16 ms·

Children, left behind by suburbia, need better community design

328 points by jseliger 3y ago

damnesian 3y ago
We idealistically designed our suburbs at first. Then commercial and industrial interests took charge. Suburban dwellers were an early large dataset for corporations looking to maximize "engagement."
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- Terr_ 3y ago
  I assume that's sarcasm, in which case I think you are conflating other parental goals/issues in suburbia, such as "well-funded schools" or "floor area and bedrooms" or "buying a house as a form of investment". Meeting those other goals doesn't automatically mean there's a good environment beyond the confines of household and school.
c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
"In England, housing is often characterized by closely situated semi-detached or terraced structures built under flexible zoning regulations. This environment allows small businesses to coexist harmoniously with residential areas, in contrast to the rigid industrial zoning common in the United States." I'm American and live in Oz. Australia does this well imo. Small cafes and shops are sprinkled throughout neighborhoods. For any large grocery runs, I need to take my car but day to day basics (and more importantly...coffee) are within only a few minutes walking distance.
- irrational 3y ago
  Are the prices comparable?
  - c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
    Not even close but then again I don't know which market in the US to compare to. I'm originally from Houston which is suburban sprawl at its worst. I could get a McMansion for $500k USD. I live in the northern beaches area of Sydney and a "knockdown rebuild" can go for roughly $2m-3m AUD ($1.3-1.9m USD). I struggle with real estate prices here.
    - irrational 3y ago
      Actually, I meant the prices of food at the local shops versus large grocery stores.
      - c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
        The prices are generally higher however the quality and service is better than what you'd get from Woolworths or Coles, the big chains here. We have a local butcher who's stuff is higher quality than what the chains carry. I can also order stuff not readily available (like a thanksgiving turkey).
- AussieWog93 3y ago
  At least in Melbourne, this is only really the case for more established (and typically expensive) suburbs. Go out to Clyde North or Officer and you've got basically nothing in a walkable distance. Even in (relatively affluent, semi-inner) Burwood East many of the old strip shops have been converted to non-regular or non-retail businesses (e.g kitchen showroom, accountant, baked goods wholesaler). You'd need to go up to Kmart Plaza to get groceries or coffee.
  - woolly 3y ago
    In Sydney, it's generally the case for established neighbourhoods close to the CBD. Walkability in inner city suburbs like Balmain, Leichhardt, Rozelle, any of the eastern suburbs really is super high. Contrast this to urban-sprawl created suburbs like Marsden Park and a few of the Hills district burbs and it's the opposite - barely any public transport and next to no community infrastructure. There's a good channel on YT that documents this sort of stuff here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDhbm-t3dXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDhbm-t3dXU
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    Yeah I’m in Melbourne and thanks to working in tech, I can afford to live in one of those inner areas with cafes and community events at my doorstep. But the average person is forced out to some hellscape like Craigieburn or Melton where kids will be surrounded by mega highways in every direction. We really need to do more to bring pedestrianisation and walkability out to the cheaper areas rather than having them be a luxury for the rich.
    - Tade0 3y ago
      There's an additional factor that is significant in my corner of the world: Plenty of people work in businesses that are necessarily far from any city, like factories, so not only they can't really afford living in those dense areas with cafes and the lot, they couldn't live there anyway because there's little to no mass transit to this middle of nowhere where they're headed every day, so they need to drive. Communists approached the problem by just building residential areas around the factory, but it was unhealthy and in this day and age you can't expect anyone to work at the same steel mill for 35 years, like my grandpa did, so it's not a solution.
- deleted 3y ago
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- prawn 3y ago
  Usually they're sprinkled on arterials of some scale. Suburbs could support more corner shops and studios, but (at least where I live) it feels like councils are nervous about parking burdens created by these. Developers avoid giving up any more land to parking than they need to. Residents don't want employees and patrons of a corner hairdresser or architect swamping their streets with parked cars. So we mostly get endless blocks of residential, and some old corner stores revert to living rooms instead of what they were designed as.
ryan93 3y ago
Why on earth is the picture of a busy truck stop type place? Most suburban neighborhoods have low traffic and plenty of places to ride your bike. Often have pools and basketball courts or fields to play in.
- BetaDeltaAlpha 3y ago
  It's not just a truck stop. Breezwood, PA is a meme at this point used to malign suburbs.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    How funny, because when you look at it from the map, there's proably < 100 housing units within a ~3 mile radius. Of course there's not a bike path and roundabouts! It's the ideal place for a stroad: a pit-stop off the interstate with almost no housing nearby, with a cold the climate half the year.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - Symbiote 3y ago
      That place is awful. If a truck driver stops for the night, but fancies a meal from the other side of the road there's no sidewalk, and no crossing. Just lots of "no pedestrians" signs. How do you get from the Tesla Supercharger to McDonald's?
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        Nobody intended Breezewood to be the way it is, it's the result of a bureaucratic jam between the state and the federal government decades ago. It hasn't been fixed since then because it's profitable the way it is. Virtually nobody actually lives there so there's no local pressure to change it. It is in no way representative of other communities in the region.
  - neogodless 3y ago
tropdrop 3y ago
Nice to see a high quality article by a high school student – kudos to this young new urbanist.
gosub100 3y ago
I grew up in the suburbs and did all kinds of things on my own. From 1991-1997 I rode my bike all around, went to the park, played sports, socialized, went to stores and fast-food on my own. My parents set some reasonable limitations on it: had to come back periodically and check in, let them know where I was, couldn't cross busy streets. I even had an SNES and my friends had Sega, and we played video games and watched TV, but we got bored of that and went outside at least as much as we stayed in. I don't know what happened between then and now. I don't have kids so I don't know how people make decisions about them. I know a big part of it is fear of child abductions and getting hit by cars. I think it's just an irrational fear of those things (or bullying or using drugs) that slowly led to tightening the leash on kids. Today I rarely see kids doing anything in public without a helicopter parent within 50-ft. One of the middle schools I drove by allows one child to leave the door, go straight to their parents car, before the next car pulls up. They aren't even allowed to walk home unsupervised.
- ignite2 3y ago
  Yeah, suburbia is not the problem. I'd much rather live in suburbia than a city. But if you can't go outside on your own, that loses a lot of the benefit.
- bell-cot 3y ago
  THIS. Back when, I walked to/from kindergarten & elementary school daily. In pretty much whatever weather there was. Usually alone. Mostly along a main-ish residential street. Those walks added up to ~12 miles/week. Pretty much all the other kids at my school did the same; I'd guess the maximum walk was ~15 miles/week. (Also - this was back when all the kids went home to eat lunch each day, then came back to school. "School lunch" for the few oddballs, who had no housewife mom available, amounted to a few folding picnic tables in a dead-end hallway, and BYO sack lunch.)
- brandonmenc 3y ago
  Same. My parents are horrified when I suggest that their grandchildren should have the same freedom to roam around that they gave us. They believe the world is more dangerous than ever even though murders, violent crime, child abductions, and car accidents peaked when we were kids. And we didn't have cellphones to check in or call 911 with. It's baffling.
irrational 3y ago
> Why don’t children leave the house? Because of screens. We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc. But it is a real struggle to get them to leave the house because they want to be on the Internet 24/7. Of course we take away the devices, but that just leads to them bemoaning their screen less state. One of the problems is, this is taught in the schools. Pretty much every class is using screens constantly. Our local school district recently experienced a hack that made it so they couldn’t use chromebooks for a few days. All the teachers lesson plans were completely centered around devices, so the kids just watched movies all day instead.
- locococo 3y ago
  I don't disagree but I think what we tend to forget is thst children mimic their parents. I've noticed that my kids will go outside more when I walk the dog more. They either join me or go outside on their own. The same applied when I work in the yard.
  - jahewson 3y ago
    That’s a good point. In turn I’d ask why the parents don’t leave the house? Because of screens…?
  - autoexec 3y ago
    My parents didn't spend much time out of the house, but they'd kick us out occasionally. We'd bike around, go to parks, or visit friends. Are parents even allowed to say "Go play outside until the street lights turn on" anymore?
  - rpxio 3y ago
    I was going to reply with this exact sentiment, so I’m glad you brought it up. There’s also talk in this thread about how we’ve designed the outside to be kid-unfriendly. Let’s think for a second about how we design our home spaces inside to have screens all around. I’d wager that if you could walk into any house in suburbia, 90%+ will have a massive flat screen hanging in the main living space. Not only that, but all the chairs are aimed to face it! It’s the focal point and THE activity to be done in that space. Some houses will have screens in nearly every room. A screen in every pocket and maybe some portable screens too! With so much priority put on these screens and when parents, grandparents, friends, etc all spend a majority of their waking life on them, what is a kid going to mimic and learn is acceptable? We definitely still struggle with screen time for our kids. They’re getting much better about turning it off without tantrums, but we only have one TV in our bedroom (rarely turned on), an iPad, and our phones. We try to watch TV or movies together rather than having a screen on in the background or relying on a screen to entertain our kids while we go off and do something else. All that said, our oldest (4 y/o) reads chapter books like there’s no tomorrow because she sees my wife and I read physical books. We also frequent the library often where she can have some independence to wander and find what interests her to bring home. Parent friends always make remarks about how smart she is and how they wish their kid would read more, but they can’t get them to stop wanting to watch TV or the tablet… but we’ve been to several friends’ houses and they always have a TV on nonstop and they themselves don’t read any books.
tempsy 3y ago
I don’t really understand how this is a new thing. The claim is that children today are being “left behind by suburbia” as if that wasn’t true of older generations of children and we as a society once all lived in an urban utopia and now it somehow isn’t the case.
- ben-schaaf 3y ago
  Car-dependent suburbia was fundamentally impossible 100 years ago because most people didn't have a car. Kids could socialise with their friends outside because everything had to be accessible via waking, cycling or public transit. It was also socially and legally acceptable to have young kids out on their own. When I grew up in suburbia my friends from school were a half hour drive away. When we met up we usually went outside and socialised. But that always meant organising with parents to drive us around. Looking back I think "left behind" isn't quite strong enough.
  - anon291 3y ago
    Exactly this. I live in the now-inner-city (a residential area mile or so from downtown office buildings and a few blocks away from small office buildings). Back in the day our walkable neighborhood was built, it was considered the outer suburbs. It's still extremely dense. Way denser than the 60s/70s suburb I grew up in, and way denser than anything today. Density isn't just about how close the houses are but how close the nearest cafe and store is too.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    >It was also socially and legally acceptable to have young kids out on their own. Here in Japan, it's still socially and legally acceptable for young kids to be on their own outside. I see it all the time. Kids under the age of 10 regularly take subways by themselves, ride on bikes outside, etc.
    - Gigachad 3y ago
      The US seems extremely devoid of individual freedoms compared to most other countries.
mechhacker 3y ago
“Why don’t children leave the house?” I did, until I was at a certain age (roughly early teenager). Then, there were a bunch of news shows talking about men driving around in brown vans abducting kids. Or kids just smoking pot at the parks. So I stopped being let to go there without adults. And that's about the time that we got a computer with a modem and I discovered online games...
absoluteunit1 3y ago
I’d love some walkable neighbourhoods in my suburbia. Automotive industry invested heavily to ensure this was so. Dependence on a vehicle in most North American cities is not an accident
- marssaxman 3y ago
  why not... leave suburbia, then, and go where the walkable neighborhoods are?
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Because if you want your kids’ peers in school to mostly be from households that earn a similar or higher income than your household, the best way to do that is to move to a school district with the biggest lots and homes you can afford, thereby ensuring the population of the school is made up only of people who can afford all the space and driving. It is literally what makes “good” school districts “good”, the household incomes of the student population. And moving to a suburban place filters that nicely. Same reason why residents will often times oppose apartment developments, since they allow lower income residents to move into the district.
    - marssaxman 3y ago
      Wow. That's a really... foreign mindset. Thank you for helping me understand.
      - anon291 3y ago
        Right. Next time you see an American arguing that we need vouchers, realize that this would greatly help redistribute where wealth is. If people could send their kid to any school they wouldn't have to all live in suburbia. They could instead choose the environmentally and socially positive option without risking their child's education.
        liotier 3y ago
thegrim33 3y ago
So, a for profit company that has the sole purpose of taking taking money from people and sponsors in order to create "think pieces" about walkable cities, pushes a propaganda piece with a major premise being that our suburbs are bad for kids because of our reliance on cars. However .. the entire premise instantly falls apart when you ask why we didn't have the same problem in the past when we were even MORE based around cars than we are today.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  > CNU is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization headquartered in Washington, DC.
- Symbiote 3y ago
  At what point in the past was America more dependent on cars, especially for children and youths?
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    when delivery wasn't a button away.
- eichin 3y ago
  I don't have a problem with the cynicism about the article... but as for not having the problem in the past - Rush: Subdivisions was effectively a pop culture essay on this problem from 1982.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    "Subdivisions" is a song about a nerdy kid finding it hard to fit in, and the similarity of the houses in large developments is treated as a metaphor for the limited range of identities kids could adopt if they didn’t want to be socially excluded. The song says nothing about kids finding it hard to play together, because in lyricist Neil Peart’s childhood all the way to the 1990s, children were finding things to do together in those suburbs regardless. Moreover, the perspective of the song is a high-school one (“…in the basement bars, in the backs of cars…”, plus see the music video), not younger children.
cjensen 3y ago
The author attends the High School I attended nearly 40 years ago. I was born, raised, and still live in Fremont. Fremont has begun doing some of these trendy concepts that are mentioned in the article, but when I grew up none of these ideas had been implemented. I socialized with other kids and rode bike around the neighborhood. As a pre-teen, we socialized in the street and at each other's houses. As a teen I was not really restricted in where to go and there are plenty of neighborhood parks and libraries to hang out at. None of the article's critiques of suburbia ring true to me with respect to Fremont. If you are seeking nightlife as an adult, you might feel it is a wasteland. But for children growing up I'm not seeing a problem. Part of that is that most of the city can be navigated without ever being on an arterial. Part of that is that most of the city was developed during an era where neighborhood parks could be mandated. Part of that is the city was master planned when it was small and they foresaw today's population. It is true children spend less time outside than they used to. Part of that is fear; when my kids were young, I didn't trust that strangers wouldn't be a problem if they were outside the house. But right or wrong, that fear is worsened by the proposed changes to how suburbs are laid out, not improved.
- jeffbee 3y ago
  The fear has nothing to do with "stranger danger". The fear is that kids will get run over by drivers, which happens all the time.
  - cjensen 3y ago
    As a parent, I was not concerned with that. But everyone has their own worries.
  - WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
    >The fear has nothing to do with "stranger danger". The reasonable fear there is helpful citizens + media bullhorning false stranger risk + police bullhorning false stranger risk + just one overzealous officer = recurring CPS visits (and/or neglect charges if officials feel feisty).
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
These articles are always idiotic by nature because they are solutions in search of problems. The suburbs are not and have never been a problem for kids. There are plenty of other kids in the suburbs to play with and far more room to do things than you will ever find in an urban area. I don't want to live in a fucking cave right up next to my neighbor and I won't as long as I can afford it. Why is it that we've got tens of millions of examples of people who grew up in the suburbs and fucking loved their childhoods, but these dimwits keep on pushing urbanism as a panacea to a problem that only ever exists if parents allow it? I grew up in the suburbs during the 80s and early 90s. My childhood was to wake up at 6ish, watch some cartoons, and then get locked outside the house except for lunch or a snack. I rode my bike, played sports, played in makeshift forts, went fishing, and went hunting. I would show up again when the sun started going down. That was my day, every day that the weather wasn't bad. My dad usually dominated the TV during the evenings, and so my time was spent playing or reading or doing homework. We didn't have a lot of money, but I did have a bunch of hand-me-down lego sets, and I would create Transformers and other toys with the lego pieces. My dad had old military blankets which I would use to create forts, or alternatively, mountains to drive my Hot Wheels cars through. I would just pile them up and shove my arms through them to create tunnels. And I'd play video games, but that time was limited and on a 13 inch black and white TV. Was it perfect? No. My parents were emotionally abusive at times. But I had to meet my friends every day in person and I had to learn how to get along with them and their parents and families. I couldn't just toss a tablet on a bed when I had an issue with GoatHumper666. Sometimes that was arguments. Sometimes that was fights. But we were all we had and we would make up at the end of the day. Go talk to a teacher. Ask them how the kids are doing today. They're all ultra-self-entitled. A bunch of little princes and princesses who won't listen to teachers because they have no incentive to do so. The school systems will push their little unsocialized, imagination-bereft asses along and the teachers themselves are powerless to discipline them in any way that actually matters. A bunch of children being raised by screens because their parents are distracted by screens and the teachers who are forced to attempt to deal with all of their pent up energy when they can't look at those same screens.
erikerikson 3y ago
Yes and a semi regular steam of articles that seem like extreme cases but nonetheless repay children taken from parents for free ranging. Further back the articles were about stranger danger and kids being kids. It's as though we've been captured by the worst cases and the illusion of a guarantee of harm avoidance without noticing the embodied harm.
jmyeet 3y ago
The major problem here is capitalism. Car-centrism in urban design wasn't an accident. It was intentional to create indebted workers who now needed to borrow money to buy cars and houses. 30 year mortgage are a relatively new phenomenon. Likewise, we have people working 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet. This again is intentional to extract even more surplus labor value from people. This comes at the cost of people spending time outside of work, including with their families. Destruction of community is a side effect of this and that too is intentional. A much more minor point that is worth mentioning is that there are a lot of people who have children who don't actually like children. Or they want adult children without going through all the steps to get there. These are people who will intentionally work late to avoid chaos at home or have really time-consuming hobbies (eg distance running) that take them out of the home for significant periods of time. Some of this I can attribute to the insecurity of not being able to provide for material needs. And that's the part capitalism plays.
- gammalost 3y ago
  I don't really buy it. It's not like capitalism is something new in the US. Blaming the change on something that's always been there is not really a good argument. Besides car-centrism isn't inherently needed either in a capitalistic society. You can live your whole life in a lot of capitalist countries without a car
  - jmyeet 3y ago
    Times change. Feudalism existed for centuries until it fell to capitalism. Prior to WW2 there was a strong labor movement in the US. There was a reason the US was paranoid about communists. Abraham Lincoln was basically a Marxist in this sense [1][2]. That's how far right things have shifted, particularly since Ronald Reagan. The Red Scare dstroyed any sense of class consciousness people had and neoliberalism ran wild. This doesn't happen overnight. [1]: https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/lincoln-abraham_on-labor-and-capital-1861.htm https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/lincoln-abraham_on... [2]: https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/how-karl-marx-influenced-abraham-lincoln-and-his-position-on-slavery-labor.html https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/how-karl-marx-influenced...
fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
Whenever this topic comes up on HN I'm always in dismay of HN's worship of cities. The main reason anyone (edit: the most common reason anyone) lives in a city in the US is for their job. And they are generally living in small apartments. There also exists some people who can afford massive brick houses in eg. Park Slope who wonder how anyone could live in such dreadful dessert wastelands called suburbs. Then you get these think of the children arguments from groups like "Congress for the New Urbanism" in order to save them by banning cars. Supposedly Suburbanite children have no friends, and are trapped in their houses on their phones.Of course there is never any data to back up this claim. If we are lucky we will get a statistic about car injuries. I wonder why this is? >The suburban preschool children spent more time outdoors, were read to more frequently, visited the library more frequently and more often attended summer camp. The suburban school age children spent more time outdoors, more frequently participated in a community sport league and more often attended summer camp. The urban school age children watched more television or videos. During the summer, suburban school age children spent more time outdoors, while during the school year, suburban school age children used the library more frequently.[0] [0]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1015254007582 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1015254007582
- kibwen 3y ago
  > The main reason anyone lives in a city in the US is for their job. This is a failure to acknowledge the existence of values systems other than your own. I live in a city because I like being around people. I spent the first 30 years of my life in rural and suburban areas, which was enough to tell me that they're not for me. If they're for you, then good for you. But other people can think differently.
  - fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
    what I meant is that the most common reason people live in cities is for their job. I didn't mean that for each person that lives in a city, the most important factor to them living there was their job. The usage of "anyone" here was indeed wrong. Thanks for pointing that out.
- 3y ago
antisthenes 3y ago
These milquetoast articles either all bury the lede or simply never get to the main issue. If real estate is the biggest expense line in a typical household, how much money would it cost to rebuild entire communities across the country? Trillions of dollars. At least. Millions of work-hours. It's probably cheaper to build new communities that foster this kind of child activity than to rebuild existing suburban stroad hellscapes. Many communities have barely enough money to keep the infrastructure from falling apart, how do you plan on rebuilding those? And that's no guarantee of success either. A lot of millennials and younger are just incredibly lazy (or too busy) physically and are in poor shape to enjoy the outdoors. I frequently find myself to be the most fit of several groups despite using the gym last time before COVID.
- anon291 3y ago
  > It's probably cheaper to build new communities that foster this kind of child activity than to rebuild existing suburban stroad hellscapes. Many communities have barely enough money to keep the infrastructure from falling apart, how do you plan on rebuilding those? This is extraordinarily easy actually. You eliminate residential zoning. Every house can now partake in limited commercial activity. Want to start a cafe? No problem. Want to start a barbershop? Sure. Massage studio, yes. Doctor office, yes. Office? Sure. Small grocery stor.? Absolutely. We can have moderate limitations for parking and congestion, but no actual restrictions on what can take place. This will immediately raise property and income taxes which can be reinvested into infrastructure. In the meantime, there's no need to immediately deal with stroads. People will be using the stroads less since they can get a significant portion of needs met locally. This is not a radical proposal. We already allow some home-based businesses and they do fine, like daycares, etc. Once the stroads are less used, and people mostly shopping locally, then we can narrow the stroads bit by bit and turn them into nice proper commercial districts.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    > This is extraordinarily easy actually. You eliminate residential zoning. I've yet to see zoning become less restrictive in communities that actually have the money to start their own businesses. It's an interesting paradox. The only advance I've seen so far is some localities began to allow building ADUs, in very limited capacity in hopes to alleviate housing shortages. But that's so local and so sparse that it's not going to make any kind of impact like the article suggests.
newuser94303 3y ago
I used to drive my kids everywhere. I lived in the SF Bay Area and transit sucked. I moved to Vancouver, Canada and my kids can just roam around. Kids under 12 can ride for free on transit. The mall is 4 blocks away and there is a skytrain station there. I do track their phones but it is way safer.
- lbrito 3y ago
  Are you familiar with https://5kids1condo.com/ https://5kids1condo.com/? I'm also from abroad and live in metro Vancouver, also have kids. Are you in Vancouver proper or the burbs? I'm pretty frustrated with walkability here, but Vancouver proper is just too expensive.
alex_lav 3y ago
I grew up in a small-ish town. It was the worst. My street didn't have sidewalks and the only people in my neighborhood were very old. I was raised by a single mother who had cancer for the majority of my childhood. Getting her to take us places, like to see other kids, was awful. Either she couldn't or she just didn't want to. I usually didn't speak between the time I went home from school and the time I arrived the next day. I don't think many people understand that level of isolation, but I definitely believe it was pretty damaging to both child-me and adult-me. Some people in my life don't understand why I'll never live outside of a city. I kinda feel like it's obvious in retrospect.
pjlegato 3y ago
Parents looking for screen alternatives: Check out the book "Playborhood" by Mike Lanza. His neighborhood had no kids playing outside, so his kids didn't want to play outside. He did something about it, and he tells us how to do the same where we live. https://playborhood.com/ https://playborhood.com/
- glafayette 3y ago
  Seconding this recommendation. The idea of solving this issue at a societal level is really daunting, but Playborhood was an empowering read as a parent. It makes the case that, at least for your children and your (hyper-local) neighborhood, you can create conditions that significantly change your kid's childhood (and mental well-being) for the better. And it provides actionable steps and examples to do that, rather than just bemoaning the state of the world.
drones 3y ago
I see this "screen-time" issue pop up over and over again, but who is to blame? Parents make a stink about kids' screen time ALL THE TIME, yet almost never go outside themselves. Children emulate their parents. Go set an example instead of blaming the child you are responsible for.
- lionkor 3y ago
  I know that every time I would see my dad spend hours in the garden, basically doing a full workout cleaning it up and making it pretty, while I was inside programming, I feld really terrible. I felt like a bum. This works. Set an example for your kids :)
Slava_Propanei 3y ago
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ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
"Public transport is the only guaranteed way for a young person to be free and enjoy mobility." Wrong. We seldom used public transportation. We rode bikes. To school, to movies, to friends' houses, to the beach. Now, entire neighborhoods come to a standstill because the streets are clogged with hundreds of cars driving one child each door-to-door from home to school. WTF? WHY? And I was riding my bike to school in a Chicago suburb. Now I'm in L.A., where apparently the perfect year-round weather is TOO MENACING for kids to get themselves to school. Pathetic. I didn't see any specific basis for this article's assertions. What specifically has changed in suburbia that makes it so horrible for kids now?
- Symbiote 3y ago
  What's changed is a huge increase in cars and driving, and the size of the cars has made them more dangerous.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    Got any citations for that? The "increase in cars and driving?" And per what? Per block? Yes, we have entitled trash driving around in giant barges. But we also have anti-lock brakes. Not sure how the heavy, all-steel cars of decades ago compare to the bloated 5000-pound hogs favored for driving one kid to school today, admittedly.
hcks 3y ago
Yes it’s well known that children in dense walkable mixed use cities such as New York spend all their time outside.
- syndicatedjelly 3y ago
  In downtown Tokyo it’s normal to see school children walking the streets on their own. Not everywhere is a penal colony like the USA is. If this was the goal of the America-haters, then maybe they won after all.
clbrmbr 3y ago
> The average American will spend over six months of their life behind a traffic light. Yeah if you spent 8 hours a day at a light! I think somebody applied the *60 operation twice…
rayiner 3y ago
In addition to overprotective parents and screens, there’s the fact that there’s just fewer kids today, reducing the chances that any kid has a critical mass of similar age neighbors to play with. The percentage of the population that’s under 18 peaked at 36% in 1960, and is down to 22% now. And that understates the perceived decline, because most children are now born to minority families. Only 18% of the non-Hispanic white population is children. So if you’re the kind of person writing about these issues—probably a college-educated, non-immigrant white living among other similar people—the percentage of your local community that’s kids is even less.
danielhep 3y ago
I grew up in the suburbs and in college I met a lot of people who grew up in the city, and I became quite jealous of their childhood. They had an independence that I never had. Many of them still don't know how to drive since we all live in Seattle near transit.
PM_me_your_math 3y ago
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328 points by jseliger 3y ago

We idealistically designed our suburbs at first. Then commercial and industrial interests took charge. Suburban dwellers were an early large dataset for corporations looking to maximize "engagement."

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Terr_ 3y ago
I assume that's sarcasm, in which case I think you are conflating other parental goals/issues in suburbia, such as "well-funded schools" or "floor area and bedrooms" or "buying a house as a form of investment". Meeting those other goals doesn't automatically mean there's a good environment beyond the confines of household and school.

c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago

"In England, housing is often characterized by closely situated semi-detached or terraced structures built under flexible zoning regulations. This environment allows small businesses to coexist harmoniously with residential areas, in contrast to the rigid industrial zoning common in the United States." I'm American and live in Oz. Australia does this well imo. Small cafes and shops are sprinkled throughout neighborhoods. For any large grocery runs, I need to take my car but day to day basics (and more importantly...coffee) are within only a few minutes walking distance.

irrational 3y ago
Are the prices comparable?
- c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
  Not even close but then again I don't know which market in the US to compare to. I'm originally from Houston which is suburban sprawl at its worst. I could get a McMansion for $500k USD. I live in the northern beaches area of Sydney and a "knockdown rebuild" can go for roughly $2m-3m AUD ($1.3-1.9m USD). I struggle with real estate prices here.
  - irrational 3y ago
    Actually, I meant the prices of food at the local shops versus large grocery stores.
    - c_o_n_v_e_x 3y ago
      The prices are generally higher however the quality and service is better than what you'd get from Woolworths or Coles, the big chains here. We have a local butcher who's stuff is higher quality than what the chains carry. I can also order stuff not readily available (like a thanksgiving turkey).
AussieWog93 3y ago
At least in Melbourne, this is only really the case for more established (and typically expensive) suburbs. Go out to Clyde North or Officer and you've got basically nothing in a walkable distance. Even in (relatively affluent, semi-inner) Burwood East many of the old strip shops have been converted to non-regular or non-retail businesses (e.g kitchen showroom, accountant, baked goods wholesaler). You'd need to go up to Kmart Plaza to get groceries or coffee.
- woolly 3y ago
  In Sydney, it's generally the case for established neighbourhoods close to the CBD. Walkability in inner city suburbs like Balmain, Leichhardt, Rozelle, any of the eastern suburbs really is super high. Contrast this to urban-sprawl created suburbs like Marsden Park and a few of the Hills district burbs and it's the opposite - barely any public transport and next to no community infrastructure. There's a good channel on YT that documents this sort of stuff here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDhbm-t3dXU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDhbm-t3dXU
- Gigachad 3y ago
  Yeah I’m in Melbourne and thanks to working in tech, I can afford to live in one of those inner areas with cafes and community events at my doorstep. But the average person is forced out to some hellscape like Craigieburn or Melton where kids will be surrounded by mega highways in every direction. We really need to do more to bring pedestrianisation and walkability out to the cheaper areas rather than having them be a luxury for the rich.
  - Tade0 3y ago
    There's an additional factor that is significant in my corner of the world: Plenty of people work in businesses that are necessarily far from any city, like factories, so not only they can't really afford living in those dense areas with cafes and the lot, they couldn't live there anyway because there's little to no mass transit to this middle of nowhere where they're headed every day, so they need to drive. Communists approached the problem by just building residential areas around the factory, but it was unhealthy and in this day and age you can't expect anyone to work at the same steel mill for 35 years, like my grandpa did, so it's not a solution.
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prawn 3y ago
Usually they're sprinkled on arterials of some scale. Suburbs could support more corner shops and studios, but (at least where I live) it feels like councils are nervous about parking burdens created by these. Developers avoid giving up any more land to parking than they need to. Residents don't want employees and patrons of a corner hairdresser or architect swamping their streets with parked cars. So we mostly get endless blocks of residential, and some old corner stores revert to living rooms instead of what they were designed as.

ryan93 3y ago

Why on earth is the picture of a busy truck stop type place? Most suburban neighborhoods have low traffic and plenty of places to ride your bike. Often have pools and basketball courts or fields to play in.

BetaDeltaAlpha 3y ago
It's not just a truck stop. Breezwood, PA is a meme at this point used to malign suburbs.
- gosub100 3y ago
  How funny, because when you look at it from the map, there's proably < 100 housing units within a ~3 mile radius. Of course there's not a bike path and roundabouts! It's the ideal place for a stroad: a pit-stop off the interstate with almost no housing nearby, with a cold the climate half the year.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Symbiote 3y ago
    That place is awful. If a truck driver stops for the night, but fancies a meal from the other side of the road there's no sidewalk, and no crossing. Just lots of "no pedestrians" signs. How do you get from the Tesla Supercharger to McDonald's?
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Nobody intended Breezewood to be the way it is, it's the result of a bureaucratic jam between the state and the federal government decades ago. It hasn't been fixed since then because it's profitable the way it is. Virtually nobody actually lives there so there's no local pressure to change it. It is in no way representative of other communities in the region.
- neogodless 3y ago

tropdrop 3y ago

Nice to see a high quality article by a high school student – kudos to this young new urbanist.

gosub100 3y ago

I grew up in the suburbs and did all kinds of things on my own. From 1991-1997 I rode my bike all around, went to the park, played sports, socialized, went to stores and fast-food on my own. My parents set some reasonable limitations on it: had to come back periodically and check in, let them know where I was, couldn't cross busy streets. I even had an SNES and my friends had Sega, and we played video games and watched TV, but we got bored of that and went outside at least as much as we stayed in. I don't know what happened between then and now. I don't have kids so I don't know how people make decisions about them. I know a big part of it is fear of child abductions and getting hit by cars. I think it's just an irrational fear of those things (or bullying or using drugs) that slowly led to tightening the leash on kids. Today I rarely see kids doing anything in public without a helicopter parent within 50-ft. One of the middle schools I drove by allows one child to leave the door, go straight to their parents car, before the next car pulls up. They aren't even allowed to walk home unsupervised.

ignite2 3y ago
Yeah, suburbia is not the problem. I'd much rather live in suburbia than a city. But if you can't go outside on your own, that loses a lot of the benefit.
bell-cot 3y ago
THIS. Back when, I walked to/from kindergarten & elementary school daily. In pretty much whatever weather there was. Usually alone. Mostly along a main-ish residential street. Those walks added up to ~12 miles/week. Pretty much all the other kids at my school did the same; I'd guess the maximum walk was ~15 miles/week. (Also - this was back when all the kids went home to eat lunch each day, then came back to school. "School lunch" for the few oddballs, who had no housewife mom available, amounted to a few folding picnic tables in a dead-end hallway, and BYO sack lunch.)
brandonmenc 3y ago
Same. My parents are horrified when I suggest that their grandchildren should have the same freedom to roam around that they gave us. They believe the world is more dangerous than ever even though murders, violent crime, child abductions, and car accidents peaked when we were kids. And we didn't have cellphones to check in or call 911 with. It's baffling.

irrational 3y ago

> Why don’t children leave the house? Because of screens. We have a forest in our backyard with a 2 story fully enclosed treehouse (including electricity), sports fields within a 5 minute walk, tons of hiking trails, etc. But it is a real struggle to get them to leave the house because they want to be on the Internet 24/7. Of course we take away the devices, but that just leads to them bemoaning their screen less state. One of the problems is, this is taught in the schools. Pretty much every class is using screens constantly. Our local school district recently experienced a hack that made it so they couldn’t use chromebooks for a few days. All the teachers lesson plans were completely centered around devices, so the kids just watched movies all day instead.

locococo 3y ago
I don't disagree but I think what we tend to forget is thst children mimic their parents. I've noticed that my kids will go outside more when I walk the dog more. They either join me or go outside on their own. The same applied when I work in the yard.
- jahewson 3y ago
  That’s a good point. In turn I’d ask why the parents don’t leave the house? Because of screens…?
- autoexec 3y ago
  My parents didn't spend much time out of the house, but they'd kick us out occasionally. We'd bike around, go to parks, or visit friends. Are parents even allowed to say "Go play outside until the street lights turn on" anymore?
- rpxio 3y ago
  I was going to reply with this exact sentiment, so I’m glad you brought it up. There’s also talk in this thread about how we’ve designed the outside to be kid-unfriendly. Let’s think for a second about how we design our home spaces inside to have screens all around. I’d wager that if you could walk into any house in suburbia, 90%+ will have a massive flat screen hanging in the main living space. Not only that, but all the chairs are aimed to face it! It’s the focal point and THE activity to be done in that space. Some houses will have screens in nearly every room. A screen in every pocket and maybe some portable screens too! With so much priority put on these screens and when parents, grandparents, friends, etc all spend a majority of their waking life on them, what is a kid going to mimic and learn is acceptable? We definitely still struggle with screen time for our kids. They’re getting much better about turning it off without tantrums, but we only have one TV in our bedroom (rarely turned on), an iPad, and our phones. We try to watch TV or movies together rather than having a screen on in the background or relying on a screen to entertain our kids while we go off and do something else. All that said, our oldest (4 y/o) reads chapter books like there’s no tomorrow because she sees my wife and I read physical books. We also frequent the library often where she can have some independence to wander and find what interests her to bring home. Parent friends always make remarks about how smart she is and how they wish their kid would read more, but they can’t get them to stop wanting to watch TV or the tablet… but we’ve been to several friends’ houses and they always have a TV on nonstop and they themselves don’t read any books.

tempsy 3y ago

I don’t really understand how this is a new thing. The claim is that children today are being “left behind by suburbia” as if that wasn’t true of older generations of children and we as a society once all lived in an urban utopia and now it somehow isn’t the case.

ben-schaaf 3y ago
Car-dependent suburbia was fundamentally impossible 100 years ago because most people didn't have a car. Kids could socialise with their friends outside because everything had to be accessible via waking, cycling or public transit. It was also socially and legally acceptable to have young kids out on their own. When I grew up in suburbia my friends from school were a half hour drive away. When we met up we usually went outside and socialised. But that always meant organising with parents to drive us around. Looking back I think "left behind" isn't quite strong enough.
- anon291 3y ago
  Exactly this. I live in the now-inner-city (a residential area mile or so from downtown office buildings and a few blocks away from small office buildings). Back in the day our walkable neighborhood was built, it was considered the outer suburbs. It's still extremely dense. Way denser than the 60s/70s suburb I grew up in, and way denser than anything today. Density isn't just about how close the houses are but how close the nearest cafe and store is too.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >It was also socially and legally acceptable to have young kids out on their own. Here in Japan, it's still socially and legally acceptable for young kids to be on their own outside. I see it all the time. Kids under the age of 10 regularly take subways by themselves, ride on bikes outside, etc.
  - Gigachad 3y ago
    The US seems extremely devoid of individual freedoms compared to most other countries.

mechhacker 3y ago

“Why don’t children leave the house?” I did, until I was at a certain age (roughly early teenager). Then, there were a bunch of news shows talking about men driving around in brown vans abducting kids. Or kids just smoking pot at the parks. So I stopped being let to go there without adults. And that's about the time that we got a computer with a modem and I discovered online games...

absoluteunit1 3y ago

I’d love some walkable neighbourhoods in my suburbia. Automotive industry invested heavily to ensure this was so. Dependence on a vehicle in most North American cities is not an accident

marssaxman 3y ago
why not... leave suburbia, then, and go where the walkable neighborhoods are?
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Because if you want your kids’ peers in school to mostly be from households that earn a similar or higher income than your household, the best way to do that is to move to a school district with the biggest lots and homes you can afford, thereby ensuring the population of the school is made up only of people who can afford all the space and driving. It is literally what makes “good” school districts “good”, the household incomes of the student population. And moving to a suburban place filters that nicely. Same reason why residents will often times oppose apartment developments, since they allow lower income residents to move into the district.
  - marssaxman 3y ago
    Wow. That's a really... foreign mindset. Thank you for helping me understand.
    - anon291 3y ago
      Right. Next time you see an American arguing that we need vouchers, realize that this would greatly help redistribute where wealth is. If people could send their kid to any school they wouldn't have to all live in suburbia. They could instead choose the environmentally and socially positive option without risking their child's education.
      - liotier 3y ago

thegrim33 3y ago

So, a for profit company that has the sole purpose of taking taking money from people and sponsors in order to create "think pieces" about walkable cities, pushes a propaganda piece with a major premise being that our suburbs are bad for kids because of our reliance on cars. However .. the entire premise instantly falls apart when you ask why we didn't have the same problem in the past when we were even MORE based around cars than we are today.

tomjakubowski 3y ago
> CNU is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization headquartered in Washington, DC.
Symbiote 3y ago
At what point in the past was America more dependent on cars, especially for children and youths?
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  when delivery wasn't a button away.
eichin 3y ago
I don't have a problem with the cynicism about the article... but as for not having the problem in the past - Rush: Subdivisions was effectively a pop culture essay on this problem from 1982.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  "Subdivisions" is a song about a nerdy kid finding it hard to fit in, and the similarity of the houses in large developments is treated as a metaphor for the limited range of identities kids could adopt if they didn’t want to be socially excluded. The song says nothing about kids finding it hard to play together, because in lyricist Neil Peart’s childhood all the way to the 1990s, children were finding things to do together in those suburbs regardless. Moreover, the perspective of the song is a high-school one (“…in the basement bars, in the backs of cars…”, plus see the music video), not younger children.

cjensen 3y ago

The author attends the High School I attended nearly 40 years ago. I was born, raised, and still live in Fremont. Fremont has begun doing some of these trendy concepts that are mentioned in the article, but when I grew up none of these ideas had been implemented. I socialized with other kids and rode bike around the neighborhood. As a pre-teen, we socialized in the street and at each other's houses. As a teen I was not really restricted in where to go and there are plenty of neighborhood parks and libraries to hang out at. None of the article's critiques of suburbia ring true to me with respect to Fremont. If you are seeking nightlife as an adult, you might feel it is a wasteland. But for children growing up I'm not seeing a problem. Part of that is that most of the city can be navigated without ever being on an arterial. Part of that is that most of the city was developed during an era where neighborhood parks could be mandated. Part of that is the city was master planned when it was small and they foresaw today's population. It is true children spend less time outside than they used to. Part of that is fear; when my kids were young, I didn't trust that strangers wouldn't be a problem if they were outside the house. But right or wrong, that fear is worsened by the proposed changes to how suburbs are laid out, not improved.

jeffbee 3y ago
The fear has nothing to do with "stranger danger". The fear is that kids will get run over by drivers, which happens all the time.
- cjensen 3y ago
  As a parent, I was not concerned with that. But everyone has their own worries.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  >The fear has nothing to do with "stranger danger". The reasonable fear there is helpful citizens + media bullhorning false stranger risk + police bullhorning false stranger risk + just one overzealous officer = recurring CPS visits (and/or neglect charges if officials feel feisty).
- mcpackieh 3y ago

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

These articles are always idiotic by nature because they are solutions in search of problems. The suburbs are not and have never been a problem for kids. There are plenty of other kids in the suburbs to play with and far more room to do things than you will ever find in an urban area. I don't want to live in a fucking cave right up next to my neighbor and I won't as long as I can afford it. Why is it that we've got tens of millions of examples of people who grew up in the suburbs and fucking loved their childhoods, but these dimwits keep on pushing urbanism as a panacea to a problem that only ever exists if parents allow it? I grew up in the suburbs during the 80s and early 90s. My childhood was to wake up at 6ish, watch some cartoons, and then get locked outside the house except for lunch or a snack. I rode my bike, played sports, played in makeshift forts, went fishing, and went hunting. I would show up again when the sun started going down. That was my day, every day that the weather wasn't bad. My dad usually dominated the TV during the evenings, and so my time was spent playing or reading or doing homework. We didn't have a lot of money, but I did have a bunch of hand-me-down lego sets, and I would create Transformers and other toys with the lego pieces. My dad had old military blankets which I would use to create forts, or alternatively, mountains to drive my Hot Wheels cars through. I would just pile them up and shove my arms through them to create tunnels. And I'd play video games, but that time was limited and on a 13 inch black and white TV. Was it perfect? No. My parents were emotionally abusive at times. But I had to meet my friends every day in person and I had to learn how to get along with them and their parents and families. I couldn't just toss a tablet on a bed when I had an issue with GoatHumper666. Sometimes that was arguments. Sometimes that was fights. But we were all we had and we would make up at the end of the day. Go talk to a teacher. Ask them how the kids are doing today. They're all ultra-self-entitled. A bunch of little princes and princesses who won't listen to teachers because they have no incentive to do so. The school systems will push their little unsocialized, imagination-bereft asses along and the teachers themselves are powerless to discipline them in any way that actually matters. A bunch of children being raised by screens because their parents are distracted by screens and the teachers who are forced to attempt to deal with all of their pent up energy when they can't look at those same screens.

erikerikson 3y ago

Yes and a semi regular steam of articles that seem like extreme cases but nonetheless repay children taken from parents for free ranging. Further back the articles were about stranger danger and kids being kids. It's as though we've been captured by the worst cases and the illusion of a guarantee of harm avoidance without noticing the embodied harm.

jmyeet 3y ago

The major problem here is capitalism. Car-centrism in urban design wasn't an accident. It was intentional to create indebted workers who now needed to borrow money to buy cars and houses. 30 year mortgage are a relatively new phenomenon. Likewise, we have people working 2 or 3 jobs to make ends meet. This again is intentional to extract even more surplus labor value from people. This comes at the cost of people spending time outside of work, including with their families. Destruction of community is a side effect of this and that too is intentional. A much more minor point that is worth mentioning is that there are a lot of people who have children who don't actually like children. Or they want adult children without going through all the steps to get there. These are people who will intentionally work late to avoid chaos at home or have really time-consuming hobbies (eg distance running) that take them out of the home for significant periods of time. Some of this I can attribute to the insecurity of not being able to provide for material needs. And that's the part capitalism plays.

gammalost 3y ago
I don't really buy it. It's not like capitalism is something new in the US. Blaming the change on something that's always been there is not really a good argument. Besides car-centrism isn't inherently needed either in a capitalistic society. You can live your whole life in a lot of capitalist countries without a car
- jmyeet 3y ago
  Times change. Feudalism existed for centuries until it fell to capitalism. Prior to WW2 there was a strong labor movement in the US. There was a reason the US was paranoid about communists. Abraham Lincoln was basically a Marxist in this sense [1][2]. That's how far right things have shifted, particularly since Ronald Reagan. The Red Scare dstroyed any sense of class consciousness people had and neoliberalism ran wild. This doesn't happen overnight. [1]: https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/lincoln-abraham_on-labor-and-capital-1861.htm https://www.cooperative-individualism.org/lincoln-abraham_on... [2]: https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/how-karl-marx-influenced-abraham-lincoln-and-his-position-on-slavery-labor.html https://www.openculture.com/2022/01/how-karl-marx-influenced...

fngjdflmdflg 3y ago

Whenever this topic comes up on HN I'm always in dismay of HN's worship of cities. The main reason anyone (edit: the most common reason anyone) lives in a city in the US is for their job. And they are generally living in small apartments. There also exists some people who can afford massive brick houses in eg. Park Slope who wonder how anyone could live in such dreadful dessert wastelands called suburbs. Then you get these think of the children arguments from groups like "Congress for the New Urbanism" in order to save them by banning cars. Supposedly Suburbanite children have no friends, and are trapped in their houses on their phones.Of course there is never any data to back up this claim. If we are lucky we will get a statistic about car injuries. I wonder why this is? >The suburban preschool children spent more time outdoors, were read to more frequently, visited the library more frequently and more often attended summer camp. The suburban school age children spent more time outdoors, more frequently participated in a community sport league and more often attended summer camp. The urban school age children watched more television or videos. During the summer, suburban school age children spent more time outdoors, while during the school year, suburban school age children used the library more frequently.[0] [0]https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1015254007582 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1015254007582

kibwen 3y ago
> The main reason anyone lives in a city in the US is for their job. This is a failure to acknowledge the existence of values systems other than your own. I live in a city because I like being around people. I spent the first 30 years of my life in rural and suburban areas, which was enough to tell me that they're not for me. If they're for you, then good for you. But other people can think differently.
- fngjdflmdflg 3y ago
  what I meant is that the most common reason people live in cities is for their job. I didn't mean that for each person that lives in a city, the most important factor to them living there was their job. The usage of "anyone" here was indeed wrong. Thanks for pointing that out.
3y ago

antisthenes 3y ago

These milquetoast articles either all bury the lede or simply never get to the main issue. If real estate is the biggest expense line in a typical household, how much money would it cost to rebuild entire communities across the country? Trillions of dollars. At least. Millions of work-hours. It's probably cheaper to build new communities that foster this kind of child activity than to rebuild existing suburban stroad hellscapes. Many communities have barely enough money to keep the infrastructure from falling apart, how do you plan on rebuilding those? And that's no guarantee of success either. A lot of millennials and younger are just incredibly lazy (or too busy) physically and are in poor shape to enjoy the outdoors. I frequently find myself to be the most fit of several groups despite using the gym last time before COVID.

anon291 3y ago
> It's probably cheaper to build new communities that foster this kind of child activity than to rebuild existing suburban stroad hellscapes. Many communities have barely enough money to keep the infrastructure from falling apart, how do you plan on rebuilding those? This is extraordinarily easy actually. You eliminate residential zoning. Every house can now partake in limited commercial activity. Want to start a cafe? No problem. Want to start a barbershop? Sure. Massage studio, yes. Doctor office, yes. Office? Sure. Small grocery stor.? Absolutely. We can have moderate limitations for parking and congestion, but no actual restrictions on what can take place. This will immediately raise property and income taxes which can be reinvested into infrastructure. In the meantime, there's no need to immediately deal with stroads. People will be using the stroads less since they can get a significant portion of needs met locally. This is not a radical proposal. We already allow some home-based businesses and they do fine, like daycares, etc. Once the stroads are less used, and people mostly shopping locally, then we can narrow the stroads bit by bit and turn them into nice proper commercial districts.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  > This is extraordinarily easy actually. You eliminate residential zoning. I've yet to see zoning become less restrictive in communities that actually have the money to start their own businesses. It's an interesting paradox. The only advance I've seen so far is some localities began to allow building ADUs, in very limited capacity in hopes to alleviate housing shortages. But that's so local and so sparse that it's not going to make any kind of impact like the article suggests.

newuser94303 3y ago

I used to drive my kids everywhere. I lived in the SF Bay Area and transit sucked. I moved to Vancouver, Canada and my kids can just roam around. Kids under 12 can ride for free on transit. The mall is 4 blocks away and there is a skytrain station there. I do track their phones but it is way safer.

lbrito 3y ago
Are you familiar with https://5kids1condo.com/ https://5kids1condo.com/? I'm also from abroad and live in metro Vancouver, also have kids. Are you in Vancouver proper or the burbs? I'm pretty frustrated with walkability here, but Vancouver proper is just too expensive.

alex_lav 3y ago

I grew up in a small-ish town. It was the worst. My street didn't have sidewalks and the only people in my neighborhood were very old. I was raised by a single mother who had cancer for the majority of my childhood. Getting her to take us places, like to see other kids, was awful. Either she couldn't or she just didn't want to. I usually didn't speak between the time I went home from school and the time I arrived the next day. I don't think many people understand that level of isolation, but I definitely believe it was pretty damaging to both child-me and adult-me. Some people in my life don't understand why I'll never live outside of a city. I kinda feel like it's obvious in retrospect.

pjlegato 3y ago

Parents looking for screen alternatives: Check out the book "Playborhood" by Mike Lanza. His neighborhood had no kids playing outside, so his kids didn't want to play outside. He did something about it, and he tells us how to do the same where we live. https://playborhood.com/ https://playborhood.com/

glafayette 3y ago
Seconding this recommendation. The idea of solving this issue at a societal level is really daunting, but Playborhood was an empowering read as a parent. It makes the case that, at least for your children and your (hyper-local) neighborhood, you can create conditions that significantly change your kid's childhood (and mental well-being) for the better. And it provides actionable steps and examples to do that, rather than just bemoaning the state of the world.

drones 3y ago

I see this "screen-time" issue pop up over and over again, but who is to blame? Parents make a stink about kids' screen time ALL THE TIME, yet almost never go outside themselves. Children emulate their parents. Go set an example instead of blaming the child you are responsible for.

lionkor 3y ago
I know that every time I would see my dad spend hours in the garden, basically doing a full workout cleaning it up and making it pretty, while I was inside programming, I feld really terrible. I felt like a bum. This works. Set an example for your kids :)

Slava_Propanei 3y ago

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ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

"Public transport is the only guaranteed way for a young person to be free and enjoy mobility." Wrong. We seldom used public transportation. We rode bikes. To school, to movies, to friends' houses, to the beach. Now, entire neighborhoods come to a standstill because the streets are clogged with hundreds of cars driving one child each door-to-door from home to school. WTF? WHY? And I was riding my bike to school in a Chicago suburb. Now I'm in L.A., where apparently the perfect year-round weather is TOO MENACING for kids to get themselves to school. Pathetic. I didn't see any specific basis for this article's assertions. What specifically has changed in suburbia that makes it so horrible for kids now?

Symbiote 3y ago
What's changed is a huge increase in cars and driving, and the size of the cars has made them more dangerous.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Got any citations for that? The "increase in cars and driving?" And per what? Per block? Yes, we have entitled trash driving around in giant barges. But we also have anti-lock brakes. Not sure how the heavy, all-steel cars of decades ago compare to the bloated 5000-pound hogs favored for driving one kid to school today, admittedly.

hcks 3y ago

Yes it’s well known that children in dense walkable mixed use cities such as New York spend all their time outside.

syndicatedjelly 3y ago
In downtown Tokyo it’s normal to see school children walking the streets on their own. Not everywhere is a penal colony like the USA is. If this was the goal of the America-haters, then maybe they won after all.

clbrmbr 3y ago

> The average American will spend over six months of their life behind a traffic light. Yeah if you spent 8 hours a day at a light! I think somebody applied the *60 operation twice…

rayiner 3y ago

In addition to overprotective parents and screens, there’s the fact that there’s just fewer kids today, reducing the chances that any kid has a critical mass of similar age neighbors to play with. The percentage of the population that’s under 18 peaked at 36% in 1960, and is down to 22% now. And that understates the perceived decline, because most children are now born to minority families. Only 18% of the non-Hispanic white population is children. So if you’re the kind of person writing about these issues—probably a college-educated, non-immigrant white living among other similar people—the percentage of your local community that’s kids is even less.

danielhep 3y ago

I grew up in the suburbs and in college I met a lot of people who grew up in the city, and I became quite jealous of their childhood. They had an independence that I never had. Many of them still don't know how to drive since we all live in Seattle near transit.

PM_me_your_math 3y ago

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