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My belief is that this can be mostly or maybe entirely traced back to the way Americans ruined their cities. At one time, before urban neighbourhoods were demol

My belief is that this can be mostly or maybe entirely traced back to the way Americans ruined their cities. At one time, before urban neighbourhoods were demolished for freeways, Americans more commonly lived in denser neighbourhoods. The transition from urban to suburban living (partially fuelled by cost of living being subsidized in suburbia, and partially caused by NIMBY advocates blocking the development of new housing to keep housing prices affordable in cities) completely destroyed any chance Americans had to be independent from their cars. Instead what they have in the states are a bunch of disjointed metro areas that demand a car to do anything. So teenagers need to be chauffeured around and lose independence because of the reliance on parent transport. I think that feeds into the mental health crisis but it also makes third places more expensive (fewer people using them than if the area was more densely populated) and more hostile (housing unaffordability drives homelessness and the use of third places as homes for the homeless.) You’ll find an exceptionally strong correlation between viable third places and cities that don’t demand that you own a car.

rayiner 2y ago
I think you’ve got the causation reversed. People built freeways so they can live in car-dependent suburbs. I’ve got a lot of immigrant family that came through New York City because there is a large community of our ethnic group there. Every single family has moved out to the suburbs as soon as possible. The folks who came with a bit more education went straight to places like Dallas Fort Worth where you could buy a big house for not too much money.
- underlipton 2y ago
  *Social engineers built freeways because it was a convenient way to raze minority neighborhoods while subsidizing suburbs that were care-dependent largely in order to limit who could move there by class. It's important to tell the full story because similar dynamics drive our current stumbling blocks.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    That’s obviously coincidental. Many countries (and even parts of the US) that have no minorities to oppress developed car-dependent suburbs around the same time.
    - underlipton 2y ago
      I can't tell if you're being facetious or not. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00225266231190177?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.9 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00225266231190177?i... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3797364# https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3797364#
      - rayiner 2y ago
        Those articles don’t support the point you made above. They show that minority neighborhoods were razed to build freeways. That’s true—for the same reason chemical plants and power stations are disproportionately built near places where minorities live. But razing minority neighborhoods isn’t the reason people build chemical and power plants. That’s just the easiest way to build things people want to build for other reasons. Likewise, people didn’t build highways for the purpose of razing minority neighborhoods. They wanted the highways, and it was easier to build them through poor neighborhoods than to build them through richer ones. Again, European cities did or tried to do many of the same things as American cities in terms of building freeways: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-removed-to-bring-back-original-water/ https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov.... Cities like Seattle and Portland that had virtually no minorities in the 1960s also built freeways through downtown. The existence of minorities isn’t what caused people to build those freeways. That’s like saying wet streets cause rain.
        underlipton 2y ago
        You need to read them again. They explain that the overarching purpose of urban renewal/the ISHS was to transfer wealth from black urbanites to newly-crowned white suburbanites. The highways would not have been built if they couldn't raze poor and/or black or minority neighborhoods (it should be noted that many were thriving economically, if unconnected politically), as the contemporary NIMBY-won fights that kill public transit project after project show. Europe's situation is different for several reasons, including the pre-automobile "urban renewal" of many cities in the late 19th century (the displacement of "slum" inhabitants being now outside of living memory) that has been preserved in contemporary layouts, the complete destruction of many cities during WWII (precluding "slum" clearance), and the robust anti-freeway movements in several cities, particularly Copenhagen. You are categorically wrong about Seattle: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5bbc63a6ef9d45f787f4bde2b1cc2629 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5bbc63a6ef9d45f787f4bde... >Robert Moses, the construction coordinator of New York City and an influential urban planner, believed that highways should be built in order to destroy black neighborhoods. "Our categorical imperative is action to clear the slums," he said in 1959. >Seattle's highway planners took Moses's idea to heart. They placed the intersection and interchange of two major planned freeways, the I-90 and the RH Thomson in the center of the Judkins Park neighborhood of the Central District which was 85% black at the time. >the urban renewal project and the placement of the freeways was a deliberate plan to destroy Black Seattle and eviscerate an area seen by white Seattleites as a ghetto. And also Portland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albina,_Portland,_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albina,_Portland,_Oregon https://web.archive.org/web/20210516160733/https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/usp_fac/286/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210516160733/https://pdxschola... https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/black-history/black-community-portland-albina-neighborhood/283-85a7ebf4-30ca-4617-bd10-839030f654da https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/black-history/black-c... You need to do more research. You are horribly misinformed.
- underlipton 2y ago
  >People built freeways so they can live in car-dependent suburbs. Lower replies which provide greater context to this statement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40335059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40335059
sneak 2y ago
Yeah, this car-centric, low density lifestyle model also likes very strict zoning: no third places that aren’t a church are allowed to be near suburban homes.
rufus_foreman 2y ago
>> At one time, before urban neighbourhoods were demolished for freeways, Americans more commonly lived in denser neighbourhoods. Before freeways, there was a huge rural population. 60% in 1900, still 36% by 1950. If your theory was correct there should have been a massive mental health crisis in rural areas during that period.
- sseagull 2y ago
  Hang around HN enough and you will realize that the root cause of all societal (and most non-societal) problems is suburbia, and that if everyone would just live in cities we could finally reach the ultimate utopia.
- randomdata 2y ago
  To be fair, those rural communities were largely self-sufficient. You didn't need a car to drive into the city to do anything. You could do everything right at home. This kept the community fairly tight-knit. In fact, with respect to the topic of third places, I was recently looking at an old township map of where my family's farm is located from the 1800s. What really stood out was that there was a church found approximately every mile. A little surprising by today's standards, but stands to reason when you think about it. I mean, what else were those people going to do? There wasn't much else to do other than socialize with your closest neighbours, providing sufficient concentration for a third place to emerge. Now imagine putting some kind of social centre every mile in those suburbs today. I don't see it working out too well.
  - rufus_foreman 2y ago
    >> what else were those people going to do? My grandparents owned farms, my parents and stepparents all grew up on them. What they did was work.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      If your parents grew up on farms in the 1800s, how old does that make you?
verisimi 2y ago
> My belief is that this can be mostly or maybe entirely traced back to the way Americans ruined their cities. Not Americans. The state. Town planning. Subsidizing. Not the people.
Lammy 2y ago
> before urban neighbourhoods were demolished for freeways I do not doubt that there were places where this happened, but speaking about it as some absolute is simply disingenuous and untrue. For example, San Francisco is the birthplace of our cultural concept of freeway revolts, but San Francisco's 1950s freeway plan was intentionally routed to avoid bisecting any of the City-and-County's residential districts. Check out this composite map I just whipped up and you should be able to see how the planned freeways were routed along district boundaries, not through them: https://i.imgur.com/MSbpF5e.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/MSbpF5e.jpeg Sources: — https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/1955trafficways.jpg https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/... (base layer) — https://i0.wp.com/thefrontsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/San-Francisco-Real-Estate-Districts-Map.jpg?ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/thefrontsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/... (33% opacity) I specify “residential” districts because SOMA is bisected but SOMA was all warehouses and freight railroad yards at the time so there was no reason to care. Even the famously-hated Embarcadero Freeway was on formerly-CA-state-owned land where the “State Belt” waterfront industrial railroad ran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad https://i.imgur.com/Mq3mWQr.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Mq3mWQr.jpeg

rayiner 2y ago

I think you’ve got the causation reversed. People built freeways so they can live in car-dependent suburbs. I’ve got a lot of immigrant family that came through New York City because there is a large community of our ethnic group there. Every single family has moved out to the suburbs as soon as possible. The folks who came with a bit more education went straight to places like Dallas Fort Worth where you could buy a big house for not too much money.

underlipton 2y ago
*Social engineers built freeways because it was a convenient way to raze minority neighborhoods while subsidizing suburbs that were care-dependent largely in order to limit who could move there by class. It's important to tell the full story because similar dynamics drive our current stumbling blocks.
- rayiner 2y ago
  That’s obviously coincidental. Many countries (and even parts of the US) that have no minorities to oppress developed car-dependent suburbs around the same time.
  - underlipton 2y ago
    I can't tell if you're being facetious or not. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00225266231190177?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.9 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00225266231190177?i... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3797364# https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3797364#
    - rayiner 2y ago
      Those articles don’t support the point you made above. They show that minority neighborhoods were razed to build freeways. That’s true—for the same reason chemical plants and power stations are disproportionately built near places where minorities live. But razing minority neighborhoods isn’t the reason people build chemical and power plants. That’s just the easiest way to build things people want to build for other reasons. Likewise, people didn’t build highways for the purpose of razing minority neighborhoods. They wanted the highways, and it was easier to build them through poor neighborhoods than to build them through richer ones. Again, European cities did or tried to do many of the same things as American cities in terms of building freeways: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-removed-to-bring-back-original-water/ https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2016/01/05/motorway-remov.... Cities like Seattle and Portland that had virtually no minorities in the 1960s also built freeways through downtown. The existence of minorities isn’t what caused people to build those freeways. That’s like saying wet streets cause rain.
      - underlipton 2y ago
        You need to read them again. They explain that the overarching purpose of urban renewal/the ISHS was to transfer wealth from black urbanites to newly-crowned white suburbanites. The highways would not have been built if they couldn't raze poor and/or black or minority neighborhoods (it should be noted that many were thriving economically, if unconnected politically), as the contemporary NIMBY-won fights that kill public transit project after project show. Europe's situation is different for several reasons, including the pre-automobile "urban renewal" of many cities in the late 19th century (the displacement of "slum" inhabitants being now outside of living memory) that has been preserved in contemporary layouts, the complete destruction of many cities during WWII (precluding "slum" clearance), and the robust anti-freeway movements in several cities, particularly Copenhagen. You are categorically wrong about Seattle: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5bbc63a6ef9d45f787f4bde2b1cc2629 https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/5bbc63a6ef9d45f787f4bde... >Robert Moses, the construction coordinator of New York City and an influential urban planner, believed that highways should be built in order to destroy black neighborhoods. "Our categorical imperative is action to clear the slums," he said in 1959. >Seattle's highway planners took Moses's idea to heart. They placed the intersection and interchange of two major planned freeways, the I-90 and the RH Thomson in the center of the Judkins Park neighborhood of the Central District which was 85% black at the time. >the urban renewal project and the placement of the freeways was a deliberate plan to destroy Black Seattle and eviscerate an area seen by white Seattleites as a ghetto. And also Portland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albina,_Portland,_Oregon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albina,_Portland,_Oregon https://web.archive.org/web/20210516160733/https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/usp_fac/286/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210516160733/https://pdxschola... https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/black-history/black-community-portland-albina-neighborhood/283-85a7ebf4-30ca-4617-bd10-839030f654da https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/black-history/black-c... You need to do more research. You are horribly misinformed.
underlipton 2y ago
>People built freeways so they can live in car-dependent suburbs. Lower replies which provide greater context to this statement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40335059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40335059

sneak 2y ago

Yeah, this car-centric, low density lifestyle model also likes very strict zoning: no third places that aren’t a church are allowed to be near suburban homes.

rufus_foreman 2y ago

>> At one time, before urban neighbourhoods were demolished for freeways, Americans more commonly lived in denser neighbourhoods. Before freeways, there was a huge rural population. 60% in 1900, still 36% by 1950. If your theory was correct there should have been a massive mental health crisis in rural areas during that period.

sseagull 2y ago
Hang around HN enough and you will realize that the root cause of all societal (and most non-societal) problems is suburbia, and that if everyone would just live in cities we could finally reach the ultimate utopia.
randomdata 2y ago
To be fair, those rural communities were largely self-sufficient. You didn't need a car to drive into the city to do anything. You could do everything right at home. This kept the community fairly tight-knit. In fact, with respect to the topic of third places, I was recently looking at an old township map of where my family's farm is located from the 1800s. What really stood out was that there was a church found approximately every mile. A little surprising by today's standards, but stands to reason when you think about it. I mean, what else were those people going to do? There wasn't much else to do other than socialize with your closest neighbours, providing sufficient concentration for a third place to emerge. Now imagine putting some kind of social centre every mile in those suburbs today. I don't see it working out too well.
- rufus_foreman 2y ago
  >> what else were those people going to do? My grandparents owned farms, my parents and stepparents all grew up on them. What they did was work.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    If your parents grew up on farms in the 1800s, how old does that make you?

verisimi 2y ago

> My belief is that this can be mostly or maybe entirely traced back to the way Americans ruined their cities. Not Americans. The state. Town planning. Subsidizing. Not the people.

Lammy 2y ago

> before urban neighbourhoods were demolished for freeways I do not doubt that there were places where this happened, but speaking about it as some absolute is simply disingenuous and untrue. For example, San Francisco is the birthplace of our cultural concept of freeway revolts, but San Francisco's 1950s freeway plan was intentionally routed to avoid bisecting any of the City-and-County's residential districts. Check out this composite map I just whipped up and you should be able to see how the planned freeways were routed along district boundaries, not through them: https://i.imgur.com/MSbpF5e.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/MSbpF5e.jpeg Sources: — https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/1955trafficways.jpg https://www.vanshnookenraggen.com/_index/wp-content/uploads/... (base layer) — https://i0.wp.com/thefrontsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/San-Francisco-Real-Estate-Districts-Map.jpg?ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/thefrontsteps.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/... (33% opacity) I specify “residential” districts because SOMA is bisected but SOMA was all warehouses and freight railroad yards at the time so there was no reason to care. Even the famously-hated Embarcadero Freeway was on formerly-CA-state-owned land where the “State Belt” waterfront industrial railroad ran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad https://i.imgur.com/Mq3mWQr.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/Mq3mWQr.jpeg