16 ms·

What I see in my deep suburbia is just far less interest in wandering past the front yard, because there's nothing to do: House after house where no front yard

• antiframe 5mo ago
  100% this. Every time someone visits me in my city home, they comment on how nice it must be able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous. Cars are dangerous. No sidewalks on 50mph roads are dangerous. Loneliness is dangerous. And yes, there are bad parts of town where the people are dangerous too. But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs. We made ours. They made theirs.
  • seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
    I live in walking distance of all these things, and the farthest I’ve gotten my kid to do things alone is to walk to and from school (a whole 8 minutes). But even in my dense neighborhood, it’s not dense enough, kids are hardly at the playground unless it’s nice out, the ice cream shop is a bit too expensive for kids on their own, the 7-11 is probably the sketchiest place they could go to. I’m not really sure what we are missing, but it’s way different compared to when we are in China and there is a whole mall next door.
    • flakeoil 5mo ago
      Is go shopping in malls what kids should do?
      • swiftcoder 5mo ago
        It'd be better if there were better 3rd spaces, sure, but hanging out at the mall with friends is still better than sitting at home watching reels
      • brightball 5mo ago
        I spent so much time hanging out at the mall in middle school. My friends and I would play in the arcade, wander around exploring book stores, game stores, walk around and bump into other people. Then we would make a collect call to one of our parents and give the name “come pick us up” before hanging up real quick to avoid charges. It was a good time. The arcade especially because if you were good at a game you could keep playing without putting in more money, so we got really good. You can’t do that with arcade games now.
        • zabzonk 5mo ago
          Far better to be out on your bike, exploring a wood, climbing trees, and possibly disturbing a very grumpy badger. The mall - breathing plastic fumes, looking at overpriced plastic toys, summoning your parents for your every whim. I know which I'd want for my kids, should I have any (too old & ill now).
          • brightball 5mo ago
            We did that too, but the mall was also a good time. Since we couldn't drive, parents had to drop us off and then eventually come pick us up again.
            • zabzonk 5mo ago
              > the mall was also a good time. Oh well, not for me. I am/was a UK project manager who spent far too much time in the malls around Princeton NJ, where we were working. I had no choice because I don't drive, so I depended on bossing my lead developer about to get me places (sometimes worked) - and god how she could shop. I just prayed that the malls would have a bar - mostly not. But I would still hate malls for their horrible atmosphere.
  • AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
    > But life is full of safety vs. living tradeoffs. That's not even the issue. Suppose that more people wanted to live in a city than currently do. The market implies that -- the price per square foot is higher in cities. And that's the problem, when the city isn't allowed to grow. The existing city already has tall buildings, so if there is more demand than supply, to create more of it you need to add more somewhere else, i.e. build some taller buildings where there are currently suburbs. Which is the thing that's banned. But then more people can't move into the city, even if they want to, because the units in urban environments are already occupied and converting more land to urban developments is restricted by law. So the existing units get bid up until the price difference is high enough to deter people from living in the city and everyone else has to live in suburbs or rural areas whether they want to or not.
    • ghaff 5mo ago
      Historically, probably more people had to work in cities and many of those people had a preference for not having a long commute. Those dynamics have doubtless changed to some degree. But, if I had to commute daily to the nearest large city, I'd seriously consider living there. But I don't have to so I live rurally/exurban or whatever you want to call it.
      • NoLinkToMe 5mo ago
        For me it's as much culture as it is work. In fact I live in the capital city of my country, even though my work has not always been here. I live here because it has world class restaurants, bars, museums, architecture, parks, gyms, a dozen public swimming pools and a million amenities you wouldn't even think of but are fun to do once or twice, like there's dedicated restaurants where you can play jeux de boules. And most importantly there's a million people here, statistically there's a good chance you run into people who're in the top 5% of whatever their field is in. Whether it's musicians, engineers, athletes, philosophers, there's a good chance you'll run into a lot of interesting ones. My friend lives in a village and he has 1 pizzeria and 1 italian and 1 chinese restaurant. There's no gym. There's a very basic park with grass and some trees. There's no museums, architecture is all the same. There's no nightlife whatsoever. There's no real amenities, not even a library. There's a few shops with the basics, with very limited opening hours. There's as much nature nearby as there is for me. Tere's also no real way to make friends, and there's a few hundred people to meet at most, statistically most of them aren't very interesting to you (not 'not interesting in general', but 'to you'. It's easier to find 'your tribe' if you can select from a million vs a hundred). So it's really the 'commute' or I should say proximity to culture, i.e. people, their thoughts and their creations, that sells the city for me, not the proximity to the company I happen to work for, which is sometimes in another city.
  • goosejuice 5mo ago
    > able to walk to school, the ice cream shop, the library, the playground full of other kids who walked or biked there, or just see other people out and about. But, they say, they could never live in the city. It's too dangerous. A lot of small towns, even in the US, offer such things. Towns far from being a city. It should be more common though.
    • antiframe 5mo ago
      Yes, and by "city" I mean a walk able streetcar neighborhood. The parents can commute by foot/bike/bus, the kids can get around by foot/bike/bus. Lots of town are also structured like that, but they're not close enough for enough employment for the parents. You can have both: a small neighborhood feel with enough density for a quality car-free living and access to many employers in "cities".
      • goosejuice 5mo ago
        Yeah walking to work would be pretty uncommon, though you can commute into the city. My comment was mostly about kids walking to school / into town and low crime. I don't think that's too uncommon for suburbs served by train in the US. College towns are pretty good for this as well. They can be costly for houses though.
• simonebrunozzi 5mo ago
  You just listed some of the reasons why I moved from San Francisco to Venice, Italy. I have a young kid and I hope he'll enjoy the village-like, car-free environment here.
  • tweetle_beetle 5mo ago
    Isn't Venice as problematic/artificial as suburbia in its own way? If you're saying car-free then I assume you mean the centre, where the real population is tiny (compared to San Francisco at <50k), aging, declining amd dwarfed by tourists. My understanding is that it's increasingly meeting needs of tens of millions of ultra short term visitors rather than real communities. It feels like there must be a wide range of happy medium places in between.
    • simonebrunozzi 5mo ago
      The actual Venice in the lagoon is fine. Nothing like suburbia.
• waterTanuki 5mo ago
  Prior to the rise of the internet, suburbia was a lot more communal: block bbqs, kids playing at the neighbours house, checking out the newest game-station/toy/pool etc. Towns and cities with less car dependency more gracefully transitioned into the post-internet world, where 3rd places and community are easy to maintain since the library/bar/office/school is a 5 min walk away.
  • bluGill 5mo ago
    Suburbs are still like that. However each one is different. The block bbq always only happened because someone living there arranged it. Not every suburb had that person and so not every one had a block bbq. Likewise, kids play together when they are of close enough age. My daughter has lots of kids to play with, but my son just a few years older is frustrated because there is nobody to play with - it is completely chance that a bunch of 9-11 year old girls live in my area and few boys.
• doctoboggan 5mo ago
  > Build environments where children can be independent, and they might even want to be. We _have_ built these environments, you just choose not to live in them. Move to a city or other urban center. Your house might be smaller, and you might have to take public transit sometimes, but you will be happier and there will be no shortage of places for your kid to walk.
  • tintor 5mo ago
    Happier? In a city? Have you been to big US cities? Angry people, crime, homeless, mentally ill people, lack of police.
    • doctoboggan 5mo ago
      >Have you been to big US cities? Yes, I live in one, and it's a city that often gets used as the poster child for urban crime. I don't feel in danger. What I am most worried about when walking with my kids outside is them getting hit by a car.
    • rob74 5mo ago
      Yes, it's exactly these (not necessarily wrong, but exaggerated) preconceptions about big cities that drive people to not let their kids outside. Thanks for providing a sample that supports the article's point!
      • Amezarak 5mo ago
        It's hard to understate how shocking it is for someone who grew up in a more rural area it is to be yelled at by a crazy homeless person. I think urban people are just so desensitized to it its hard to understand how big a deal it is to people who have never experienced that. There's lots of other major culture shock moments too, like finding out public bathrooms in parks are NOT for kids or the general lack of unlocked freely available clean bathrooms in businesses.
        • embedding-shape 5mo ago
• expedition32 5mo ago
  Americans used to drop off their kids at the mall but apparently even that's gone?
• porphyra 5mo ago
  Spain sounds like a child's paradise. Too bad their birth rates are one of the lowest in Europe (and in the world) at around 1.1 births per woman.
  • torben-friis 5mo ago
    Spain is particularly screwed in terms of housing. Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront, which means that most Spaniards rely on inheritance to reach a point where they can consider children. Tourism also balloons real estate prices even more than is usual everywhere nowadays. But the children friendly aspect of society described above is 100% true. It hasn't degraded at all compared to when I was a kid.
    • swiftcoder 5mo ago
      > Access to mortgages is ridiculous, requiring sources of income that can be proved to be stable and ~35% of cost paid upfront Also out here in rural Galicia, the minimum mortgage size the bank will give is something like 2x the average home price. A friend wanted a ~€30k mortgage to buy a fixer-upper in a small village, and the bank was just like "we don't make loans that small".
      • calgoo 5mo ago
        As someone living in the center of Barcelona, i might have to come over to Galicia in the future. Hows the public schools in general, similar to here in catalunya i assume. Buying anything around here feels like a half million investment and its not wort it.
        • swiftcoder 5mo ago
          The kids get to take a couple of classes in Gallego instead of Catalan, but otherwise I don't see too many differences. Fair warning, that if you want to live in a city, while Vigo and A Coruna are cheaper than Barcelona or Madrid, I don't think its that stark a contrast - my friend was buying in a rural village, an hour from Vigo.
• tshaddox 5mo ago
  While Spain does sound lovely, I don’t think “having anything to do” was really in my generation/demographic’s mindset while we roamed around the neighborhood. This was small town Midwest in the 90s. We just roamed around doing nothing.
  • Poacher5 5mo ago
    But there was a place in which to do nothing - whether it was a scrappy patch of land that's now a big-box store, or a permissive neighbour's garden who has now put up a fort knox of ring cameras, or a mall that used to tolerate kids just screwing around that now has a fleet of rent-a-cops. Third spaces aren't just trendy urban cafes, especially as a child. Having a place that feels like "your bit" is increasingly rare.
    • breezybottom 5mo ago
      You think malls didn't have security on the past?
      • nostats 5mo ago
        I came up in malls in the past. They did but it was also different. You could be a kid there and it was more tolerated. You weren't treated like a suspicious person by default. (Unless you were not white, or a punk. Then security tailed you the whole time.)
        • kjkjadksj 5mo ago
          Have you been to a mall today? They are still shockingly busy with gaggles of teens roving around.
          • OkayPhysicist 5mo ago
            They are either shockingly busy, or complete ghost towns, depending on how much power the anchor stores had. A lot of malls were kept afloat by the big department stores, and those are doing bad now that those stores are on the ropes. Like, really bad, think "less than 50% occupancy of stores, air conditioning being run at a bare minimum because it's too expensive" bad. Others (notably the ones that Westfield bought after their success with Valley Fair in San Jose) focused more on the "affordable luxuries" segment, with small stores selling specialized stuff, and are doing fine.
• RHSman2 5mo ago
  Suburbia is the creepiest thing known to man.
  • breezybottom 5mo ago
    This is something that could only be said by a sheltered suburban kid
• dnnddidiej 5mo ago
  Surburbia gets a bad rap but you can have your burbs and something for kids to do. You need regular buses or trains, footpaths and parks with skateparks etc. My preteen kids get a bus up to (checks map...) 20km away. It would be cool to live in a very dense Tokyo kind of place though. Tokyo is like a playground it is awesome!
• AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
  > But it's amazing how much modern-ish suburbia just has no place for you to even exist without a car. It's trendy to blame cars for this but the problem is fundamentally zoning. It's not that there is nowhere for you to exist without a car, it's that there is nowhere for you to exist there at all, and you thereby need a car to leave the vicinity in order to get anywhere you can. If you want to build a cafe or an arcade or a hackerspace out in suburbia, can you? That's not even about density. If you could put those things there then people would and there would be something kids could walk to. But everything other than residences is banned, so of course there is nothing else there.
  • oersted 5mo ago
    As a European, I don’t understand why there’s such resistance to this. I get it NIMBY, but why? Surely good amenities would improve property values and life quality. If it’s right next to your home all the better. Peaceful quietness is so overrated by US and northern Europe. It feels creepy and dead to me, a liminal space. Besides, modern insulation does wonders for blocking noise if that bothers you, not to mention the savings on your energy bill. I want my streets to feel alive!
    • AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
      It's some kind of perverse regulatory capture by landlords with the self-destructive assistance of homeowners. Actual urban real estate is preposterously expensive, but the only reason it stays that way is that you can't create more of it, i.e. put urban developments in high demand areas that are currently suburbs. The landlords who own the urban real estate correctly deduce that allowing more to be built would lower rents. They then convince suburban homeowners to go in with them on preventing that from happening, even though it's not really in the homeowners' interest, because rezoning would reduce the value of housing (i.e. price per square foot) but increase the value of land because you could build more housing on it. The urban landlords are the only losers there, because they have a high ratio of housing to land, so they want the housing to be expensive rather than the land. The ordinary suburban homeowners, by contrast, have a high ratio of land to housing, so they benefit from making the land worth more, i.e. allowing more to be built on it, but are bamboozled into wanting the price of housing to be high and therefore oppose urbanization. You also get a lot of rubbish arguments about "induced demand" which try to imply that building housing would raise prices, when what it actually does is raise prices in the area immediately surrounding the new development (because people like new developments) while making it more affordable in all of the places they're moving from. Which is then used as an excuse not to do it, even though it improves affordability on net while creating more of the areas people actually want. Something similar happens with commercial space. The landlords want it to be scarce. The argument used in that case will be something like "businesses will buy up houses to build Starbucks" or "it will make traffic worse" as if they wouldn't happily give you a Starbucks and a dozen new housing units on that piece of land if you'd let them, and as if traffic gets worse instead of better when people are closer to things and therefore drive fewer miles. But again it's really the landlords with the limited land that is zoned for those things trying to keep anyone else from getting any, and the other arguments are just the kayfabe because "we want rents to be high" is unsympathetic.
• vibekoter 5mo ago
  [dead]
• epolanski 5mo ago
  My family grew up in communist Poland. In the kind of neighborhood with those ugly grey buildings. Well, say what you want, but the communists knew how to build neighborhoods. Between all buildings there was always a 30-50+ meters green space with benches, places for kids to play, walkways, etc. I remember in the early 90s how lively and safe it was. People spent a lot of time of the day outside. Grandmas had their benches, looked the kids, play, adults would gather and have a drink, etc. Today? It has all been swallowed by cars. As progress and money came the entire neighborhood has been swallowed by cars. Kids are confined in a single area. You rarely see people outside. People sit at home. For reference, this is my old neighborhood, albeit the street view is a decade+ old (half the areas are from 2013 because since then entrances to cars have been gated and are only for private cars), but if you stretch the imagination and try to put people around and benches and kids playing areas you can get the sense: https://www.google.it/maps/place/Osiedle+Kopernika/@49.8159614,19.0141329,3a,75y,318.1h,76.51t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sfcfYWS2aABe5CHa2VNNNAw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fcb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile%26w%3D900%26h%3D600%26pitch%3D13.489005966601212%26panoid%3DfcfYWS2aABe5CHa2VNNNAw%26yaw%3D318.09905291340357!7i13312!8i6656!4m6!3m5!1s0x4716a1ca18320d9b:0x7d8c9b1c021bd863!8m2!3d49.8171137!4d19.01428!16s%2Fg%2F122bg4lx?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDUyMC4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.it/maps/place/Osiedle+Kopernika/@49.81596...
• grvdrm 5mo ago
  Something I don't see mentioned often in this discussion: what's a "long distance" Is there a formal measure or comprehensive view on that question? I lived in Manhattan (NYC). Walked a mile at a time (or more) without thinking about it. To/from work, in cold, in rain, etc. Now I'm in NYC 'burbs. The train is 1.1 miles from my house. I walk that distance on occasion but not often. My wife drives to/from train most days. Town is also 1.1 miles from my house, near the train. My daughter is about to be 8. I'm not far off from letting her wander into town on her bike (or on foot), but it's anywhere from a 10/15-25 minute journey depending on how fast you walk/bike and how often you stop. I also live in what feels like a dense suburb. Many houses close to each other. Example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/KBcvG5vnnh48hGwY8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/KBcvG5vnnh48hGwY8 So, I think there's a difference between nothing to do and it's "close" - whatever that means to you, and there's nothing to do and it requires a 30 min car ride. Those latter suburbs aren't far from me, and I grew up next to one good example of a suburb w/large houses and nothing much else (Dover, Massachusetts)
  • ghaff 5mo ago
    It depends on the infrastructure as well. I'm about a 7 minute drive from my local commuter rail but it's essentially unwalkable as that 7 minutes is basically along an interstate. I do take the commuter rail if I'm going into the city 9-5 on weekdays but that's very rare.
    • grvdrm 5mo ago
      Right. I find this whole topic reductive in general. Specifics matter quite a bit. I don't disagree with some of the article but it feels very gloomy compared to suburban life I see around me.
      • ghaff 5mo ago
        Yeah, it depends on your definitions I guess. I'm certainly not in classic suburbia. I think ESRI says I'm in an exurb. In any case, I'm certainly not walking anyplace except down to the river or to a couple adjacent neighbors or conservation land within a 100+ acres total. Where I grew up was similar. This is considered urban by the US census by the way.
• hk1337 5mo ago
  We didn’t need things to do back then. We would usually find something like playing wall ball against someone’s house. What we need is kids who respect other people’s things, neighbors to not be crotchety, wide open spaces and trails would be nice.
• ACCount37 5mo ago
  "Nothing to do" is not how children think. They're new to the world. Just roaming around a neighborhood freely is a lot of "things to do" for them. Having exciting destinations helps, but children are perfectly capable of making their own fun. Whether that can compete with the modern day "pre-made" fun of YouTube, Roblox and the likes though? That's a different matter.
• ethagnawl 5mo ago
  > House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair. This is an important point. In my hometown, I spent a lot of time playing in vacant/double/unused lots. Those lots are all gone and have been turned into parking lots or mini-McMansions. It breaks my heart every time I visit my parents' house and I see that our old soccer, football, wiffleball field and all of the trees we used to build forts have been replaced by cheap houses whose lawns are covered in a rotating cast of inflatables. I can't fault the landowners for cashing in on their spare property but it would seem that the town could do with more localized parks. If anyone has been to Alphabet City in NYC, a lot of vacant lots were turned into community gardens and they're incredible little oases to stumble upon and relax in for a few minutes. I wish the town had had the foresight to do this with some of the aforementioned lots. This is a major aside but another major change is that >50% of the trees which used to dot my hometown are gone. They either fell, died or got in the way of the power lines and were not replaced by the town or property owners. The streets all used to be covered in leafy canopies, everybody's houses were a few degrees cooler and all of that wood prevented a lot of the noise pollution from the Metro-North and I-95 from making its way through.
• dividefuel 5mo ago
  I know the discussion of urbanism vs suburbanism is a common topic on HN, but I don't think suburbs themselves are the root issue here. When I was growing up in the suburb, there were kids outside all the time. Yes, some friends lived across town in another suburb, but we just biked there instead of walking. Now when I visit that same suburb, there are no kids in sight. I still see adults of parenting age, so I assume there are still children in the neighborhood, but they're just indoors. The density of the town didn't change, but rather people's attitudes towards where kids can and can't be seem to be what changed. I also suspect the declining birthrate and having fewer kids is contributing to the problem too.
• whimsicalism 5mo ago
  yep, zoning and the gerontocracy. we should reweight votes based on age
• chrisan 5mo ago
  > House after house where no front yard has anything for anyone, and quite long distances before you get somewhere you might be welcome, or have a chair. This is very bizarre to me. I never once thought about a chair as a child. _If_ you got tired you just took a seat anywhere or just laid down. An empty lawn was the perfect place to play any number of things. Even better was when 2 empty backyard lawns connected and there wasn't much/any landscaping for some really big activities.
• kjkjadksj 5mo ago
  Suburbs are fun as a kid if the parents are chill. Some of my best childhood memories have been roaming suburbia like a pack of dogs with no regard to anyones property lines. Places to sit? Kids don’t need that. We are content with some bushes by the drainage ditch with some standing water to throw rocks in. Yes, this happened in internet era too. If you had friends, those are way more fun than web surfing alone. We never even grew out of that stuff. Transitioned right out of games of tag in the woods right into smuggling beer into the woods.