you don't need a car in the city. Many other countries do cities correctly, for cheaper, and far more social order. Most american cities are also not cities, except maybe the grandfathered in choice of NYC and SF somewhat.
SCUSKU 4y ago
I used to think the same think having lived in the suburbs my whole life, but once I moved to a city (San Francisco), I came to see that while there was certainly truth to the media hooplah, a lot of it was just hype designed to polarize us.